tieman64
"The assumption that animals are without rights, and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance, is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality." ― Arthur SchopenhauerAnother disturbing but fascinating documentary from Frederick Wiseman, "Primate" observes scientists at work at the Yerkes Regional Primate Research Center. His title alluding to both men and apes, Wiseman's film opens with a series of close-ups in which the paintings and statues of esteemed human scientists segue into shots of apes in cages. The film's hierarchy is being set up here – man as enlightened and lording over nature – but also its mocking tone, Wisemen's apes and men inseparable, base and equally absurd.Wiseman's more grotesque films ("Hospital", "Titicut Follies", "Blind", "Welfare", "Meat" etc) tend to feature humans and animals being brutalised within social institutions. "Primate" itself mostly consists of a series of increasingly violent tests being carried out on apes and gorillas. These tests include vivisections, injections, decapitations and so forth. This, of course, recalls the murdered animals in Wiseman's "Meat", the grotesque rehabilitation centres of "Blind", the surgical procedures of "Hospital" and the lobotomies and torture sessions of "Titicut Follies". The cruelty of "Primate" is not an aberration. This is how human "civilization" works. But are such things necessary?Wiseman uses simple juxtapositions throughout the film. The detachment and mundanity of the scientists, for example, is repeatedly contrasted with the gruesomeness and apparent senselessness of their experiments. Elsewhere we see female scientists maternally caring for infant apes. "Good morning, darlings. Good morning, Mama's babies," they say, reinforcing our sentimental identification with the animals. In the following scene, though, we're back to apes being subject to human domination, mutilation, and termination.Like "Blind", Wiseman questions the nature of kindness and altruism. He establishes a dialectic between acts that we are likely to perceive as kindness and acts that we are likely to perceive as cruelty. Eventually, though, the kindness of the researches reveals itself to be a form of betrayal or hypocrisy, all designed to ease the consciences of the scientists and make the apes more malleable and prone to co-operation. This, of course, recalls the handicapped men and women of Wiseman's "Blind", who are "taken care of" and "rehabilitated", but also exploited and used as cheap labour by Army contractors. Recall too the panoptical mental hospitals of "Titicut Follies", whose atmosphere of confinement and observation echoes the world of Yerkes Research Center. Indeed, the inmates at "Titicut's" mental hospital echo the apes at Yerkes in numerous ways. Both groups are powerless, subject to forced feedings, studied in a chillingly detached, unsympathetic manner, and suffer abuses rationalised as being "necessary" and "humane"."Primate's" most gruesome sequence finds a baby gibbon being anaesthetised. A hole is then drilled into its skull, a needle inserted and its chest cavity opened. The gibbon's skull is then cracked open before it is outright decapitated. It's brain is then sliced and put on microscopic slides. Later, scientists discuss whether such "animal cruelty" is justified. Yes, they decide. "All research is useful," a scientist says, "even though its usefulness is not apparent at the time it's done."Much of the film finds the scientists studying the sexual behaviour of apes. Their studies reduce sexual behaviour to droll mechanics, the scientists stimulating erections and even ejaculating the apes, sometimes by means of brain-implanted electrodes. After a while it becomes clear, though, that Wiseman has positioned us to study these human scientists in much the same way that they are studying the apes. To the scientists, animals are always "the observed", always on one clear side of the subject/object divide. The very language of the scientists seeks to objectify the animals, reducing them to pieces of meat; a means to a larger end. Wiseman's camera performs a similar trick on the scientists, reducing them to grotesque, silly, banal bundles of arrogant flesh. But while Wiseman's stance invites us to experience a kind of comic and cosmic rage, it is not simply accusatory, but deliberately paradoxical. His stance is not forensic, or even political (ie – a simple question of animal rights), but existential. "Primate" is not about a corrupt social institution but abut something that is much more invisible and complex. Most of the institutions Wiseman explores are filled with deep-rooted contradictions, with conflicting policies which are perhaps impossible to resolve."Primate" ends with a rhesus money in a Perspex contraption being blasted off into the stratosphere. The scientists, we learn, are now researching zero-gravity conditions. Final shot? A monkey mockingly sticking out its tongue at us. Wiseman cuts to black.8.5/10 – See "American Experience: The Boy In The Bubble".
tbyrne4
Typically horrifying Frederick Wiseman documentary about experiments at a primate research laboratory where chimps and apes and monkeys are subjected to bizarre and inhumane testing. Wiseman (probably the greatest documentary filmmaker who ever lived) is something of a magician when it comes to snagging jaw-dropping "moments" that will have squeamish viewers quickly reaching for the remote. Much footage here (as with many of Wiseman's films) still would be censored from most cable programs.We get to see these poor creatures subjected to intelligence tests, gravity tests, muscle stimulation tests, and (bafflingly) a veritable thesaurus of sexual function/dysfuction tests. A few talking head interviews with the researchers as they babble loftily and (at times) incoherently. Part of the genius of Frederick Wiseman is his gift for showing things from beginning to end, undiluted to spare the audience's feelings. One sequence shows a small, very confused monkey being taken from its cage and strapped into what can only be described as a tiny version of an inquisition rack then wheeled through a series of rooms, only to be (literally) sliced and diced and cracked into tiny pieces then stuffed into a dozen jars by a guy who speaks to the camera with the blase attitude of a man chopping carrots. Wiseman's camera doesn't even leer at this. I've seen some graphic mondo footage but I was unable to view this sequence and had to cover my eyes. Truly, almost as nauseating as the torture inflicted on the primates is the desensitized nature of the hippie scientists doing the testing. Scene after scene unfolds with chimps and monkeys being flayed and sent through living hell as the researchers act with minds that seem curiously elsewhere and detached. It makes one wonder if working at such a place for too long would engender this kind of thinking.As another reviewer noted, Wiseman's camera is "absent" but certainly not unbiased. This film is a scream of rage at the establishment firmly rooted in the counter-culture born of the 1960s.
