In a barren caged enclosure, two gorillas listlessly mate while a slow drizzling rain falls upon the scientist assigned to take detailed notes on the procedure. It’s a pathetic and hilarious image, reducing raw animality to joyless scientific bureaucracy, and Primate is littered with similarly absurd sights. Frederick Wiseman’s 1974 study of the Yerkes Primate Research Centre finds considerable humour in contrasting the dry manner of the scientists with the instinctive behaviour they chronicle (you’re unlikely to ever again hear so many thoughtful discussions on the various qualities of monkey erections). But the director, rather than just chuckling at the scene of five men in white coats staring intensely at a vial of chimp semen, is interested in turning that dispassionate observational style back on the researchers themselves to meditate upon the uneasy moral questions of scientific progress. Does the value of knowledge always outweigh its costs? Wiseman responds with a horrific vivisection, where we watch a monkey slowly disassembled before our eyes—chest sliced open, organs pulled out, head cut off, brain removed and sectioned. A once-living creature becomes a microscope slide in a laboratory. “That is beautiful,” one awe-struck scientist says while studying the abstract swirls on the slide, liked a dazzled art lover standing before Guernica, admiring the strange beauty that can arise out of violence and death.
The scientists have their own say in a late scene where the centre staff share frustrations over finding funding amid the relentless drive for practical knowledge. As one sagely notes, the discovery of penicillin likely would struggle to win a government grant in the present day. The winding path of human progress runs through many unexpected detours, and scientific leaps often rely on discoveries previously thought to have no pragmatic value. So are all of the methods shown in the film, however cruel they may seem, ultimately justifiable? Wiseman leaves the question floating uncomfortably in the air, much like the subject of the final experiment depicted, a monkey experiencing zero-gravity in an air force jet. Still, it’s hard to ignore the various mechanical devices and processes employed by the scientists in pursuit of a deeper understanding of natural behaviour. The study of the monkey’s brain under microscope is edited together with the same speed and repetitive motion you might see in footage of an industrial factory. Electrodes stimulate the animals to sex or violence, and scientists swing from bars in an effort to prompt their subjects into action. While discussing plans to artificially inseminate a chimp, one man says, without any apparent irony, “Then we’ll let nature take its course.” The only natural thing in the film is the centre’s front lawn.
