Primate

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.

Titicut Follies

Frederick Wiseman began his film career fully formed, his distinctive approach to documentary already firmly established, with Titicut Follies, a probing study of a state hospital for the criminally insane. The Massachusetts government blocked the general public from viewing the film for decades, eventually prompting Wiseman to add what is surely one of the most passive-aggressive legal disclaimers in film history. Given the matter-of-fact brutality depicted throughout the film, the state’s response is hardly surprising; this would not be the first time an institution would regret exposing its inner workings to the director. Stark moments like the tube-feeding of one emaciated patient add a sour undertone to even the most benign sequences, like a birthday party where well-fed guards and inmates eat cake and play games. In a sequence that calls to mind Samuel Fuller’s America-as-madhouse classic Shock Corridor, two men debating America’s involvement in Vietnam are slowly drowned out by another patient’s tuneless rendition of “The Ballad of the Green Berets.” The titular follies—put on by the hospital staff for the benefit of the patients (and based on how Wiseman films the performance, us as well)—seem downright horrifying in this context, a momentary upending of the power balance that only reinforces the helplessness of the patients. One moment the guards are telling corny jokes and singing; the next, they’re forcing the inmates to strip and march down the hall.

Anyone watching all of this institutionally sanctioned abuse might reasonably ask what sanity is supposed to look like in such a place. Would Jim, the teacher reduced to screaming outbursts by the childish taunts of the guards, seem terribly ill in an environment that accorded him greater dignity? The possibility that it is the hospital that makes the madness and not the reverse is one of the film’s more disturbing questions, posed most forcefully by Vladimir, a paranoid schizophrenic arguing with his doctors that his time in the facility has only worsened his condition (a brief stay for observation has stretched into a year and a half). The doctors greet his arguments with bemused condescension, and one immediately suggests upping the man’s drug dosage to tone down his agitation. The possibility that Vladimir might be right—that sitting naked in a bare cell listening to a delusional inmate rave about obscure papal politics might not be conducive to addressing deep-rooted psychological trauma—is never entertained. In the eyes of the institution, he’s less a human being and more a problem to be solved. Sanity is interchangeable with pliability in this equation, and he will presumably be deemed “better” when he ceases to complain. Tellingly, the only patient in the film to be released leaves in a pine box.