Nobody says films should always be easy to watch. I’ve seen my share about the most horrific subjects - genocides, murders, tortures. starvation - both fiction and non-fiction, and it’s admirable that film-makers have been able to record and confront some of the terrible activities humans have been capable of. We need those histories recorded and remembered. That said, I must admit that I find Primate to be an extremely hard film to watch - really hard for long stretches. It’s so difficult that my first reaction is admiration for Wiseman keeping his camera closely observing things I can barely keep my eyes on when they’re in his film. It can also be due, though I’m surely not alone, to having a very difficult time watching animals in pain and also watching medical procedures. More than a few times, I held my hands to my eyes and peeked through them to keep watching just a bit of what was going on. Beyond my squeamishness, the film felt like it was taking me as close to a Nazi death camp, to one of Dr. Mengele’s ghoulish medical experimentations, as it was possible to get. That this film was shot at a “Research Center” in Atlanta somehow only made it worse.
The word “primate” allows for a smartly double-meaninged ironic title, because as the most cursory Google search will tell you should you have any doubt, humans are primates too, or to reverse it, other primates have many human qualities. And should you think that NHP stands for the Nevada Highway Patrol, Wikipedia can tell you it’s also a term to describe the several hundred species of Non Human Primates. So we humans are just one among many, us eutherian mammals whose mothers feed us in the womb by way of a placenta. (Wiseman shows us one in the movie, maybe as a reminder of our commonality.)
This little taxonomic lesson is helpful to understanding the horror of Primate. Not that it would be ok if other non-primate species were being operated on, decapitated, caged, and artificially inseminated, all of course in the name of scientific research, but seeing these things done to members of our same animal family makes it especially rough to experience or to justify. The Wisemanesque irony too is that the people outside the cages and holding the medical and scientific equipment, the humans, can seem a lot lower on the evolutionary scale than the animals they’re observing, measuring, and killing. The interplay between the people who work in an institution and those they’re meant to be serving has never been so full of pathos.
Let’s sort out two issues here. One is the justification for all the “research” as being necessary for the advancement of human knowledge. Feeling defensive, perhaps, there’s an interesting meeting toward the end where the director of the Center makes an attempt at defending whatever they choose to do, by saying that penicillin was discovered as a basic research accident, saying "All research is useful, even if it's usefulness isn't apparent at the time”. Even this bunch seems to know that a lot of things they’re doing can’t be called “applied” research, as they pile on in defense of this idea of “basic” research, which seems to mean looking at things without any idea of their potential practical value. How much of their activity that kind of claim can support is certainly a question that Primate asks. This discussion is the penultimate sequence in the film and at least gives the researchers a chance to stake their position. Whether we go along with them is highly unlikely, I’d guess, given all that precedes it in the film.
That “All research is useful” quote is an important example, too, of one of the ways Wiseman films are especially smart - people will say things that raise large questions. I know I’ve said versions of this already before (and we’re still pretty early on) but I think it’s something that’s easily overlooked while we experience the specific situations in each of the films. My feeling is that Wiseman is almost on the lookout for these - how the things he’s filmed can develop levels of complexity and connection because ideas come out of larger import. That doesn’t minimize what they might mean in one place at one time, but he’s really sensitive to presenting things said that raise bigger issues. In that same discussion, for instance, the director quotes a doctor’s lecture he once saw that he said was titled “The Usefulness of Useless Knowledge”. He goes on to make an argument that perfectly applies to Wiseman’s films as well: “Sometimes a piece of information isn’t valuable until there’s another piece of information” and that then the first piece of information “in light of the second one, takes on a completely different value. This is the way discovery often works.” That may not apply well to the activities we’ve seen in his research center, but it’s sure an interesting idea both in general and especially in relation to how Wiseman puts together his films.
Just in that vein a little further, some of the activities of research can well be connected to the film-making process. Plenty of people in the film are seen in observation - so the film is observing observers. (One could even see all the preoccupation with the sex life of primates as having something to do with lots of the films we see.) We observe observers observing on another level repeatedly, because video monitors are used pretty regularly in the film to watch the primates, and Wiseman will train his camera directly on the video monitors to emphasize the surveillance. The last shot in the film is one of the these, part of a weird final sequence where a primate is taken up in a U.S. Air Force plane to experience weightlessness, but he/she is locked in a box and observed through a monitor, rather than floating free in the plane like the human primates. Our own role as observers, which Wiseman himself has been too, as these films are, is underscored. Like these people who have been watching the primates, we must try to make sense of what we’ve seen.
In the comparing them to the film we’re watching category, the opening of the film almost makes this process perhaps too explicit. In our first view of their work, he asks "Are they in here together for a purpose?" We could well be asking this ourselves. One of the researchers then comments about what they’re doing by saying "I don't think it ever is the whole story”, and then beautifully adds "That's what makes it so good, complexity”. Like they say, you can’t write lines like that. It describes perfectly what Wiseman goes after, with more evident success than the people he’s currently filming. Another scene shows a researcher speaking into a recorder at length as he describes the primate birth he’s watching. Hearing him describe this in a supposedly scientific way also functions as a critique of narration generally, which Wiseman himself of course entirely eschews. What the guy says into his microphone is wholly unnecessary and needlessly detailed. (For added similarity to the film-makers, he snaps photos of what he’s looking at and describing too.). We can watch for ourselves and make our own judgements, as Wiseman’s films always choose to do.
As excruciatingly painful as watching Primate can be, it wouldn’t be a Wiseman film without doses of surrealistic humor and irony. I’d guess probably a third of the film is caught up in the sex life of monkeys, and we get everything from a couple of researchers observing the erections of chimps on a minute-by-minute basis to jacking them off with strange lubricated tubes. We do hear that this has been funded by an “artificial insemination grant”, which probably makes these goings-on all the more hilarious. The bizarre measuring of electrical frequencies to see if it affects the amount of ejaculate produced is near Strangelove-level humor, as are room after room of high-tech machines to make this appear all the more scientific.
Even in this strange place, we get lots of scenes that reverberate well with other Wiseman films. Making a chimp hang from a bar looks all too much like something from either a physical education class in High School or a step in Basic Training. And the scariest similarities which pop up frequently are to the inmates in Titicut Follies. Our apes get a little time in an exercise yard, before returning to cells that look just like what a prison would afford. And I have no doubt whatsoever that seeing an animal fed through a feed tube is an overt reference to when we see a Titicut Follies inmate subjected to the same process. And some of the Hospital like situations seem equally knowing - especially a “Newborn Reception”-labelled room for new baby animals, presided over by a nurse-like researcher who speaks to them like little babies, announcing her entrance with "Good morning, darlings. Momma's babies. Be good girls and boys for mommy" and speaking to them as if they understand English, as when she says "Momma take your temperature. Hold still." And of course we out-hospital Hospital in the excruciatingly long sequence of operating on a monkey and then dismantling his brain in order produce some sample slides. This place seems to resemble other institutions in a nightmare sort of way.
Because we’ve now seen eight films, I think I’m starting to figure out a few things that are different enough about Wiseman’s films that it might be helpful for me to offer a few let’s call them suggestions rather than rules. I think we need to readjust ourselves when we see works that are distinctive, so here are a few do’s and don’t’s I’d like to offer at this early stage. Of course I’m talking as much to myself as I am to you.
HOW TO WATCH A WISEMAN FILM
1. Listen to what people say. The spoken word is hugely important, even though there may be many long wordless sequences.
2. Think about connections between episodes. The way his films are put together is crucial to their possible meanings.
3. Think about what’s going on that reflects outside the place we’re looking at.
4. Does it matter that we are watching real people in actual places? If we imagined them as actors or characters in a fiction film, how would they be different? (Lots of times, it might make no difference.)
5. It’s ok to think that some things are very serious and very funny at the same time.
6. Be ready to change your mind a lot.
7. Don’t necessarily think you’re getting it the first time. Lots of subtle stuff is easy to miss.
8. Not everything has to make sense or have a clear and immediate purpose. Just watch.
9. Many social conditions have no easy solutions. It still helps to try to understand them.
10. Lots of things people do are worth appreciating in their own right, not as examples of something.
11. If you’ve seen more than one Wiseman film, what seems similar to or connects with what you’ve already seen? In what ways is this place and these people the same or different from what we’ve seen? (I know that sounds like a high school writing assignment. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.)
12. Just try to be an attentive and smart viewer. It’s not as easy as it sounds.
HOW NOT TO WATCH A WISEMAN FILM
1. Don’t worry about whether it’s a “good” or a “bad” institution.
2. Don’t try to guess what “issue” is being explored or illustrated.
3. Don’t worry too much about Wiseman’s “intentions” for including something.
4. Don’t wish for a documentary narrator to tell you what to think or to provide additional information.
5. The specific location where the film takes place and its apparent subject may not matter as much as you first think.