I’ve got a big Wiseman idea that I was either very slow to figure out or that took seeing a bunch of these in a row to realize. It really hit me with Zoo. Let’s talk “Behind the Scenes”. This combines institutions and performances and is a major aspect of all his movies. An institution has a “public” it is serving and a performance has an audience. In both cases, we can either see what that public or audience sees or does, or we can go behind the scenes, take a look at what the institution is doing when the public isn’t present or we can see what goes on out of view that contributes to the in-front-of-the-audience part. Sometimes “Behind the Scenes” is obvious (I’d say most times) and sometimes we might have to think a bit about where we are. Are we “supposed” to be watching this? Would it ordinarily be hidden? Who gets to be present? We can take just about any Wiseman film and ask when we’re seeing ordinarily hidden stuff. In Near Death, only employees go down to that morgue room in the basement. When teachers in High School talk to each other in a lunchroom, the students aren’t around. When employees assess the jewelry in a dark back room in The Store, potential customers better not be listening. Fans at Belmont Park don’t want to know about the operations horses get on their legs when they’re injured. Most of Meat is usually hidden away. A judge in chambers, as so often in Juvenile Court, is a perfect expression of this. The public place is the courtroom. We’re getting the private stuff when we go back there. On and on - you get the idea I hope. This partly explains the fascination with meetings - it’s usually the execs who are revealing plans and attitudes that wouldn’t be expressed to paying customers.
Documentaries can have a strong voyeuristic element - letting us peek in and see what the film-maker has managed to gain entry to that we’d never otherwise observe. Especially cinema verite or direct cinema or whatever we want to call Wiseman films offer the promise of privileged access. While many of his films take place in public institutions or public places (of the latter, let’s now think of Central Park or Racetrack or here Zoo - where at most a ticket might be needed, but not even that), even these places have their private spaces, or let’s call them Behind the Scenes. Going to a racetrack doesn’t gain us entry to the stables or the operating rooms. Central Park still has its police station and its maintenance yards. What the public gets to see can be very different from what goes on Behind the Scenes. Even documentaries that are mostly public, like say a music performance film, will likely still tantalize viewers with a few backstage glimpses.
The public perception of an institution can be very different from what goes on Behind the Scenes. It’s a funny tension when a film is made that includes lots of the otherwise hidden stuff, as part of that might be showing the process of hiding these things. Here’s a Zoo example to make this clearer. Some feral dogs have been allowed loose by their private owners and killed a couple of beautiful zoo zebus. Several zoo workers go on an actual hunt and locate one of the dogs and kill it. As they drag him to the back of their pickup truck to take him away to an incinerator, one of them says “Let’s load him on the truck before the monorail shows up.” That’s a nice way of saying let’s get this dead dog out of public view, because that’s not what zoo visitors are supposed to see. Similarly, when we see a dead rabbit fed by a worker to a snake, who will devour it whole, a kid tries to come into the snake area. “We’re closed. You can’t come up here,” she calls out to him, in clear understanding that this rather unpalatable view should not be available to the public. Wiseman’s film, though, will show us all these things, and plenty more, pulling back the veil from the public show.
Wiseman looks very appreciative of the animals themselves. They are photographed beautifully. But this is certainly not a nature documentary, and we probably see just enough of how photogenic they are to appreciate the difference when they are out of view. When that happens, a rhino will give birth to a stillborn baby, and the baby will be subject to a necropsy - cut into pieces and decapitated and the head left briefly out to be looked at by those who have performed the procedure. Funnier but still pretty horrific to watch is the castration of a wolf shown as a fullscale operation, complete with scrubbing up and an operating table and all the paraphernalia from human operations. Only here, when they do it, the female vet will joke “just snip those babies right out” as we see what she’s snipping in extreme close-up. I think we know by now that Wiseman will not shy away from a medical procedure in all its details - we’ll be right in there looking straight on. I guess that’s part of the public’s right to know idea - we’re seeing what needs to be done to make the show run smoothly.
A fair amount of Zoo is involved with feeding. When it’s not whole rabbits and mice, the task of catering to all these special diets is clearly a serious undertaking. We see crayfish and crickets being fed to otters and a surprisingly enjoyable sequence takes us to a large kitchen, where a worker does a professional job of getting bananas and hard-boiled eggs mixed together which he then places in large containers that he covers in plastic. We’ll then follow the journey of the food in a small truck to the animal cages. When lions and tigers are fed, the locking and unlocking of cages is an elaborate ritual in order to make sure that the zoo workers are not themselves a part of the meal. It may be inevitable then, after seeing so many animals fed, that we can see the animals themselves the prey of yet other animals, as happens to those zebus, as mentioned.
This all sets up for Zoo’s extremely brilliant final sequence, one of Wiseman’s best I have to say. We watch a “Feast With The Beasts” (a sign tells us) fundraiser, where donors in fancy dress are dining, while in the background we see a beautiful white tiger roaming about (presumably to live up to the name of the event). The entire sequence until just the very end is entirely without dialog, which makes it all the funnier when we see a big bowl of salad being mixed and a few of the guests are served little salad plates. It’s uncannily similar to the food preparation earlier for the animals, and I’ll bet anything the irony wasn’t lost on Wiseman. It gets funnier (and more painful) when we move from salads to seeing some meat cooked on an open flame grill. Who knows what kind of animal is being served up! At least no one is eating a whole rabbit or mouse. We then see some other kind of meat being served in little puff pastry shells, maybe some chicken, but who knows. There’s also some large ice sculptures of animals - swans and dolphins are the “beasts” - but in Miami heat a guy keeps trying to fan them down to keep them from melting. I’d say the whole game is given away, if it hasn’t been several times already, with a sign in front of one of the dishes on the buffet table: “Hickory Grilled Quail with Thyme Fennel Sauce”. That would be the right moment for someone to check the quail exhibit to see if anyone is missing. The strangeness of all this bird eating in support of the zoo just can’t be lost on the film-maker of Meat, and likening the actions of humans to animals is what we might expect from the maker of Primate. This time, it’s also so, so funny. We also get another reminder never to turn off before the last frame of the end credits, as after-party chatter starts up on the soundtrack as a guest talks about take-home plastic bags - one last yuk made funnier because it’s the only words we’ve heard from guests throughout the party.
A definite pleasure of films from a great film-maker is the combined sense of seeing the new - their eye fixed on fresh subjects - together with the sense of continuity with their previous work. It’s kind of a relief to see chimpanzees and orangutans again, without seeing those Atlanta scientists doing their weird science on them. They’re still mainly in cages, but they seem much better off here. (One pissed off gorilla at least gets to bang hard on a window between him and some spectators, something the primates never got to do in that other film.) When we get gorgeous bird montages (we must see twenty or so different kinds) we have to think back to Central Park, where bird spectators were in equal supply. And when a zoo person takes a group of kids around and we see that she’s signing to them, we know it’s a form of Wiseman recognition.
I wouldn’t have expected it here, but I guess it makes sense that as the animals are on continual public display, it starts to feel like they’re models. We see spectators with huge telephoto lenses on tripods and a regular display of clunky nineties-style now very outmoded video cameras, back in analog times. Watching people watch and film the animals may happen more in Zoo than watching the animals directly. And quite Wisemanesque, as we’ve discussed several times, are scenes of films being done within our film, to the detriment of those in I’d say an appropriately condescending way. For one, we see a professional cameraman with a big betacam video camera and a couple of assistants as he tries filming tigers swimming. “Let’s get the bengals in the shot” he commands, by which he means that the assistants have to move around some palm fronds they’re holding in order to make the scene look more like the wild and less like a Miami zoo. They keep moving their vegetation in wrong directions, much to the consternation of their director. Films where assistants move props around are just not Wiseman’s way of doing things, as this bit of ineptness reminds us.
More elaborate, but to similar result, is when a news crew comes to cover a story. We might guess what’s about to happen from the appearances of news reporters in earlier Wiseman films (check back to Manouevre and Deaf), but this one is even more critical, humorous, and a touch deservedly cruel. After we see a gorilla tranquilized (a scary moment since in Wiseman this could lead to an operation and/or a decapitation), it turns out all of this is about giving him a teeth cleaning and a physical exam. This is apparently big news for a local TV station, who sends a reporter and a cameraman to cover the event. The reporter has to position herself just right and then does her short report, which sounds perfectly acceptable. Recalling what happened with the tv crew in Manoeuvre, we might guess what’s coming. She’s not happy with it, so she repositions herself in front of the gorilla and they do a second take. What’s less predictable is that she’s not happy with this one either, so they do it a third time. Her cameraman is getting a bit exasperated and when she asks if her little intro is ok says “That’s two good endings.” Not done yet, she says “Let’s do a tease”, TV talk I guess for her little promo on how this will be part of the “Earth Watch” segment. Somehow the gorilla, who’s been getting his teeth cleaned, has become a prop for this segment about how a TV news segment gets recorded, again in stark contrast to a Wiseman film, which would never have a narrator or do things over to get it just right.
I think it could be time to return briefly to another big Wiseman subject, which I think we talked about a little with Meat, which incredibly is fifteen films ago, and probably glancingly in a few other spots. Let’s call it Processing. It’s what documentaries want to do a lot - show how things work by following the steps involved in making or changing raw materials of some sort into finished (or more finished) results. It’s very cinematic, watching something change before our eyes, often due to a skilled worker or artisan. Check Netflix for all the series about chefs if you need some recent examples. Wiseman is certainly interested in Processing too, and on several levels, and with an unparalleled rigor and direct vision. If the whole film itself is not about a process (although a number of them are), we will see many in the course of a film - things being changed as we view closely the steps in that change. There’s bound to be more of these than I list here, but it’s maybe something worth keeping track of a bit.
WHAT CAN BE PROCESSED:
1. Food. Like here in Zoo, we already talked about what happens to mashed potatoes and bananas. The point is, we start with raw stuff and watch what happens to it all the way to animals devouring it.
2. Manufacturing. An example: making brooms in Adjustment & Work, from basic materials to finished product.
3. Medical procedures, like operations. Almost too numerous to mention. Zoo has a mere two - a castration and a baby rhino necropsy. I hope never to see either again.
4. Life and death procedures. We can call dying a process too, which can involve multiple steps.
5. Self-help and personal grooming. Aspen has multiple examples, but hair, makeup, dressing up happen a fair amount. The Store counts big here too.
6. Processing people. The Big one. Education is a process. Training is another. High School and Basic Training are the easy examples.
I’ll probably add to this list before we’re done, but generally I’d say it’s useful to ask whether we are viewing a form of Processing, what are the steps involved, who’s in charge, and sometimes maybe whether it’s such a good idea.