Page - 85 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

Film, Parable, Reciprocity | 85www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 69–98 plain just small ships on a vast ocean, with something larger than politics at play. In National Gallery (2014), for example, commentators refer to restoring paintings “as a work of art that you read” (NG 84), of “learning ways to de- code paintings” (NG 14) and, in a drawing session with a female model record, “we can’t help ourselves but add narrative when we’re dealing with the human body” (NG 34). These efforts at explanation are held in tension with repeated acknowledgements of how “very very ambiguous” and amorphous paintings are (NG 18–19). Beyond statements about the ambiguity of paintings, a reso- nant speechlessness emerges in Wiseman’s reiteration of images of silent yet expressive paintings, and faces of people looking or waiting in line. Further- more, Wiseman’s films present an expansive range of human and animal aural address along with sounds made by the technological extensions of humans (traffic noise, ships’ horns, beepers, machines),43 thereby expanding the range of democratic noise and its participants, and inviting the viewer into the un- known of an “attitude toward a soul”. THE ANIMAL IN US AND WITH US Wiseman’s work – its expansive aurality, the visual presence created through portraiture – invites kinship with humans compromised in their capacity to communicate, as well as animals (or representations of them in art). The threat of force in social relations is actual in Primate (1974), shot at the Yerkes Pri- mate Research Center in Atlanta, Georgia, where treatment of caged animals includes gentleness, dispassionate use in experiments, and forced constraint of the primates when they resist. In Newborn Reception, women hold, bottle feed, hug, play with and diaper baby orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees; elsewhere, interaction with the primates ranges from observation to vivisec- tion. Despite the scientific detachment, the use of words like “hands,” “arms” and so on to describe primates’ parts suggests an implicit acknowledgment of kinship, along with images of primates clinging to, or being held by, humans as if they were infants. In one sequence, a Rhesus monkey with a metal box on its head containing electrodes into its brain is prepared for a zero-gravity experi- ment, its head, arms and legs confined in a plastic form of “stocks”. A visitor to the research centre breaks with the scientific detachment of the researchers with her facial and vocal expression of concern, “Oh, he does resent it, doesn’t he?” The researcher replies, “Yeah, generally he does.”44 The monkey’s vocal expressiveness is perceived by the scientist, but ignored or discounted. In the film’s opening sequence, after a montage of images of eminent scientists, two 43 McLuhan 2013, 57. 44 Transcript of Primate, Wiseman, 1974, 19. Further page references from this transcript will be cited in the text, the title abbreviated to P.