Page - 86 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

86 | Alyda Faber www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 69–98 researchers discuss observational techniques at the centre – a person watches a cage of gorillas and records, in timed intervals, what the primates are doing. The observer notes that the orangutan giving birth makes sounds (“It vocalizes … It stops vocalizing … It vocalizes briefly.” [P 4]), but none of this counts as data when the animals resist or protest capture, or when they create a cacoph- ony in adjoining cages when a chimpanzee is rolled by on a trolley after surgery. It is impossible not to notice the resistance of animals taken from cages for ex- periments (resistance overcome with the animal’s arms held behind its back, or with plastic devices that immobilize the head and waist, or with anaesthesia). A man repeatedly attempts to inject a caged chimp with anaesthetic; the animal’s fingers reach out through the bars, swat at the needle; it makes high-pitched sounds whenever the needle hits its flesh. These and other scenes in Primate (1974) evoke the ambiguities of competencies in moral reasoning and various professions that train us to question and even discount “animal recognition” in the achievement of some purpose.45 Near the end of the film, equally clear “messaging” from a creature is ig- nored. As in other Wiseman films, the least powerful creature in a scene has a large visual and often aural presence, images of more-than-reciprocity. A man tries to catch a spider monkey – it escapes the man’s gloved hands by moving to the far side of the cage, gripping the mesh side; it chirps, squeals and chitters; when the gloves confine it to the other side of the cage, it clings to the inside of the door; the man swings the door open with the monkey clinging to it, and pries it off the door. Outside the cage, the monkey signals anger and fear with its agitated tail, the only expressive participant in this sequence, the man’s back to the camera. Just before another man immobilizes the monkey in a plastic “stocks”, it bends over the man’s glove and attempts to clasp onto it; even as its neck is being forced into the device, it makes an open fingered “appeal” (fig. 5). When secured, it opens its mouth without producing sound and stops resist- ing, the contrasting silence as expressive as its noise. It is anaesthetised, head shaved, cut open and stitched; the other spider monkeys are agitated and noisy when its inert form is placed back in the cage. The second stage of the process begins with the monkey being sliced open, inner organs pulsing, the head cut off and the brain removed to prepare for sections to be taken from it and ex- amined under a microscope. Repeated close-up shots of the spider monkey’s face convey its presence before (fig. 6) and after the removal of the brain, while the men capturing and immobilizing the spider monkey are filmed in ways that minimise their expressiveness, with their backs to the camera or brief shots of their faces in profile along with close-ups of their giant gloves. 45 Williams 2000a, 43. This issue of ignoring cues has also been raised in discussions of sexual assault by Melanie Bere in Anderssen 2014.