Film: Project Nim
Director: James Marsh
Duration: 93 minutes
It’s the story of a baby taken from his mother at birth and raised in the Upper West Side of New York City. Except the baby is a chimpanzee.
The documentary, Project Nim, uses 1970s footage of a group of scientists who raise a chimp as a human in hopes of teaching him how to communicate.
In 1973, behavioural psychologist Herbert Terrace at Columbia University adopted two-week-old Nim Chimpsky. Terrace wanted to use Nim to challenge linguist Noam Chomsky’s theory that only humans are capable of language.
Nim was raised in a middle-class household with two parents, seven siblings and a dog. Stephanie LaFarge acted as his mother, even breastfeeding him.
Nim started learning sign language at three months, eventually mastering approximately 125 signs. But Nim is still an animal, resulting in nerve-deep bites to caretakers’ arms and faces.
Four years into the experiment Terrace believed he had ample data and there was no sense putting caretakers in further danger. The rest of the story is mostly melancholy with Nim ending up in a cage on a ranch.
Project Nim’s main fascination is that the audience can never understand Nim’s true feelings. The film is built off interviews with Nim’s instructors, who state how Nim must have felt.
Director James Marsh uses real footage from the project and dramatic re-creations featuring actors and animatronics. These propel the narrative and compensate for obsolete footage.
It’s an entertaining, yet sorrowful story. But, Project Nim should’ve avoided emotional climaxes and engaged in more of a critique of the experiment.
Since the documentary isn’t from Nim’s perspective, there are biases in this documentary that should have been acknowledged.
Project Nim is playing at the Screening Room until Friday.
Tags
Chimpanzee, Film Review, Nim Chimpsky, Project Nim, Terrace Howard
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