James Marsh's compassionate but unsentimental documentary Project Nimlooks at a 1970s scientific experiment gone bad whereby a chimp was placed with a human family in New York and 'taught' to sign. The well-meaning project came unstuck as nature asserted its primacy, the director tells TARA BRADY
IT WAS the early 1970s and linguistics and sociobiology were as cool as they were ever going to be.
Inspired by the ideas of Noam Chomsky, the direct tutelage of BF Skinner and recent experimental successes teaching primates to sign, Prof Herbert S Terrace of Columbia University instigated an extended study of language acquisition among animals. What do primates think, anyway? And can they be taught to use grammatical rules? The subject was Nim Chimpsky, a baby chimpanzee named as a jabbing reference at Chomsky’s assumption that humans were uniquely hardwired to have language. In 1973, 10 days after the animal’s birth in an Oklahoma research facility, Nim was taken from his mother and placed with the LaFarges, a wealthy, academic family living in a New York City brownstone.
There he lived happily as a child among his seven LaFarge siblings.
His adoptive human parent Stephanie, a former student of Dr Terrace’s, breastfed Nim until he was old enough to crave ice cream and pizza instead. As the animal grew, he grew human enough to favour sips of alcohol and occasional hits from the joints that were going around the free-spirited household.
"Some audiences have been very taken aback by Stephanie," notes director James Marsh, whose new film, Project Nim, maps the chimpanzee's sad biography. "But there's no textbook on how a human mother should raise a baby chimpanzee, and I have a lot of sympathy for the interesting way she sought to learn his needs and service them. If you ask a mother to take care of a helpless baby, you're immediately in a world of very primitive, powerful emotions. You can't really apply rigour to that.
“It’s entirely subjective. Yes, she gave him joints and alcohol. But I’m not sure that’s any more perverse than putting him in a public zoo or teaching him sign language. They’re all against his nature. At least he enjoyed the old joints and alcohol.”
Sadly, Nim’s life would not be dominated by experimentation but by experimental trials. His relatively unfettered existence among the LaFarges entailed a daily commute to Prof Terrace’s Columbia lab where he was expected to memorise American sign language. Later he was taken from the family home and transferred to a university-owned facility in the Bronx, to be passed between a series of students and academics.
"Chimpanzees do not have a succession of caregivers in the wild," says Marsh, whose equally engaging chronicle of Philippe Petit's 1974 World Trade Centre tightrope walk, Man on Wire, won an Oscar in 2009.
“Chimpanzees have mothers they hold on to for pretty much four of five years. Nim’s upbringing is extraordinarily unusual. If his behaviour is perhaps sometimes confused and violent, that might be a reason.”
Marsh's wry, non-judgmental record of Nim's life is more concerned with nature than nurture. Pieced together from archive footage and startlingly candid testimonies from the important figures in the chimpanzee's life, Project Nimunfolds as a drama of hubris, cruelty, indifference and repeated abandonments. It is as quietly devastating as Man on Wirewas exhilarating.
“Responses to the film have fallen all over the emotional spectrum. How you see it can depend on if you’re a man or a woman or a parent. Some people find it quite upsetting, because you’re aware this creature is intelligent and he displays emotions we can recognise in ourselves. You can’t help but feel for his predicament.”
Despite Marsh's compassion for his subject, Project Nimis unflinchingly unsentimental. The chimp may have learned to use 125 signs over five years of instruction at a desk, but he was still a chimp.
The signs enabled him to say “sorry” after he hit or bit someone, but that did not dissuade him from attacking humans again.
“His tragedy is that he’s put in circumstances where he does not belong,” says Marsh. “The film is not offering any scientific or strong moral judgement. This is a story of what happened when we brought this individual animal into our world. His hardwired behaviour was more powerful than anything he acquired from us. His human traits were actually quite superficial. Violence is hardwired in male chimpanzees in the wild. We know they’re violent. We know that’s how they organise themselves socially as a hierarchy. We know they test each other on a daily basis. Nim can’t help but test those around him. It’s the circumstances that are weird for him, not the behaviour.”
The director, who spent months watching the animals at a chimp- research facility in Louisiana and at the chimp enclosure at Copenhagen Zoo, acknowledges certain similarities between Project Nimand Werner Herzog's repeated documentary warnings from nature.
" Grizzly Manaccepts the premise as I do – that animals are animals. It was a reference point, not as a story or in its execution, but in its acknowledgment that animals have their instincts and if you start going against those instincts, if you start fucking with nature, then someone is going to get hurt. It would have been easy to overlook some of Nim's animal behaviour and to suggest that he's a bit more like us than he actually is. But to my mind that would have been a categorical error, because it's just not truthful."
Having decided that Nim's use of words did not amount to anything like language acquisition, Prof Terrace pulled the plug on the experiment in 1977. The chimpanzee that had once appeared on Sesame Streetand the cover of New Yorkmagazine, was subsequently left to bounce between primate research facilities and a medical lab where chimps were used as test subjects for vaccines. Human companions had tucked Nim into bed every night; now he lived in a cage with a death sentence.
“The glimpse we get of that facility introduces James Mahoney, a vet and a very humane individual working the best he can to alleviate chimps’ distress. I think that’s typical of most of the people we meet from Nim’s life.”
The results of Prof Terrace’s landmark experiment have been hotly debated since. Allen and Beatrix Gardner, who taught Washoe the chimpanzee to use sign in an earlier project, have argued that Nim’s intellectual development could never have blossomed in an environment so bereft of stability and affection. Either way, Project Nim seemed to herald the end of campus-based great-ape language research.
“Terrace’s conclusion is perfectly valid,” says Marsh. “I don’t think a chimpanzee is created for human language. But let’s be quite clear: language is a human construct. I think the question itself is questionable. Perhaps a more valid enquiry is how can we communicate with chimpanzees. I think Bobby – who you see in our story at one of Nim’s later facilities – creates a kind of meaningful language made from gestures, body language and words with Nim. I think the richness of that communication transcends Terrace’s question in many ways.”
Marsh insists the film is not a campaigning piece but a comment on human, rather than simian, hubris. Project Nim, a warmer companion piece to Frederick Wiseman's similarly themed Primate, lured the director with its narrative hook and because of what Nim's life says about Homo sapiens.
"It's against the film's nature to be co- opted in any way: it doesn't have a perspective. I already knew when I was thinking about Nim that the film needed to be as much about humans as it was about Nim. Wiseman's Primatecrystallised that notion, because our behaviour in that film is way weirder than the animal's. I think there are certainly reflections to be had on animals generally and how we impose upon them and exploit them. We have enslaved whole species over the years. But I would be disappointed if the film were used in that way. I think it's a bit more complicated than that. There's no Inconvenient Truthagenda here. There are only a lot of shades of grey."
And did he get through the research stage without getting covered in any shades of brown? “I had no shit thrown at me,” notes a relieved director. “One chimp in Louisiana kept trying to beckon my hand in to the cage so he could bite it. I know I wouldn’t last five minutes in a chimpanzee enclosure. I know so much about them I wouldn’t be able to fake not being scared of them. They’d pick it up and go for me in a second.”
