Project Nim
There was a time when it seemed a wise idea to raise a chimpanzee in a Manhattan brownstone, let it live exclusively among humans, get it press in glossy magazines and dress it in leisure suits. That era was called the 1970s.
In that disco-fabulous decade, in an age when many academics reflexively distrusted convention, New York City professor Herbert Terrace hatched an unorthodox experiment in which a newborn chimp named Nim was placed in the Upper West Side home of one of his students and treated like a human baby. And that was just the start of the Me Decade narcissism.
Nim was taught an exceptional amount of sign language in his unnatural setting–the study ostensibly centered on human-simian communication–but when the chimp reached age five and grew too aggressive for fun outfits and photo-ops, Terrace cut bait on the project and sent his subject back to his original owners to be warehoused with primates he could no longer assimilate with. The exiled chimp spent years shunted from handler to handler, some crueler than others, at the mercy of fate, enduring a heartbreaking journey à la Bresson’s Balthazar.
Having previously made Man on Wire, another film about life at an extreme, documentarian James Marsh is clearly the creative descendant of Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, though not yet as bold a visionary as either. His reserve is fine, however, as long as his topics are larger than life, like this one about a creature nurtured into a state neither man nor beast, just so that we could enjoy seeing yet another reflection of ourselves, though what stared back lacked all beauty. Watch trailer.
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Tags: Herbert Terrace, James Marsh