Viewpoints: Shooting The Institution

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

For the better part of a decade, Film Documentarian Frederick Wiseman has been sending us--mostly over the Public Broadcasting Service--a series of Goyaesque pictures from our institutions. The police, the courts, hospitals, a high school, the Army, even a monastery have given him his subjects. In almost every instance he has found them to be butterfingered bureaucracies. They show more dedication to preserving the untroubled functioning of their own administrative systems than to doing their job, which is usually supposed to be helping people. What has made these brutal films bearable is that time after time Wiseman has discovered competent, even loving individuals struggling within these systems not only to assert their own humanity but to help society's cripples and victims to maintain theirs.

PRIMATE. PBS. Thursday, Dec. 5, 10 p.m. E.S.T., is perhaps Wiseman's most important work. It differs from its predecessors in that his camera discovers no saving human grace among the employees of the Yerkes Primate Research Center in Atlanta. What he gives us --unfairly, according to Yerkes people --is a dismaying study of what he obviously believes to be idiot savants.

Wiseman sees men and women apparently devoting their lives to tormenting our closest neighbors on the evolutionary scale, apes and monkeys, for reasons he considers inadequate.

In the first, often hilarious section, they are cast as voyeurs, peering coolly into cages, stop watches and check lists at the ready, to study the sexual behavior of their victims. "Did you record that interaction?" one of them inquires in the ineffable jargon of his craft, as male gorilla approaches female. The analogy between ape and human behavior in this realm is dubious at best, the more so when the subjects are "interacting" not in their natural state but in prison. This portion of Primate makes the Yerkes crowd look like fugitives from a Woody Allen movie.

Thereafter, however, the film turns almost unbearably dark in tone, as the scientists attempt to stimulate erections and ejaculations electrically, perform mutilating operations in order to study muscle functions, and finally, in its most sickening sequence, briskly and bloodily reduce a living squirrel monkey to a set of microscope slides. The excitement of the researchers rises to almost orgasmic heights in the process, though just what they are doing--other than transforming life into a sliced abstraction--is unclear.

Primate is a tough film, and like almost all of Wiseman's previous work, it is raising outraged howls from its subjects. As usual, these take the form of demands for a narration that would "explain" what they think they are doing. But Wiseman believes that showing unpremeditated behavior (plus the subjects' own dialogue) tells more about the human reality of an institution than after-the-fact rationalizations of that behavior. He does not pretend to be an objective reporter. Primate is obviously one man's honest, if controversial view of an institution. Nevertheless, this assault on scientism and social scientism, the unquestioning belief that "pure" research must -- perhaps because people insist on calling it pure -- be valuable for its own sake, raises an issue of extraordinary urgency. More than that, and more than any of the Yerkes experiments, it also raises questions about the nature of man and suggests disturbing answers. qedRichard Schickel

"There's a lot of bullshit tossed around about cinema verite and direct cinema," says Fred Wiseman, 44. His own description of his work, prefaced by "awkward but accurate," is "reality fictions: reality, in that the people are real and the events unstaged; fictions, in the sense that I have condensed and ordered those events in a fashion they did not have in real life."

A lapsed lawyer, Wiseman turned to film making because he decided "there was a lot of unexplored territory.

At that time most documentaries were about personalities. I thought there was 1 away for me to do a place and the relationships among the people in that place." s He began with the explosive Titicut Follies in 1967, an expose of a place --the Massachusetts state facility for the criminally insane--that he had used as a field exhibit for his students at Boston University Law School. Since then he has pursued the "cultural spoor" of the elusive institution through seven more films.

"They are always the same film, by and large," he says. "By accretion, they present a sense of the values of many people in different places but dealing with essentially similar situations in the 1960s and'70s."

Wiseman works almost alone. His crew consists of a cameraman and an assistant. Wiseman himself is producer, director, editor and sound man. His tools are a lightweight, quiet Eclair camera, high-speed film, available light and time --usually three to four weeks. He spends a day or two "getting the geography and a quick sense of the power relationships that exist," and then moves in.

"He didn't want to take anything set up," says Dr. Geoffrey Bourne, director of the Yerkes Research Center, "but to wander in where something was already going on." Explains Wiseman:

"I try to be where the decisions are made --in the dean of discipline's office in High School, for example, because that is where you get a sense of the real attitudes of an institution. There is always a discrepancy between formally stated ideology and the values practiced every day. This also provides you with situation comedy."

Working in his rabbit-warren studio at the end of a wharf in Boston harbor, Wiseman spends six months to a year editing a film, "figuring out what the sequences mean to me and ordering them in a way that expresses the themes I think are there." These sequences are visual quotes, and in Wiseman's "reordering and condensing" they are both by intent and of necessity often used out of context. Says Wiseman: "I hope that this is done in a way that is not distorted or unfair to the subjects."

The subjects do not always agree.

While Memphis Judge Kenneth Turner praises Wiseman's Juvenile Court as a film that "accurately depicts what goes on in this court," Dr. Bourne of Yerkes damns Primate as "grossly misleading."

Bourne particularly objects to Primate's lack of explanatory narration. He cites as one of many examples a scene in which a scientist cuts open a heavily anesthetized monkey, injects something into his heart, and then snips off his head, explaining "I'm going to remove the brain." In fact, says Bourne, the scientist was studying the optical nerve system, a project that "might eventually help blind people to see." A voice-over explaining that, he contends, "would make all the difference." Wiseman is adamant in his belief that his films tell the truth without narration. Dr. Bourne dissents, claiming that "the film says nothing about the great contributions to human health and welfare [at Yerkes]."

A dealer in and generator of conflict, Wiseman still has none of the air of the crusader. "When I began," he says with a grin, "I might have had a naive idea of the relationship between film and social change. But it is ridiculous to think you are going to reform the world with a documentary. I make these films because I enjoy making them enormously. In a sense, what I am doing is natural history. Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a film about what it was like in a hospital during the Civil War?"

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