Creaturely Poetics: Animality and Vulnerability in Literature and Film

I shall strike you without anger
And without hate, like a butcher

—Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil

Dadaism and surrealism are extreme cases; they represented the intoxication of total license…. The surrealists have set up non-oriented thought as a model; they have chosen the total absence of value as their supreme value.

—Simone Weil

The two documentaries I discuss in this chapter—Georges Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes (Blood of the Beasts; 1949) and Frederick Wiseman’s Primate (1974)—revolve around Simone Weil’s conceptual relay between vulnerability, existence, and beauty as the threshold of a creaturely aesthetic. I have been arguing that the relationship between vulnerability, existence, and beauty cuts aross the confines of the human, the illuminated zone in which Cartesian man basks in the glory of his own consciousness and self-knowing.

Franju and Wiseman’s films address a common theme—the institutionalized violence against animals—in the contexts of the slaughterhouse and the research laboratory. These institutional sites perhaps more than any other disclose the fusion of rationality and violence as paradigmatically modern. In their visual economies, Franju and Wiseman’s films also expose the distinctly aesthetic dimension of the institutions they study. The abattoir and laboratory are not simply observed by Franju and Wiseman in a manner that transforms them into a cinematic spectacle. They are treated as places that creatively produce their own visual codes inspired by what the film scholar Raymond Durgnat described as the “surrealism of science” (Durgnat 27), an aesthetic that strongly contrasts with the creaturely poetics I have been pursuing through Weil’s work.

Sang des bêtes and Primate deal with institutions whose activities may literally be described as the controlling and processing of animal bodies. Sang des bêtes is a twenty-two minute short depicting the work at a Paris slaughterhouse (Franju filmed in three separate sites in Paris, but the distinctions in the film are between the different kinds of slaughtered animals—a horse, cows, calves, and sheep—not the locations of the slaughterhouses). Wiseman’s feature-length Primate (105 minutes long) follows the experimental routines at the Yerkes Primate Research Center at Emory University, Atlanta. Both films are forensic in their theme and in their form, and I argue that both are also reflections on modern instrumentalism and technoscience as forms of surrealist art.

Sang des bêtes, Franju’s first important short (the format he was to excel in) is also the first in his series of films that deal directly with animals. This is the film to which most if not all subsequent cinematic images of the abattoir (very nearly a minigenre in its own right)—from Frederick Wiseman’s Meat (1976) to Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Our Daily Bread (2005) or Richard Linklater’s Fast Food Nation (2006)—look back. In the history of cinema, Sang des bêtes holds a special, iconic, status.¹

Franju is first and foremost a director of setting and shape, and the abattoir presented him with some truly exciting visual possibilities. In 1929 Georges Bataille’s surrealist magazine Documents published a series of photographs by Eli Lotar of the same La Villette slaughterhouse where Franju would later shoot his film. Lotar’s photographs reveal surrealism’s affinity with violent imagery.² Sang des bêtes captures the dismembered, grotesque figures of animal carcasses in a similar way to its companion documentary Hôtel des invalides (1951), which dwells on the disfigured faces of world war veterans.³ The severed human and animal bodies in Franju’s work function as a common mise-en-scène, and it is at this formal level that Franju’s intersecting between cinema, science, and surrealism is at its most arresting. Franju’s mixture of surrealism’s fantastical, isolated objects and shapes with science’s surgical graphics prompted Durgnat, in his important book on Franju, to discuss his visual style as scientifically surreal: “after all, what is more Surrealist than those scientific films which translate into visually perceptible forms the sectors, levels or patterns of reality which, with authority, undermine the frameworks constructed by our socially conditioned perceptions, usually miscalled ‘realism’?” (28–29). Moreover, Franju’s surrealism does not hinge on a simple jolting juxtaposition of objects, whose point of reference is internal and psychic rather than worldly. “The mere ‘colliding’ of objects can, of course, rapidly become a cliché,” Durgnat writes. “In Franju,” on the contrary, “the reference is constantly to the objective world in which we do all move, and at which our eyes unseeingly stare. Far from cutting out the real world, his vision lets it in” (19). Scientific surrealism is thus “realistic” in the manner developed in the previous chapter, as a mode of attending to the condition of living exposure. Despite its unflinching show of violence, therefore, Franju’s cinema does not preclude what Durgnat calls the “potentialities of tenderness” (27).

The first sequences of Sang des bêtes establishes the film’s general pattern of alternating between a poetic surrealism (designated by a female voiceover) and a violent realism (designated by a male voiceover). Following the credits, a crane shot of the Paris outskirts carries the title Aux portes de Paris. We are coming into yet also looking out of the City of Light (the views are reminiscent of Céline’s piercingly honest depictions of suburban Paris in Journey to the End of the Night). A woman enters the frame from the right, her back half turned. The female voiceover accompanies the images of an urban wasteland with its scattered treasures and found objects: household oddities, scraps, an armless mannequin. In the background, trains move horizontally across the frame. The camera closes in on an anonymous painting; children dance in a circle. An old man sits alone at a round table in the barren field. The sequence ends formally with the opening and closing of a fan that wipes to the next image of a couple kissing. The kiss is followed by the (recurring) image of trains, only this time more prominently occupying the frame. The trains become trucks in the next shot, as we arrive to the slaughterhouses of Vaugirard. Before the first violent sequence of the killing of a white horse, the killing tools are laid out and presented by the male voiceover. Only then does the camera cut to the horse led forward and stunned by the “Behr gun” introduced in the earlier sequence. The horse’s throat is slit, and blood is drained from the body. The camera follows the swift skinning and segmentation of the horse.

The abattoir workers’ movements are smooth and professional. The camera does not shy away from depicting the violent act in all its minute detail. There is obvious tension in these scenes between the first sequence, with its array of found “outmoded” objects on the outskirts of the Parisian metropolis, and the shock of the subsequent spectacle, reminiscent of Artaud’s Theater of Cruelty “in which violent physical images crush and hypnotize the sensibility of the spectator” (Artaud qtd. in Sloniowski 171). The divisions are initially stable and clear: the dreaminess of the opening sequence leaves one unprepared for the violence unleashed in the next sequence of the killing of the white horse. But this is not quite how things work, for there is in the slaughter sequences, terrifying as they are, a muted quality, something akin to a banality of violence. Banality is signaled first by the male voiceover that presents the killing tools and explains the procedures with cool precision. The effect of such standardized violence is disquieting, and, more important, already questions the shock tactics of surrealism, as if exceeding (and critiquing) surrealism through banality itself. Violence, in short, is simultaneously surprising and utterly mundane: this type of violence is not merely the city’s subterranean flipside or dark unconscious; it is the very paradigm of civilized urban modernity. What is disquieting here is not so much the goriness of slaughter as the shock of its banality—its extreme yet wholly quotidian occurrence.

Shot in 1948, a mere three years after Liberation and a short while before the arrival of the vast industrialized meat packing plants, Sang des bêtes is mired in the intense banality of the modern killing machine that so successfully merged the brutality of killing with the docility and asceticism of rational thought. Indeed, Sang des bêtes contains clear allusions to the Holocaust, both in the recurring shots of trains, in the final sequences depicting the killing of sheep, their “tricking” onto the kill floor by what the narrator calls the Judas sheep, and the last, ruminating shots (accompanied by a mournful female voiceover) of the remaining victims locked in an overnight pen, awaiting their fate the following morning. Jeannette Sloniowski notes the influence of Sang des bêtes on Alain Resnais’s seminal Holocaust documentary Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, 1956) (Sloniowski 177). The Holocaust will return again in Franju’s 1955 short Mon chien (My Dog), on abandoned dogs in Paris who end up in the municipality’s gas chambers, and in Les Yeux sans visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959), Franju’s best-known (most commercially successful) horror film, in which the Mengele-like scientist/vivisectionist Dr. Genessier (Pierre Brasseur) kidnaps young women in order to steal their faces and graft them onto the ruined face of his daughter (played by Franju’s regular actress Edith Scob). But how should one approach Franju’s many references to the Holocaust?

A fair amount of scholarship on Franju and the Holocaust is still debating the significance of its many citations in Franju’s ambiguous body of work. Adam Lowenstein’s Shocking Representation, for instance, makes a detailed case for the historical relevance of Sang des bêtes as a postwar film. In his opening chapter, “History Without a Face: Surrealism, Modernity, and the Holocaust in the Cinema of Georges Franju,” Lowenstein reads Sang des bêtes as historical allegory and its method as a powerful way of awakening the viewer—through shock—to France’s recent historical trauma.⁴ Franju’s film, says Lowenstein, is “profoundly Benjaminian in its dialectical goal of imbricating perceptions of the familiar with those of the unfamiliar, even in the process of audience reception of documentary ‘reality’” (Lowenstein 25). In the context of postwar France, Sang des bêtes functions as “an allegorical illumination of the ghosts of Occupation and the Holocaust” (Lowenstein 27).

Yet despite—or precisely because of—the persuasive appeal to Benjamin’s critique of the “continuum of history” (Lowenstein 14), reducing the animal presence in Franju to the allegorical and the symbolic leaves interpretation with a questionable notion of history and historicity: still a firmly human and humanist understanding of the historical as a coherent if not teleological narrative at the center of which operate privileged human subjects. As I argued extensively in chapter 2, through the work of Hanssen and Santner, Benjamin’s analysis of the creaturely and natural history undermines the humanity of the traditional historical subject. Franju’s repeated return to animals in his films, precisely in the context of historical trauma, is thus visibly critical of a humanist understanding of history. Franju is therefore Benjaminian not only in resisting what Benjamin called historicism’s “empty time” but to the extent that both read history nonanthropocentrically. Franju’s insistence that “his interest is in the victim, that he is on the side of the victim, whether it’s a white horse in a slaughterhouse, a salmon with the hook tearing at its mouth, a war cripple with shrapnel-twisted lips, or a mental patient staring at the wall” (Durgnat 31) addresses the workings of power in a nonanthropocentric way. Animals as cryptic signifiers complicate rather than facilitate a symbolic reading of Franju’s animal films, not because animals are infinitely other but precisely because seeing animals as mere foils for humanity denies the shared physicality of human and animal life–and what Benjamin saw as the ahuman physicality of history itself. Can we really confine Franju’s depiction of slaughter in Sang des bêtes to an allegorical reconnecting with—or the traumatic replaying of—human history?

If history penetrates Franju’s films through what Lowenstein reads as the sensitizing gestures of extreme violence, or through what Franju called the “homeopathic” administering of horror, this is not only by way of an awakening to the realities of pre- and postwar France but more broadly and reflexively as a critique of modernity and its coupling between extreme violence and, as it were, extreme rationality. The killing in Sang des bêtes is already highly systematic, rationalized, and professionalized. The combination between the seemingly incommensurate elements of rationality and violence as one hallmark of modernity, Franju seems to be suggesting, is formally surreal. Rather than channeling an alternative to modern rationalism (exemplified in the relentless rise of empirical science and the military-industrial complex), therefore, surrealism may be seen to merge with it. In the shadow of the two world wars, Franju’s scientific surrealism invokes modern technoscience’s cool monotony of violence whose effect is, oddly enough, to expose a certain “datedness” of surrealist art.⁵

Anyone who watches Franju’s films is quick to note that his work stands apart from his contemporaries of the French New Wave. In her book Georges Franju, Kate Ince provides some illuminating comments on Franju’s attitude toward the nouvelle vague: “In Franju’s view the nouvelle vague was a movement without substance, little more than ‘un “remous” publicitaire’ created by certain directors in favour of their own films, and mounted with the aid of journalists whose job was to ‘discover’ new values (Vialle 1968: 92). A real ‘wave’ … had to be international, have a social dimension, and endure (92), and while German expressionism and Italian neo-realism met these criteria, the nouvelle vague did not” (Ince 7–8). Sang des bêtes and Les yeux sans visage, Lowenstein points out, are more fittingly thought as precursors of the slasher movie, bestowing on this often misunderstood subgenre a seriousness and depth: “Franju’s films remind us that splatter does not preclude (and may sometimes even encourage) an allegorical confrontation with the historical trauma of modernity” (Lowenstein 53). In these two films, I would add, Franju anticipated the creeping (and creepy) merger between science and art, one of the most salient features not only of the horror film but of a wide range of contemporary visual culture.

Franju appreciated scientific cinema as an avant-garde art form. In 1945 he took over from the scientific cinematographer Jean Painlevé as the director of the Institute of Scientific Cinematography (he remained in this position until 1953). Both Franju and Painlevé had loose ties with the surrealist movement. Painlevé’s famous scientific films, like The Vampire (1945), which studies the life of the South American blood-sucking bat accompanied by a Duke Ellington jazz score, are prime examples of the sort of scientific surrealism that Bataille’s surrealist wing was engaged in. The “extreme reality” (André Bazin’s éblouissante vérité, literally “dazzling truth”) that scientific cinema was capable of delivering (including surgery, radiography, and other microcinematography films) attracted a great deal of artistic attention in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Ince writes that “this tendency of the scientific film to attract attention more for its aesthetic interest than for its content is a constant in the cinema of science in France up to and beyond Franju” (108). Bazin wrote about the so-called overtaking of surrealism by scientific cinematography. He went “so far as to estimate the surgical cinema of Thierry de Martel ‘beyond’ surrealism” and as encapsulating “film’s purest aesthetic” (qtd. in Ince 110). Bazin is well nigh mystical about the cinematic purity of scientific imagery: “for this is the miracle, the inexhaustible paradox of scientific cinema: it is at the extreme of goal-oriented, utilitarian research, when aesthetic intentions as such have been absolutely ruled out, that cinematic beauty develops, excessively, like supernatural grace” (qtd. in Ince 110). Beauty for Bazin (emphatically not in the sense of “pretty” imagery) emerges just at the point when aestheticism has been purposefully abandoned. But beauty is not merely a by-product of a cinema that seeks reality through and as scientific endeavor; it is scientific cinema’s excessive and abundant effect.

Far from “just a phase,” we should, I think, take the seemingly unintended aestheticism and hypersurrealism of scientific cinema as the forerunner of our present, highly conscious fascination with scientific “bio arts,” from the Welcome Trust’s visual collections, exhibitions, and displays, to brain imaging, the body art of Orlan, Günther Von Hagens’s Bodies and Body Worlds, the sliced cows and dying flies of Brit art entrepreneur Damien Hirst, the transgenic bunnies of the American artist Eduardo Kac, or Karl Grimes’s animal embryos and fetuses in his Future Nature exhibition.⁶ Reality television programs like Live Autopsy and extreme makeover shows such as Plastic Surgery Live or The Swan are throwbacks to nineteenth-century displays of anatomical models for the purpose of education and public entertainment alike. The molecular spectacles and cellular blowups of the television franchise CSI, in which an observable world—conceived in its entirety as a “crime scene”—becomes the dissectible object of scientific violence and the site for the corroboration of reactionary morals is perhaps the most popular example of this forensic fetishism. These examples illustrate just how interchangeable art and science were, and increasingly are, in the arenas of popular culture. This is the cultural and aesthetic mutation that I refer to as scientific surrealism.

Traces of the science film in Sang des bêtes do not reside in the visuals alone but also in the (male) commentary, written by Painlevé. Apart from the introduction of the professional killing tools at the beginning of the film, the narrator later recites two lines from Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil:

What is this violence that kills without hatred and without emotion? And what, if we were to take Baudelaire’s lines at face value, could possibly be more terrifying than precisely this sort of violence? During a sequence about the slaughtering of cows, Franju shows a cow’s severed head being smashed; we watch the face, that crucible of personhood, destroyed by repeated blows from an axe.

“I shall strike you without anger / And without hate, like a butcher.” Deliciously ironic, Baudelaire’s description of dispassionate killing is interesting precisely because we sense it is false. Despite being a truism of modernity, dispassionate killing is an odd and displaced notion. The belief that one can kill without hate, is, I suggest, more than just a modern fantasy about the complete rationalization of the biological processes of life and death; it is, in effect, a modern performance, modernity’s peculiar and morbid ritual. Is it true that those who kill do so without anger, hate, or desire? The question is not meant psychologically but culturally. For a culture that holds that it is possible to slay without hate is one that believes the opposite is equally true: provision and imparting of justice are possible without love. Indeed, these twin assumptions furnish the dominant liberal theories that “ration” justice according to certain attributable qualities and speak of “moral subjects” or “agents” as possessors of ascertainable rights.

Baudelaire’s nightmarish vision of the strictly professional act, of execution efficiently devoid of emotive expression, calls to mind not only the modern mechanization of slaughter but also its supporting discourses of welfarism and bioethics. What are we to make of this sort of mission, this professionalism, that goes by the name of animal welfare? Baudelairian irony may be said to expose the automated poetry of the mechanical itself and the cruelty (yes, hatred) inherent in the purely utilitarian act. Such cold lyricism is what I take to be at stake in Geyrhalter’s documentary Our Daily Bread, in which various mechanized procedures in food production take on a peculiar mesmeric quality. Our Daily Bread invokes the poetry of agribusiness, whose hypnotic rhythms are freed from the quirky humanity of a voiceover. To what extent Geyrhalter is critiquing the global food machine depends on how susceptible one is to the undulations of his hypnotist’s pendulum. Our Daily Bread’s aestheticism is the effect of rational excess, the point at which reason no longer pertains to or addresses the world. No film that I have seen makes visible the insanity (and comedy) of the rational—a distinctly modern achievement—more explicitly or painstakingly than Frederick Wiseman’s Primate.

Made in 1974, Primate is one of the most striking of Wiseman’s series of institutional portraits, begun in 1967 with Titicut Follies about life at Bridgewater, a Massachusetts state institution for the criminally insane. Titicut Follies and Primate are, in fact, close companions (the caged human inmates at Bridgewater are frequently naked, literally “naked apes”), with a number of scenes directly mirroring each other from film to film. Both focus on vulnerable and exposed bodies under the surveillance and control of a specialized institution and both exemplify Wiseman’s longstanding interest in the mechanisms of institutional life and their impact upon the individuals within them. There is, therefore, a strong Foucauldian element to all of Wiseman’s work. The focus on institutions (be they hospitals, schools, military bases, meatpacking plants, theater companies, or medical research facilities) rather than individuals renders the question of species almost redundant. What is common to Titicut Follies and Primate is the formative presence of the institution and the malleability of the institutionalized (both inmates and staff), regardless of their species.

Wiseman’s unique style developed alongside the Direct Cinema movement in American documentary, though Wiseman differs from it in several ways. The divergence from the edicts of Direct Cinema is most apparent at the level of editing. Wiseman uses a mosaic rather than a linear or chronological structure. After shooting on location between four and six weeks and collecting many (often hundreds) hours of footage, the finished film is created at the editing stage, a process that in Documenting the Documentary Barry Keith Grant called “second order looking” (Grant 240). This means that the documentary we watch is a highly and consciously constructed artifact, a carefully ordered and condensed montage. Not only is Primate no exception to this, it contains a particularly high number of shots.⁸

The nonhuman primates at Yerkes are subject to a total management of their biological life functions. This includes a prurient interest in their sexual behavior. In the film’s second scene, a primatologist says (referring to gorillas): “we don’t want them doing anything sexually when we’re not in a position to see it.” On the wall beside him is a photo of two gorillas copulating. As the film progresses the procedures of sexual-behavioral research become increasingly intensive and intrusive. Some of the most disturbing scenes are those in which researchers forcibly masturbate apes (to extract semen for artificial inseminations) or experiments in which scientists literally switch monkeys on and off using different frequencies of electric brain stimulation, to induce and observe sexual and aggressive behavior (“electro-ejaculation” and brain localization experiments). In one experiment a monkey in a restraining device receives repeated brain stimulation via electrodes inserted into his skull and has his erections measured.⁹

Yerkes emerges in these episodes as an intricate biopolitical institution whose overall project is definable as the ceaseless production of a clear differentiation of species. It exemplifies, in accurate Foucauldian fashion, the convergence between knowledge and power: the absolute control over nonhuman bodies merges and overlaps with the production of expert scientific knowledge. Here again is a version of Agamben’s “anthropological machine,” which rigorously differentiates between “bare” life functions and those allegedly peculiar to human life. Struggles over the corporeal, Agamben shows, strive to maintain a clear cartography of species by isolating what is human and mastering and purging all that is not. But as already shown, Agamben is less interested in the place of actual animals in contemporary biopolitical institutions such as Yerkes or the slaughterhouse. His focus is on the internal management of the animality of man. Primate challenges Agamben’s residual anthropocentrism, which overlooks the paramount place of animals in the Western humanist machine: real animals (not just conceptual animality) are the raw materials upon which depends the daily upkeep of human identity. This upkeep, Primate suggests, is indistinguishable from objective, scientific truths whose discovery is the official function of a center like Yerkes.

As in Wiseman’s other films, Primate is strictly observational, with no voiceover or interviews. We watch complex and baffling scientific procedures without explanation. This strategy is central to Primate and has some far-reaching consequences. On its first airing on PBS, the Yerkes scientists reacted with anger. They complained that Wiseman unfairly denied them the opportunity to clarify and justify their actions. Without reasoned explanations, the experiments we see appear capricious, grotesque, or downright insane. In the absence of a scientific register, other discourses invariably suggest themselves: loaded (and topical) terms like torture, abuse, and detention begin to echo in the void.

Scholarly debates on the subject of animals are occasionally tinged with a theoretical density that serves as a rhetorical smoke screen, a way of circumventing the direct ethical appeal communicated by the sort of troubling content, the difficulty of reality, shown in Primate. On first watching Primate (and on subsequent, reluctant viewings of this painful and frightening film for the sober purposes of teaching and research), it is hard to hold back the visceral sense that here, truly, is a vision of hell. Is this the result of the lack of information on the purpose of the experiments?

In its missing or silenced voiceover commentary, Primate poses an opposite problem to the one raised by so-called traumatic material (for example, texts dealing with the Holocaust, genocide, or sexual abuse). Traumatic representation seeks words to express the inexpressible, the infernal, in the knowledge that words fail. Yet Primate, which contains the elements of trauma’s catalogue of horrors (extreme violence, sexual exploitation, incomprehensible suffering), has not been discussed in traumatic terms. The reason for this is obvious: though unspoken, the horrors here are speakable because they pertain to nonhumans. Trauma’s language of unspeakability is the sole preserve of the human because only those who can speak may be said to experience the unspeakable. And yet what is most significant (and brilliant) about Wiseman’s documentary is that it refuses to speak: with no voiceover or interviews—neither a defense nor an assault on the subject of vivisection—Primate is the traumatic text par excellence and so belongs, in all its inarticulacy and silence, to the realm of witnessing.

How, then, to communicate in words and concepts what Wiseman’s film communicates almost exclusively through pictures? Primate shows without telling, so that much of what is seen remains scientifically opaque. Yet this is precisely what makes Primate a unique intervention into the discourse of bioethics. Thomas W. Benson has suggested that it is mistaken to read Primate as “a rhetorical act in the narrowest sense—as persuasive discourse in the forensic and deliberative modes, accusing a group of particular scientists of cruelty to animals, and attacking the policy of public support for animal research” (Benson 192). Through its visual and narrative strategies, Primate renders difficult the common discursive moral frameworks for discussing vivisection. Criticisms of the film as unfair on science or as scoring cheap antivivisectionist points serve to reveal the discursive boundaries that govern how we do, and do not, talk about animal experiments. When considering the use of animals in research, the question asked—in classic liberal and utilitarian fashion—is whether the benefits of the research outweigh the costs. This line of questioning has definite limits and limitations. It revolves around matters of utility, policy, and practicality at the heart of which is a consensus about maximizing animal welfare and minimizing “unnecessary suffering.” Much can be said about this way of framing the discussion, not least that it fails to question the moral grounds of our use of animals as a resource for human purposes and focuses instead on the manner in which animals are treated when used.¹⁰

Primate refuses to engage with the issue of animal experiments from the welfarist position just described. The film invites one to ask not how animals should be treated in vital medical research but, as Benson puts it, “whether any verbal justification is relevant to what we have seen” (198). At this point Primate ups the ethical stakes in ways some may find alarming. The film’s real concerns, Benson writes, are “not merely forensic or deliberative” they are “existential” (193). This is not a “problem film” anticipating some “easy liberal solution” (196), nor a shocking exposé of a rogue institution. Rather, Primate is “about something that is much more indivisible from our everyday lives, and about institutions that—even when they have some modifiable policies—are never going to be able to resolve the paradoxes they were set up to deal with. Problem films are most always optimistic, in that every problem implies a solution. Wiseman’s films do not imply any solution to the enterprise of being human” (196; my emphasis).

While the Yerkes scientists criticized Wiseman’s method for manipulating the material in such a way that it obscures the rationale of the experiments, Primate suggests, conversely, that rationalism and scientific discourse are themselves a sophisticated form of manipulation. What these discourses deflect and distort is the fact of animal powerlessness and the assumption of ethical difference that follows (rather than precedes) this fact, an assumption on which an institution like Yerkes is founded, and which it must tirelessly labor to perpetuate. In so doing, Yerkes utilizes the discourse and methodologies of science to narrow down the possible meanings of the word life—the bio of ethics—and reduce it to a set of predictable biological procedures.¹¹

By, as it were, muting narration, Wiseman “dumbs down” the language of science, disclosing its contours, exposing its limitations and its peculiar constructions of the object of life. In this way Primate raises the ultimate (bio)ethical questions: Could any explanation, however rational, or any amount of information justify the activities at Yerkes? Can—or should—there be any reason for using animals in this way, and can we not identify here a profound overlooking of the state of creaturely vulnerability and, by extension, also an overlooking of the very same vulnerability humans share with other living beings? Wiseman does not venture to answer these questions (he claims to hold no position in the vivisection debate). Primate raises these questions instead to make clear the limits and lacks of our way of addressing the issue.

An expanded notion of life—around the shared creatureliness of vulnerable bodies—is apparent in the film’s glimpses of the so-called extracurricular activities of animals as they play together in their cages, care for their infants, sit pensively in their cells, cling to, show affection for, or actively resist their human captors. Primate flatly refuses to cast such gestures as anthropomorphic. The film (and ironically also the scientists) reads these living gestures without scientific prejudice, as coherent and transparent. It is at once curious and telling that at no point in the film does anyone behave as if it were impossible to decipher what an animal thinks or feels. One of Primate’s greatest merits, then, is to not follow the skeptical path by making the otherness of animals a serious issue. Primate’s wit and originality lie in shifting attention from the alterity of animals to their institutionalized disempowerment. Otherness in this film is not an attribute of animality but of the discourse of science and the odd way it prefigures and orients the bioethical conversation. The proper “other” in this film is finally instrumental rationality itself, exposed as profoundly and precisely irrational.

Baudelaire’s chilling couplet on modern butchery—calculated, unemotional, reasoned—is equally important in Primate. Hate, anger, and rage have not been superseded; they have merely been abstracted and displaced. In her novel Good Morning, Midnight, Jean Rhys—another important writer of exposure—called this predicament humanity’s “cold insanity” (Rhys 145), by which she means the cruelty and irrationality inherent in reason itself. To counteract this cold insanity, Primate replaces positivist scientific observation with an ethics of vision: our observation of scientific observation yields incomprehension. We cannot understand what the scientists are looking at, but we do see something they remain blind to. Scientific opacity enables ethical transparency. Wiseman makes viewers attentive to the fragility of those who are mere stuff at the hands of the powerful. By resisting the cool seductions of scientific rationalism, Primate institutes an alternative quizzical space in which questions about human domination over nonhuman bodies cannot be repressed and are considered without recourse to scientific objectives. As with Titicut Follies, where criminology and psychiatry are bracketed off and lose their purchasing power, so in Primate, scientific currency deflates by being linked not to truth but to the exercising of power. Whatever else it may produce, research at Yerkes primarily transforms living bodies into mastered and dispensable stuff and into sets of abstract scientific calculations.

In “Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger describes the essence of modern technology not as a means or an instrument but as “a way of revealing” (Heidegger 39). What is revealed in this way is not a particular use of nature, but rather a “challenging [Herausfordern], which puts to nature the unreasonable demand that it supply energy that can be extracted and stored as such” (40). Yerkes is a classic example of the “challenging forth” of nature and its transformation into an energetic “standing reserve,” which Heidegger regards as the essence of modern technology. The repeated “milking” for semen and the artificial inseminations at Yerkes, for instance, disclose the status of the animals less as mere objects and more as a resource—Heidegger’s “standing reserve”—for the potentially endless extraction of energy or, in this case, the (re)production of further resources. Heidegger’s point about modern technology, it is important to stress, is not that it objectifies but, on the contrary, that it annihilates objects. Interestingly, the common opposition to vivisection that rejects its reduction of sentient beings into things is only a preliminary stage in Yerkes’ activities. Following Heidegger’s logic, the essence of Yerkes is more radical still: animals are not simply objectified but ultimately disappear as objects. This aesthetics of disappearance, to borrow Paul Virilio’s phrase, is at its clearest in the film’s most unsettling sequence, which follows the procedure of the killing, decapitation, and brain dissection of a squirrel monkey: the animal is transformed from a body into a thing, and finally into a microscopic, abstracted representation of a brain. The sequence is the film’s violent coda and brings together the various motifs of power, instrumental rationality, and the visual codes of scientific surrealism.

Yerkes does not merely produce what, in Primate Visions, Donna Haraway describes as the “achievement of ‘man’s’ humanist goals of self-knowledge in science and technology” (117). There is also an important aesthetic dimension to the place.¹² Wiseman’s film is scientifically surreal. Its “look” is deliberate: the interiors of labs with their futuristic paraphernalia are the visual embodiment of the fantasy of rationalism. Wiseman heightens this by the use of dense montage and by occasionally zooming in on the technology itself—revolving machines, a flickering monitor, test tubes arranged in geometric rows, the view through the lens of a microscope, or the film’s science fiction finale in which a rhesus monkey is launched into space. We are finally in Kubrick territory with its clinical decors and hushed white corridors. Surrealism’s chimeric aesthetic is also present in the subtle insinuations of bestiality: images of the sexual exploitation of animals or the nursery scene early on in the film, in which newborn chimpanzees are gently cuddled and bottle-fed by women in surgical masks. The rows of cells in which the animals are kept between experiments cannot but recall the efficient architecture of indefinite detention, from Auschwitz to Guantánamo Bay.

Whereas in Sang des bêtes violence and poetry reanimate one another through tension and contrast, in Primate they can no longer be told apart. Primate displays the muted affectations of the scientific machine becoming their own poetic-artistic expression. We can think here again of surrealism’s attachment to the irrational, the fantastic, and the bizarre as lending a visual, aesthetic dimension to science. Primate can be seen, in the most polemical terms possible, as an extended exposition, not just of the banality (or rationality) of evil but of the aesthetics of evil.

I should like in closing to return to Simone Weil’s notion of beauty entailing an apprehension of vulnerability with which this chapter began. At the end of the long dissection sequence, the two scientists examine the sections of the squirrel monkey’s brain through a microscope and converse excitedly:

“Oh, here’s a whole cluster of them. Here, look at this.”
“Yeah. My gosh, that is beautiful”
“By golly, and see how localized. No fuzzing out …”

We can now more clearly conceive two different notions of beauty. In this sequence the beauty of science refers first and foremost to technical and technological prowess—the power to observe beyond—to take apart, scrutinize, disassemble, penetrate, quantify, and calculate—the integral objects of the world. This is the very same beauty that fired the mind of Dziga Vertov, Soviet cinema’s avant-garde pioneer and inventor of the kino-eye, the rational enhancement of the human eye by cinematic technology, an early example of cyborg vision that hoped to fulfill the Communist dream. The vulnerability of living beings is for the rationalist a condition to overcome and an opportunity for the creative powers of thought. But it is at the very same time, as Foucault realized, an invitation to dominion and mastery. Only in these terms, which conflate beauty and power, could the sectioned brain of an animal be deemed beautiful.

No notion of beauty could differ more profoundly or more essentially from the kind of aesthetic appreciation Weil’s work espouses, an appreciation whose proper object is not the fragmented and abstracted body but its opposite: the beauty inherent in the perilous integrity of living things. The first, scientific beauty, revels in taking apart and looking in; the second, vulnerable beauty, is a pained response to the ease with which living bodies may be taken apart. Both are commonly rooted in natural law—in the materiality and finitude of living bodies—but whereas Weil’s notion of beauty is mournful, scientific beauty is morbid.¹³

In Screening the Body Lisa Cartwright explores the historically close alliance between science, cinematic technology and popular visual culture. Film was organically suited to the study of physiology, but its object lay beyond the mere understanding of motion: “The film body of the motion study … is a symptomatic site, a region invested with fantasies about what constituted ‘life’ for scientists and the lay public in the early twentieth century, and anxieties about whether the ‘life’ scientists studied in the laboratory was something that could be seen, imaged, and ultimately controlled (whether by prolonging it, as Lumière wished to do, or by having the authority to determine the moment of death)” (4). In Primate the medical gaze penetrates the body at the microscopic level in a bid to magnify, resolve, and finally “possess” the object of life. Visuality and aesthetics emerge as inseparable from both the microscopic apparatus and from what Cartwright describes as the “unmanageability of the object” (86) under inspection. “The unseen ‘promicroscopic world,’” Cartwright explains, “exists only in part as a phantasm of the Western viewing subject. It exists more significantly as a subjugated institutional history, a history of the agency of the object of the gaze, the subjective being represented in the bodily fragment posed on the microscopic stage” (88). Anxiety and uncertainty over the elusive nature of the researchers’ objects of study underlie Primate’s portrait of Yerkes.

The microscopic representation of the monkey’s brain fragment in Primate is one example of Cartwright’s Foucauldian reading of the “surveillant gaze” (13) of science. In designating the visual code of this and other images in both Primate and Sang des bêtes “scientific surrealism,” I am suggesting a final twist to Foucault’s famous dictum “knowledge is power/power is knowledge.” For, in Franju and Wiseman’s films, power is no longer just knowledge; power is beauty. Virilio’s “A Pitiless Art” sums up in blunt capitals the stakes of the overlap: “Ethics or aesthetics? That is indeed the question at the dawn of the new millennium. If freedom of SCIENTIFIC expression now actually has no more limits than freedom of ARTISTIC expression, where will inhumanity end in future?” (61).

Scientific surrealism’s prurient gaze unites the experimentalism of science with the experimentalism of art in pursuit of a radical (if always resistant) object of vision. Scientific surrealism returns to Benjamin’s famous (and erroneous) singling out of fascism as a form of aestheticized politics. Today’s onslaught of prescribed freedoms, of the market, of science, of industry and art, Virilio suggests, is hell-bent on producing an extreme biopolitics, whose evil eye yields a new kind of beauty.