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Can a chimpanzee learn to speak by using sign language? Yes. But in what sense does it know what it is saying? "Project Nim," a fascinating documentary, follows the life of a chimp named Nim Chimpsky as it's raised like a human baby and then shuttled from one set of "parents" and "homes" to another. The chimp emerges from this experience as a more admirable creature than many of its humans.

Nim was born in captivity in Oklahoma and taken from his mother after a few days by Herbert Terrace, a Columbia professor who recruited his student Stephanie LaFarge to be the chimp's foster mother. This was in the 1970s, which helps explain why Stephanie breast-fed Nim and allowed him to smoke pot and have the occasional beer. In his early years, Nim was a bright and affectionate child, quickly learning what would eventually grow into a vocabulary of 125 signs. He even made progress at potty training, although I doubt he ever quite saw the point.

I call Nim "he" rather than "it" because that's how his humans see him. The movie is more about how we see them. "Project Nim" is by James Marsh , who made the Oscar-winning " Man on Wire ." Like Errol Morris on occasion, Marsh weaves dramatic re-creations into this film, so that sometimes we are seeing actual documentary footage, and at other times, we're seeing actors or even (although you won't notice it) animatronics. Stephanie, for example, is played by Reagan Leonard , because original doc footage of Nim's early days might well be scarce. How this substitution fits with traditional documentary ethics I will set aside. It produces a very absorbing film.

The real people depicted here don't always come across very well, especially Professor Terrace, who seems to be less hands-on with Nim than with two of his attractive research assistants, Stephanie and Laura-Ann Petitto. The foster parents, later including a hippie type, Bob Ingersoll, do love and worry about Nim, and forgive him a great deal, especially when in adolescence his natural aggression begins to grow.

There comes a point after which a chimp can no longer safely be kept as what we might call a house pet. This is not the fault of the chimp, which is programmed by evolution to develop anger and other self-protective mechanisms. Chimpanzees are five times as strong as humans of the same weight, and you don't want one to grow impatient with you. In the film, various handlers show the scars on arms, legs and cheeks of Nim's aggression.

After severely biting one researcher on the cheek, Nim signs: "Sorry." But is Nim truly sorry, or is that merely the sign he learned to use after sensing human displeasure? His name is a play on "Noam Chomsky," the linguist who suggested some human language skills might be hard-wired at birth. It's an excellent question whether chimps are in fact "speaking" in a human sense at all. Yes, Nim knows the sign for "banana." But when a dog wants a Milk-Bone and begs on its hind legs, it's not precisely thinking, "Please, master, give me one of those excellent cereal-based treats from the Milk-Bone box."

Nim's later life is melancholy. After first seeming destined for medical research, he is saved, only to be consigned to a small cage. He then moves through what must have been a baffling series of homes, his early language skills no longer needed or praised. The movie suggests that humans benefitted little from Project Nim, and Nim himself not at all.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Project Nim (2011)

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Project Nim

By Chris Norris in the July-August 2011 Issue

The door to our dark places is guarded by an ape. He’s been there through a hundred years of cinema: Merian Cooper’s Kong, Charlton Heston’s “damn dirty” captors, the test gorillas of Frederick Wiseman’s Primate . He’s there in stories several centuries older, his desperate grunts and almost-human DNA inspiring even that masterpiece of acquired language, Lolita . In his famous afterword, Nabokov traces his American opus back to an “initial shiver” he felt reading an article about an ape that produced the first animal-rendered drawing: “this sketch showed the bars of the poor creature’s cage.”

Project Nim takes us back to and inside that drawing. British director James Marsh arrives here fresh off 2008’s Oscar-winning Man on Wire , a highly mediated documentary chronicling a Twin Towers tightrope act that took place a year after the birth of his new subject. Project Nim opens in 1973, with home-movie footage from Oklahoma’s Institute for Primate Studies. There—as twinkling nursery music and staged reenactments guide us—we see an infant pried from his mother’s arms and spirited away to embark on a narrative straight out of Fielding, Defoe, and Voltaire: the low-born naïf’s errant journey through a cruel, often ludicrous society.

Christened Nim Chimpsky by a Columbia psychologist, the furry heartbreaker arrives at the Upper West Side brownstone of a family of “rich hippies,” whose Montessori-schooled matriarch, Stephanie LeFarge, has agreed to raise him as a human, teach him sign language, and so test Chomsky’s theories about “generative grammar.” The experiment had its human conscripts too. “There was no family discussion about ‘should we, shouldn’t we?’” LaFarge’s daughter, the fortyish Jenny Lee, recalls early in the film. “It was clearly Stephanie saying, ‘Let’s have a chimp!’” she says, laughing, and with a whaddya-gonna-do shrug, adding the unneeded explanation, “It was the Seventies.”

Was it ever. As a linguistic project, Project Nim’s data proved inconclusive. As a social experiment on power and moral blindness in America’s now-faded intellectual class, however, it’s nothing less than essential. Drawn largely from Elizabeth Hess’s Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human , Marsh’s Nim blends staged theatrics, dramatically shot interviews, and faded 8mm home movies to evoke a whole PBS-drunk, paradigm-quoting age of pseudo-reason. Nim was born seven months after An American Family debuted and sowed a reality virus that turned pandemic by century’s end.

Nim ’s crucial line comes from the project’s leader, just after the chimp-napping scene. Recalling his choice of ex-student/lover Stephanie LaFarge to raise Nim, Columbia professor Herb Terrace says, “A chimp could not have a better mother”—summarily dismissing every female of said infant’s actual species. While LaFarge seems amply maternal in present-day interviews and home-movie gambols, she starts a refrain soon taken up by most of Project Nim’s early team members: “I knew nothing about monkeys or apes.” Soon after comes a chorus of unfamiliarity with American Sign Language, Nim’s primary mode of communication. Eventually, you get the sense that Project Nim took place a few doors down from the parapsychology department where Bill Murray was testing hot chicks for ESP prior to leaving Columbia to ghostbust. 

Marsh helps things along considerably, crosscutting contemporary interviews with deadpan archival counterpoint. “Herb was infinitely exciting,” LaFarge says as a Seventies-era close-up of the shirtless, hirsute prof plays like Wallace Shawn’s sight-gag walk-on in Manhattan . When Terrace replaces LaFarge as Nim’s foster mother, his choice reads Woody Allenish too. “Herb’s power as a professor, his age—completely impacted me,” recalls his nominee, Laura-Ann Petitto. “I wanted so much to be a part of his world. The world of academia.” Terrace says only, “I had strong personal feelings about Laura, but I don’t think that in any way got in the way of our science.” Cut to photo of the bikini-clad Petitto bearing Nim like a child. “I made her, in a sense, my director of education,” Terrace then says of this photo’s subject, who was, at the time, 18.

In a sense, Marsh is as guilty as Terrace: both use actual sentient beings as vessels for an often idiosyncratic agenda. By some lights, Marsh’s strategies are more shameless: nudging melodrama from Dickon Hinchliffe’s score; slow, low-angle dollies past faces of stricken interviewees; and a narrative arc that hits every major note from Shock Corridor to The Shawshank Redemption to Schindler’s List .

“I’m certainly being shameless in my pushing of those events,” Marsh acknowledged when we met in a Manhattan café in April. The dark-haired 48-year-old spoke openly and quickly, looking like a sunnier version of one of his early doc subjects, John Cale. Marsh’s filmography before and after Man on Wire alternates between artful documentary and verité fiction: a solely gustatory biography of Elvis Presley ( The Burger and the King , 96); and the second (and best) entry in Channel 4’s Red Riding crime trilogy. Marsh credits his oblique strategies to Peter Greenaway’s early work and his expansive view of subject to Errol Morris—and he’s also borrowed music scores from both. But he added: “I’ve been as much influenced by feature films as documentaries.” 

When I floated the word bildungsroman, Marsh nodded vigorously. “Novels of that type were definitely in my mind,” he said. “I studied English literature and read those novels, and Fielding was one of my favorite writers. He was never shy to point out the absurdity of things with his characters.” Facts certainly seem to support this treatment, providing a sharp morality play on sex, power, and their various rationalizations. A Cornwall-born son of a semi-employed mechanic and a housecleaner, Marsh also caught picaresque nuances that others might not have—like the moment LaFarge recalls the arrival of Petitto. “She came out of nowhere as a . . . cute little thing from Ramapo [New Jersey],” says the Manhattan Brahmin, unchecked class hostility hanging in the air as archival interviews intercut with present-day ones to reveal that Petitto still has the same Jersey accent—along with a university chair in cognitive neuroscience, and a Guggenheim fellowship. 

“It’s about power,” Marsh said of Project Nim . “And the human beings that have the least power seem to behave the best. Those women didn’t have any power and they’re all very intelligent, interesting people in their own right. So to look at them 35 years later without those power structures in place was the right thing to do, I think.” Marsh screened the film for Project Nim’s most empowered participant last. Now director of Columbia’s Primate Cognition Lab, Herb Terrace sent one measured e-mail in response. “He took issue with the absence of scientific context in the story,” said Marsh. “But it wasn’t an aggressive push-back about ‘How dare you characterize me this way!’”

While the film’s producers bugged him for more “expert opinion,” Marsh has about as much time for Chomsky as Nabokov had for Freud. “That’s not what this film is—a TV science documentary,” he said. “What I didn’t want to do was overload it with context when I was doing a dramatic story of Nim at large in our human world.” He cited documentaries like Vertov’s kino-eye manifesto Man with a Movie Camera and Franju’s Blood of the Beasts as early, formative influences. “It’s incredibly constructed for a raw, improvisational film,” Marsh says of Franju’s debut short. “He cuts away to plot while somebody is being taught how they can chop an animal in half. The images in that film are unforgettable and amazing. It’s a documentary, but one that’s really dramatically constructed to mediate Franju’s interest in the slaughterhouse.”

This is probably a good time to say that things don’t go well for Nim, or for the humans who care most about him. As his vocabulary grows to include scores of signs—letting him communicate every desire from toilet access to a hug to a bong-hit—so do his size and strength. When Nim rips a chunk out of a young female teacher’s face, Terrace decides he has enough data, terminates the experiment, and abruptly reclassifies his star pupil as an animal.

The trauma of this remains visible on the faces of current interviewees, some of whose accounts are broken off by tears. “We did a huge disservice to him and his soul, and shame on us,” says Joyce Butler, the teacher obliged to manage Nim’s exile from humanity. Even Terrace shares a moment of carefully hedged regret. “I did feel bad,” he says. “I was definitely doing something that he somehow would feel is unjust or wrong.” Yeah, we think, as Nim signs “play” to his blank-faced new cellmates. He certainly somehow might feel that.

After an edenic idyll in a university-owned   estate, Nim gets kicked back to gen-pop at the Oklahoma penal colony, where his return is the very essence of classical tragedy: a bona fide anagnorisis, when the hero confronts the shattering truth about his own identity. The moment was captured on archival video. “Finding that was incredible,” Marsh says of the tape that shows Nim hunched near a dozen chimps with padlocked chains around their necks. “You see so much confusion of such a profound nature there. It’s us leading him to say, ‘This is what you are.’”

In his preparation for Nim , Marsh revisited Bresson’s Au hasard Balthazar , “for obvious reasons.” The breadth of human tragedy Bresson drew from the title donkey’s brief, sad arc moved Godard to call it “the world in an hour and a half,” and Marsh gets comparable mileage out of a chimp. Once larkish, Project Nim becomes life-altering for several characters—some of whom turn heroic in confronting their own animal and human nature.

Project Nim operated in the murky field of language, and was conducted by an individual who, according to his assistants, was largely absent from his subject’s life. “[Terrace] bases his conclusions on data, not on observation,” says Marsh. “He’s behaving as a rational scientist and yet saying to someone, ‘Be someone’s mother.’” And since even the rawest data needs interpretation, it’s hard to imagine Project Nim finding acute intelligence in someone its director shipped off to a vivisection lab. A few years after the experiment, Terrace reversed his original findings, determining that Nim’s three- and four-word strings of signs weren’t sentences but mere imitations, performed solely for rewards. Others didn’t see much of a difference. Nim’s most steadfast supporter turns out to be a Deadhead former employee of the Oklahoma primate center, Bob Ingersoll, who, in one interview, demonstrates a sentence Nim often signed to him: “stone,” “smoke,” “now”—a verbatim transcript of conversations I’ve personally had with fellow primates.

Marsh names as his favorite documentarian Frederick Wiseman, of all people, “although he clearly does something very different from what I do.” Since Wiseman himself once jokingly called his own seemingly unexpurgated works “reality fictions,” Marsh may be onto something. The history of primatology casts grave doubt on the news item Nabokov cites in Lolita ’s afterword, a story the writer stood by nonetheless, telling at least one interviewer he even saw the drawing himself, reproduced in Paris Soir. Fittingly, that same afterword also includes Nabokov’s famous caution against the one word we should only use with scare quotes: reality.

They don’t make enough scare quotes for what we call reality today. A new study of 250 DNA-exonerated prison inmates found that 40 of them had falsely confessed to murder, all but two giving precise details of the crime that were unreleased to the press, and every single one of them on videotape. But you can bet these police documentaries didn’t begin with their subject’s arrival at the station. “To a large extent, what you leave out of a film determines what it is,” Marsh told me, suggesting the ocean of uncertainty that still surrounds all primates, an uncertainty even DNA science won’t resolve. The best we’re left with is a Platinum Rule, an update to the Golden, that respects another’s unknowable subjectivity and our tendency to project our own: do unto others as your deepest self and the latest research indicates others would have done unto them. 

Chris Norris is a frequent contributor to Film Comment .

© 2011 by Chris Norris

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Movie Review | 'Project Nim'

Some Humans and the Chimp They Loved and Tormented

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By A.O. Scott

• July 7, 2011

“Project Nim,” a new documentary by James Marsh, is a probing, unsettling study of primate behavior, focusing on the complex dynamics of power, sex and group bonding in a species whose startling capacity for selfishness and aggression is offset by occasional displays of intelligence and compassion.

The movie also features a chimpanzee.

His name — a human imposition, like everything else in this creature’s remarkable, heartbreaking life — is Nim Chimpsky. In the 1970s he enjoyed (or endured) a season of fame as a research subject. Shortly after his birth at an Oklahoma laboratory, Nim was taken from his mother’s side and delivered to New York, where he became part of an experiment, led by a Columbia professor, Herbert Terrace, to determine whether an ape could be taught human language.

It is a bit curious that Mr. Marsh’s film has nothing to say about the roots of Nim’s name, a jab at the influential linguist Noam Chomsky , whose theories about the innateness and uniqueness of language to humans were the implicit target of Dr. Terrace’s work. His project was an effort to discern if a chimpanzee could learn sign language and if that learning could proceed beyond the mimicry of specific gestures into the creation of grammatical sentences. If Nim could be raised more or less as a human child, and could master human communication, that would challenge the Chomskyan idea of language as a special, hard-wired trait fundamentally separating us from other animals. ( Koko the gorilla, another celebrated signing ape born around the same time as Nim, also tested this hypothesis.)

“Project Nim” glances briefly at the scientific controversy that shaped Nim’s fate, but Mr. Marsh is less interested in comparatively dry matters of linguistics or neurobiology than in a humid, messy domain of identity and emotion that has, in the past, been the terrain of psychoanalysis. And of literature: Nim, thrown from one home to another, vulnerable to cruelty and neglect and dependent on the kindness of strangers, resembles the titular hero of a Dickens novel, an orphan buffeted by circumstances whose biography is also a fable of individual virtue and social injustice.

A helpless innocent compared with his protectors and tormentors, Nim bounces like a long-armed David Copperfield from one unnatural home to another — a Manhattan brownstone, an estate in the Bronx, a medical testing center upstate — living through periods of pastoral bliss and gothic horror. His tale is Dickensian, but also Kafkaesque, since he is at the mercy of powerful forces beyond his ken or control.

Red Peter, the learned ape in Kafka’s devastating “ Report to an Academy ,” dreams, above all else, of a “way out,” and to watch footage of the young Nim at play and in confinement is to infer that he must have known a similar longing. Unlike the Kafka character, however, this educated primate never acquired enough words to tell us his story, and so “Project Nim” relies on human interlocutors, some of whom cared about Nim a great deal, almost all of whom wind up telling us more about themselves.

They are a remarkable collection, often at odds and sometimes in bed with one another, with Nim as their pawn, rival or surrogate child as well as the blank slate on which they inscribe their fantasies and intellectual conceits. Dr. Terrace, speaking with precision and detachment in present-day interviews, is either resigned to being the film’s designated villain or oblivious to being set up for that role. His former colleagues, some of them also former lovers, don’t have much good to say, and the ’70s footage, showing an academic dandy with a comb-over, a BMW and a Burt Reynolds mustache, is hardly flattering.

For the first few years of Nim’s life, Dr. Terrace was the master of his fate, though not always a significant presence in the chimp’s day-to-day routine. After leaving Oklahoma, Nim was installed in the home of Stephanie LaFarge, where he became part of a household that included seven children, at least one dog and Ms. LaFarge’s husband, a poet and “rich hippie” who appears to have been Nim’s romantic rival.

Ms. LaFarge, an open and genial interview subject, drops a few casual bombshells testifying to what the psychobabble of our own time might call boundary issues. “It was the ’70s,” her now grown-up daughter Jenny Lee says, but even then, and even on the Upper West Side, it might have been a bit unusual for a woman to breastfeed a baby chimpanzee.

After a while, Nim was transferred to an estate in Riverdale, cared for and tutored by young people — most of them women — who come before Mr. Marsh’s camera in middle age to recall the pleasures and dangers of working with their spirited simian charge. It is hard not to be charmed by the affection that passes between these humans and the chimp, or to appreciate what seems to be a reciprocated effort at communication. But at the same time it is difficult to avoid a certain queasiness at the sight of a wild creature forcibly and irrevocably alienated from his nature — dressed in clothes, tethered and caged, smoking a joint out in the woods with his pals. You laugh, sometimes, to force the lump out of your throat.

There is no doubt that Nim was exploited, and also no doubt that he was loved. Mr. Marsh, by allowing those closest to Nim plenty of room to explain themselves, examines the moral complexity of this story without didacticism. He allows the viewer, alternately appalled, touched and fascinated, to be snagged on some of its ethical thorns. He also engages in a bit of manipulation, using sleight-of-hand re-enactments and Dickon Hinchliffe’s nerve-rackingly melodramatic score to sensationalize a drama that hardly requires it.

Mr. Marsh, whose last documentary was the lovely, Oscar-winning “ Man on Wire ,” is a patient listener and an able storyteller, but the subject of “Project Nim” is so rich and strange that it might have benefited from the hand of a wilder, bolder filmmaker. An obsessive like Errol Morris or Werner Herzog might have pushed beyond pathos and curiosity, deeper into the literal no man’s land that lies between us and our estranged animal relations. But it is also possible that our language and our science do not equip us to understand the truth about Nim — or the truth about us that he may have discovered through years of rigorous, involuntary research.

“Project Nim” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Strong language, drug use, sexual references and depictions of animal suffering.

PROJECT NIM

Opens on Friday in New York and Chicago.

Directed by James Marsh; based on the book “Nim Chimpsky: The Chimp Who Would Be Human” by Elizabeth Hess; director of photography, Michael Simmonds; edited by Jinx Godfrey; music by Dickon Hinchliffe; produced by Simon Chinn; released by Roadside Attractions/HBO Documentary Films. Running time: 1 hour 33 minutes.

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Project Nim: James Marsh

Human intelligence, behavior, interpersonal relationships and an ape named nim chimpsky., july 7, 2011.

Nim Chimpsky, as seen in PROJECT NIM. Photo credit: Harry Benson.

Project Nim , the latest documentary feature from Oscar-winning director James Marsh ( Man on Wire ) is as much a history of Herbert Terrace’s eponymous animal language acquisition experiment as it is the real life “tragedy” of the subject of that experiment: Nim Chimpsky. Marsh’s film is a study in its own right of the interpersonal dynamics, hopes, dreams, perhaps even delusions of the parties involved. Adopted from a primate research center in 1973, Nim—named for the linguist Noam Chomsky, who theorized that humans alone were “hard-wired” to acquire language—is placed in the care of one of Terrace’s ex-students, Stephanie Lefarge, to be raised alongside her own children and taught sign language. When Terrace concludes that the project has failed, and returns Nim to his original owners, what ensues is a real life picaresque of Dickensian proportion. As we follow the chimp’s unbelievable peregrinations in the society of humans—from being sold to an animal testing facility and being rescued by a dubious animal rights figure, to nearly standing trial for his life—Marsh explores not only the legitimacy of Nim’s communicative abilities, but what he may or may not communicate to us, as a living symbol. I had a chance to speak with Marsh on his handling of the subject and, naturally, his thoughts on Nim.

Zachary Block  Is Nim Chimpsky, either the real life chimp or the one depicted in the film, a “tragic figure”?

James Marsh  What an interesting question to start. Well, I would say he was because he had no power. And he’s powerless from the moment he’s born. He’s born in a cage, under our control, and that control becomes lesser or greater as the story unfolds but if tragedy is . . . well, how do you define tragedy? Yes, to answer your question, he’s a sentient, sensitive, intelligent creature that has no control over his destiny and therefore would be tragic, I would think.

ZB  Was it your intention to emphasize the wish fulfillment element at play among the research assistants? Do you think that Terrace was probably correct in his assessment, being the most qualified among the researchers and having access to the data for the longest period of time?

JM  I think what was surprising about the conclusions of the experiment was that it took them so long to conclude what was, in a sense, before their very eyes for five years. So I think there are still discussions about primates’ ability to use language and learn language, but I don’t think that anyone’s ever proved that they can be creative with grammar and sentences the way that we are as a species. But then again, they’re not us, they’re chimpanzees: they have a very rich communicative life that’s beyond the limited amount of signs we gave Nim to use. And he’s in a position of powerlessness, as I mentioned to you, so he’s bound to use those signs to advance his own particular objectives which are often very, very immediate and very, very primitive, shall we say, like eating and shagging and . . . I guess, like ours. ( laughter )

ZB  Did you want to explore the idea of the assistants wanting to believe what may not have been provable?

JM  Yes, but that’s true of almost anything, is it not? That you can’t do anything without having optimistic expectations and pessimistic doubts. I think in this case there was a real hope that he would learn language and therefore revolutionize our ideas about ourselves, as much as about chimpanzees. To find out that language was not unique to our species would be quite a breathtaking thing to have to reckon with. So I think there was a lot of, as there is in any scientific endeavor, a lot of . . . wishful thinking is not the right word to use, but hoping for a good outcome.

ZB  Do you feel that many of the subjects in this film have confused the idea of intelligence with “sentience”?

JM  Firstly, I think chimps are intelligent in ways that are different from us. For example, they have an extraordinary visual-spatial memory: they can memorize spatial aspects that we cannot. So they have intelligence in ways that are different, and what the experiment was trying to do was to build a bridge between the two species with language—and it didn’t particularly work. But it would be wrong to say that that proves chimps aren’t smart or that chimps are dumb. I think almost the opposite: he used language, in a way, to deceive us, and you see very specific examples in the film, where he uses words to get out of situations he doesn’t want to be in. But also, what use is language to a chimpanzee? He doesn’t want to hang out with us and talk with us, he’s got better things to do than that. He has different imperatives and therefore, I think perhaps we were asking the wrong questions. What I discovered through making the film was how intelligent chimpanzees were, not how dumb they were.

Professor Herbert Terrace with Nim Chimpsky in car as seen in PROJECT NIM. Photo credit: Susan Kuklin.

ZB  Is it possible they were so impressed that a chimp displayed any kind of intelligence they concluded he was smarter than average?

JM  I think he was probably smarter than average, just based on what I heard. When he was taken back to Oklahoma, with Bob Ingersoll and Alyse Moore, who are looking after him, they both say, “well, we see chimps all the time and this is a smart chimp.” And like us, there’s a whole spectrum of intelligence. Jim Mahoney, the vet in the film, says, “well, some of them are just dumb.” ( laughter ) You get dumb chimps, you get smart chimps, as you do with human beings.

ZB  Do you think it is significant that the study was carried out by a behavioral psychologist and not a linguist?

JM  Yes I do, actually, though I’m not completely across the ins and outs of what that means.

ZB  Well, the idea that they thought Nim’s being “raised by a family” would allow him to acquire human language capabilities.

JM  Exactly, well, I think the understanding was that clearly children learn language in that kind of environment, and they do. Therefore, it wasn’t such a strange idea to say if we want a chimp to learn language we have to give him the right circumstances: which is that around him there will be other people using language and he’ll “have to” use it in order to get what he wants. And that to some extent was true. But I’m not sure that putting him in a classroom was such a great idea, nor would it be for a two year–old, three year–old child: children don’t learn language in a classroom. They learn certain other things, but they learn language by firstly being hard-wired in a way that a chimpanzee is not.

ZB  Right, so this is very much a behavioral psychologist’s notion, whereas linguists mainly agree that we’re hard-wired to learn languages, that it’s specific to humans.

JM  Exactly, but there’s definitely a hope and a presumption that by nurturing the chimp they can go against his nature, and his nature wins out big time in this story: that’s what I took away from it.

ZB  Would you agree that there is a significant difference between a chimp being able to sign “play” or “I’m sorry” and being able to understand what prepositions are?

JM  Yeah, or being able in a sense to be endlessly inventive with language the way that children are from very early on. Once you have a few words you put them together any way you want to get meaning. I don’t think Nim is doing that, I think he’s constructing signs to get his objectives and using the language that way, playing us for what he can.

ZB  I feel that the film is as much about Nim as what Nim means to different people. What does Nim mean to you, personally?

JM  It’s interesting: one thing I learned from making the film was that individual chimpanzees have very strong individual characters, they have a personality that’s pretty much unique to them. And you can see in the film that he has a character and a personality and you get to know that he reacts to things in a certain way; he’s often very confused in our story about where he is and what he’s done to be there, and even the hard-hearted professor says as he leaves Nim, you know it’s a very striking thing, he says “Well, I got the impression that I was doing something that he would think was wrong.” So Terrace, who is the unsentimental professor, is ascribing to Nim a sort of moral judgment about what’s going on and I think he’s not wrong about that either, to be fair to him. So yes, you get to know this personality of a chimpanzee and you get to understand the bigger picture: that if all chimpanzees have very particular personalities, what a tragedy it is for them to be locked up and separated from the life they should have. And there are thousands of chimpanzees, as we speak, in captivity, and it’s really the last place they want to be.

ZB  A lot of attention is paid to the interpersonal relationships of the subjects, specifically the sexual relationships between Terrace and several of the assistants. Why does this interest you?

JM  One of the reasons we’re doing the film is because I was interested in behavior. Not just chimpanzee behavior, but what behavior would be flushed out in us in the presence of this chimpanzee and therefore the relationships that kind of form around him and that play out. This I felt to be very much a part of the story: our behavior, what we did, how we are. When we talk about him, and he’s an experimental animal, we’re going to find out what he thinks and what he’s about, but what we are about in the situation too. And it felt like there was a whole human drama waiting to be explored in this story. As for the sexual relationships: that happened in the context of the experiment and indeed the story we’re telling. And if you’re looking at behavior generally, which I think the film does, if you see a human alpha male character behave in a certain way towards the people who had less power than him, the women who had less power than him—this felt to me to be a very interesting comparison between the behavior you see in the chimpanzee who’s striving for dominance, striving to become the top chimpanzee and seeing a human alpha male doing the same thing. The comparison was implicit and interesting and available should you want to go there.

ZB  Is Bob Ingersoll in some respects the hero of this film? The only one who really loves Nim on his own terms and wants nothing from him?

JM  Bob was free of any kind of specific agenda with Nim. He wasn’t trying to find out anything particular, he was a student at an institute that was breeding chimpanzees for studies. So his objectives are not nearly as reductive as the previous people involved in the experiment, and therefore he also approaches Nim on a much more level playing field, he’s saying: “Let’s meet halfway, let’s communicate not just with sign but with body language and with words,” and so he becomes more of a chimpanzee. That’s why he’s so successful with Nim and becomes Nim’s most loyal friend throughout his life. I think they have a very genuine bond that’s built on Bob going halfway to meet him.

ZB  But he does sort of believe in it, a little bit.

JM  But I think it’s very clear, he says “he may not have sentences or grammar but he can communicate,” and Bob would know about that, and then you see them having a very rich life of communication in the footage that we have; they can make each other’s intentions known, they can share food, they can share joints, you know, they definitely can understand each other and that plays out in the footage that we see in the film.

ZB  Do you feel that chimp figures like Nim, but also Koko and perhaps even Oliver the Humanzee have garnered attention less because they seem to support evolutionary or linguistic hypotheses, but because they are in a sense, magical? In other words, are they symbols of scientific advancement or are they signs of the unexplainable?

JM  I think a bit of both, in a way. Clearly the reason why we’re particularly fascinated with higher primates and chimpanzees is there are so many things we can immediately—they resemble us in ways, physically; they clearly have an emotional overlap with us that’s interesting and very instructive and not always what you want it to be. So I think their very proximity to us is seductive and yet at the same time allows many misunderstandings, because they’re actually very different. And that was a thing I learned more than anything else: how different they are from us, given that there is this very interesting overlap between the two species. What’s different about them, and different about Nim in particular, in the story, condemns him to the life that he has; not the similarities, it’s the differences that determine his future.

Laura-Ann Petitto teaching Nim Chimpsky sign language, as seen inPROJECT NIM. Photo credit: Susan Kuklin.

ZB  Was it your intention to blur the lines between the knowable and the unknowable? There are scenes, especially in the Riverdale sequences, which seem to give the lie to Terrace’s theory.

JM  I think that the question Terrace was asking is a very simple and perhaps very reductive one: can a chimpanzee use grammar in the same way that a human child can. And therefore that’s his question, and I think perhaps the bigger question, which is still ongoing, is how can we communicate with another species and how can we, in a sense, meet them more on their terms, as well as saying “I’m putting you in a classroom, I’m going to teach you grammar.” I’m not sure that is the way to understand chimpanzees’ communication, but that’s what he was asking, if they could learn it, and his conclusion was that they can’t. But I think Terrace’s conclusion, that he was merely a mimic, is overly reductive, because I think Nim does show in the film, you see him using for example the toilet sign as exactly what it means, he means “I want to go to the toilet,” but he also used the signs so he could be freed from an environment he doesn’t want to be in; so the word he used more than anything else was “play.”

ZB  Well, I thought it was interesting when he signed “sorry” after attacking the assistant, because one way of looking at it was that he was able to verbalize that emotion as a means of managing the situation.

JM  I think what he understands is that he’s done something wrong, they make him very aware of it, that he’s done something that needs to be made up. But the worst thing of all, for a chimpanzee, is to be cut off from other chimpanzees or from people: they are fiercely social animals. So the biggest sanction they had for him was stick him in a room on his own, and he feared that, clearly, so he signed sorry because that’s what he was expected to do.

ZB  Because they probably taught it to him when he had done something wrong and evoked a similar response—

JM  Still, it shows that there’s a conceptual intelligence there. That use of language. It’s not going to stop him from doing it again, but it doesn’t stop children from doing it again: they do the same thing all the time. They say "sorry"—my daughter for a while used to have to burp a lot and we would say “don’t burp” and she would just burp and say “sorry,” like that. Same way that Nim would do it.

Project Nim  is in theaters Friday, July 8th.

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Zachary Block is a writer based in New York.

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Project Nim

A shattering documentary about a chimpanzee raised as a human..

Zookeeper isn’t the only movie about talking animals opening this weekend. But the other one, Project Nim (Roadside Attractions), a documentary from James Marsh, director of the Academy Award-winning Man on Wire , isn’t a heartwarming comedy about a group of furry beasts who use their newfound power of language to help their caretaker find love with Rosario Dawson. It’s a gripping, unsentimental, at times unbearably sad real-life drama about an animal torn from his own world and stranded in the human one. I could wish Project Nim were a different movie—longer and more information-dense, with fewer poorly signposted re-enactments and self-conscious directorial flourishes. But I’ll be forever grateful to this movie for introducing me to Nim’s story, a tale so powerful and suggestive that it functions as a myth about the ever-mysterious relationship between human beings and animals. Are we more like them than we can ever know, or more different?

The early scenes of Project Nim focus on the likeness rather than the difference. In 1973, Herbert Terrace, a psychology professor at Columbia, devised an experiment to study language capabilities in primates. (His former colleagues describe Terrace as arrogant and vain, a characterization that’s largely borne out by the archival footage and present-day interviews we see.) At a research center in Oklahoma, a screaming newborn chimpanzee was taken from his mother after she was knocked out by a tranquilizer dart—in essence, a violent kidnapping, which is re-enacted in a harrowing pre-credit sequence. From there the infant chimp—called Nim Chimpsky, a play on the name of influential linguist Noam Chomsky—was transferred to home of Stephanie LaFarge, a young mother who had been Terrace’s student and lover. LaFarge occupied a gracious Upper West Side brownstone with her “rich hippie” poet husband, a Brady Bunch-style pack of young siblings, and a German shepherd.

LaFarge and her grown daughter appear in interviews, recalling how their household was both upended and transfixed by the presence of this tiny, cuddlesome, wildly destructive infant chimp, who wore diapers and baby clothes and ate at the table with the family. Though LaFarge kept no scientific records of Nim’s progress (a fact other researchers note with scorn) she did shoot a lot of home movies, which provide a charming visual for these early interviews. But here, and throughout the film, Marsh also uses staged re-enactments of past events that are just realistic enough to make you doubt the authenticity of every clip you see thereafter. It’s a boy-who-cried-wolf narrative strategy that doesn’t serve the film well.

Feast your eyes on the adorable home-movie footage of a romper-clad Nim dismantling Modern Library first editions, because things get very sad, very soon. Frustrated with LaFarge’s slipshod approach (to be fair, she does come off as a real flake, with stories of breastfeeding the chimp and giving him hits off her joint), Dr. Terrace takes Nim back and settles with him into an unused grand estate belonging to the university. There, accompanied by a revolving-door series of attractive young female protégées (many of whom, now accomplished social scientists, appear in interviews), Terrace sets out to teach Nim sign language while maintaining a quasi-rigorous experimental environment. The chimp continues to live like a human baby, but his advances in language acquisition are duly recorded.

As Nim grows larger and stronger and starts to assert his instinct for dominance, the daily struggles of getting him fed and dressed turn into life-threatening perils for his keepers. Finally, after a research assistant’s face is badly gashed, Terrace dissolves the experiment and takes Nim back to the research center where he was born. Overnight, Nim goes from a coddled baby in a mansion to a lonely ape in a cage. I won’t give away the tragic turns the story took thereafter, except to say that this chimp’s downward social mobility is something out of an Edith Wharton novel.

There is one bright spot in Nim’s later life: Bob Ingersoll, a worker at the Oklahoma research lab who befriended the chimp and took him out on walks, where they picked berries, communicated in sign language, and—you can’t make this stuff up—smoked joints together. “I had the best time of my life,” recalls Ingersoll, deciding on reflection that his hours with Nim were even better than a Grateful Dead show. Though the director pokes gentle fun at him, as he does at most of the film’s interview subjects, Ingersoll comes across as a more trustworthy narrator than most of the other people who drifted through Nim’s life: Where Terrace is defensive and LaFarge too self-forgiving, Ingersoll both appreciates Nim’s otherness and seeks to communicate their shared experiences.

Project Nim does something more complex than advocate against the suffering of lab animals (though some scenes do just that, with passion and clarity). It asks what our responsibilities are toward those who require our care. Watching Nim be dragged unwillingly into the human world and then abandoned in a hell that’s neither human nor animal, I couldn’t stop thinking of the story of Genie , a girl who was found in 1970 in a horribly abusive home in California, where she was had been kept chained to a chair in a dark room for most of her young life. Scientists, thrilled at the prospect of a real live “wild child” on whom to test theories of language development, passed her from hand to hand for years until, once her limited ability to learn language was apparent, she was left to be cared for in a group home. It’s easy to express outrage at the researchers’ betrayal of Genie by saying she was “treated like an animal.” But as Project Nim makes painfully clear, treating animals with such cavalier indifference is just as inhuman.

Project Nim

The psychological phenomenon explored in the film Project Nim is Chimpanzees language acquisition. For decades, psychologists have explored the question as to whether chimps can learn a human language. It is thought that one of the basic differences in language between humans and animals is to ability to perceive and process speech. There are said to be many differences in human and animal’s communication such as the meaning, structure and adaptability of language. However, now scientist believe that common ancestors evolve with the capacity of speech and it’s due to exposure to language not the innate ability. Project Nim is a documentary of the life story of a chimpanzee called Nim Chimsky. film aimed to discover whether a chimp could …show more content…

Evidence of this ability in chimpanzees was the poignant reaction of Washoe to the news of her baby’s death and Kanzi’s execution of instructions from trainers. However, there is limited evidence of sentence comprehension and productivity as evidence suggests chimps learn to perform appropriate actions not grammatical rules which is an element of language unique to humans. Sentence production so not justify any sophisticated claims about linguistic ability of apes. Pearce (2008) provides explanations as to why animals may nor develop language. for example, humans have a unique language acquisition device to develop language and word grammar. Also, animals lack the evolutionary motivation as they do not need language to survive and do not have the cognitive ability of a language brain structure to compered and understand order. In the Film project Nim the validity of the study is disrupted as Terrace ( ) argues that all ape language studies including project Nim were based on misinformation. Data from other studies correspond with the view that there is no evidence of an ape's ability to use a grammar however could use fragments of sign language. A Clockwork …show more content…

He is eventually imprisoned and involved in rehabilitation via controversial psychological conditioning. In the film Alex is injected each day with a drug that is designed to cause extreme nausea. He is then strapped to a chair and forced to watch a series of extremely violent movies, including everything from rapes to genocide. As he watches the films he begins to feel nauseas from the injections. Resulting in successful classical conditioning and aversion therapy. Alex now associates any form of violence with feeling ill therefore rehabilitating him. Many studies evaluate the effectiveness of this therapy. For instance, Jan ter Mors et al (2012) admitted aversion therapy on a 40 year old man who sustained a serve traumatic brain injury in a traffic accident leaving him with server cognitive impairments including aggression and inappropriate sexual behaviour. Results concluded a significant reduction in target behaviour and inappropriate sexual behaviour due to brain damage. Therefore, can be considered as an effective form of treatment for these criteria which supports the claims made in the

Dolphin Communication

Today, I will discuss how dolphins communicate and how symbolic language and collective learning makes humans different from animals. Dr Kathleen Dudzinski is the lead scientist reviewing dolphin communication and is also the director of Dolphin Communication Project which is a group of scientists concentrating on dolphin interaction. It’s important to establish that human language is unique in terms of our ability to use collective learning and symbolic language. We will compare this with dolphin communication and how human language can be advantageous.

Primates Do Not Live In Cages

One reason that he states is that primates are able to understand humans and can communicate with them. They have the capacity to understand humans along with communicating with them. The strength of this reason is that it shows that primates can communicate with humans and can learn from them since they can understand humans. The weakness of this reason is that any animal can understand humans and some animals can speak languages, closer than what primates can do. There were three monkeys in the movie to show that primates have the capacity to

Examples Of Non Primate

The rarity of human uniqueness no longer exists in the thoughts of scientists believing that human ability skills lie within the construction and use of tools. As declared by Goodall in which chimpanzees used straight sticks after removing the leaves and branches to collect termites or ants for consumption. (Goodall, 1986) Other species both primate and non-primate demonstrate successful abilities., which include a sense of self as well as the theory of mind, by which other species recognize that other individuals contain different information than themselves. Different species also have the ability to communicate symbolically to one another through the sounds of vocalization. (Sapolsky R. M., 2006)

Primates: A Case Study Of Kooko Primate

When I was taking psychology 101, we were tasked with an animal metacognition research project. Metacognition is the ability to anylize our thoughts. In other words, to be aware of our existence and our selves in the world. While conducting research, I found a very special case of a primate. This primate's name was Koko. It's thought that Koko has been one of the few primates that has been able to master a certain degree of sign language. Many think its only a case of watching and repeating, but many experiments have been conducting to reinforce the idea that Koko can actually make her own decisions based on physical cues. A very interesting case, yet theres still not a clear answer among scientists as to weather any non-human species poceses

Nonhuman Primates Innate

Many experiments with primates have shown that monkeys and apes are able to learn sign language in order to communicate. But they only learn it when hold captive, free-ranged animals do not use (sign) language to communicate (Hewes et al., 1973).

Clockwork Orange Diagnosis

Although conditioning was temporarily effective, it was ultimately detrimental to him since he tried to commit suicide. According to WebMD, there are currently no approved medications to treat conduct disorder. Therefore, psychotherapy would be the most beneficial to Alex as he could learn how to control his impulses. An effective treatment modality would be Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). In CBT, Alex would be able to go though the six components of the therapy. In the psychoeducation portion, he would be able to understand his disorder and the management that is required for this type of mental illness, which will be lifelong. Somatic management will help him learn techniques to control any sort of physical symptoms that may come up with conduct disorder and cognitive reconstruction would be able to help Alex modify the thoughts he has about violence and his relationships with others into more positive ones. Problem solving would have Alex learn coping strategies for when he feels violent impulses so he would not act on them and exposure would have him exposed to stimuli that would trigger his violent impulses so he eventually conquer them. Lastly, relapse prevention would lay ground work for him to prevent him from relapsing into old violent behavior and outbursts and for him to maintain positive thoughts and behaviors. The main treatment goal for Alex would to reduce his violent episodes from seven times a week (assuming he goes out every night and has an episode each time) to at twice a

The Mind Of The Chimpanzee Summary

Jane Goodall’s article “The Mind of the Chimpanzee” explores her experiences with man’s closest genetic relative. Goodall’s field studies in Gombe, Tanzania brought her a greater understanding of the mental similarities between humans and chimpanzees. She specifically discusses their complex emotions, mental ability, understanding of American Sign Language (ASL), and even their use and understanding of tools. While the evidence was clear, Goodall battled the scientific community for years. Many argued that animals were incapable of having humane thoughts or individual personalities.

Broroca Language Analysis

Language is perhaps the most concrete way of differentiating between humans and animals. Broca's area-- the center of the brain dedicated to processing speech and language in humans-- is larger in our species than in any other animal. Studies in childhood development have found that young children are able to assimilate language at an alarming rate when compared with other species. Young children start learning how to make vowel sounds and respond to their parents at five months of age and are able to produce basic words, as well as understand the concepts they represent, at around a year of age. We learn to speak before we learn to walk or eat on our own; clearly, language is an integral part of the human experience.

Singing In The Rain

I interpret this scene as Alex being put in the same position he put his victims in. Eventually he becomes the victim and he cannot stand it .He later wakes up in the hospital after his suicide attempt and it is hinted at the end that Alex returned to his original abusive and violent

What Makes Us Human? Essay

“What makes us human?”, is an unanswered question asked by many. Is it because of our ability to have empathy for others? Or is it because of our cognitive ability which allows us to look into the future? One of the main arguments made that separates humans from animals is our communication style; our language. Is language inherently unique to human? To answer such a question, we first operationally define language as; “a system of communication based upon words and the combination of words into sentences” (University of Oslo). The purpose of language is for us to be able to convey an infinite amount of ideas to one another. Sign language in general also falls under this definition as it has a complex system of rules and syntax that allow the signed figures to function as words. Animal communication on the other hand, is operationally defined as, “the transmission of a signal from one animal to another such that the sender benefits, on average, from the response of the recipient” (Pearce 1987). With this in mind, current research has shown that the answer is that language is inherently unique to humans.

Alex: The Gruesome Adaptation Of Alex

Prior to this moment, Alex is released from an experimental rehabilitation treatment to make him incapable of doing wrong. Alex has a solid commitment to the ideals of violence and has aesthetic pleasure he takes in his crimes. The delight he finds in classical music closely relates to the joy he feels during acts of violence and elevates his brutal behaviour. He believes evil represents a natural state for human beings. The State, who seeks to deny him of the decisions to act cruelly, encroaches on his freedom as a person. Thus, in choosing savagery, Alex ultimately affirms his sense of self. He never truly understands his entitlement. At the end of the treatment, he deprives the ability to make moral choices

Gelada Monkeys

The origin of speech in Homo sapiens is controversial topic since the problem is related to humans' unprecedented use of the tongue, lips and vocal organs as instruments of communication. As we know, the other animals vocalize, but do not use the tongue to modulate sounds. The most interesting scenario about this evidence, with regards to human language evolution, is the lip-smacking. According to scientists, lip-smacking has been observed as the first step towards the evolution of speech, although it is a phenomenon common in every primate. The evolution of distinctively human speech capacities has become a distinct and in many ways separate area of scientific research. Many studies have been done throughout the history regarding the origins of human language. The article about the Gelada monkeys of

Summary/Analysis: Is Language the Key to Human Intelligence? Essay

• 1 Works Cited

For example, imitation and teaching explain that chimpanzee’s may watch their mother doing actions academically (problem-solving) she never gives her young enough feedback or just a simple look to reinforce his observation. He concludes by explaining that humans have a preexisting capacity that allows them to represent what they imagine by combining human elements (language) while, animals clearly do not.

The Pros And Cons Of Human Language

The claim, humans are the only animal that can acquire language has been the subject of much debate as scientists have investigated language use by non-human species. Researchers have taught apes, monkeys, parrots and wild children with various systems of human-like communication. Thus, one might ask, what is human language? According to Ulla Hedeager, A universally accepted definition of language or the criteria for its use does not exist. This is one of the reasons for the disagreement among scientists about whether non-human species can use a language. In nature, researchers find numerous types of communication systems, several of which appear to be unique to their possessors, and one of them is the language of the human species. Basically, the purpose of communication is the preservation, growth, and development of the species (Smith and Miller 1968:265). The ability to exchange information is shared by all communication systems, and a number of non-human systems share some features of human language. The fundamental difference between human and non-human communication is that animals are believed to react instinctively, in a stereotyped and predictable way. Generally, human behavior is under the voluntary control,

Essay about The Development of Cognitive Psychology

Linguistics has impacted cognitive psychology as the quest to understand language acquisition and the structure of language itself is undertaken. Linguistics is a complex and multifaceted; it includes language structural patterns and language development (Barsalou, 2005). The process of language development is complicated and dense, as the study of language is examined; the role of cognition is inherently examined and analyzed. Sternberg (2006) also explores language as an innate process and presents the idea that humans are born ready for language as a biological and cognitive process.

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News: Project R&R News

May 6, 2011 • Posted in Project R&R News

Dr. Capaldo reflects on her reaction to the film.

Project Nim tells the factual and moving story of Nim, one of the first chimpanzees to be used in language experiments, and in so doing unveils the story of so many chimpanzees who suffered his same fate—torn from their mothers, raised as humans, used in behavioral/language research and then abandoned to invasive, even deadly, biomedical research. The opening scene immediately sets the tone. The footage (actual and reenactment) coupled with a simple voiceover relating the raw facts, put us at the genesis of all the abuse: the moment chimpanzees are denied their birthright and taken into human hands. The faces of Nim and his mother, Carolyn, washed me up in that sad and tragic day for them. Nim’s mother had six babies taken from her before Nim.

From here, the film compels you to be a part of the confusing and ever changing world to which Nim forcibly adapted. His journey was demanded by researcher Herb Terrace, so that Terrace could make his claim to fame and learn something about language and its uniqueness to humans or its tranferableness to other species. The underlying science and Terrace’s agenda (which in the end he, in so many words, admits was a failure) were lost to me in the unforgettable footage of Nim, trying beyond anything else to be who he was and deal with the life choices forced on him.

Nim reacts as we all would. As a psychologist, I have seen human children torn from their families and tossed from foster home to foster home plunge into fear, anxiety, anger and ambivalence—the natural consequences of such lack of developmental stability. Yet, at the same time they retained their childish joy, enthusiasm and hopefulness against all odds until it was finally extinguished. We see Nim bonding to his caregivers only to lose them because they abandon him or were forced to abandon him because of circumstances beyond their control. We watch the faces of his most caring teachers blanch with sadness when they are told the project is over and Nim is being sent back to the lab in which he was born. And we watch as Nim holds on to certain bonds and does not allow his everchanging circumstances to make everyone in his life untrustworthy.

Ingersoll cared for Nim when Terrace abandoned the project and sent Nim back to the Institute for Primate Studies at the University of Oklahoma. The lab’s director, psychologist William Lemmon, used dogs, electric cattle prods and other punitive means to control the chimps. Lemmon, like Terrace, eventually shut down his project and sold the chimps to the Laboratory for Experimental Medicine and Surgery in Primates (LEMSIP). James Mahoney, the LEMSIP research veterinarian, met Nim when he visited Lemmon in prelude to purchasing the chimps. Nim was transferred to LEMSIP where he along with a few hundred other chimpanzees would live confined to slightly smaller than 5’ x 5’ x 7’ cages and endure years of invasive research in hepatitis, HIV and other protocols. Controversy mounted over Nim’s perceived special status, given his ability to sign a human language and his having been cross-fostered and raised as human. To avoid the pending lawsuit on Nim’s behalf, LEMSIP released Nim to Black Beauty Ranch, a sanctuary for rescued hoofed animals.

When Ingersoll is finally allowed to visit Nim at Black Beauty, he is greeted by Nim’s enthusiasm and an invitation to play. Nim lived alone at Black Beauty for years. This footage of Nim’s joyful meeting with his old, beloved friend was for me the hardest scene to watch. Nim’s heart, despite what he suffered, was still open. While the film is filled with poignant moments like this, it does not shy away from the other reality of who Nim also was. In his growing chimpanzee-ness, the film gives you a solid hold of just how foolish and potentially deadly it is to try to make them like us and force them to live in our world. Nim acquiesced to this with some degree of tolerance and grace. That is, until those unpredictable moments erupted and he would attack or severely bite a more fragile (compared to his strength) human. More than once, he caused severe injury. He would then sign “sorry” as if he was confused by his behavior and the harm it caused. The film, in addition to being a testament to the cruelty and insensitivity of research, will also go far in reminding us how wrong and dangerous it is to have “exotic” animals like chimpanzees as companions or entertainers.

The evening ending with a Q&A with several of the people who were interviewed in the film. After the last Q&A comments, I asked Elizabeth Hess what motivated her to write the book. She said simply, ‘I wanted to do a biography of an animal.’ The film does justice to her ambition. I had wondered what those on stage who had been part of Nim’s life would think Nim might say to the audience right now— if he had been human enough . I didn’t ask the question, though, because I realized the film had already answered it on his behalf.

Project Nim was released in July 2011 by Roadside Attractions and HBO Documentary Films.

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Project Nim: Movie Analysis

Show More Within the film Project Nim, researchers study a Chimpanzee, Nim Chimpsky, throughout his life within different homes, labs, and most importantly types of research. Researchers playing God upon a life is difficult to watch at times, and so there are visceral and intellectual reactions regarding specific scenes that were shown. Viscerally, it was really weird because Nim’s life was to understand how similar Chimps are to humans, however, it became more than that after 5 years. Intellectually, it was fascinating to see how Nim interacted with others with primal behavior during his “ human ” life and his “lab chimp” life. When Nim begins to drastically increase his sign vocabulary, it was intellectually interesting because I was curious to see what

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Inseparable Movie Analysis

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'Project Nim': A Documentary For The Curious Animal-Lover In You

Linda Holmes

As I fly through this really busy week, it's a good time to pick up on a few things I've been meaning to mention and haven't gotten to.

In a DVD extra from Project Nim , the chimp meets up with another chimp for the first time.

Credit: Lionsgate DVD

You all know how I enjoy a terrific documentary, and the one sitting on my desk right now is Project Nim . It's freshly out on home video, and the DVD includes a variety of extras, including an audio commentary with director James Marsh (who also did Man On Wire ) and a look at other scenes, like the film's footage of Nim's first encounter with another chimp.

We're through awards season, which is a good time to pick up on films and other things that got away from you. While Project Nim didn't make it to an Oscar nomination (quite surprisingly), it did win the DGA (Director's Guild) award and a number of others . It sounds like an odd thing to say, but if you liked Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes and its cautionary tale about why it's not a great idea to try to treat chimps like kids and make them wear pants, here's a rather vivid documentary that makes some of the same points, without the motion-capture.

Project Nim Research Paper

Mandy Sanguigni Dr. Park SOC 101 Take-Home Essay Exam 1 Project Nim Imagine yourself trying to communicate with a baby chimpanzee. One might be scared, frustrated, or confused. One might teach sign language to be able to understand one another. On the other hand, one might adopt the creature and experiment on how to create a language both can comprehend. In this essay, I will discuss the purposes of the experiment demonstrated on the chimpanzee, Nim, in the film Project Nim, what researchers were hoping to discover, and some conclusions on the experiment. In the film, Project Nim, a chimpanzee named Nim was part of a psychological experiment. Nim was taken at an early age from his mother and placed into a daily life with a human family. …show more content…

Nim was exposed to different people and was even locked up for medical research prior to his final move to a ranch for rescued animals. The experiment may have better results if only just evaluation what a chimpanzee things due to the fact they are similar to humans. Terrace, the leader of the experiment, delivered Nim to several female students to see where Nim was more affected too. When Nim was still a baby LaFarge breast-fed for several months, which she believed was completely normal. Secondly, she gave him beer and marijuana to get him high. Thirdly, she started to feel attracted to Nim since she worked all the time around him. While watching, it was heartbreaking to watch an innocent chimp was around these caretakers that took advantage of him rather than work towards the main goal to be successful to comprehend a human language with an animal. In conclusion, I believe that the film “Project Nim” was interesting to watch and understand how some animals can understand a human language too with the proper guidance. Project Nim helped researchers experiment on breaking a language obstacle between animals and

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Larrysa McDonald Ms Gregory Missouri History 17 October 2017 Missouri Valley College Missouri Valley College is a liberal arts college that is located in Marshall, MO. This college is located on a 150 acre campus and is over a hundred years old! The college was started and founded by the Presbyterian church in 1899. The entire student body is around 1,400 with over 30 different majors available. The college also offers a variety of extracurricular activities including sports teams,clubs, student government, and musical opportunities.

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To get Washoe to pay attention so the sign language rather than what we spoke, the Gardeners ask for the teachers to never speak while signing with Washoe. In other studies, the teachers would expose the chimps to spoken languages and the chimps would not pick up on the signs as much. The Gardeners method was proven to work, Washoe thrived in ASL. If she didn’t know a sign she would make one up, like “dirty good” for toilet. When Washoe was exposed to other chimps, she was able to teach them ASL to communicate with each

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Project Nim Essay

Watch live on foxbaltimore.com as crews refloat the Dali container ship and bring it to port.

Anne Arundel teacher arrested on charges of sexually abusing multiple students

by Project Baltimore

An Anne Arundel County elementary school teacher has been arrested on charges of sexually abusing multiple students.

Matthew Schlegel, 44, was taken into custody Thursday morning at his home in Severna Park. He faces more than 30 charges, ranging from second-degree assault to sex abuse of a minor. Schlegel is a third-grade math teacher at Severna Park Elementary School. The charges confirm much of what Project Baltimore last month.

Project Baltimore was on scene early Thursday morning as police officers searched Schlegel's home and vehicle. According to charging documents, the alleged victims are all current or former students of Schlegel who say he touched them inappropriately. The girls told police the alleged abuse occurred in class during the school day.

Detectives also spoke with additional witnesses who, according to charging documents, said they "observed the victims on Schlegel's lap during class." The alleged abuse dates back to August 2022 up until March 2024, occurring when each of the alleged victims was in third grade.

Schlegel was removed from Severna Park Elementary school on March 15, following the initial allegation. Three days later, on March 18, Severna Park Principal Kyle Butler sent an email to parents of third -grade students, explaining that Schlegel had been removed from the school “indefinitely”. Parents were not informed why Schlegel, reportedly a popular teacher, was suddenly gone.

In April, Project Baltimore first broke the news that Schlegel was being investigated by police. At the time, we were able to confirm the school was aware of at least four alleged victims.

ALSO READ | New details emerge in Severna Park Elementary’s alleged teacher misconduct

On April 7, parents at Severna Park learned more information when the principal sent a second email to the entire school community.

The email said an allegation involving Schlegel had been reported to the school system’s Office of Investigations. Following the initial allegation, the principal said he met with “several other sets of families” and provided their information to authorities as well.

Schlegel has been teaching in Anne Arundel County Public Schools since 2008. He spent his first eight years at Tyler Heights Elementary in Annapolis, where he taught second grade. In 2016, he moved to Severna Park Elementary. He is scheduled for a bail review hearing Friday morning.