Smoking chimpanzee
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"The human behaviour we see flushed out by Nim's presence in our world was very interesting, and revealed something about us," he says. In Project Nim's case, it's the original sin, the abduction of Nim, that sets the whole thing off."Īnother reason Marsh decided to make Project Nim was the rich seam of human drama that unfolded around the chimp. So in Man on Wire's case it was Philippe having a nightmare the night before, and he wakes up in feverish excitement and fear. "I want to find a dramatic way into the story, which is part of the story. Marsh, 48, fresh from the Oscar success of Man on Wire, was looking for a new documentary subject when his producer came across The Chimp Who Would Be Human, Elizabeth Hess's book about Project Nim, which he thought had potential. I felt that Nim's life had been blighted by people projecting on to him human qualities and trying to make him something that he wasn't."Ĭatherine Shoard talks to the film's producer, Simon Chinn, and Bob Ingersoll, a former graduate student partly responsible for Nim's care .uk But at the same time I was very wary of those from the get-go. "The overlap between the species does involve emotions. Marsh admits that conveying Nim's experiences was tough. "I was intrigued because I hadn't seen that in a film before, the idea of telling an animal's life from cradle to grave using the same techniques as you would use for a human biography." What try to do is inhibit his nature and you see the results in the story. In Nim's case, he has a chimpanzee's nature and that nature is an incredibly forceful part of his life. "The nature-versus-nurture debate clearly was part of the intellectual climate of that time and remains an interesting question – how much we are born a certain way, as a species and as individuals. He's in the wrong context and that becomes his tragedy," Marsh says, drinking his third espresso of the morning on a drizzly Sunday in Edinburgh. "Nim behaves in a way that is normal for a chimpanzee, but he's in a human world.
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Smoking chimpanzee archive#
He has used archive footage, photographs and interviews with those who cared for Nim to create a tribute to the chimp and his turbulent life. Nim's life story is told in Project Nim, a new documentary by Man on Wire director James Marsh, described by the New York Times as a "probing, unsettling study of primate behaviour". His name is a pun on Noam Chomsky, the linguist who theorised that language is unique to humans, which the experiment hoped to disprove. Highly intelligent, he was chosen to be the subject of a language experiment at Columbia University, called Project Nim, that aimed to discover whether or not chimpanzees could use grammar to create sentences if they were taught sign language and nurtured in a similar environment to human children.
Smoking chimpanzee full#
Nim Chimpsky, to give him his full title, was born at the Institute for Primate Studies in Norman, Oklahoma, in the early 70s. W hether he's zooming past in a pushchair, perched on a lavatory seat or getting a little too intimate with a passing cat, it's impossible not to be charmed by Nim the chimpanzee.