{"id":12653,"date":"2011-08-09T04:46:43","date_gmt":"2011-08-09T03:46:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/?p=12653"},"modified":"2012-01-09T03:45:48","modified_gmt":"2012-01-09T03:45:48","slug":"project-nim-review","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.filmdetail.com\/2011\/08\/09\/project-nim-review\/","title":{"rendered":"Project Nim"},"content":{"rendered":"

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The life of a chimpanzee raised like a human makes for a rich documentary, which is assembled with considerable skill and intelligence.<\/p>\n

After the success of their previous film Man On Wire<\/a> (2008), director James Marsh<\/a> and producer Simon Chinn<\/a> came across another story that has its roots in New York of the 1970s.<\/p>\n

In November 1973, a professor at Columbia University began an experiment to raise a chimpanzee like a human being in order to explore how this would affect the his communication skills with humans.<\/p>\n

The chimp was named Nim Chimpsky<\/a> after Noam Chomsky<\/a>, the linguist whose thesis stated that language is hard-wired to humans only, and the experiment became a practical exploration of communication.<\/p>\n

If Man on Wire played like an unlikely heist movie, this film is more like Frankenstein or a genre film where scientific breakthroughs have unintended consequences.<\/p>\n

But as it progresses, the film is more than just about a curious scientific exercise as it peels away the different layers of the story to become something profound and unsettling about the relationship between humans and animals.<\/p>\n

The opening section explores the behavioural psychologist who supervised the experiment, Professor Herbert Terrace<\/a>, and his various assistants during the 1970s who treated Nim like a human child – a period which saw him introduced to human breast milk, alcohol and marijuana.<\/p>\n

This makes for some eye-opening comedy in places, which is brilliantly augmented with interviews, period photographs and various other media from the time.<\/p>\n

Part of the virtues of choosing a scientific project as the subject of a documentary is that the original observational materials can be incorporated into the film, as well as contemporary TV reports and magazine covers.<\/p>\n

But the film really hits another plateau when we follow what happened to Nim when he left the supervision of Professor Terrace and his various surrogate mothers.<\/p>\n