All the Chimps That's Fit to Print

Apropos of next week's reading, Derek Bousé's Wildlife Films, we might find something interesting in the recent spate of news in the New York Times and elsewhere about human-animal relationships, and particularly about chimpanzees who have been placed in the role of humans. Bousé raises fascinating questions in his opening chapter (which you'll notice is slower-going than the following chapters, but well worth the work) about the ways and reasons that documentary has been distinguished from wildlife or nature film, arguing that the same moral, ethical, and cultural paradigms that have been used to justify the independent existence and aesthetics of documentary film as a genre can be found in nature, and that wildlife films become a place to get away with everything that would be beyond the pale in documentary. This op-ed from a week or so ago in the Times makes a similar point about animal "actors" in film and TV, their sad afterlives, and what both tell us about humans.