Zoo (Frederick Wiseman, 1993)

 

Frederick Wiseman’s observation of the Miami zoo isn’t among his more satisfying works, seeming mostly content to record interesting events and sights, without particularly probing their ethical, financial or other underpinnings. Of course, given the setting, this makes for a frequently fascinating chronicle: the film includes among much else a rhinoceros giving birth, a gorilla having its teeth cleaned, and a hunt for feral dogs that penetrated the fences and killed several animals. There’s a “circle of life” aspect to how we see one of those dogs, tracked down and shot dead, thrown into the same incinerator that earlier saw the end of the sadly stillborn baby rhino, but while Wiseman captures such correspondences and echoes, there’s nothing in the film that interrogates the basic artificiality of the enterprise, the propriety of (say) clubbing to death an emblematically cute white rabbit so it can be fed to a snake that lives its whole life in not much more than a glass box (perhaps Wiseman would have said the film provided sufficient information for the viewer to form a judgment, but that would underestimate the complexity of the issues). The greatest ambiguities of all, of course, are between observers and observed, the gaze of the animals sometimes seeming (at least) as intelligent as that of the visitors, the (again, under-explored) difference of course being the explicitly captive nature of the former. A brief glimpse of a management meeting suggests the conversations at that level are most about donors and bringing in money, although it’s too fragmented to tell. The movie ends on an enjoyable but not very taxing piece of parallelism, the sights and sounds of a “Feast with the Beasts” black-tie fundraising event effortlessly evoking earlier scenes of animal-feeding. Some of what Wiseman records (the performing elephants being a prime example) would no longer be viewed as favourably; in such respects the film again feels (in contrast to other Wiseman works) somewhat complacent, reduced by the passage of time.