A strange film about a very strange episode in the life of New York City: it’s a filmic B-side to Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man. In 2003, Antoine Yates was arrested for keeping a full-size tiger named Ming in his apartment in Harlem – and also an alligator named Al. They seemed happy enough, until Ming playfully got Antoine’s leg in his mouth and a call to the emergency services had to be made. Without ever questioning Yates that closely about how he got the animals, or what it was like to live with them, film-maker Philip Warnell interviews him generally about how these animals’ captivity must have felt – and he includes ambient footage of local residents drifting about, his camera regarding them as incuriously as if they too were animals in a cage. His centrepiece is a reconstruction of Yates’s apartment with fixed camera positions, with a real-life tiger in situ, to represent the deeply strange and surrealist spectacle of Ming the tiger pacing about the rooms, making a melancholy groaning sound. Warnell takes as his cue various quotations from Jacques Derrida’s meditation on the mysteries of animal consciousness: The Animal That Therefore I Am. I wondered if he might mention Wittgenstein’s dictum: if a lion could speak, we would not understand him. Fallacious and pathetic as it seems, Ming appears to expressing a very human loneliness.
