13. ‘The Wild Inside’: An Interview with Phillip Warnell on Ming of Harlem

Excerpt

In May 2013 the British artist-filmmaker Phillip Warnell spent six days constructing a set and shooting footage in one of the tiger enclosures at the Isle of Wight Zoo for his experimental documentary Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Storeys in the Air (2014). Initially inspired by the news coverage a decade earlier of a 400-pound tiger named Ming and a five-foot Caiman alligator called Al being raised in a high-rise New York apartment by Antoine Yates, the film explores the human-animal relationship at the centre of a story that fascinated international media audiences. Real-life events culminated in a serious tiger bite for self-styled urban “Dr Doolittle” Yates, which—despite his claims to emergency services that he had been attacked by a pit bull—alerted the authorities to his inner-city menagerie. Though the exact details of this living arrangement remain unclear, neighbours in the Harlem public housing complex told reporters that for a while Yates’s mother and several foster children had also inhabited the apartment alongside his animals. Images of the spectacular animal control operation showing tranquiliser dart-bearing marksmen abseiling down the side of the apartment block were picked up by global media, followed by coverage of Yates’s subsequent trial and imprisonment for reckless endangerment and Ming’s rehoming in an Ohio wildlife sanctuary. However, it is the possibility of intimate interspecies cohabitation that concerns Warnell’s film. Accordingly, although archival news footage of a sedated Ming being removed from the apartment block and snippets of media interviews with Yates as he attends court are included, the greater part of the film rejects mainstream documentary conventions to offer a more oblique response to the issues raised by the story. …