In her last on-camera interview, English primatologist Jane Goodall used her platform to uplift others. In a direct address to an unknown audience, she says, “Your life matters, and you are here for a reason. And I just hope that reason will become apparent as you live through your life.”
Growing up in a family with two parents who studied anthropology and archaeology, one of whom taught a physical anthropology course at the local community college, some of the earliest people I thought of as celebrities were palaeoanthropologist and archaeologist Louis Leakey, as well as his protégés Dian Fossey and Jane Goodall. These two women challenged the way we think about primates as social beings who live in communities not all that dissimilar to our own. They showed me, and other girls like me, a path towards living life with passion and dedicating oneself to something greater than oneself.
Fossey had her short but impactful life memorialized by the 1988 film “Gorillas In The Mist,” featuring an Oscar-nominated Sigourney Weaver as the primatologist who was murdered by poachers at the age of 53. Jane Goodall was much luckier with her work, spanning nearly six decades. By the time she passed away on October 1st at the age of 91, Goodall had authored thirty-two books, fifteen of which were specifically written for children, and had been featured in over forty documentary films.
Born in 1934 in Hampstead, London, Goodall became interested in animals after her father gave her a stuffed toy chimpanzee, which she named Jubilee, rather than a traditional teddy bear. This fascination led her to the White Highlands in the Colony and Protectorate of Kenya in 1957. A life-changing meeting with Leakey led to several opportunities for her to study primate behavior and primate anatomy with experts Osman Hill and John Napier, and later to earn a PhD in Ethology from the University of Cambridge. Leakey’s thought was that if they could learn more about the behavior of existing great apes, this would help his work, which sought to understand the behavior of early hominids.
Goodall has said her mother’s encouragement gave her strength as she began her research career in this intensely male-dominated field. Goodall’s trailblazing work, along with her ongoing advocacy for more young women to join the field, has been cited as a factor in the equalization of men and women working in primatology today.
In her 1999 book “Reason for Hope: A Spiritual Journey,” Goodall recalled that while observing chimpanzees at the Gombe Stream National Park, Tanzania in the 1960s, she initially thought that they were “nicer than human beings,” but later she found, “that chimpanzees could be brutal—that they, like us, had a darker side to their nature.” This, along with her discovery that chimpanzees can make tools, helped redefine everything we thought we knew about both early humans and our primate cousins. She founded the Jane Goodall Institute in 1977 with the aim of continuing her research, as well as facilitating legal frameworks to protect wildlife habitats.
Goodall and her work have been the subject of numerous documentaries over the years. Kirk Simon and Karen Goodman’s 1990 short documentary, “Chimps: So Like Us,” features interviews with Goodall as she describes how each chimp has its own unique voice, just like humans do, intercut with footage of chimps in the wild living their lives. That same year, Judith Dwan Hallet’s “In The Life and Legend of Jane Goodall” similarly follows Goodall as she does her job in the wild, observing the animals while teaching what she’s learned to others. In this film, Goodall shares with the audience her feelings about her favorite family of chimps, whom she affectionately calls the “F” troop.
While these early films align with Goodall’s goal of sharing her singular knowledge with the world as a form of preservation and activism, later films about Goodall take a more hagiographic approach, aiming instead to position her into an icon status. However, one recent film stands high above the pack: Brett Morgen’s impressionistic 2017 documentary “Jane,” which features astonishing never-before-seen footage of Goodall’s field work, shot mainly on lush 16mm color film stock by filmmaker Hugo van Lawick, who would later become Goodall’s first husband, that had been hidden away in the National Geographic archives until its discovery in 2014. Morgen’s kaleidoscopic editing style, Philip Glass’s impassioned score, and the love between Lawick and Goodall that shines through his breathtaking footage form a rich portrait of both the trailblazing woman and the sacrifices she made to protect that natural world that had so beguiled her.
In March of this year, Goodall was interviewed by filmmaker Brad Falchuk for a Netflix series called “Famous Last Words,” intended to be released only after her death. The hour-long special features a candid fifty-minute conversation between Goodall and Falchuk. The two then share a shot of whisky, Falchuk leaves the sound stage, and Goodall faces the camera, addressing the world for one last time. Goodall’s goodbye to people of the world lasts a full five minutes. Her speech ends with an urgent clarion call about the impact of man-made climate change, reminding us that, “as we destroy one ecosystem after another, as we create worse climate change, worse loss of diversity, we have to do everything in our power to make the world a better place for the children alive today, and for those that will follow.”
Goodall lived her life with a purpose, not just rooted in her work with chimpanzees, but also in her mission to conserve our natural world before it’s too late. As I read more and more headlines about the destruction of the world’s oceans, the depletion of resources for A.I. data centers, and the environmental impact of war, I truly hope her life wasn’t lived in vain after all.
