Celluloid Specimen

The Celluloid Specimen examines twentieth-century behaviorist films that captured animal experiments, revealing the central role of cinema in generating psychosocial definitions of species, race, identity, and culture that continue to shape our contemporary political and scientific discourses. BenjamiÌ1n Schultz-Figueroa analyzes rarely seen archival films made by Robert Yerkes in the 1930s at the first experimental primate colonies in North America, the rat films made to simulate human society at Yale University in the 1930s and 1940s, and the promotional films made by B.F. Skinner to sell the U.S. military on his design for a pigeon-guided missile during World War II. These laboratory films have long been categorized as passive recordings of scientific research, but when examined in their own right, they become rich historical, political, and aesthetic texts that played a crucial role in the history of science--

• | Author: Benjamin Schultz-Figueroa
• | Publisher: University Of California Press
• | Publication Date: Feb 28, 2023
• | Number of Pages: 270 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback
• | ISBN-10: 0520342348
• | ISBN-13: 9780520342347