The Celluloid Specimen

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In The Celluloid Specimen, Benjamín Schultz‑Figueroa examines rarely seen behaviorist films of animal experiments from the 1930s and 1940s. These laboratory recordings—including Robert Yerkes's work with North American primate colonies, Yale University's rat‑based simulations of human society, and B. F. Skinner's promotions for pigeon‑guided missiles—have long been considered passive records of scientific research. In Schultz‑Figueroa's incisive analysis, however, they are revealed to be rich historical, political, and aesthetic texts that played a crucial role in American scientific and cultural history—and remain foundational to contemporary conceptions of species, race, identity, and society.

"The Celluloid Specimen: Moving Image Research of Animal Life" analyzes the films made to document animal experiments in behavioral psychology laboratories during the early- to mid-twentieth century. It argues that this largely ignored cinematic history reveals a dynamic field of behaviorist looking, where the distinctions between nature and culture were inscribed into animal images, generating concepts that broadly shaped the politics of immigration, labor relations, educational practice and gender identity, well beyond the walls of the lab. Its chapters focus on the 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 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. "The Celluloid Specimen" was produced through a hybrid methodology, bringing together archival films and documents, primary source materials from film history and science history, as well as the theories of film studies, science and technology studies, critical animal studies, and critical race studies. It concludes that filming animal research was a pivotal practice for generating the psychosocial definitions of species, race, identity, and culture that continue to shape our contemporary political and scientific discourses.

Corporeality in Early Cinema inspires a heightened awareness of the ways in which early film culture, and screen praxes overall are inherently embodied. Contributors argue that on- and offscreen (and in affiliated media and technological constellations), the body consists of flesh and nerves and is not just an abstract spectator or statistical audience entity. Audience responses from arousal to disgust, from identification to detachment, offer us a means to understand what spectators have always taken away from their cinematic experience. Through theoretical approaches and case studies, scholars offer a variety of models for stimulating historical research on corporeality and cinema by exploring the matrix of screened bodies, machine-made scaffolding, and their connections to the physical bodies in front of the screen.

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