“Owning the Evidence: The Lasting Controversies of Early Primatology Filmmaking” traces the unusual history of intellectual ownership over a groundbreaking collection of early comparative psychology films. From 1913-1917, the psychologist Wolfgang Köhler shot 6 reels of film depicting his experiments into ape cognition at an Anthropoid Station in the Canary Islands. Köhler believed that the moving image produced insights into the minds of nonhuman animals, allowing scientific observers to objectively empathize with the onscreen apes by documenting their gestures and expressions. But, as theories of behavior changed, so too did the meaning of these recordings. Behaviorists such as Clark Hull, Robert Epstein, and B.F. Skinner rigorously criticized Köhler’s interpretation as a projection of interiority beyond what the science could prove. In an attempt to demonstrate how the moving image might lead to consistent misreadings of animal behavior, Skinner and Epstein produced several filmed experiments in 1982 that reenacted Köhler’s films using pigeons instead of apes. These reenactments were meant to illustrate the limits of cinema as a scientific tool for revealing profilmic truths, but they also demonstrate the plasticity of scientific providence, in which a film’s meaning changes alongside scientific theories. Within this context, I argue that “ownership” did not refer to the material possession of a film or its patent, but rather to the power to define the discourse through which a film’s images would be seen.
