Wildlife Conservation Society. Film collection

Motion pictures are entwined with the history of the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), founded as the New York Zoological Society (NYZS) in 1895. WCS arose at the very time that motion picture technology was developing, with 1895 also marking the world’s first public movie screening. Early on, the organization’s leaders recognized the power of still and motion photography to advance WCS’s founding mission to preserve wildlife, touting the value of cameras in “making imperishable records of inestimable value” (NYZS 1929 Annual Report, 61). The Bronx Zoo’s first Curator of Herpetology, Raymond Ditmars, was actively involved in producing popular nature documentaries as early as 1912. This collection holds a title from Ditmars’s Living Natural History series, which NYZS made available for use in New York City schools. Indeed, from its start in 1929, the Bronx Zoo’s Education Department began using film to educate and inspire interest in wildlife and by 1936 had purchased its own 16mm Cine Kodak Special. Over the following decades, the Education Department continued to create and distribute film for educational purposes, including screening in classrooms and illustrating lectures by NYZS staff.

By the 1950s, motion picture production began to dominate the activities of NYZS’s Publications and Photography Department, which alongside the Education Department, produced films for a range of purposes. Some were created to promote the society’s activities at its annual member meetings or to promote exhibits and services at its Bronx Zoo and New York Aquarium. In this era, NYZS also began producing increasingly sophisticated educational films with wider distributions, working with companies including McGraw Hill and Encyclopedia Britannica.

Some of the films produced by NYZS in the 1950s and 1960s included footage shot in international locations where the organization’s conservation interests were expanding. The creation and collection of this international footage—particularly from East Africa—was encouraged by NYZS President Fairfield Osborn, who supported the power of film to inspire conservation action. In addition to narrative films, NYZS began producing motion pictures in the 1960s that showcased the studies of some field biologists whose work was sponsored by the organization; among these were studies by George Schaller, Jane Goodall, Iain Douglas-Hamilton, and Thomas Struhsaker. Apart from these edited films, NYZS also acquired dozens of reels of field footage taken by NYZS-sponsored and staff researchers, including William Conway, F. Wayne King, Roger Payne, Carleton Ray, and others.

The legacy of the audio-visual service roles of the NYZS Education Department and the Publications and Photography Department is evident in the WCS Film Collection’s composition today. In addition to edited films, the collection includes hundreds of reels of unedited footage, possibly intended for study by WCS staff or for potential use in films by WCS or others. It also includes hundreds of reels whose contents duplicate those found in other reels in the collection, a sign of the Education and Publications and Photography Departments’ roles not only to produce content but also to make film accessible within the organization and beyond. Over its history, the WCS Film Collection additionally grew to include reels related to the organization’s activities but not created by WCS. These range from local news segments featuring Bronx Zoo staff to footage of Jacques Cousteau’s team testing his famed diving saucer, the SP-350 Denise. In the case of the Cousteau footage, the reasons for its presence in the collection are unknown. WCS had its own deep sea research program in the 1930s with the Bathysphere dives; perhaps these reels were shared with Bathysphere co-creator William Beebe. Or, perhaps they were screened at the NYZS Annual Meeting in 1960, when the organization presented Cousteau with its Gold Medal. Similar questions exist about the presence of other footage, including a reel that appears to show Theodore Roosevelt and others on a hunting trip.

Indeed, there are many questions about the WCS Film Collection, resulting from what was either a dearth of documentation created during its development or the loss of that documentation. When the collection was transferred to the WCS Library and Archives in 2014, the few records about it consisted of a 1942 inventory, labels written on the reels’ original cans, and occasional notes found within them. The challenge of knowing the reels’ provenance was exacerbated by the fact that the collection had been relocated a few times and by 2014 was stored without apparent order. Further still, these relocations left the collection in sub-par storage environments that intensified the already precarious condition of the film, an inherently fragile medium.

The collection’s history—and really its future—cannot be told without the Shelby White and Leon Levy WCS Film Archives Initiative. Funded by the Leon Levy Foundation, this 2022-2023 project allowed the WCS Library and Archives to inventory and assess over 1,600 film reels, greatly enhancing knowledge about the collection’s holdings and improving its preservation. The initiative also allowed WCS to digitize approximately 100 films. Recent efforts to assist the collection’s preservation and accessibility have also been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Vidda Foundation.