History of the WCS 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). 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 promoted 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 its own films or by others. It also includes hundreds of reels whose contents duplicate those found in other reels in the collection, a likely sign of the Education and Publications and Photography Departments’ functions 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 footage showing men on a hunting trip in the early 1900s.
Indeed, there are many questions about the WCS Film Collection, resulting from what was either a dearth of documentation created over 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 preservation status 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 Film Preservation Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Vidda Foundation, and by interns from NYU's Moving Image Archive and Preservation Program.
FILM Collection Contents
The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) Film Collection is currently composed of 1,607 film reels created or collected by WCS between approximately 1900 and 1996. Formats include black-and-white and color films; the majority are silent, 16mm, acetate films. A portion of the collection has been digitized, with additional details about digitized film available at each series level and at the item level in the collection's finding aid. The bulk of the collection consists of films created by the organization between the 1940s and the 1970s, during which it was called the New York Zoological Society (NYZS). The contents of the WCS Film Collection reflect a wide range of the organization’s mid-twentieth-century activities. Most prominent among its subjects are the Bronx Zoo, the New York Aquarium at both Battery Park and Coney Island, and NYZS’s international and US wildlife conservation efforts.
Although the collection’s reels were originally intended for both public and internal audiences and were created to promote, educate, and sometimes entertain, the WCS Film Collection today serves as a historical resource, recording not only the people, animals, and places central to WCS’s past but also documenting the histories of zoos and aquariums and global conservation efforts across the twentieth century. As such, some of the films depict practices, attitudes, and messages that are in direct contrast to WCS’s values and standards today. Among these are films showing earlier forms of animal care and collecting that are unacceptable by today’s standards. The collection also includes NYZS-produced films from the 1950s and 1960s, produced in the wake of independence for many African nations, that unjustly blame threats to wildlife on Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
Accessing and Using the Collection
79 titles from the WCS Film Collection have been digitized and are publicly available online. Another 20 are digitized but are not publicly available due to access or usage restrictions. As resources permit, the WCS Archives will continue to digitize films from the collection. For questions about accessing the films or licensing them for use, please contact library@wcs.org.