Event Description:
The bizarre scenario that can result from people cohabiting with animals is on view in two documentaries from different eras that will be presented by the Museum of the Moving Image's Science on Screen series on April 28. In 1931, Henry Cushier Raven, the American Museum of Natural History’s Curator of Human and Comparative Anatomy, returned from West Africa to his home in Long Island with a baby chimpanzee named Meshie. Raven shot a home movie-style documentary of Meshie living, playing with, and taking care of his young kids Harry, Jane, and Mary. Meshie, Child of a Chimpanzee is part of the American Museum of Natural History’s Library, and a restored 35mm print will be screened (the first time the film has been seen by a public audience). Harry Raven, six-years-old when his father filmed he and Meshie, is now 91; he will be in attendance. (Meshie is now taxidermied and installed in the Hall of Primates at the American Museum of Natural History.) In 2003, a 450-pound Siberian-Bengal tiger named Ming and a seven-foot alligator named Al were found to have been living over three years in an apartment in a public housing complex in Harlem, with a man named Antoine Yates. Phillip Warnell’s award-winning documentary Ming of Harlem: Twenty One Stories in the Air (2014) juxtaposes interview, observational, and reconstructed footage of Yates, Ming, and Al to create an outlandish work that regards the human-animal bond.
These films will screen back-to-back in a two-hour film program that will be followed by a conversation between director Phillip Warnell and pioneering animal cognition researcher Diana Reiss, Professor of Psychology in the Animal Behavior and Comparative Psychology Doctoral program at CUNY.
Event Speakers:
- Phillip Warnell, Director
- Diana Reiss, Professor of Psychology in the Animal Behavior and Comparative Psychology Doctoral program at CUNY
Event Information:
Tickets are $15 with discounts for students and seniors. Please register via the event webpage. This event is hosted by the Museum of the Moving Image.
