B.F. Skinner Plays Himself
B.F. Skinner Plays Himself takes Skinner’s proposition as a conceptual point of departure - it is an audio-visual portrait, examining the biographical history, ideas, words, and representations of a non-person through raw footage of the subject and their environment.
The notorious behaviorist B.F. Skinner was the most controversial psychologist of the 20th century, yet there is no serious film about his life and work. This film uses recently discovered, unseen materials from the Harvard Film Archive to reveal B.F. Skinner’s personality and ideas about what it means to be a person through an experimental reconstruction of his life.
Directed by
Ted Kennedy
Runtime
72 min
Country
USA
Year
2025
B.F. Skinner Plays Himself — Ted Kennedy [Doc Fortnight ’25 Review] - In Review Online
B.F. Skinner Plays Himself — Ted Kennedy [Doc Fortnight ’25 Review] - In Review Online
Doc Fortnight 2025: Archival Emergence - International Documentary Association
Doc Fortnight 2025: Archival Emergence - International Documentary Association
MoMA Announces Lineup for Doc Fortnight 2025, the 24th Annual Festival of International Nonfiction Film - MoMA
MoMA Announces Lineup for Doc Fortnight 2025, the 24th Annual Festival of International Nonfiction Film - MoMA
Film Fest Documentary Preview: ‘B.F. Skinner Plays Himself’
Film Fest Documentary Preview: ‘B.F. Skinner Plays Himself’
Doc Talk: The Newburyport Documentary Film Festival — One of the Strongholds for the First Amendment
Doc Talk: The Newburyport Documentary Film Festival — One of the Strongholds for the First Amendment
Screenings
Feb 2025 - The Museum of Modern Art, Doc Fortnight (world premiere)
Aug 2025 - Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival
Sep 2025 - Richmond International Film Festival
Sep 2025 - Newburyport Documentary Film Festival
Sep 2025 - Cinesthesia FactoryFest
Sep 2025 - Oregon Independent Film Festival (Best Historical Documentary)
Oct 2025 - Kyiv International Film Festival Molodist
Nov 2025 - Tacoma Film Festival (Best Feature Documentary)
Jan 2026 - Labocine ARCHIVES
Jan 2026 - New Jersey Film Festival
February 2026 - Brooklyn Institute for Social Research
Presentations
“About Skinner and Behavior Analysis.” 12th International ABAI Conference, Lisbon, Portugal (2025)
“Panel: Representing the Animal,” Visible Evidence XXVII, Frankfurt am Main, Germany (virtual) (2021)
“Filmscreening & Discussion: B.F. Skinner Plays Himself,” Philipps-Universität Marburg, Institut für Medienwissenschaft, Marburg, Germany (virtual) (2021)
“B.F. Skinner Plays Himself: Portrait of a Nonperson (Work in progress),” Norsk atferdsanalytisk forening, Storefjell, Norway (2018)
“Animating the Evolution of the Skinner Box: Challenges in Visualizing Scientific Method,” Association for Behavior Analysis International, San Diego, CA (2018)
“B.F. Skinner’s Experience Making a Film Biography,” Association for Behavior Analysis International, Paris, France (2017)
“B.F. Skinner Collection – Harvard Film Archive,” European Association for Behavior Analysis, Enna, Italy (2016)
“Transforms the found-footage film into a generative construct, using the structural limitations imposed on Skinner’s own autobiographical portrait - filmed a half century ago - as a conceptual frame for rethinking the man and his ideations. Non-polemical by design, the film subtly achieves political and cultural resonance by questioning the use of behavioral determinism in the current historical moment. “
— Jay Kuehner, Tacoma Film Festival juror, 2025
“If I am right about human behavior, I have written the autobiography of a nonperson.”
— B.F. Skinner
DIRECTOR'S STATEMENT
This film began with an accidental discovery. While researching real-world intentional communities modeled after behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner’s imagined utopia in his novel Walden Two, I came across an intriguing entry in the Harvard Film Archive’s finding aid. It said simply “unidentified Jerry Johnson film,” a description that turned out to represent tens of thousands of feet of film and audio saved from a 1970s biographical movie about Skinner.
The film turned out to be an overly ambitious project that resulted in a clichéd educational film that disappointed the producer and B.F. Skinner himself. Fortunately, the material was preserved and after many hours of archival work could be sent for digitization.
The film turns Skinner’s theories on himself and shows how the environment of the film production shapes his behavior as he is filmed, questioned and directed. All of the false starts, unused takes, edited facial expressions, and preparatory discussions are reconfigured and combined with personal photographs and notes, magazine covers, painted portraits, drafts of books and home movies, including a videotape documenting his home immediately after his death in 1990. The resulting film is a collage of image and sound that presents Skinner’s controversial ideas in an open format leaving the viewer to make their own interpretations.