Film Fest Documentary Preview: ‘B.F. Skinner Plays Himself’

This is a preview of a film featured in the 2025 Newburyport Documentary Film Festival.

If you’re a visual person, if you have a weakness for eye candy and/or a broader sensory experience, then you should watch “B.F. Skinner Plays Himself” for no other reason than the gorgeously mesmerizing mid-20^th century film footage.  

The documentary follows B.F. Skinner – a world- renowned psychologist and behaviorist — through his professional and personal life. Curated with an artistic intuition that caters uncannily to today’s resurging obsession with film photography, and scored beautifully with a soundtrack of instrumentals and synth music that compliments the flighty, grainy, cathartically colorful 35mm footage like hand in glove, the head trip alone is worth the ticket. If, However, you like a documentary that delivers the facts and information effectively and efficiently, then I suppose you should also buy yourself a ticket. 

B.F skinner delivers provocative social and philosophical quandaries that caused me to turn this modest 75-minute documentary into a nearly two hour viewing with the number of times I paused it to be sure I accurately transcribed numerous quotes and theories that caused me to sit with pen and paper in hand.  

The subject matter in combination with the artful directorship, and cinematography, created in my mind, somewhere between the conscious and unconscious, the impression of a science fiction feature which at any time could turn dystopian, forgetting that what I was watching was history and not audacious fiction. Skinner relentlessly explores ideas and possibilities startling in their relevance, and provocative even (especially?) today in their controversy, which left me eager to buy at least one of his books and familiarize myself with a character I’m very embarrassed to admit I had no knowledge of before this film. 

This documentary has everything a good documentary should have: a purpose, convincing presentation of the information relevant to that purpose, and passion and beauty in that presentation.  

Peter Neverette

The 21st-annual Newburyport Documentary Film Festival runs from September 26-28, 2025.