If, as Sigmund Freud asserts, Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution inflicted a second “narcissistic wound” on humanity – teaching, after Copernicus, that humans were neither the center of the universe nor the crowning glory of creation – then cinema soon became one of the theory’s most powerful allies in dismantling the illusion of human ontological privilege. Not only did evolutionary theory inspire early films whose narratives destabilized human supremacy over other species; it also entered into a continuing dialogue with film theory and natural history, as moving images offered an unprecedented aesthetic and cognitive experience of the world, revealing forms of life at scales and from perspectives inaccessible to human vision. As part of a broader project on evolution as an epistemological and political paradigm of film forms, this paper examines a body of popular comedies produced primarily between 1907 and 1914. These films initially appear to reflect the polarized reception of Darwinism in early cinema, either presenting evolution as a threat to human supremacy or reaffirming hierarchical distinctions between humans and animals. Yet they also suggest another reading of evolutionary theory, one that departs from its neo-Darwinian, hierarchical, and anthropocentric interpretation.

I propose to read these films through the work of Darwin’s contemporary, the anarchist geographer Peter Kropotkin. In Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902), Kropotkin challenged the reduction of evolution to a struggle for survival, emphasizing cooperation and interdependence within and across species. Read through this lens, the animals populating these comedies emerge not simply as comic figures or allegories, but as agents of disorder who forge unexpected alliances with servants, vagabonds, and other marginalized subjects. Their incursions into bourgeois domestic spaces temporarily unsettle both species and class hierarchies, transforming the home into an “anarchist ark” where human and non-human beings discover forms of mutual support.

I argue that these films offer a popular, comic, and distinctly cinematic articulation of evolution as a principle of interdependence rather than competition – anticipating contemporary more-than-human approaches to life, relationality, and collective world-making.