Of Muybridge and Motion

Most lovers of movie history know the nameEadweard Muybridge (Edward Muggeridge, 1830-1904); he’s the eccentric English gent who invented a form of proto-cinema in the late 1870s, using that technology to perform motion studies on people and animals throughout the years that followed. In that context, he got a brief mention in my book Chain of Fools, as he does in most works that treat of how the movies began. But Muybridge seems to be in the zeitgeist at the moment. Jordan Peele gave some attention to him in a monologue in Nope (2022), with fictionalized reference to the black jockey riding the horse in Muybridge’s most famous photo sequence. There was also a new documentary Exposing Muybridge (2021) that is available across multiple streaming platforms. (The title is misleading; the film doesn’t unearth any scandal, it’s just an ill-chosen photography reference). There was a also a 2015 bio-pic named Eadweard starring Michael Eklund. He’s been the subject of numerous books (fiction, non-fiction, and poetry), stage plays, museum exhibitions, and tv specials. I never thought of him much beyond pictures of running animals, but his life story turns out to be a ripping, picaresque yarn!

More than a photographer or an inventor, Muybridge might best be described by the umbrella term “adventurer”. Though his family had money, he opted not to coast on his advantages. He left his home in Surrey at age 20 and set out for America, where he set up as a bookseller, first in New York, then in New Orleans, and finally San Francisco at a time when it had only been in existence for a few years. In addition to books, he sold art and prints, and eventually photographs, which is how he developed an interest in the field himself. In 1860, he was to embark on a voyage to Europe, when he was involved in a serious stage coach accident in Texas which laid him up for many months. He suffered a head injury that seems to have made him much more eccentric, and freed up his creative side by releasing his previously controlled personality. After this time, he began patenting inventions, and became a celebrated photographer of America’s western frontier. This is when he changed the rendering of his name to something that seemed more authentically “Anglo-Saxon: to him. In earlier years he also signed his work with the name “Helios”, with reference to the Greek sun god.

In 1874 Muybridge suffered a major set-back after he shot and killed his wife’s lover, one Major Harry Larkyns. He was finally let off with a verdict of justifiable homicide. He went on a photographic expedition to Central America after this. And he turned his attention to the problem of solving a friendly dispute with former California governor Leland Stanford (founder of the University) concerning the gait of horses. To solve it, he came up with a process that arranged multiple cameras, triggered by trip wires, to snap pictures of a horse as it moved past. The result was something very close to what we think of as moving pictures. He devoted himself to such motion studies for research purposes of both science and art, for years. He also invented something called the zoopraxiscope, a kind of disc for animating pictures; and did a photographic panorama of San Francisco reminiscent of the concoctions of John Banvard.

Muybridge presented his work at the World’s Columbia Exposition in 1893, no doubt inspiring many for that was the very moment that true cinema was being born. According to Philip Pearlstein, in a 2010 essay for Artnews, Muybridge’s motion studies also influenced fine art across a wide range of styles, from the anatomically accurate realism of Eakins, to the more stylized sculpture of Rodin, to the Cubist investigations of Duchamp in things like Nude Descending a Staircase.

After the Chicago World’s Fair, Muybridge returned to England, where he continued to lecture and released the books Animals in Motion (1899) and The Human Figure in Motion (1901) that have pretty much never gone out of circulation.

For more on early cinema please read  Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.