Hindsight, which is another way of saying "history", sorts erratically. Innovators whose work came to nothing may seem eccentric to us, even grotesque, in their expenditures of vast effort and wealth to invent things that, as it turned out, no one needed. Eadward Muybridge, the subject of Thom Andersen's 1974 documentary, is an example of this sort of retrospective evaluation. Muybridge styled himself a "zoopraxographer" -- that is, one who recorded the motion of living things. To accomplish this, he created systems of cameras, sometimes using as many as 24, to photograph still images of people and animals in motion. The cameras were set up to be triggered at intervals as the creatures moved across a background, either lime-white or an eerie black void inscribed with a pale grid-marks. The project started as science or, at least, had the semblance of science. Muybridge recorded his results in detailed notes, created charts as to the positioning of his camera ("side", or "front foreshortened" or "back foreshortened") and his tables show the intervals between exposures, generally about a third of a second. The point was to see what had earlier been unseen -- that is, how birds flew or horses galloped, motion that were too swift for the eye to fully appreciate. But Muybridge's ostensibly scientific studies (published in the 1880's) seem to have deviated into something quite different, and, even, obsessive: what is the scientific value in exposures showing a naked 380 pound woman struggling to rise from the prone position? Why did Muybridge pose pretty young girls, completely naked, sipping tea or crocheting? His nude male wrestlers invoke a homosexual frisson -- at least, these images affected Francis Bacon, the great British painter, in that way and he alludes to these pictures in several of his canvases. What was the purpose of filming the trot of a bison or elephant? Why did he painstakingly photograph naked people with grotesque disabilities hobbling or crawling across his black and white grid -- he shows us a little girl with such curvature of the spine that she can only crawl on all fours like a cat (she grins at the camera); in one sequence of images a teenage boy who seems to have had half of his body amputated wriggles around to climb into a chair? It seems evident, that, at some point, Muybridge's studies became obsessive and bizarre. One wonders about the atmosphere in his Oakland studio. How did he interact with his subjects? What were his relations like with his assistants? Andersen's film adverts to Thomas Eakins (and, it seems, that Muybridge did some of his work in Philadelphia where Eakins painted and taught). Eakins was famously discharged for drawing aside the covering over a male model's genitals in the art classroom in which female students were present. At the time Andersen made the film, Eakins was regarded as a martyr to Victorian sexual prudishness. But we now know much more about Eakins' sexual inclinations and strange personality and the conduct that resulted in his firing from the art school seems to have been questionable, possibly some kind of sexual harassment, at least, as we define that concept today. It's not the act that might concern onlookers, but how Eakins behaved in unveiling the model, what he said, the expression on his face, his gestures and the direction of his gaze. Something similar, perhaps, confronts us with Muybridge's resolutely naked models, cavorting and creeping across the stage he built for them. Mostly, it seems that Muybridge's zoopraxography was the pursuit of something completely useless -- the exact manner that a 380 pound woman rises from the floor has no scientific value, at least in Muybridge's eerie and grotesque photographs. How are we supposed to use the grid? What kind of measurements are we supposed to make? There's no evidence, as far as I can determine, that any doctor involved in the treatment of disabled persons has ever made any study of Muybridge's zoopraxigraphical studies.
Curiously, Thom Andersen is, at pains, to demonstrate that Muybridge's work led nowhere and was, as Werner Herzog has said of his own work, the "conquest of the useless." Andersen's narration tells us that moving pictures subsequently invented by Lumiere and Edison (a technology that made Muybridge's studies utterly obsolete) rely upon flexible rolls of film. By contrast, Muybridge's zoopraxography used cumbersome photographic plates. Motion can be inferred from the separate images but they are exceedingly difficult to assimilate into a "moving image" -- that is, it is hard to animate the separate glass plate exposures into the semblance of motion. Muybridge attempted this with a magic lantern device and went on tour with his invention, but, probably, the results were underwhelming. A modern motion picture camera takes 24 exposures per second. Muybridge accomplished only three exposures per second and so most of the motion that he studied is simply not recorded. His longest sequence consist of 24 exposures, or, at modern projection speeds, one second of footage -- his animated sequences, which had to be painstakingly redrawn and corrected, for magic lantern projection are only three or four seconds long and jerky; they don't really provide much semblance to real motion. Andersen's narration to his film is poetic and he ends the picture with meditations as to Zeno's paradox, an ancient Greek proof that motion is impossible because space and time are infinitely divisible. Andersen observes that we imagine cinema moves because of persistence of vision -- this was not something that Muybridge really appreciated although the concept was first discussed by Leonardo da Vinci in the renaissance. Andersen, in modernist fashion, seems most interested in the black space between exposures, the glowing voids, the strange grid against which the figures move -- he comes to Muybridge not from cinema, but, I think, through Francis Bacon. (The film is an artifact of its era -- Andersen begins the picture with a quote from Chairman Mao, probably a charming device in 1974,but embarrassing today.)
The film details Muybridge's life. He came from England and took pioneering photographs of the American West, handsome vast vistas that look like black-and-white versions of Hudson Valley school paintings. He documented the early settlement of the Bay Area. At 41, he married a much younger woman and, when he learned that she had given birth to a child sired by her lover, he went to the camp where the man was mining and murdered him. He apparently persecuted his wife into a cerebral hemorrhage which killed her. Then, he put the child away in an orphanage. Muybridge seems to have been a vicious fellow, but people like him were common on the frontier, I suppose, and a jury acquitted him on the plea of justifiable homicide. He worked on his zoopraxography studies for about ten years, spend vast amounts of money ($30,000) and published huge tomes that are now so rare that only a few libraries own copies. All of this bankrupted him. He went on tour with his animations and was planning another series of studies on marine mammals and fish and, I suppose, human swimmers -- exactly how he would have rigged these shoots is unclear to me. Perhaps, mercifully, no one was interested in investing in this project which was rendered pointless, in any event, by the invention of projectible film in the mid 1890's. Muybridge went back to England and died there in 1904.
Andersen supposedly spent 10 years working on the film which is austere and consists almost entirely of images taken by Muybridge with a couple of diagrams showing how the camera set-ups were devised. There's a brief excursus into cinema in which a naked man and woman approach one another and kiss. This is supposed to demonstrate the advantages of cinema over Muybridge's complicated and cumbersome process. Apparently, it was fantastically difficult to animate Muybridge's exposures into the jerky motion we see in the movie. Andersen made the film to comply with requirements of his MFA. He has since made several important documentaries, most notably a compendium of images shot in Los Angeles, LA Plays Itself. The Muybridge film itself was, more or less, lost and had to be laboriously reconstructed and restored. In some ways, the movie is as archaic as Muybridge's zoopraxography -- a computer today could animate Muybridge's still shots into motion in about a half hour. (This process took Andersen years to accomplish.) And the whole notion of persistence of vision and projection speeds is atavistic today -- I think movies are digitally encoded and no longer projected at all. So, in an uncanny way, the anachronism that doomed Muybridge's project is embodied in Andersen's own film.
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