All language subtitles for eadweard.muybridge.zoopraxographer.1975.dvdrip.x264-bipolar

NARRATOR: As soon as
photography became
a practical reality in 1839,

its inventors and partisans
dreamed of using it to
analyze and synthesize motion.

In the 1890s
the modern cinema,
made possible

by the development
of flexible roll film,
realized these dreams.

But even before roll film,
Eadweard Muybridge found a way

of making motion pictures
using photographs
made on glass plates

with the wet collodion process
and a projector of
his own design,

which he called
the zoopraxiscope.

In 1878, under the title
"The Horse in Motion,"

Muybridge published the first
instantaneous sequential

photographs of animals
in motion.

These pictures were not
simply a technical curiosity
of passing interest.

They overthrew all the
accepted conceptions
of animal motion

and extended photography's
exploration into
the optical unconscious.

Although today his work
is known as still photographs,

sequential but static,
beginning in 1879

Muybridge also presented them
as motion pictures
with the zoopraxiscope,

one of the earliest motion
picture projectors.

The zoopraxiscope predated
by 16 years

the Lumieres' cinematograph,
the machine that established
the modern cinema.

As Muybridge claimed,
the zoopraxiscope was
the first apparatus

ever constructed
for synthetically
demonstrating movements

analytically photographed
from life.

In 1885, with the new
rapid dry plate process,

Muybridge widened
and extended his work.

His emphasis shifted from
horses to men and women.

He made 562 sequences
analyzing the movements
of the human figure,

95 sequences of horses,

and 124 sequences
of other animals.

100,000 negatives on glass
plates were exposed
at a cost of $30,000.

This encyclopedia of motion
encompassed 20,000 positions

assumed by men,
women, and children,

clothed and naked,
and by birds and animals.

Human action was
photographed through all
the round of work

and play, for both sexes
and all ages.

Champion athletes
and hospital patients alike
were photographed.

This work was finally
published in 1887

as 781 photogravure plates

contained in 11
mammoth folio volumes.

The full title of this
anatomy of motion was

Animal Locomotion:
An Electro-Photographic
Investigation of

Consecutive Phases
of Animal Movements.

But, Muybridge notes,
the term "Locomotion

"in the title of this work
is stretched to
its broadest capacity."

Muybridge considered
himself a scientist.

His concern was
demonstrating the successive
phases of animal movements

to illustrate the motion
and play of the muscles.

He called his new science
"Descriptive Zoopraxography."

He was the first and
only zoopraxographer.

Before his work in
motion photography began,

Muybridge was a successful
landscape photographer
in San Francisco,

a middle-class Victorian from
Kingston-on-Thames, England,

who had originally
journeyed to California
as a book-seller.

Although his work in
conventional still photography
has been obscured

by his later work
in zoopraxography,

it, too, embodies a
monumental undertaking
of encyclopedic scope.

From the beginning
of his career in 1867,

Muybridge rejected
studio portraiture in favor
of location photography,

which was both less profitable
and more arduous.

Traveling with
a darkroom wagon he called
"The flying studio,"

and publishing his work
under the pseudonym Helios,

Muybridge undertook
a systematic survey of
the wonders and curiosities

of Western America.

But not all his pictures
were documentary or topical.

In his studies
of trees and clouds,

the subject matter could not
be more commonplace.

These pictures, made in
the 1860s, anticipate
a mode of photography

only thoroughly explored
two generations later.

Muybridge photographed
San Francisco as it was

before the great
earthquake of 1906.

And he photographed
the havoc wrought by
one earthquake,

the quake of
October 21st, 1868.

Around San Francisco,
he photographed
the state prison

at San Quentin,

the warden's daughters,

Mills Seminary in Oakland.

In Berkeley, the California
School for the Deaf and Blind.

The Medical Department
of the State University,

a lecture on anatomy.

(INDIAN WAR CRY)

NARRATOR: In 1873, Muybridge
went to the lava beds

around Tule Lake
in northern California

to make stereographs
of the Modoc Indian War.

This episodic war eventually
engaged 700 government troops

to hunt down a band of
50 Indian warriors
and their families,

so that they could be removed
from their homeland

and exiled to
a reservation in Oklahoma.

The stereograph was
the most popular photographic
format of the era.

Two almost identical images
taken by a camera with

two lenses a few inches apart
were mounted together

to produce a three-dimensional
effect when viewed
through a stereoscope.

(INDIAN WAR CRY)

Muybridge's Modoc brave was,
in fact,

one of the mercenary
Tenino Indian scouts

recruited from the Warm
Spring Reservation.

These Indians did most of the
fighting for the US Army.

In 1867 and again in 1872,

Muybridge
photographed Yosemite,

the classic challenge
for California photographers.

A correspondent for
the leading San Francisco
newspaper of the day,

the Alta California,
reported his
second expedition.

"Muybridge has waited
several days to get
the proper conditions

"of atmosphere for some
of his views,

"has cut down trees
by the score

"that interfered with
the camera from the best
point of sight.

"Has had himself lowered
by ropes down precipices to
establish his instruments

"in places where the
full beauty of the object
to be photographed

"could be transferred
to the negative.

"Has gone to points where his
packers refused to follow him

"and has carried the
apparatus himself,

"rather than forego
the picture on which
he had set his mind."

At the end of
this Yosemite trip, Muybridge
sat for a self-portrait

at the base of a sequoia tree.

Around the time he posed
for this photograph,
Muybridge, at the age of 42,

married Flora Stone,
a girl half his age.

Two years later,
in October 1874,

he discovered that she
was having an affair
with Harry Larkyns,

an adventurer
and newspaperman,

and that Larkyns
was the father

of the child whom he
thought he had sired.

Muybridge proceeded
to the Yellow Jacket
quicksilver mine

near Calistoga,
where Larkyns was
working as a surveyor.

He accosted Larkyns
at a party,

and with a single pistol shot,
killed him.

In February 1875, Muybridge
was tried for murder.

Although his original plea
was insanity,

he was acquitted on
the verdict
of justifiable homicide.

A few months later,
his wife died of a stroke

and her child was placed
in an orphanage.

Almost immediately
after his trial,

Muybridge left for
Central America on

his most productive
photographic expedition.

(MARCHING BAND PLAYING)

Manifest Destiny, incarnated
in the Pacific Mail
and Steamship Company,

carried Muybridge
to Darien, which was then
a world on the wane.

In Guatemala and Panama,
he distributed a circular
announcing the sale

of the photographs
he made there
and signed it

Eduardo Santiago Muybridge.

As he had on most
of his previous journeys,

Muybridge carried cameras
for making both large prints
and stereographs.

He photographed
the elegant capitals,

Guatemala, Panama,

as well as
the uncharted interior

and its overgrown ruins.

Muybridge made a
series of photographs
devoted to the

recently established
coffee plantations which

he titled, "The Cultivation
and Transportation of Coffee."

"First Day of the
Coffee Season, Las Nubes."

"Coffee Pickers at Dinner,
Hacienda Mateo."

"A Fete Day with
the Coffee Pickers,
Santa Maria."

"Coffee pickers
at their Ablutions,"

or, as he also titled it,
"Coffee Pickers at their
Evening Recreations."

In one photograph
he shows their masters,

a picture titled, "Coffee
Planter's Residence,
San Felipe."

Three years before his trip
to Central America,

Muybridge had begun
experimenting in the
instantaneous photography

of motion under the
patronage of Leland Stanford,

a builder of railroads
and breeder of racehorses.

Stanford, who once said,
"The machine cannot lie,"

thought a photographic
analysis of the horses' stride

might make possible
a more efficient
method of training.

However, with a single camera,

Muybridge could not record
the consecutive phases
of a complete stride.

So in 1878, three years
after his return,

at Stanford's Palo Alto
stock farm, Muybridge set up
a battery of cameras

to make a series of
photographs in
rapid succession

and at regular intervals.

Muybridge's motion
picture studio required

12 to 24 still cameras
enclosed in a long open shed.

The row of cameras
was arranged parallel
to a white track

over which, in Muybridge's
words, "the animals are
caused to move."

The shutters of the cameras
were successfully activated

either by a clockwork
apparatus or by wires
stretched over the track

and broken by the horses,
as they moved along it.

Journalists marveled
at this novel plan

by which the horse took
his own picture.

Muybridge photographed
the basic gaits of the horse,

walking, pacing, trotting,

cantering, running,
and hauling,

and he photographed
other animal species
in motion,

the greyhound,
the ox, the goat,

the boar.

In August 1879,

he photographed
the human animal,

athletes from the Olympic
Club of San Francisco.

In the fall of 1879,
Muybridge began

reconstituting the motion
his cameras broke down

and analyzed, by
projecting his photographs
with the zoopraxiscope.

The zoopraxiscope
had many precursors,

the simple optical devices
such as the phenakistoscope

and the zoetrope,

which the Victorians
called, "Philosophical toys"

because they were designed
to provide both entertainment
and enlightenment.

Like these forerunners,
and like its descendant,

the 20th century
movie projector,
the zoopraxiscope relies

on the phenomenon of
persistence of vision.

When a series of intermittent
flashes of light succeed

each other rapidly so that
before one fades away

from the retina,
another appears,

the successive impressions
fuse into one
continuous sensation.

In Muybridge's projector,
the images were arranged

consecutively around
the perimeter of a glass disc

which revolved at the front
of a magic lantern.

So that the revolving images
would not appear
as a continuous blur,

a second disc made
of metal and perforated

with narrow slits at
regular intervals was attached
in front of the glass disc.

Because the narrow slits
compress the images
projected through them,

Muybridge mounted on
the glass disc elongated
drawings based on

the photographs, rather than
the photographs themselves.

When the two discs revolved
in opposite directions,

the metal disc
served as a shutter.

Thus the separate images
were revealed intermittently

and united by
the persistence of vision

to form a continuous
moving image.

However, the modern
cinema projector

is a far more
sophisticated device

for illuminating and animating
photographic images

than Muybridge
had available to him.

It makes it possible
to see his photographs
as he never could.

The almost artificial
quality of these images
was determined by

the insensitivity of
Muybridge's
photographic materials.

To intensify the brilliance
of the illumination,

the track was covered
with lime and
the backdrop set

at a 20-degree angle
and covered with rock salt.

But with all
these ingenuities,

instantaneous exposures
on wet collodion plates

gave little more than
silhouettes set off

against a white void.

At the beginning of the 1880s,
there was a revolution

in photographic technology,

the perfecting of
the rapid gelatin dry plate,

far more sensitive to light
than the collodion plate.

The dry plate made Muybridge's
first motion studies obsolete

and suggested that a
more systematic and
comprehensive investigation

of animal motion
could be undertaken.

So six years later,

under the sponsorship
of the University of
Pennsylvania in Philadelphia,

Muybridge repeated
and expanded
his experiments.

The white backdrop
was replaced

by a white-on-black gridwork
made of strings.

His models performed their
simple actions on a level
track 120 feet long.

In Philadelphia, he used
three batteries of cameras

positioned to a afford
a lateral view,

a front foreshortening,

and a rear foreshortening.

This was
the general plan.

But in many sequences,
only one or two

of the three
camera banks was used.

And there are 48 sequences
where the cameras

were arranged in
a semi-circle around
the track and triggered at

the same time to give
simultaneous views
of a single moment

in the course of the action,
instead of sequential views
of a continuing action.

He again photographed
horses, the first subject
of his motion studies,

horses walking, ambling,

trotting free,

galloping.

Horses leaping hurdles,

rearing up,

hauling heavy weights,

horses with jockeys,

and horses with naked riders,

male and female.

Again he photographed
greyhounds and oxen,

but he also photographed
many other animal species

that he seemed to pick
especially for the
euphony of their names.

The Chacma baboon,

the oryx,

the Dorcas gazelle,

the white-tailed gnu,

the guanaco.

Again, he
photographed athletes.

Most of these models were,
in Muybridge's words,

"Students or graduates
of the University
of Pennsylvania,

"each one of whom
has a well-earned record

"in the particular feat
selected for illustration."

Among the athletes, Muybridge
included a contortionist,

a performer he identified
as a public acrobat.

But for the first time,
he photographed men, women,
and children in actions

incidental to everyday life.

Walking,

crawling,

standing still,

drinking tea,

reading a pamphlet,

kneeling in prayer,

playing ball,

getting out of bed,

emptying a bucket of water,

spanking a child.

And men working
at various trades,

blacksmiths,

a carpenter,

a farrier.

Muybridge also made
a more circumstantial record

of his times in sequences
of elaborately dressed
men and women

performing social actions.

Waltzing,

walking as if in the street,

making a gesture of
acknowledgment to
an imaginary passerby,

encumbered with
a satchel and cane,

or a parasol and handkerchief.

The long full dresses
accentuate the radicalism

of the nakedness
in other sequences.

And in five sequences
depicting movements
of the hand,

Muybridge made the first
moving picture close-ups.

BefoAnimal Locomotion
was published,

Muybridge issued a prospectus
and a catalog of plates.

In the catalog,
he offered a title

and explanatory note
for each sequence.

The titles are given
in the form of gerunds,

suggesting that the action is
universal and timeless.

In contrast,
the explanatory notes
are topical and specific.

In this profusion of
descriptive and
technical data,

the action and the
method of recording

are analyzed, codified,
tabulated and annotated.

He includes a statement
of the interval of time

between successive exposures,

a measurement of
the unphotographed time

which elapsed between
one image and the next.

"Plate number 219,

"stooping and lifting broom,

"and sweeping.

"Model 7, Costume: nude

"Twelve lateral views.
Ten 60-degree
rear foreshortenings.

"Interval between exposures:

"325 thousandths of a second."

An interval that can be
approximately represented
in modern cinema

by an interval of darkness
lasting one third of a second.

Each of Muybridge's
exposures lasted only one
hundredth of a second,

so less than a 30th of
the movement is
actually photographed.

The rest is lost.

"Lying on a couch and
turning over on side,

"Model 47, Costume: nude

"Ten lateral views.
Ten 90-degree
rear foreshortenings.

"Interval between
exposures: .264 seconds."

The verbal dialectic
in Muybridge's catalog,

between the generalizing
titles and the precise data

of the notes,
corresponds to a dialectic
within the images.

It might be called
a dialectic of subject
and method.

The inherently compelling
subject, naked men and women,

is set into
a neutral framework.

The timeless, functionless,
autonomous human
actions depicted,

actions often adapted from
romantic painting,

are countered by the site
in which they take place,

commanded by the gridwork.

The grid, in turn, implies
the systemic methodology

of which it is part.

Its use was suggested
by Thomas Eakins,

a painter noted for his
careful studies of
perspective and anatomy

to facilitate analysis
of the movements.

The white crosslines
formed a network
of regular coordinates,

making it possible
to plot the movements

superimposed on them
in the photographs.

But the grid has
another effect.

Because it is the most inert,
inorganic mode of
delineating space,

the rectangular grid
provides the most
dramatic means

of establishing the
separateness of
human beings

from the physical objects
surrounding them.

Muybridge, in his catalog,
gives the names of

all the horses, mules
and dogs he photographed.

Hansel,

Deusel,

Dread,

Eagle,

and Elberon, among others.

But he identifies
his human models
only by number.

However, a few bits
of information about
some of them

can be gathered
from his prospectus,

and from the notebooks
he kept during the photography
Animal Locomotion.

From the prospectus,
that Model 22 was a mulatto

and a professional pugilist,

and from the notebooks,
that his name was Ben Bailey.

Model 60, who invariably
appears rifle in hand,

was, according
to the prospectus,

a well-drilled member
of the state militia.

In the notebooks,
Muybridge jotted the names,
age, height, and weight

of a few female models,

and in the prospectus,
he relates the marital status
of 18 of them.

Four were married,
one was widowed,
and 13 were unmarried.

Aside from these
biographical shards,

Muybridge recorded only
one statement about them,

"The female models were
chosen from all
classes of society."

Reflected in the ambiguity and
irony of this statement is
the presence of a society

which, as Henry Adams
testifies, regarded
the suppression of sex

as its greatest triumph.

While Muybridge was
preparing Animal Locomotion
for publication,

Thomas Eakins was dismissed
from teaching

at the Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Arts

for uncovering the genitals
of a male model
in a life drawing class.

To the dismay of
his fellow Philadelphians,

Eakins had revealed that
which the Heavenly Father
himself concealed

from the sight of
his fallen children.

Artists were accustomed
to searching

for their female models
among prostitutes.

Any women willing
to pose naked

was generally considered
a degraded women,

unworthy to sit
in a parlor, clothed.

Muybridge's female models
violated the conventions
of their society not only by

appearing naked in his
photographs,

but also by wearing
their hair close-cropped

and by languorously
smoking cigarettes.

But Muybridge's objective gaze
discovered not licentiousness
and dissipation,

but naturalness and grace.

Muybridge's work was
necessarily subversive

of the taboo against realistic
representation of nudity.

In a culture which associates
evil with materiality,

even today representations
of nudity are considered

acceptable to the degree
they are dematerialized.

The usual strategies
are lyricism,

idealization, and good taste.

But Muybridge's method
precluded these forms
of artifice.

It required him
to renounce the decorative
and the pictorial.

It forced him to exclude
anything unnecessary
to his project,

analyzing the forms
of matter in motion.

He photographed naked men
and women objectively,

without superfluous lighting
or flattering angles.

Always the same lucid,
merciless, direct sunlight.

Always the same set
of mechanically
predetermined angles.

Muybridge made no attempt
to spare his models

from embarrassment
or discomfort.

He had them walk on all fours,

crawl on their hands
and knees.

He called one sequence,
"A Shock to
the Nervous System."

Around the waist
of Blanche Epler,
Muybridge strapped

a metal box from
which extended,
three white-tipped antennae.

These artificial appendages
were designed

to aid in measuring
the oscillations of her hips

as she walked across
a wooden platform.

At the suggestion of
Dr. Francis X. Dercum,

a specialist in mental
and nervous diseases

at the University
of Pennsylvania,

Muybridge photographed
artificially induced
nervous convulsions.

In a paper on this experiment,
Deercum wrote,

"The tips of the fingers
were placed upon a table

"as to give merely
a delicate sense of contact.

"An object was selected,
and the mind fixed upon it.

"After a period of time,
from a few minutes
to an hour,

"tremors commenced
in the hand.

"The tremor is just being
magnified into to
and fro movements

"of the hands and feet.

"If the experiment
was continued,

"the muscles of the arms,
shoulders, back, buttock
and legs

"would become
successively affected

"and the subject thrown
violently to the ground

"in a strong
general convulsion.

"It might have been possible
by prolonging the experiment

"to produce still more
startling results.

"However, the results were
by no means unsatisfactory.

"The convulsion was
of considerable violence."

Muybridge also photographed
forms of pathologic motion,

epileptics,

a young girl suffering from
infantile paralysis

whose only method
of locomotion was by
the use of her limbs

exactly in the manner
of a four-legged animal.

Amputees.

A 340-pound woman,
struggling to stand up.

But Muybridge, in turn,
appeared naked before
his own cameras,

identified in
the catalog simply as

"an ex-athlete,
aged about 60."

He was, in fact, 55.

Muybridge began
the photography of
Animal Locomotion

in the spring of 1884,

and it was finally
published in 1887.

He spent most
of the next six years
on lecture tours,

attempting to repay
the money advanced by

the backers of
Animal Locomotion and to
finance another study

of the forms of motion.

He hoped to refine
his system and to
enlarge his encyclopedia

by photographing
aquatic birds,
marine mammals,

and actors performing
scenes from plays.

But he never
found a sponsor
for this project.

He hadn't repaid
the deficit from
Animal Locomotion

when the kinetoscope
of Edison and the

cinematograph of Lumiere
took away his audience.

He retired and returned
to his birthplace,

Kingston-on-Thames, England,
where he died in 1904,

nine years after the
debut of the cinematograph.

On his lecture tours,
he used the zoopraxiscope

to reconstruct the motion
fragmented by his cameras.

The individual photographs
from the plates

were projected
on the screen as stills,

then animated
by the zoopraxiscope,

its wheel accelerating
until finally,

life-like motion
was reproduced.

In 1903, Louis Lumiere said,

"The cinema is an invention
without a future."

The prediction was not
unreasonable since
his invention was

still considered
a crude toy, a silly
little device for

making pictures
that would dance,

as Thomas Edison,
another of its inventors,
called it.

However, Lumiere was wrong.

But although, Muybridge's
zoopraxiscope was
granted more respect

on its debut than
the kinetoscope and
the cinematograph,

it was an invention
without a future.

Muybridge made the first
photographic motion pictures,

but he was in no sense
an inventor of
the modern cinema.

All modern systems
of motion pictures depend

on flexible roll film.

When celluloid was fabricated
as a film base

at the end of the 1880s,

any intelligent mechanic
who turned his mind
to the task

could invent cinema,
and many did.

But still bound by
the inflexibility
of glass plates,

Muybridge had to employ
a separate camera for
each image he recorded.

His multiple camera system
was a technological curiosity,

unnecessary for
the development
of modern cinema.

His longest sequence
contained 24 images,

the number a modern motion
picture projects every second.

As early as the 1890s, films
lasted over 30 seconds.

And by the early 1900s,
10 minutes had become
the standard length.

But in Muybridge's work,
photography in its
passage to cinema

overcame a
philosophical obstacle.

The modern motion picture
camera bisects human time

into equal moments
of light and darkness,

their duration regulated
by the constant rotation
of the shutter.

Between each frame,
when the shutter closes

over the lens as
the strip of the film
is repositioned,

there is a moment of darkness,
a fragment of time which
is not recorded.

Time, like any
continuous quantity,

is infinitely divisible.

It cannot be reconstituted
in its unity
by a mechanical instrument

which bisects it finitely.

So we might question
the possibility of cinema,

asking, "How can we
recapture motion

"in a finite number
of still pictures?"

Just as Zeno asked,
"How can we cross space

"in a finite number
of movements

"since it is
infinitely divisible?"

The solution to this paradox

lies in the persistence
of vision,

metaphorically described
in the 15th century
by Leonardo da Vinci.

"Every body that moves rapidly
seems to color its path

"with the impression
of its hue.

"Thus when lightning
moves among dark clouds,

"the speed
of its sinuous flight

"makes its whole course
resemble a luminous snake.

"This is because
the organ of perception

"acts more rapidly
than the judgment."

Through the persistence
of vision,

human perception is able to
bridge the darkness

which always alternates
coequally with the light

on every
motion picture screen.

The persistence of vision
had already found
a practical application

in the simple illusionistic
optical toys
of the early 19th century.

But it remained
to Eadweard Muybridge
to demonstrate empirically

that the infinite flux of time
could be reconstructed

from a finite
number of photographs.

Muybridge transformed
photography

from the Zenonian reverie
on movement it had been,

into the modern instrument
that recovers
the unity of human motion.

The motion by which
Zeno's paradoxes
are refuted in a single step.