{"id":1978,"date":"2009-03-08T15:12:19","date_gmt":"2009-03-08T19:12:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/?p=1978"},"modified":"2009-03-08T15:12:19","modified_gmt":"2009-03-08T19:12:19","slug":"eadweard-muybridge-zoopraxographer-1974-thom-andersen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/1978","title":{"rendered":"Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer (1974, Thom Andersen)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;He was the first and only zoopraxographer.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/image09\/edmuybridge2.jpg\" alt=\"image\"><\/p>\n<p>Hour-long doc about the man who invented a form of motion photography (the famous series of tripwire-triggered photos of horses running), spending half his career as a successful still photographer, and the other half capturing and studying human and animal motion with his zoopraxiscope.<\/p>\n<p>Visually, the movie is mostly composed of Muybridge&#8217;s work, nicely assembled and presented, including moving reproductions of his motion series.  Voiceover tells us his story (memorable detail: he was acquitted for murdering his wife&#8217;s lover in 1875).  <\/p>\n<p>For his location still photography Muybridge (pronounced &#8220;Edward Mybridge&#8221; &#8211; people added extra letters to seem fancy back then) travelled with a &#8220;darkroom wagon&#8221;, foreshadowing <a href=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/487\">Medvedkin&#8217;s cinetrain.<\/a><\/p>\n<p><em>Muybridge photographed the effects of the Great San Francisco Earthquake&#8230; but not the one in 1906 &#8211; this is from October 1868!<\/em><br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/image09\/edmuybridge3.jpg\" alt=\"image\"><\/p>\n<p>Muybridge died in 1904, having seen the birth of Edison&#8217;s cameras and Lumiere&#8217;s cinema which shuttled his own inventions to the sidelines.  It would be 90 more years before <em>The Matrix<\/em> would combine Edison&#8217;s motion photography with Muybridge&#8217;s circular camera arrays to create the bullet-time effect.  Muybridge&#8217;s photographs of San Francisco are valued as a record of the city before it was leveled by the Even Greater Earthquake of 1906.<\/p>\n<p>Movie is narrated by two-time Cannes best-actor-winner (and future <em><a href=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/31\">Blue Velvet<\/a><\/em> crooner) Dean Stockwell.  Editor Morgan Fisher went on to make that movie I read about which is composed of all insert shots, and the same year, director Andersen made the stock-footage masterpiece <em><a href=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/archives\/370\">Los Angeles Plays Itself<\/a><\/em>.  All Movie Guide says this film took ten years to make, and J. Rosenbaum calls it &#8220;one of the best essay films ever made on a cinematic subject.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Muybridge self-portrait:<br \/>\n<img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/image09\/edmuybridge1.jpg\" alt=\"image\"><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;He was the first and only zoopraxographer.&#8221; Hour-long doc about the man who invented a form of motion photography (the famous series of tripwire-triggered photos of horses running), spending half his career as a successful still photographer, and the other half capturing and studying human and animal motion with his zoopraxiscope. Visually, the movie is [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[691,400,93,91,833],"class_list":["post-1978","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie","tag-1890s","tag-1970s","tag-documentary","tag-filmmaking","tag-thom-andersen"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1978"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2038,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1978\/revisions\/2038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1978"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1978"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/deeperintomovies.net\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1978"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}