Pioneer Intro

The film festival post, both yesterday and today (and perhaps those to come) came to me by accident after falling into YouTube rabbit holes. I don’t fall into them often and rarely with such delightful results.

This happened about a year ago, so the deatils are a bit fuzzy, but I think a repeat viewing of Nope, and discovering a book of his studies in motion had me looking up Eadweard Muybridge again.

Lore has it he photographed a man riding horse as part of a bet to see if all four hooves are ever off the ground at once (spoiler: they are). The story goes on to purport the 24 cameras set up created a happy accident. Still images that appeared to move when shown in rapid succession.

That’s true enough, but that makes it more of a “eureka moment” than it really was. Having discovered the book, I saw Muybridge assiduously used film to study motion over many years. Also, Nope, was correct. While many Muybrdige’s subjects (even horses) where named in intertitles, the horse’s jockey in his most famous film, was not. But it is noteworthy that while the horse ride sets motion pictures off. There were quickly many disparate experiments with motion pictures that are fascinating, even exciting to see now, so many years later considering their early vintage.

Films

Here are some works by Étienne-Jules Marey another pioneer.