Motion Photography and the
Beginnings of Cinema
Eadweard Muybridge, 1879
Eadweard Muybridge (Edward James Muggeridge, British 1830-1904), AKA “Helios”
San Francisco Landscape photographer, Valley of the Yosemite, ca.1867
Muybridge’s five-month trip to
the Yosemite Valley in 1867
yielded 260 published views,
160 of them stereographs.
His were among the most
celebrated images taken of
the Valley.
Eadweard Muybridge (Edward James Muggeridge, British 1830-1904), Galloping Horse,
Motion Study: Sallie Gardner, owned by Leland Stanford, running at 1.40 gait over the
Palo Alto track, June 19, 1879, wet plate collotype, a sequence of photographs with 12
cameras
Muybridge began the project in 1872. In 1878, he succeeded in taking a
sequence of photographs with 12 cameras that captured the moment when
the animal’s hooves were tucked under its belly. Publication of these
photographs made Muybridge an international celebrity.
Eadweard Muybridge, The Zoopraxiscope, projector presented in
autumn of 1879
The private gathering that watched the first Zoopraxiscope
projections at Mayfield Grange, the home of Muybridge's sponsor
Leland Stanford at Palo Alto farm, in the autumn of 1879 has the
distinction of being one of the earliest motion picture audiences.
Zoopraxiscope disc and detail of stencil
Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: Plate 455, “Woman Throwing herself on heap of hay”,
1887, collotype, The Pennsylvania Project 1883 –1887, University of Pennsylvania
Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: Man Shoveling (Self Portrait), 1895
University of Pennsylvania
Thomas Eakins (American Realist Painter, 1844-1916), George Reynolds: Seven
Photographs, 1883, albumen print, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts
(lower left) Motion Study: male running jump to left, ca. 1885,
(lower right) Motion Study: female nude, blindfolded, walking to left, ca. 1885
Eakins approached the human figure with the analytical eye of a scientist.
(left) Thomas Eakins, The Swimming Hole, oil on canvas, 1884-85
(right) Eakins Eakins's Students at the Site for Swimming, albumen print, ca.1884
Etienne-Jules Marey (French Physiologist 1830–1904), Photographic Gun: camera with
a rotating plate capable of taking rapid sequence of separate images.
(below) Marey, Pelicans in Flight, c.1882
Marey saw Muybridge’s
motion photographs when
they were published in
Paris in 1878.
Muybridge’s multi-camera
system wasn’t scientific
enough for Marey.
Marey, Chronophotographic study of Man Pole Vaulting, 1890 -1891, albumen silver print
Marey used dry photographic plates, faster than the wet plates Muybridge used, and
an ordinary camera with its lens left open. Behind the lens, Marey put a rotating metal
disk that had from one to ten slots cut into it at even intervals. As the subject, dressed
in white, moved in front of a black background, the rotating shutter exposed the glass
plate, creating a sequence of images.
Thomas Eakins, Motion Study using Marey’s wheel camera, Pennsylvania Academy of
Fine Arts, 1885
Edgar Degas (French Realist/Impressionist Painter and Sculptor, 1834-1917)
Frieze of Dancers, 1895, oil on canvas, 27 3/4 x 79”
Multiple views of a single figure, an approach that violated the traditional notion that a
painting must represent a unity of time, place, and viewpoint
Giacomo Balla (Italian Futurist Painter) Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (Leash in
Motion), 1912, oil on canvas, 35 x 45”
Antonio Bragaglia (Italian Futurist Photographer), Change of Position, 1911, gelatinsilver print
Giacoma Balla, Swallows, 1913, oil on canvas
(right) Lucien Bull (Marey assistant) with Marey-wheel camera photographing soap
bubble, 1906
(left) Bull, Soap Bubble Bursting, 1904, silver gelatin print from a film strip
This stereoscopic camera took 54 pairs of
pictures per second.
The Movies Begin
First Kodak camera, 1888
Celluloid Film
"You press the button,
we do the rest"
Drawings submitted by George
Eastman for his new camera,
The Kodak, showing detailed views
of the camera's exterior and the
interior with its barrel shutter and
roll-film transport designs.
Kinetograph motion picture camera, William Dickson (British inventor 1860 - 1935) under
the employ of Thomas Edison
Camera (the first to use perforated film stock) for producing subjects for the Kinetoscope
peepshow machine. Developed over several years, shot commercially produced movies
from 1893 and patented in 1897
Thomas Edison’s Kinetoscope, 1894. The loop of film was about 45 feet long.
Edison to George Eastman on receiving 50-ft celluloid roll:
"That's it -- we've got it -- now work like hell!"
(center) Man Using a Sound Version of the Kinetoscope
(right) Kinetoscope parlor in San Francisco, ca. 1894
(bottom right) Sandow, the Modern Hercules, 1894 (Still from strip of the Edison
Kinetoscope) B&W : 39 feet, Directed by W.K.L. Dickson and William Heise, Eugen
Sandow (Friedrich Muller), Edison Manufacturing Company production
Thomas Edison wanted
"an instrument that
does for the eye
what the phonograph
does for the ear."
The Black Maria, Edison’s film studio, part of an industrial research laboratory Edison
built in West Orange, New Jersey
Edison’s “inventors” in West Orange, c. 1890
Within twelve years of its invention, film grammar is being determined in The Great Train
Robbery the cut, the close-up, parallel action - along with the social and economic
structures that would integrate cinema into the pattern of people’s daily lives and make it
pay for itself.
The Great Train Robbery (1903), directed and photographed by Edwin
Porter, 10 minutes long, with 14-scenes, filmed in New Jersey at Edison’s
studios and along the Lackawanna railroad. Actor: Justus Barnes