Pre-Cinema

PHOTOGRAPHING MOTION

The next step in the development toward moving photographic images required applying the principle of the persistence of vision to the display of a series of photographs depicting the phases of a single motion. This possibility was successfully pursued by the English-born American photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830–1904), who became the first photographer to take pictures of subjects in motion. Muybridge's photographs of galloping horses depicted phases of movement normally imperceptible to the human eye and therefore deviated significantly from traditional representations of a horse's gait used by painters for centuries. To emphasize this contrast, Muybridge presented his images alongside artists' depictions of equine motion. Whereas Muybridge's first experiments in series photography aimed to decompose motion to allow otherwise imperceptible phases of movement to become visible to the eye, he next turned to the reconstitution of recorded movement through a mechanism called the zoopraxiscope, which allowed him to project moving images. Zoopraxography, the study of animal movement, should not be confused with motion pictures: the actual images projected were illustrations, not photographs, and the technology Muybridge used simply synthesized older technologies such as the magic lantern and the phenakistoscope.

Between 1884 and 1885 he resumed his experiments in animal locomotion, expanding the range of animals he photographed and refining his methods for producing images. He switched from wet collodion plates to dry plates and re-arranged his cameras into a semicircle around his subject so that photographs of a single motion shot from multiple angles could be taken simultaneously. He also began to photograph athletes as well as mostly unclothed men, women, and children engaged in everyday activities. Muybridge photographed these subjects against a black wall striated by a grid, giving the images themselves a more scientific appearance (though the actions themselves were never measured or quantified).

Muybridge's studies in animal and human locomotion caught the attention of the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904), who was also experimenting with photography to make visible aspects of motion otherwise invisible to the unaided human eye. Even more so than Muybridge, Marey was primarily concerned with the photographic decomposition of motion for the purposes of scientific analysis. Marey photographed phases of human and animal locomotion using a method called chronophotography ("photography of time"). Marey devised an ingenious instrument called the chronophotographic gun, which captured twelve instantaneous photographs per second on a rotating glass plate. However, Marey was displeased with the use of the revolving glass plate because it limited to a set quantity the number of discrete images that could make up a series (a problem when photographing rapid movement, such as a bird in flight). This technical glitch was resolved in 1888 with the invention of paper roll film by the American inventor and industrialist George Eastman (1854–1932); this film, to be used in Eastman's new Kodak box camera, ultimately enabled the chronophotographic gun to take twenty pictures per second. (In 1889 Eastman made transparent celluloid roll film commercially available—the type of film stock ultimately to be used in the making of motion pictures.) However, in order to take clear individual photographs on flexible roll film, Marey had to devise an intermittent mechanism that would allow the filmstrip to pause briefly before the lens to allow each frame to be exposed to light. Some of Marey's human subjects were outfitted in black clothing and photographed against a black background. The subject's arms and legs were embossed with bright white lines that connected to bright white dots at the joints. The results were fairly abstract images of white lines and curves against a dark background. Because he was primarily interested in the dissection of motion, Marey was only minimally interested in reconstituting it through the projection of his images. Ultimately, he was unsuccessful in his attempts to construct a projector.

Around the time Muybridge began his motion studies in the United States, the Frenchman Émile Reynaud (1844–1918), a teacher of mathematics and science, turned his attention to improving optical toys based on the principle of the persistence of vision. In 1877 he built the projecting praxinoscope. In principle, this device was similar to the Zoetrope: its main mechanism was a spinning drum lined with a series of images. However, the praxinoscope made its images visible to viewers through their reflection off of multiple mirrors. Because the images were not seen through slots, the "flicker" effect of other slot-based devices was eliminated. In 1892

Reynaud premiered his exhibition of moving drawings, Théâtre Optique, at the Musée Grévin in Paris. He devised a mirror and lantern mechanism to display rear-projected images onto a screen painted with scenery. Reynaud's images were hand-painted onto long bands of individual frames. These were difficult to produce, and by 1895 he began to use cameras to produce his images. However, Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers had invented far more practical and simpler devices for projecting moving photographic images, making the praxinoscope obsolete by the end of the century.