The Kino "Movies Begin" DVD prefaces this 2-minutes series of animations of Eadweard Muybridge's photography with "Series Photography 1877-1885", but actually the instantaneous sequential photography shown here is all from Muybridge's work for the University of Pennsylvania between 1883 and 1886. Muybridge's work in series photography began in 1878 and continued for a couple years thereafter at multi-millionaire railroad magnate Leland Stanford's Palo Alto Stock Farm in California where he used a battery of cameras to capture animal locomotion, especially the gait of horses (see "Sallie Gardner at a Gallop" (1880)). He also toured the U.S. and Europe giving lectures with his Zoöpraxiscope, a combination of the magic lantern and the phenakistoscope, of hand-painted facsimiles of his photographs. Before that, Muybridge was an artistic location still photographer and was infamously found not guilty in a murder trial despite admitting to the premeditated fatal shooting of his wife's lover and possibly her son's father.
The more than 100,000 photographs he took at the University of Pennsylvania represents his most voluminous portfolio. Although he covered many different subjects in animal locomotion, including for medical studies, the ones with nude models, especially women, are probably the most famous and are the subject of this brief homage. Eleven series of nude women are animated. They're "Child Carrying Flowers to Woman", "Woman Turning and Walking Upstairs", "Woman Walking Downstairs", "Woman Setting Down Jug", "Woman Picking Up Skirt", "Woman Picking Up Child", "Woman Pouring From Jug", "Woman Throwing Baseball", "Woman Jumping From Rock to Rock", "Woman Hopping on One Foot" and "Woman Sitting Down".
There's no evident scientific value to these images, contrary to Muybridge and the University's aspirations and claims, but there's obvious artistic worth. As Marta Braun says in her book "Picturing Time: The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey", "Muybridge, under the guise of offering us scientific truths has, like any artist, made a selection and arranged his selection into his own personal truth." There'd be no other reason for some of the models to be partially draped in such a way. Or for how Muybridge sometimes arranged his series of images in a way that was counterproductive to scientific measurement. They're unlike the chronophotogrpahy of an actual scientist; "Marey's studies of human and animal movements are everything that Muybridge's are not: disinterested, accurate, analytic, and systematic", as Braun states. Contrary to what the previous IMDb reviewer said, Muybridge actually continued to use multiple cameras and angels, which did lend themselves to creating brief artistic narratives. Among the series shown here, "Woman Jumping From Rock to Rock" begins from a head-on point of view and ends with a side view. In "Woman Hopping on One Foot", we see both a frontal and rear view, and "Woman Sitting Down" was also photographed from two different angles.
As others have pointed out, Muybridge's photographs were used by painters, from realists and impressionists to abstract artists. Francis Bacon, Edgar Degas, Marcel Duchamp, Thomas Eakins, Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier and Frederick Remington were among those who have been said to have been largely influenced by them. Muybridge's influence has extended into other arts, and, today, he remains one of the most intriguing figures in the history of the invention of motion pictures.
