Bought a gun, found the man

Letters

Vol. 25 No. 15 · 7 August 2003

From Brian Winston

Anne Hollander (LRB, 24 July) is remarkably generous to Rebecca Solnit's Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge, despite Solnit's unfounded suggestion that Muybridge should be considered as the 'father' of motion pictures.

Muybridge was not the first to produce sequences of projected images. In 1864 Louis Ducos du Hauron, who is also credited with the first effective colour photographic system, patented a camera which used up to 580 lenses to capture motion. In 1870, two years before Muybridge took his famous stop-motion shots of a trotting horse, 1600 people in Philadelphia bought tickets for a lantern show on a February Saturday. They saw the Phasmatrope projecting moving photographic images of an acrobat and of a couple waltzing to the accompaniment of a live orchestra.

On another February Saturday, this time in 1888, Muybridge projected stop-motion photographs and brief moving sequences of drawings (not photographs) in his Zoopraxiscope to an audience in Orange, New Jersey, where Thomas Edison lived. On the Monday he visited 'the Wizard' and suggested that Edison's new phonograph could be combined with the Zoopraxiscope. Edison didn't follow this up, but he did add the capture of photographic motion to the subjects to be researched by his lab. His interest had probably already been roused by a recent meeting with Muybridge's French opposite number, Etienne de Marey; and he must have known about Eastman's celluloid film, which had been widely advertised from 1885.

There are errors, too, in the story of subsequent events as recounted by Solnit. For example, the famous Lumière screening in 1895 was not the first paid-for public show that year but the fourth. Unimportant in themselves, such mistakes mask her more important error of crediting the cinema to 'eureka' advances by solitary great men. Like all such 'inventions' it owes far more to social forces than that. Attempting to position Muybridge as a significant player in the history of cinema goes against the grain of his most famous work in any case. Like Marey, but unlike du Hauron and those who followed him, Muybridge was essentially aiming to stop motion, not to re-create it.

Brian Winston
University of Lincoln

Vol. 25 No. 19 · 9 October 2003

From Rebecca Solnit

Brian Winston takes me to task for the 'unfounded suggestion' in my book Motion Studies 'that Muybridge should be considered the "father" of motion pictures' (Letters, 7 August). I never used that phrase. Eadweard Muybridge made a foundational contribution to the invention of cinema: he did not invent it and I did not say he did. Muybridge's two great breakthroughs were high-speed photographs of people and animals in motion and the reassembly of these sequences as projected animations. But as I point out on p. 213, the first of these was made irrelevant by the arrival of the faster medium of dry-plate photography. Elsewhere I observe that no one could be described as having invented cinema because it was a synthesis of various existing technologies and new media, notably celluloid film, which the Lumières and Edison took up but Muybridge never touched. Winston implies that I've left out key parts of the history of innovation that led to cinema, citing Henry Heyl's 1870 projection of six still photographs of people posed as if waltzing. I did in fact mention this.

What interested me about Muybridge is that, with his involvement with the railroad baron Leland Stanford, the Indian wars of the American West, his other photographic subjects, as well as those photographic technologies that would lead to cinema, he engaged with the much larger story of what Wolfgang Schivelbusch calls 'the industrialisation of time and space'. My book not only doesn't claim that Muybridge was, in that tired masculine metaphor, the father of cinema, it doesn't even consider that to be what makes Muybridge worth consideration.

Rebecca Solnit
San Francisco