Worth: $19.00
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Cast:
Gary Oldman, Marta Braun, Philip Brookman, Richard Jackson Kushakaak, Richard White
Intro:
Brilliantly and beautifully edited, the technical details of Muybridge’s work are clearly explained, and fascinating.
Gary Oldman is something of an expert on Eadweard Muybridge, the subject of this superb documentary. Oldman – one of several talking heads – is reportedly planning to make a Muybridge biopic, and if he plays the lead role, it will be yet another transformation for the actor. Imagine Oldman as an eccentric, with unruly grey-white hair and a beard, looking a little like Charles Darwin…
If Oldman gets to make his Muybridge biopic, he’ll have a lot of incredible material to work with. When asked for a word to describe Muybridge, the photographers, historians and experts in this documentary came up with “duplicitous”, volatile”, “eccentric” and “daring”.
Born in small town England in 1830 as Edward James Muggeridge, he moved to America in his youth and became involved in landscape photography. He had an artist’s eye, a technician’s skill, and a big ego. He was a pioneer of photography and early cinema, famed for his motion study images. Muybridge’s work capturing a horse’s movement in a series of stills, taken a split second apart, is iconic. He later had sequential drawings of his photos painted onto a disc, much like a CD, that created the illusion of motion when played.
Before the famed equine images, were mystical black and white Yosemite landscapes. He’d often have a figure in the frame, not only to show scale but to tell a story. Sometimes that figure was himself, perched high on a rock, a potential drop to his death just under his feet.
This true tale takes an unexpected detour into crime territory after Muybridge, now in his early 40s, marries the much younger Flora. Later, the motion studies are explored, with fascinating details like the description of cameras set up in a circle, taking simultaneous images.
But Muybridge’s second major foray in motion studies – using mostly people this time and made largely under the direction of a group of academics – is controversial and weaves themes of race, class and gender into the film. While Muybridge’s early portraits of Indigenous Americans showed an empathy rare for his times, there’s more than a whiff of white supremacy about the second motion studies project. But not all the images, many of them of naked people, were prescribed by the academics… Some were Muybridge’s, and the doco takes another detour, this time into soft porn. “It’s the content of what will become the industry of motion pictures,” says art and photography historian Marta Braun, “stories and sex.”
Writer/director Marc Shaffer is a storyteller himself and has crafted something exquisite. Brilliantly and beautifully edited, the technical details of Muybridge’s work are clearly explained, and fascinating.
Muybridge used a chemical in his process that, to this day, no one can identify. Gary Oldman says there was “alchemy” at play – and it’s also at play in Exposing Muybridge.