Muybridge was an early photographer whose pioneering work in using multiple still pictures to capture motion too fast for the human eye to see led directly to cinema. He also photographed remote places like Yosemite and Alaska immediately after the US purchased it.
He was neither particularly ethical (murder) nor honest (his name mutated multiple times over his life, evolving from Edward Muggeridge to Eadweard Muybridge).
As actor Gary Oldman, who narrates some of this doc, puts it, Muybridge was also the first director, because he would pose and dress people to get the visual effect that he wanted, and to imply small stories. What is that but directing?
Recommended.
Plot summary
Exposing Muybridge tells the story of trailblazing 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, who changed the world with his camera. Muybridge set the course for the development of cinema when he became the first photographer to capture something moving faster than the human eye can see--Leland Stanford's galloping horses. He also produced a sprawling and spectacular landscape catalog, ranging from Alaska to Central America, Utah to California. Artful, resilient, selfish, naive, eccentric, deceitful--Muybridge is a complicated, imperfect man and his story drips with ambition and success, loss and betrayal, near death experiences and even murder. "The machine cannot lie," Stanford declared of Muybridge's pioneering motion images. But what about the photographer? More than a century after his death, Muybridge's photographs have never ceased to seduce cutting-edge artists, scientists, innovators, and general viewers alike.
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