Eadward Muybridge, Zoopraxographer

Thom Anderson's film chronicles Muybridge's attempt to access Benjamin's optical unconscious, to make evident those movements that pass too quickly for us to perceive. The film also shows the espistimolgical drive which Muybridge followed in his invention. Muybridge photographed not only to reveal the movements that the mechanical camera/eye could see better than the human eye, but also to create an archive of the body (human and animal) and movement. Anderson is driven by a similar desire to archive; he archives Muybridge's archive, reflecting on the fact that that his (Anderson's) audience, through the "magic" of cinema to see Muybridge's images "better than he" himself could at the time of his invention. Perhaps this magic of cinema can be thought of as a manifestation of a drive to narrativize and historicize a medium. We would like to ask how this progressive model, which implies that seeing the frames (instead of elongated copies put through a visual compressor) is better than the zoopraxiscope, oversimplifies the differences between the mediums.

Anderson also highlights the "philosophical obstacle" that Muybridge was able to overcome through his photography and its transition to cinema. Let's recall the the final sequences in Anderson's film, which features two women approaching and embracing each other. As the scene begins, the gaps between frames are obvious; they appear as Muybridge's did, as Muybridge's sequences consisted (on average) of 24 images, which is the number of frames that modern cinema shows in a single second. The voiceover explains that with modern cinema, the infinite flux of time could in fact be reconstructed by a finite number of photos since the human eye is able to bridge the gap between the images ("the moments of darkness that alternate coequally with the light"). What we would like to ask, however, is how these gaps--the limitations of the method that reveal limitations of the project--(which can be overcome by human perception but always still exist) point to the futility of creating the complete archive of the human, of history, etc. What gaps exist in the epistemological project and how are they overcome by human perception? What is at stake in these gaps?

AB + SS