Photography and Cinema

22

Photography preceded cinema, but does this imply that photography is

the parent of cinema? Certainly many of the written histories tend to

think so. The two share a photographic base, but beyond this the link is

usually made through ‘chronophotographers’ of the late nineteenth cen-

tury, primarily Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey (although

there were several others). Muybridge used banks of cameras to record

sequential instants of human and animal locomotion. Marey produced

multiple exposures of movement on single photographic plates. Both

lived long enough to see the Lumière’s cinématographe, but as ‘parents’

they were indifferent. It was cinema that claimed the lineage. To cinema,

Muybridge’s grids of consecutive photographs looked pre-animated, as if

awaiting motion to come. Marey’s images resembled translucent film

frames layered on top of each other. Both pursued instantaneous arrest,

the decomposition of movement, not its recomposition. Stopping time

and examining its frozen forms was their goal. It was a noble goal, pursued

diligently and achieved comprehensively. Marey even told the Lumières

that their Cinématographe was of no interest because it merely reproduced

what the eye could see, while he sought the invisible. Muybridge did come

up with a means of animating his images (the Zoopraxiscope of 1879 ),

but he saw it as a novelty, far removed from the serious project of stilling

things. Nevertheless, it is almost impossible not to see a connection

between these instantaneous consecutive images and cinema. The problem

is that chronophotography and cinematography give rise to incompatible

yet intertwined ideas about the truth of images and the understanding of

time and motion. In addition, they are aesthetically distinct forms.

one

Stillness