“Pagan Constellations in the Sky”: (Re)Animating Muybridge in the Film History Classroom

makes me imagine what is out of framenot the studio in Philadelphia— instead  it’s a darklypainted farmhouse predicting the Black  Mariaand ol’ Muybridge grabs a chair and sits,pushing his thighs downas if his limbs forgot how to bend on their  ownwhile everything creaks:knees elbows shoulders wriststhe chair under his weight,even his sigh comes out with a raspas he cranks himself up.

— mollie murtagh, “descent”

Writing about Eadweard Muybridge’s late- nineteenth-century experiments with chrono-photography, Rebecca Solnit remarks, “If Muy-bridge was at the root, the zero point, the dawn of moving pictures, then he is everywhere as the ghost at the end of those trails of photographs rushing by, beamed across the world as television, dreamed across the world as the shared content of contemporary life, present not only as specific images but as several media.”¹ Solnit is not being hyperbolic; Muybridge is indeed everywhere.² His photographic studies of bodies in motion have intersected with everything from popular culture and debates about the origins of the cinema to questions in histories of art and science; critical studies of race, gender, and disability; the avant- garde and digital media art; and philosophies of time and movement. Perhaps the pervasiveness stems from the scope of his work; his photographic output was prolific and monumental. Or perhaps it is the stubborn resistance of Muybridge’s motion studies to being easily categorized— are they art or science? do they belong to the history of film, photography, or painting?— that allows them to resonate with so many aspects of modern visual culture and the popular imagination.

For someone so clearly obsessed with time, it is quite fitting that Muybridge is now caught up endlessly in it. Specifically, in relation to the cinema, his instantaneous photographs of moving bodies— stilled, serialized, and transformed into what Hollis Frampton called “pagan constellations in the sky”— move through film history with the same repetitive circularity that the photographed bodies exhibit as they move across their recognizable grids.³ Put simply, Muybridge is an uncanny figure. As Tom Gunning observes, “the image of Eadweard Muybridge haunts us, beckoning to us from the space between things, the interstices and gaps that appear, unexpectedly, within actions and between instants.”⁴ For many, simply mentioning Muybridge or his galloping horses calls to mind an array of commonplaces, associations, and myths that together form a picture (however focused or fuzzy) of early film history.

The haunting ubiquity of Muybridge’s work is central to something that I consistently encounter in teaching early film history to undergraduate students. Along with Étienne- Jules Marey, Muybridge usually frames students’ introduction to the proto- cinema and early cinema periods. He is also fairly well established in the popular knowledge that students bring to my classes. If they do not know him by name, they are quick to recognize his photographs of horses in motion and have a general sense that his cameras played important roles in shaping the technological landscape in which the cinema emerged. Students also sometimes hold Muybridge up as one of the “fathers” and “inventors” of motion pictures and readily identify his images as “primitive” emblems of the cinema’s “infancy.” These perceptions reflect a teleological narrative about the emergence of the cinema that students no doubt inherit from popular culture. Especially at the introductory level, the narrative can conjure an image of that period as a mausoleum filled with the “dead” or inanimate remains of old media that subsequent innovations rendered obsolete, both as cultural artifacts and as objects of study. The challenge, as I see it, is in helping students overcome this perception so that they can “imaginatively recreate the [cinema’s] past as a present lived moment,” to borrow Mary Ann Doane’s words.⁵

Figure 1.

Plate 490. Movements, Male, A, sitting down; B, sitting down; C, sprinkling water; D, stooping for cup and drinking. From Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An Electro- photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements...