Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film, 1838-1952

3. Motion Pictures Begin

3 Motion Pictures Begin Eadweard Muybridge—Capturing Time When Coleman Sellers arranged the successive still stereo photographs of his sons at play in the nursery, he attempted to place them in the proper order to convey motion. "A little experimenting showed that a better illusion could be secured if three photos were made of the hammer at the beginning of the stroke and two at the middle, with one illustrating the hammer achieving its purpose," writes Homer Croy; "arranged in this order they better conveyed the increasing swiftness of the stroke." Significantly, Croy characterizes the Sellers stereo photographs as "the first photo ever made to show motion."1 Eadweard Muybridge, also known as "Helios," formerly Edward Muggeridge of Kingston-on-Thames, England, was faced with a similar challenge in his attempt to photograph successive images of a horse in motion. The story, practically a legend in motion picture history, asserts that Muybridge , backed by Southern Pacific railroad tycoon Leland Stanford, was led to set up a series of instantaneous photographs in 1872 to settle a bet between horsemen as to whether a horse s four legs are ever off the ground at once. Muybridge has been a controversial figure in motion picture histories. He certainly didn't fare too well in Terry Ramsaye's A Million and One Nights, a 1926 two-volume history of the early motion picture. "Muybridge , in a word, had nothing to do with the motion picture at all," wrote Ramsaye, "and, in truth, but a very small part, if any, in the creative work of the hallowed race horse incident."2 "Many strenuous attempts have been made by American writers to decry Muybridge's work," wrote Leslie Wood; 36 Stereoscopic Cinema and the Origins of 3-D Film "the true importance of the pictures of the galloping horse lies in the fact that they were photographs of real and continuous movement and not posed pictures to counterfeit action."3 Ramsaye's account was very much influenced by Thomas Edison, who possibly was looking for a way to disavow the fact that Muybridge had visited him at his laboratories in Orange, New Jersey, on February 27, 1888. On that date, Muybridge had given Edison a demonstration of his animal locomotion studies using his projecting Zoopraxiscope. "Edison's meeting with Muybridge was important enough to the inventor," writes Rebecca Solnit, "that he afterward denied what happened and tried to shuffle the sequence of events."4 Solnit, most recently, and Gordon Hendricks ,5 a strong critic of Thomas Edison, have published books that have defended Muybridge s work and championed its importance to the evolution of the motion picture. After arriving in San Francisco in 1855 and spending over a decade as a bookseller, Muybridge took up stereo photography in 1867. Using the nom de camera "Helios," Muybridge advertised that he was "prepared to photograph private residences, animals, or views in the city or any part of the coast."6 He shot both 6 by 6 large-format and stereo photographs in sequence. One of his first projects, following in the tracks of stereo photographer Carleton Watkins, was a series of 160 stereoviews of Yosemite National Park. The stereoviews of Helios were sold on Montgomery Street in San Francisco , where there was a growing market for stereo photographs. "The majority of the landscapes taken by Muybridge and many of his peers would be in this hyperdimensional medium," writes Solnit: "The effect was less like the depth of field and dimensionality of ordinary binocular vision than it was like the pop-out valentines and paper theaters popular in the era. . . . Stereocards fed a passionate desire to see the world represented as compelling as possible, a desire that would find its greatest satisfaction in movies."7 By 1869, Muybridge was experimenting with a spring-operated shutter that allowed for fast exposures of clouds, of which he made a series of fifteen studies in stereo. Solnit points out that Muybridge was interested in capturing ephemeral phenomena, in nature as well as in the city. "It is easy to see precursors of the motion studies in this early work," she writes; "he was already preoccupied with how photography could capture time—not a single moment of time already past, as a single photograph does, but the transformations wrought by time's passage."8 Motion Pictures Begin 37 Stereoview card by Eadweard Muybridge (ca. 1860). Using a series of horizontally spaced...