Jim Regan -- Site Reviews
Father of the Motion Picture and The Complete History Of The Discovery Of Cinematography
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The year 2000 is over, and the Oscar race has officially begun. By the time you read this, the nominating ballots should be winging their way to the 'Members of the Academy,' and in about three months time, the world will be watching a three hour -- if we're lucky -- broadcast for roughly 90 seconds of information. So this week, in an effort to acknowledge all those who made it possible for the eventual winners to thank all those who made it possible, we look at two sites devoted to the history of the movies -- before there were movies.
First up is Eadweard Muybridge: Father of the Motion Picture. Created by Michael Linder, (whose work has run the gamut from television's America's Most Wanted and Future Quest, to Berserkistan - one of the key web sites covering the Bosnian War in 1996-97) the Muybridge site is dedicated to a man whose chief claim to fame involved 'flying horses.' (Even if the name rings no bells, you'll immediately recognize examples of the photographer's early moving images.)
This visually attractive -- though too brief -- documentary traces Muybridge from his first rise to prominence (settling a debate about whether a trotting horse ever lifts all four hooves off the ground at the same time) through later studies in human movement, to his less pertinent -- though no less public -- trial for the murder of his wife's lover. (The 'trotting debate' images at the site show a later study of a galloping horse, but purists can find a genuine trotting animation here.)
Though Linder's exhibition is short, the presentation wraps up with recommended links and readings -- and there's a good chance that visitors will avail themselves of those outside links, if only to learn more about a man with so many curious parallels to the present day. Before his motion studies, Muybridge specialized in skyline panoramic photographs -- a 19th Century version of the VR panoramas that inhabit so many Web sites today. (A Muybridge panorama of San Francisco, translated into QuickTimeVR is available on the home page).
His projects were not true 'motion pictures', but were single images taken with a series of adjacent cameras and joined for later animation - a similar method is used, to very different effect, for the recent assortment of 'panning freeze frames' appearing in films like the Matrix. Finally, his tabloid-style scandal even included a quintessential element of the 20th Century murder trial, namely the incredible excuse delivered with a straight face -- played on this occasion by the "stagecoach defense."
Although true motion pictures would have to wait for the Lumiere Brothers, our second site begins its research even further back in time than Muybridge. How does 900 B.C. sound?
The Complete History Of The Discovery Of Cinematography is the work of Paul Burns, a film historian and researcher who takes the position that the history of the motion picture should also include the history of all its elements, even before they coalesced into a distinct medium. (Film may be a fairly recent invention, but the science of optics -- necessary to fix an image on that film -- can be traced to China in the 5th Century B.C.)
This is a much more extensive offering than the Muybridge site (not surprising, considering a roughly 3000 year time span) and to keep things manageable, the History is divided into 15 chapters. Encyclopedia-style entries trace the ancestry of movies from shadow plays and Da Vinci's Lantern, through Camera Obscura Rooms and Zoetropes, to the Lumiere Brothers and the less than prophetic words of Auguste Lumiere; "Our invention can be exploited for a certain time as a scientific curiosity, but apart from that, it has no commercial future whatsoever."
Much of the content consists of basic text entries -- such as Aristotle's musings on pinhole projections -- but there is also a substantial collection of images, animations and links to such sites as the home of American Biograph (D. W. Griffith, Mack Sennett, Mary Pickford) for those wanting to dig a little deeper. (One such link, to Amina's three second clip of the world's earliest existing movie film, also gives surfers the chance to sample demonstrations of such optical toys as thaumatropes, phenakistiscopes, zoetropes, zoöpraxiscopes, and magic lanterns.)
Neither of these sites can compare to the interactive extravaganzas that constitute the online homes of most of today's major theatrical releases, but the latter would never have been possible without the work represented by the former. (And to think - all this and more was necessary for the creation of Battlefield Earth.)
Eadweard Muybridge: Father of the Motion Picture can be found at http://www.linder.com/muybridge/index.html, with The Complete History Of The Discovery Of Cinematography at http://www.precinemahistory.net/