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Stillness
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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 century, 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.