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[mysterious folk music]
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[birds chirping]
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[eerie music]
[overlapping chatter]
[interviewer] When you think of Muybridge, is there a--
What single word comes to mind for you,
when you think of Edward Muybridge?
Tricky. Um...
and certainly daring.
I almost said "crazy."
Eccentric.
Duplicitous.
He's temperamental, volatile.
I don't have to like him.
I like his work, I like what he did.
Ego.
He wanted to be seen as...
I don't know if it was the God or the Devil.
Probably both.
My one word for Muybridge is "survivor."
Mischievous,
and out of that mischievousness,
we have this wonderful work.
He's sharp.
Uh, talented.
Just a wonderful cocktail.
[portentous music]
[Byron] Edward Muybridge is best known
for his breakthrough motion study photographs.
Early in his career,
Muybridge was largely a landscape photographer,
and he was traveling throughout the West--
California, Utah, Alaska--
making photographs that he was hoping to sell
to a buying public.
He's photographing destinations, like Yosemite,
that have a sense of drama, a mystique,
perhaps a degree of exoticism.
His vision was singular.
[mysterious folk music]
♪
[Mark] When you stand
in the same place a photographer stood,
and you look at what they saw,
you see with your body,
not just your eyes.
You feel the place.
You see not only what's in the picture,
but what's on the side of the picture, what's behind it.
And then we can say, "Well, look what Muybridge did."
[Byron] Re-photography of Muybridge...
gives us some insight into how he saw the world
and how he recreated the world
within the borders of his photographs.
The place is never like the photograph.
It never matches.
I mean, sure, you can make details,
but the experience is not the same thing as the photograph.
I mean, landscape photography is often thought
of as pictures of rocks and trees,
and they may be the subject of the pictures
in a place like Yosemite,
but there is no such thing as a neutral photograph.
You're making a picture.
It's made from the position of the-- the maker,
and their opinion,
their thinking about how to make the picture,
pushes their own vision
and decides what to see, and how to see it.
♪
Pictures, in the end, are stories, you know?
So, who was Muybridge?
He was a character in his own story.
[Byron] He's a mysterious figure.
He was always engaged in some sort of decision
about what to reveal and what to hide.
-[Mark] Ooh, yeah. -[Byron] Yeah, this is it.
[Mark] This is it.
-That's great. -There's a rock right there.
-There, there. -[Mark] Here we go.
Oh, no, no. Too far.
That covers it up. I got to go this way.
There, there. There we go. See that?
Does that look about right?
[Byron] Let me look at the, uh, one you had.
[clicking]
[playful music]
[Mark] One of the things
that makes Lake Tenaya a special place for us
is that there were several different photographers
who made pictures here.
These photographers didn't know
where the other one made their picture necessarily,
but they chose vantage points
that were within 20 feet of one another.
[Byron] The Weston and Adams pictures
really depict a very similar scene,
looking out across Tenaya Lake.
And in fact, their two photographs
overlap a little bit
with the way that they frame the scene.
They're these highly graphic,
incredibly simplified representations of a place.
Big granite faces, and deep, dark shadows.
Very simplified and bold,
and kind of modern-looking pictures.
Muybridge photographs are not that.
[Mark] I think Muybridge was telling
a more complicated story.
He's looking at stuff that--
that's dead.
There's a lot of debris.
[Byron] Foreground spaces are often confusing.
He uses details like rocks and trees
in ways that feel chaotic and jumbled.
It's often hard to tell where you are standing, as a viewer.
He uses space and planes
in ways that are highly disorienting.
[eerie music]
Lovely.
Uh, my wife and I are fortunate to have found this.
It's got a little fading,
I think maybe a little watermark, and some foxing,
but-- but o-- overall, it's in pretty good condition.
And this is-- is-- it was taken in Yosemite.
And of course, there is Mr. Muybridge.
Now, what you see here...
is...
there's a determination
and a real sort of...
f-- fixity of purpose in the eyes.
Even though the body language is relaxed,
the eyes are intense and focused.
I mean, for an actor,
if I were to play Muybridge, or an actor were to play him,
um...
I mean, that's-- that's gold dust.
♪
[Marta] Muybridge was born in 1830,
in a small town called Kingston-upon-Thames.
He's given the name Edward James Muggeridge.
Time was measured by the rising and setting of the sun.
There was no electrical illumination.
Transportation is by horse and carriage,
or by barge and boat.
And he's still in a-- a society
in which ancient traditions are followed,
traditions of-- of family, of class.
[Philip] Muybridge's family ran the barges
between London and Kingston that would bring coal and corn
between the outlying areas and the city.
Muybridge, he certainly was
an incredibly creative individual.
Right from the start,
even as a young person,
he sought out a life for himself
that was separate from the generations
of his family that he was born into.
[Marta] He leaves England when he's 20 years old,
for a completely unknown country.
[Philip] In 1855,
Edward Muybridge arrives in San Francisco.
He's a-- a bookseller, a publisher,
an inventor,
a banker, an investor...
a photographer.
Muybridge's photography takes place
in a period of just 20 years of his life.
He goes from learning photography
to becoming one of the-- the best known
and most important photographers in the world.
[Marta] But as a photographer, he calls himself "Helios."
Helios was the name
of the Greek God of the sun.
So, he certainly took on this idea of the photographer
as a mythic being.
[Marta] He'll go anywhere, he'll photograph anything,
and it'll be perfect.
Helios and his flying studio.
[Philip] One of the most popular forms of photography
in the 1860s were stereo views,
a pair of photographs
taken through a special camera with two lenses,
just slightly different.
And then when they're viewed through a special viewer,
your brain puts them together as a three-dimensional image.
[delicate, haunting music]
These are the pictures that different photographers
would sell in their galleries
to the middle class people, you know,
who could afford to buy them
for a dollar a view.
And, you know, Muybridge made an extensive catalog
of stereo views at the time.
[playful music]
[Gary] Of course, in those days
you would have to hire an expedition team.
You might want a guide who knows the area.
You've got these massive plates that-- that weigh a ton,
and many of them, and they're in crates,
and you've got the tripod,
which is very, sort of, cumbersome.
And you've got these big cameras.
And really dangerous chemicals.
It was all glass, so everything was in glass bottles.
You got to keep these things really-- spotlessly clean.
And you've then got to traverse this terrain
with all of this equipment to get to where you're going.
The story goes
that he would do things and go to places
where the guides and the team would not go.
He would go out on a ledge,
and really not care for his own safety,
to get the picture.
The picture was all. The picture was everything.
[footsteps shuffling]
[eerie tone]
Muybridge is right about here, where my hands are,
and he made a stereo view
from right about this position, two lenses.
But it's interesting, because he could have had his assistant
sit in the view,
but he had the guy he was working with
take a picture of him, so he's actually choosing
to put himself in the picture for some reason.
Who knows? Maybe his assistant refused to go out on the point.
Maybe! I don't blame him.
-I'm not going out there. -Would you go out there?
-[overlapping chatter] -I'm not gonna go out there.
-Yeah. -Yeah.
♪
[Byron] Glass plate film was incredibly slow,
so an ordinary exposure could easily take a minute,
or up to two minutes, depending upon
what the lighting conditions were.
So, if something like a river were to be photographed,
it might end up as this sort of blur in the scene.
[Gary] A lot of those waterfalls are like white foam.
They become creamy and...
they're like lace,
or chiffon, or something.
There's some...
something very soft and feminine
about them.
[birds chirping]
Photographers might put a figure
in a landscape for scale.
Muybridge shows scale,
but then he just gives it an artistic twist.
At times, it's whimsy.
♪
He'll put someone
way down in a third of the frame
with their back to you.
They always seemed to be looking out.
♪
When Muybridge arrives in San Francisco,
he arrives in this world that's being modernized,
with the railroad,
with the steam engine,
with the telegraph.
[Richard] Everything is changing, where a way of life,
which had gone on for quite literally millennia,
is now over,
and Muybridge is a part of it.
Photography is used to sell bonds for the railroads,
and it's used to bring people west as tourists,
and to bring them west as settlers.
Certainly, Muybridge is selling the west.
[dreamy, haunting music]
[Philip] He makes images that are a great representation
of the destiny of the nation.
You know, reach the Pacific Shore
with the beacons of the lighthouses
marking that territory.
♪
Muybridge is working
for corporate and government interests.
He's certainly making pictures that are propaganda pictures.
But he's also playing with it,
and he's using those opportunities
to make pictures for himself.
[mischievous flute music]
Independence was paramount for him.
It's just who he was.
Muybridge is commissioned to help
the United States Army,
the War Department,
to photograph a war going on
between the Modoc Indians
in Northern California,
and the US military.
Basically, Muybridge is hired to help the army
to understand the territory
in which the fighting is going on.
And at the same time, there's interest in the media.
Muybridge's photographs are used in Harper's Weekly,
which was a very important weekly magazine.
One of the images that Muybridge makes is called
Modoc Brave on the Warpath.
I think that Muybridge's photographs of Native people
are his most documentary images,
showing, kind of, everyday side of life,
uh, among people who are native to the American West.
He's not trying to make photographs that
disparage the people he's photographing.
I think he's trying to survey and document
and convey a sense of respect
to communities outside of his own,
you know, in ways that other photographers
weren't really doing at the time.
[snow shuffling]
[Mark] In 1868, Muybridge was invited
to accompany a military expedition to Alaska,
and it's just after America has purchased
the territory from Russia.
Muybridge's job was really
to photograph military forts and harbors.
[haunting percussive music]
But he also photographed Native people.
[drums pounding]
Muybridge made, really, the very first photographs
of Native people in southeast Alaska.
♪
The Tlingit people, if you look at the word "Tlingit..."
It's-- it's a blowing sound-- "Thlingit. Thlingit."
It-- they're the Tidelands people.
Russia claims Alaska, through a discovery, right?
They came here and discovered it, even though we were here.
We had our ownership rules,
we had our established villages.
And then in 1867, they sold it to the United States.
And there's a thought that, you know,
because they were--
we were purchased by the United States,
that we were going to be cultured, right?
Well, we already had a culture.
We expected some reciprocity for...
them moving on our land.
Instead, we were moved off the land.
We were excluded from boating,
we were excluded from having civil rights.
We lost our soul.
The soul that we are, the soul of our identity.
We lost. We lost a lot.
We've been here since time immemorial.
And now we're down to maybe two million families
that are left in an area
that can trace their history
back to Tongass Island.
[somber music]
There's a Kootéeyaa over here, a totem pole.
The base of one.
It fell down...
falling back into the forest.
Yeah.
[singing in Tlingit]
[singing continues]
Okay, so, here, I want to hand this to you
and have you look at it.
Only pick it up and sort of-- that's right, just like that.
And my grandmother was on this island after this.
She was born in 1876.
And I think one of these ladies
could be my grandmother's mother.
The young ones.
And similar loo-- looks--
features like my grandmother right here.
It gives me a longing.
At this time they were a unit,
they were families.
They had a cultural life.
[soft Tlingit song]
Well, they probably think,
"What-- what's that strange box?"
So, when Muybridge sent the picture to them...
it was a gift to them.
It was a return of what he-- he promised them
from the box.
They probably didn't know it,
but then, probably, when they saw it,
they-- made them real excited.
That you say say,
"Here I am inside this picture, and here's my family."
♪
He gave us [speaking Tlingit], our "precious thing."
This is the precious thing now.
That's what we say, when we say, [speaking Tlingit].
This is something that belonged to me and my soul.
It's a renewal when I look at it
to-- and feel better when I walk out of here
and continue on my life.
And once in a while, when I don't feel so good,
I'll look at this picture.
That's kind of like a revitalization every time.
That's what I feel.
[solemn piano music]
♪
[Marta] In 1871, Muybridge meets
and marries Flora Shallcross Stone.
She's much younger than he is.
She's in her early twenties, and he's in his early forties.
This is a description of Flora
by a Postjournalist who would actually have known her.
"Petite, but voluptuous-looking,
with a sweet, winning face
and large eyes of tender blue,
and with a wealth of dark brown hair.
She was just the woman to make an impression
upon a cynic like Muybridge, who was then,
after a life of toil and privation,
beginning to achieve
the enviable reputation he enjoys now."
He's traveling, he's expanding his career.
He's always on the move, and he leaves her at home.
That spells trouble.
[ominous chord]
In a way, you have the mistress.
The siren's call, the art.
You have to be obsessed with it,
you can't dabble.
That-- that's the thing,
if-- and-- and it's-- a-- and it's very selfish.
♪
[Marta] She gets taken out to the theater a lot.
She loves the theater.
And one of the men who take her to the theater
is a man called Harry Larkins.
I am related to Harry Larkins.
He was my great-great-great-uncle.
Muybridge was born into a family of, um,
coal dealers and corn salesmen who ran barges on the Thames.
Harry's family, uh, owned these great ships,
and were captains of these ships,
and they were running, uh, indigo, opium,
uh, porcelain, and tea around the world.
When the two first met, according to the reports
in the press written by Harry's friends,
Muybridge was deeply enamored of Harry.
Um, maybe slightly glamorized by him,
before it all fell apart.
I think he was somewhat naive
to think that he could marry a pretty young girl
who's 20 years his junior
and disappear for six and seven, eight months
up a mountain, taking pictures.
And she's gonna to be
waiting for him.
[Rebecca] In the 1950s, a man called Brandenburg,
found a photograph album in a secondhand shop.
It was identified early on as belonging to Flora.
Fascinatingly, two of the figures in there
were theorists about women's equality
and women's sexual liberation.
One, Victoria Woodhull,
who was the first woman to run for United States president,
and the other, a man called Orson Squire Fowler.
Fowler argued passionately
that women should be as fulfilled sexually as men.
[interviewer] And was this unusual for that era?
Absolutely, yes.
[both chuckling]
Not just thatera.
[laughing]
[Richard] And Flora gets pregnant.
Muybridge, well, he's off like he usually is, you know,
making pictures, during the whole pregnancy.
[Marta] Flora gives birth to their son.
They begin a family
and Muybridge makes a very unfortunate discovery.
Muybridge sees a picture of, uh, the child,
and on the back is written, "little Harry."
This little inscription that says, um,
"Oh, my lovely little Harry."
Major Harry-- Harry Larkins.
And he thinks...
"I'm going to-- I'm gonna-- I'm--
I'm going to kill him."
[tense music]
He is in a whirlwind
of-- of-- of...
I mean, just rage.
[Rebecca] Muybridge went to see William Roelofson,
who was by this point, selling his photographs for him.
Had a complete, sort of, nervous breakdown.
Roelofson, uh, said
that he desperately tried to stop Muybridge,
but Muybridge with the strength of ten men
burst away from him.
Leapt from the dock onto the boat.
Caught the train to Callisto, hurried through the night,
reached the Yellowjacket mine at about 11 o'clock.
[Gary] Larkins comes out,
looks into the sort of...
velvet black,
and says, you know, "Hello? Who is it?"
[Marta] And Muybridge says,
"I have a message from my wife..."
and shoots him.
[interviewer] One time?
Dead.
[dramatic chord]
[Gary] Muybridge...
is caught red-handed.
This article contains Muybridge's direct account,
in theory, of what happened when he shot Harry,
uh, under the subheading, "The Fatal Meeting."
"The only thing I am sorry for
in connection with the affair
is that he died so quickly.
I would have wished
that he could have lived long enough
at least to acknowledge the wrong he had done me,
that his punishment was deserved,
and that my act was a justifiable defense
of my marital rights."
Extraordinary.
Flora not only doesn't take Muybridge's side,
she actually tries to help
the district attorney prosecute Muybridge.
She also institutes divorce proceedings against Muybridge.
[eerie music]
[Gary] And at the trial, Muybridge's defense team
dredged up something from earlier years
that they hoped might get him off.
He had been in a stagecoach accident
that had almost killed him,
and left him, perhaps, brain damaged.
This is how Muybridge recalled the accident
from the witness stand:
"We got on board the stage,
which was drawn by six wild Mustang horses.
That is the last I recollect of that nine days.
After that, I found myself lying in bed.
There was a small wound on the top of my head.
When I recovered,
each eye formed an individual impression,
so that looking at you, for instance,
I could see another man sitting by your side.
I had no taste, nor smell, and was very deaf."
We don't really have much of an idea
of what he was like before the accident.
It may have triggered something.
It may have changed something in his personality.
[Marta] Afterward,
we hear about, he's eccentric,
he's prone to rage,
he's uninhibited, he wears strange clothes,
he's got a hole in his hat,
he doesn't shave.
He's always putting himself out
on the very edges of rocks,
looking into an abyss.
There's the risk-taking aspect of Muybridge
that one could say is a product of this injury.
In the reliving of it and the telling of the story,
it was a way in which he could,
perhaps, persuade the jury
and the judge
that this...
madness that came upon him
was-- was, in part, connected to the head injury.
They plead temporary insanity.
This is a picture of Muybridge in Yosemite
on Contemplation Rock.
And he is sitting untethered,
with his feet dangling over the edge.
There's a 3,000 foot drop
beneath him.
And this was used in evidence to prove
that Muybridge was indeed insane.
Why the prosecution allowed him to make that case,
I'm not sure, but they brought in the superintendent
of a local in-- insane asylum
who absolutely disagreed with all evidence
to suggest that Muybridge was, uh, insane
at the time of the killing.
The opposing counsel...
argued that it was cold-blooded murder,
plain and simple,
and that he should hang for it.
Muybridge, and everyone at the trial...
knew he-- he was guilty.
Muybridge confessed his guilt. He was proud of what he did.
He has a very, very good attorney
by the name of, uh, Pendergast.
So, Pendergast kind of has to really do a 180,
think on his feet, and he comes back.
Now they're pleading, really, crime of passion.
This is from the closing statement of the defense.
"You, gentlemen of the jury,
you who have wives whom you love,
daughters whom you cherish,
and mothers whom you reverence,
will not say insanity.
I cannot ask you to send this man back to a happy home.
He hasn't any.
The destroyer has been there
and has written all over it
from foundation stone to roof tile.
Desolation, desolation!"
They obviously go back to the jury room
going, "Yeah, you know.
Well, how would you feel, Bill,
if someone came in and slept with your wife?"
[wheezing laughter]
I mean, whatever this conversation was
in the jury room,
it didn't take very long to deliberate.
And they came back and they said not guilty.
[interview] And what's Muybridge's reaction?
Oh, he-- he collapses...
and bursts into uncontrollable tears.
He's, like, just stupefied by it.
I mean, he is-- he is just-- uh,
he-- he becomes like w-- water, you know?
And so much-- [laughing] so much so...
that even Pendergast and the people are telling him,
"Really, you've got to pull yourself together."
He was wailing.
People were leaving the courthouse--
the judge had to actually leave
because he said, "Oh, for heaven's sake."
My-- Ta-- take that man!
He was going-- [whining]
Muybridge... sort of snapped out of it again
after a certain time and, uh, gathered his wits
and walked out of court
and started joking with the pressmen,
and he also said, um, he wished Flora well,
and while he had a penny to his name,
she would never come to want.
[Gary] Muybridge, he slips away
in the middle of the night,
and boards a steamer to Central America
on a new commission,
leaving, uh, his troubles and Flora behind.
Flora, she was overcome by some illness
that's never really been clearly explained,
and, in July, she died
in hospital, age 24 by then.
Alone, no money ever having come through to help her.
[haunting music]
[Marta] The son, Muybridge put into an orphanage.
Abandoned him, left him.
♪
[Richard] In Central America,
he changes his name to Eduardo Santiago Muybridge.
Muybridge took on so many different names.
He's born Edward James Muggeridge,
and then he takes out the "E"-- "Muggridge."
When he goes to the United States, "Muygridge."
[Marta] Then he becomes "Muybridge" with a "B,"
and then finally,
the strange first name, Eadweard,
the name that he takes after Edward, the King of England.
I think Muybridge keeps changing his name
because I think his whole life
is the search for...
his self, for status.
[dramatic folk music]
He says, as a very young child, to his grandmother,
"I am going to make a name for myself.
And, uh, if I don't, you'll never hear from me."
♪
[Richard] A couple of years before the events
that really changed Muybridge's life,
the murder of Larkins and his trip to Central America,
he began working with Leland Stanford
when he was hired to photograph his home.
♪
[Philip] If Stanford is the king on the hill
looking out over all of his wealth and territory, you know,
Muybridge is an artist who's commissioned by the King.
♪
[Richard Leland Stanford's known
for building the Central Pacific Railroad.
He was one of the richest and most powerful men
in 19th century California-- indeed in the United States.
He was a governor, he was a senator.
This man who is enamored with horses.
He really is in love with horses.
He'd rather spend more time
with his horses than with the railroad.
And in fact, he often does.
And Leland Stanford builds
what is probably the greatest stable of trotting horses
in the United States in the late 19th century.
He throws himself into it.
Stanford wants to show
that a horse at full gallop is going to have
all four feet off the ground at the same time.
The issue is when a horse is galloping,
no human eye can see exactly what it's doing.
It's too quick.
He wants Muybridge to take a single picture
of a moment
when the horse has all, uh, hooves off the ground.
Muybridge thinks that the-- the adventure is impossible.
The mission is impossible.
The process of photography is just too slow.
When it's all very quickly,
I think, put together, and they get--
uh, I think, just a smudge.
[wind howling]
When Muybridge comes back from Central America,
they picked up this mission,
this adventure.
[Philip] Muybridge proposes to try to capture
a sequence of images. Not just one picture,
but a sequence of images,
one after another,
that show a horse running through time.
And Stanford agrees to this.
[Marta] Stanford wants to use machines
to understand how the horse runs
in order to make them run faster,
in order to make them compete better,
in order to win.
I think Muybridge had no interest in that at all.
I think Muybridge was interested in
the idea that one could
create the illusion of real life with a camera.
And that's what he set out to do.
He wants to capture this horse moving
over a certain...
space in time.
So, he's thinking,
"Well, the horse is moving, you know,
as it-- as it runs across.
I'm going to need multiple cameras."
Of course, you had all the naysayers
saying that it couldn't be done.
The chemistry used to produce the images
at that time period,
the lenses, the shutters,
all of the technology, um, said no.
[Marta] Muybridge is still working
with a very slow, wet plate.
[Luther] So, this was made by taking a piece of glass
and, uh, pouring on a very special type
of chemistry called collodion.
Collodion are cotton balls dissolved in nitric acid.
They have ether and alcohol as the vaporants
and salts of iodides and bromides,
in this whole mixture concoction.
Super volatile.
You could have caught fire
and blown yourself up.
[Luther] Pour that onto the glass plate
from corner to corner, to corner to corner,
and drain that off
and then put that into a bath of silver nitrate.
The silver nitrate was not light-sensitive,
the collodion is not light-sensitive,
but you put this little bit of chemistry together
and it becomes light-sensitive,
and, uh, it makes molecules of light-sensitive compound
floating in a sticky substance stuck to the glass.
And while that light-sensitive emulsion is still tacky,
carry that plate in a light-proof box
over to his camera,
put it into his camera, expose it.
Back in the day you were counting out seconds,
not fractions of seconds.
You can't remove a lens cap real fast-- that fast--
and have it happen. You couldn't time that.
[Gary] This is how primitive it was.
I expose.
So, you-- you're not going to be
able to capture a horse running.
Probably what's the most important
part of this equation is a shutter.
Something to open and close
to let a fraction of a second of light
into that camera.
That would allow the light to go through.
[Luther] He kept on trying, reinventing his inventions,
figuring out better ways to do this.
So, this wasn't a one-shot deal.
He tried all different ways to do this.
[Marta] Still, his cameras are too slow
to ever capture the horse, so he has to make something
that's completely artificial
in order to make the cameras
capture something.
He built this big, monstrous wall
that was raked at an angle
so the sunlight would bounce off of it
and straight into the cameras.
[suspenseful music]
[Marta] He then makes the ground white
by putting marble dust or lime on it.
[Luther] White, white, white, white.
All the light they could possibly muster.
They were trying to photograph the light behind the object,
and the horse would become the absence of light.
[Marta] Looking at the wall
are, in fact, a series of cameras.
Each a stereo camera
that has two lenses which operate
faster than any lens operated at the time.
In front of them is a guillotine shutter.
And there's the added thing of alchemy.
[transcendent vocal music]
[Marta] There's something in the chemistry
that Muybridge does.
We don't know what it is.
♪
[suspenseful music]
[Gary] Muybridge, with help,
uh, from some of Stanford's engineers,
had, uh, been working on this for months,
and they invited the press to come and watch
so there would be no disputing that the images were real.
♪
[horse snorts]
[horse rider] Yaw!
[music crescendos]
[music cuts out]
[transcendent music]
[Gary] And the image appears.
And it is like...
"Ooh! Oh, my God."
It's-- it's-- it's magical.
[Marta He was able to
take a series of images
in 1/500th, 1/1000th,
1/2000th of a second.
He captures time.
[Marta] He got mostly silhouettes,
but they were exactly what Stanford had hoped.
For the first time,
one could see the gaits of a horse.
It's like splitting the atom.
It's like discovering penicillin
or-- I-- I mean, you know,
it's-- it's...
a monumental achievement.
Muybridge was offering a picture
that nobody had seen before.
Here, we're involved,
I would say, in a real revolution.
The camera becomes
more powerful than the eye.
The camera's purposes, its abilities,
its possibilities, become redefined.
To be something that can penetrate
into, basically, an invisible world.
[Marta] The images were simply a phenomenon.
Everyone is astonished and Muybridge is triumphant.
[soft classical music]
[Thomas] But immediately, there was also skepticism.
There are people who don't believe them.
If you look at paintings in the 19th century
and earlier of-- of galloping horses,
they're very often like a rocking horse.
You know, the legs are stretched out
before and after.
Whereas if you look at a Muybridge,
they're curled up under the belly.
I often say they look like a dead spider.
They're ugly.
Rodin, the great French sculptor of this era,
when he was asked,
"Do you believe these? Are these true?"
He said,
"No, Muybridge's work lies.
Muybridge gives you the truth of the machine
that can stop an image,
but it's not the truth of human experience.
It's not the truth of human vision."
[solemn music]
Leland Stanford travels to Europe on the heels
of the success of Muybridge's,
uh, experiments and the construction
of the album,
The Attitudes of Animals in Motion.
And Stanford brings a copy of the album
to the great French painter,
Jean-Louis Ernest Meissonier.
And Meissonier is astounded
by what he sees.
Meissonier really expresses disbelief that, you know,
the pictures were authentic and true.
Stanford responded to Meissonier,
"The machine cannot lie."
So, can the machine lie?
You know, I think that in some ways, you know,
Muybridge and his photographs
are at the heart of this question.
♪
There's the question of how do you prove
that they're authentic?
That even though they look very bizarre
when you look at them one by one,
if you look at them in rapid succession
so that, you know, you're looking at them in this,
in effect, motion picture device,
you can see continuous motion.
It doesn't look weird.
It looks just like a horse galloping.
[curious music]
So, he devises
what he calls a zoopraxiscope.
Muybridge actually creates disks
that have sequential drawings on them--
drawings made from his photographs--
each phase of the movement,
and a machine
that will put those disks into motion
and project the movement of the animal.
[reel whirring]
He is able to show discs
that he's made from his photographs from
the San Francisco Olympic Club.
So, you have guys doing somersaults,
jumping and running and leaping
and even shaking his hand.
Muybridge, sort of like Alfred Hitchcock,
he always puts himself into the project.
♪
Then he gives public lectures
and-- and people are absolutely lining up to see it.
They love it. They can't get enough of it.
[applause]
He combines the various photographs
that he had made in this creative, narrative,
fantastical way.
[Gary] He has an idea that, "What I stopped,
I can reanimate."
So, when people first saw this,
this was the very beginnings of cinema.
Just the effect of watching something that was still
move... is magical.
It's witchcraft.
[stirring orchestral music]
[Marta] There's, a-- a new aspect
to Muybridge's understanding
of what kind of name he wants to make for himself.
He wants to be a scientist,
and he wants to be associated with that kind of...
higher calling.
I mean, even on the back here,
it says, "Left forefoot,"
and then the horse's head is 85 inches
and then 38 inches,
the vertical lines are 27 inches apart.
I mean, it's incredibly detailed.
But I also like
the aesthetic.
I think they're just beautiful-looking.
[soft classical music]
[Marta] And Muybridge goes to Europe as a famous man.
He's made a name for himself.
And he presents his zoopraxiscope,
uh, to the artists and the scientists of his time,
and the royal family.
There's a record of the Prince of Wales
being astonished and laughing
and enjoying what Muybridge has to show.
♪
Letter from Muybridge to Frank Shay,
Leland Stanford's secretary.
"Many of the most eminent men in arts,
science and letters in Europe were present
at the exhibition.
Happily, I have strong nerves,
or I should have blushed
with the lavishness of their praises.
Yours faithfully, Muybridge."
"Happily, I have strong nerves,"
I'll have to use that one.
[posh accent] "No, you're too kind.
Oh, no, it was--
it was merely competent, come now.
Ha-- ha-- happily,
I have a strong nerve."
[laughing]
[normal accent] You know, and he's soaking up the applause
that he so desperately wanted.
[applause]
Now he's quite famous.
He is being asked to these places
that Stanford had to buy his way into.
And it puts Stanford's nose out of joint.
He doesn't-- he-- he-- he doesn't like this.
"It was my idea,
my funding."
[Richard] Stanford's letter to Stillman, 1883.
"The actual facts are, from beginning to end,
he was an instrument to carry out my ideas.
I think the fame that we have given him
has turned his head."
[mysterious music]
When Muybridge is about to get
his greatest honor,
Stanford publishes a book.
But the author of the book is not Muybridge.
The title is The Horse in Motion
with a Study of Animal Mechanics.
And it's by J.D.B. Stillman.
"Executed and published
under the auspices of Leland Stanford."
There is no credit here given to Muybridge at all.
He is not mentioned on the title page.
He is mentioned only briefly in the preface
and then again as a technician.
So, all of a sudden, Muybridge's triumph is dashed.
Muybridge's whole work is called into question
and his name, uh, is besmirched.
He's actually being told that the work isn't his--
the work he's showing.
He-- it-- it's not his, it's-- it's stolen.
I mean, talk about having your legs cut off.
The Royal Society...
that was the-- that's the Oscar.
That's the recognition by your peers,
and he was almost,
almost to it, you know what I mean?
It is really a b-- a betrayal.
He doesn't ha-- he doesn't handle it well.
And-- and really,
uh, Leland Stanford just cuts him off.
Muybridge never got over,
never got over the pain of what Stanford did.
He writes a letter
to Mrs. Stanford years later
saying how hurt he was.
"I received a note requesting my presence
at the rooms of the society.
Upon my arrival, I was conducted
to the council chamber
and was asked by the president
if I knew anything about a book,
then on the table, having on its title page
the following:
The Horse in Motion by J.D.B. Stillman, M.D.
Published under the auspices
of Leland Stanford.
The doors of the Royal Society
were thus closed against me,
and my promising career in London
was thus brought to a disastrous close."
So great.
[ominous music]
Muybridge began lecturing again
with his zoopraxiscope all over the East Coast.
He was in Baltimore,
Washington, New York, Philadelphia...
[Amy] When he was finished with California,
he went to Europe.
When Europe was finished with him,
he came back to the States.
And he just keeps soldiering on,
picking himself up
when his reputation is trashed,
when his body is trashed.
He is persistent
and he keeps finding a way
to be relevant and important.
♪
In one of these lectures,
he met Thomas Eakins, the painter.
Eakins was one of the painters,
like Meissonier,
who saw Muybridge's Stanford work
and was absolutely enthralled by it.
Eeakins introduced him to the provost
of the University of Pennsylvania
whose name was William Pepper,
and they invited Muybridge
to make a new series of photographs
on animal and human movements.
[lively music]
[Amy] This was a very expensive undertaking,
and William Pepper was really taking a gamble
with a lot of people's money
on the project's outcome
being magnificent and amazing.
[Marta] Pepper creates
what he calls his "scientific commission."
A group of professors
that will ensure
the scientific accuracy of the project.
Why did he put this committee together?
Why did he need this oversight?
He must have known about the murder,
because that was in all the papers.
He may have known about Muybridge's reputation
as an eccentric character.
[Amy] There's no question
that this is Muybridge's project,
but he is so circumscribed
in what he can do
by virtue of the people
who are overseeing his work--
professors, doctors,
physicists, artists.
They believe that he can deliver
what they all want.
Frances Durkheim, who's a neurologist,
brought his patients
from the Philadelphia hospital
to measure and document the changes in their gait,
the difficulties they had with balance.
[reel rattling]
♪
And then you have the comparative zoologists
who are really interested in this very Darwinian project
of understanding the relationship
between animals and humans.
Where is that line really crossed?
♪
[reel rattling]
[Amy] And then, of course, you have artists
who stand to benefit from these representations
of the body in motion.
♪
[Marta] At the very beginning,
he sets up his cameras,
not in a sequence at all.
He has six cameras
and he plants them
around the subject
he's photographing.
And he has them synched
to go off simultaneously.
It's kind of like a cinematic tracking shot,
the camera is moving around.
[music intensifying]
[Marta] And then, just as he did in Palo Alto,
he puts 12 cameras in a row
and he photographs sequences.
And then he adds two more cameras,
so from the rear and from the front.
And then he takes 12, 12 and 12,
and he assembles them so that they line up.
But in order to make those final prints,
he has to organize them,
he has to enlarge some of them,
he has to crop the laterals.
He has to make every image match up.
[Amy] All of these men on the commission
think they're creating knowledge that is neutral,
that is verifiable, that is measurable.
[Marta] We see a grid in the background,
very scientific looking grid that makes the whole picture
look scientific.
[Amy] Muybridge wasn't the first photographer
to use a grid,
but it typically was used
in anthropological studies
to document images
of people of color.
[Marta] There was a strong belief
in the hierarchy of race at this time.
There's the belief
that the most technologically advanced humans
are the most civilized humans.
And there's a desire
to measure racial difference
in order to show a hierarchy
with white men at the top.
[solemn music]
[Amy] In Muybridge's case,
the very first person
that he photographs with a grid
is a gentleman who's listed as a mulatto pugilist.
[Marta] Ben Bailey, the first, and only, Black model
in the whole project.
The grid appears with Ben Bailey,
because the commissioners
were studying racial difference.
♪
[Marta] And the grid stays in the picture
from this time onward.
♪
The project, as it develops,
confines Muybridge a little bit,
because the professors are working with him.
The professors are sending him,
uh, the people that they want photographed.
[Amy] These are all white men making decisions
about who they're going to photograph
and what they're going to photograph
and what these people are going to be doing.
If you're a man, you're going to be photographed
as an athlete,
performing amazing feats
of flexibility and strength.
[reel rattling]
[whimsical music]
Women are asked
to do things like move gracefully...
♪
... carry buckets of water.
Often they're asked to do things
that refer to domestic tasks.
♪
[playful music]
The male models include
University of Pennsylvania student athletes and alumni.
♪
The reason that those upper class students
were not afraid to pose in the nude
was because they weren't vulnerable.
The women in the photographs
were vulnerable.
The women who posed for Muybridge in the nude
all came from these ranks
of working class women who didn't have a lot
of employment opportunities.
Then at the far end, we have women
who would not be, in any way,
respectable and polite middle class society.
Muybridge's models were--
some of them, and especially the ones
that-- that carry
the, uh, erotic content of the word--
artist's models.
Artist models were no better than,
or, prostitutes.
Muybridge, really, his attraction
is to the naked women and to the frozen water.
That is what Muybridge is,
where his interests lie.
[tense orchestral music]
So, you have class, you have race, you have gender.
Is there anything else you need?
[quirky music]
[Amy] And then there are scenes
that really don't make any sense
from a scientific perspective.
[Marta] This is supposed to be a scientific project,
it's funded as a scientific project.
When you read the history of photography,
Muybridge is always the great creator
of the study of locomotion.
Hmm. What movement is being described here?
What are the laws of locomotive mechanics?
[Amy] Certainly, William Pepper never imagined
that Muybridge was going to try
to make funny pictures.
It was definitely not in the mission statement,
but it's in there.
♪
[Thomas] You know, all those strange images
of naked women having tea parties.
What are those?
He-- he had no idea what surrealism was,
you know, and I don't think he thought
they were funny or bizarre,
but they are.
[Marta] Jokes, these are jokes.
These are fantasies.
Most of all, they're stories.
It's the content...
of what will become
the industry of motion pictures.
Stories and sex.
That's it, that's Muybridge's
contribution to motion pictures.
It's the fantasy that we all know
from the movies,
that we all go to the movies for.
-[reel rattling] -[gentle melody playing]
He's a rulebreaker.
He doesn't get the accolades
for his inventiveness,
for his ability to do what he wanted to do,
even under the watchful eyes
of a committee
that really didn't want him to do that.
Muybridge, the artist, and Muybridge, the scientist,
what he produces with the conflation
of those two things,
to me, is really the true work of art.
A true work of genius.
[sentimental orchestral music]
♪
[music fades out]
When I think about the choice
that William Pepper made
to forge on with Muybridge's project,
even including the photographs
that have somewhat provocative,
and clearly unscientific themes,
I think about how far deep he was in,
in terms of his own reputation
and the reputation of the university.
There was no turning back.
It would have been such an admission
of poor judgment.
They decided to just hold their nose
and keep insisting
that this was a scientific project.
And the decision that's made in 1886
is basically to go ahead
with the publication and distribution,
but to market them in a way
that they would only be accessible
by very rich people
in limited circulation,
thereby pretty much guaranteeing
that only wealthy white men
would ever see these photographs.
♪
She has this kind of--
He's-- he's outlined her boobs.
He's taken an instrument to outline certain things,
to add shade to certain things that are missing.
I mean, there's all sorts of things you can see
about the process and about the pictures here
that...
again, support this idea of how manipulated it was.
Some of the pictures he took
are just single images of poses
which he put into a sequence.
And sometimes not even a sequence of movement,
it's the sequence of a pattern.
[playful violin music]
[Marta] This is called,
Woman Dropping a Handkerchief.
The position of the handkerchief
in this image, and in this image,
is not the same.
It didn't happen at the same time.
[interviewer] Do you think it's being sold as the same,
like, we're meant to think that?
[Marta] Of course.
You know that the sequence
tells you how to look,
so you never question it.
You have to really look.
[interviewer] Is it a deception?
[Marta sighs]
Is it the truth?
The truth of what?
♪
This picture is called, La Libertad, El Salvador,
and like many of Muybridge's photographs,
it has a figure positioned somewhere,
partly for scale.
It also has some details,
like a little rip in the emulsion
where you can see part of the picture
literally peeling away from the glass.
There are some specks and spots
throughout the scene.
And normally, these are details
that you wouldn't pay that much attention to.
But when I looked at this picture,
I was looking for those kinds of telltale signs
that would indicate the uniqueness
of this actual picture,
so that when I would look at a photograph
that existed in another album,
I could see a different view.
And I could know
that this same landscape picture
with the torn negative also revealed a picture
that included clouds,
and a fictional horizon
that showed mountain peaks in the scene.
And so, these two pictures side by side
are what I call, La Libertad,
basic and deluxe versions.
♪
There is an element of--
I don't know if I would call it
whimsy or playfulness.
There are particular clouds that he liked to use
over and over again.
♪
When I first looked
at The Crater of Volcano, Quetzaltenango, I laughed.
It was as-- an absurd picture,
it was a construction, a fabrication.
I came to appreciate that one picture
maybe more than any of the others,
because it has a falseness to it,
which makes it a little bit more believable.
It doesn't hide behind...
a fiction of pretending
to be an accurate representation of a moment.
Muybridge's photographs in Central America,
and in some ways, all of his work,
are more like poems,
and less like precise, accurate descriptions
of something that happened in the world.
[Philip] At the time Muybridge is doing this,
the manipulation of photographs
was really open and prevalent.
Photographers did it all the time.
You know, we have to always be vigilant
in looking at photography
about, you know, whether what we're seeing
is actually right and-- and truthful.
What's so interesting
about Muybridge's photograph of the Modoc warrior
is that it is represented
as a journalistic photograph,
as the news.
But when you look closely,
you can see that the Native American man
is actually holding a military rifle
and it's not, in fact, a Modoc warrior at all.
It's a Warm Springs scout helping the US Army.
Muybridge himself, he couldn't go to the front,
and so he had to stage a photograph.
So, in fact, Muybridge is deceiving the viewer.
He-- he was not going to go to that encampment
and return to San Francisco
without picture.
And so, he dressed a guy up
as a Modoc warrior,
and posed him with a gun on a wall.
I mean, that's dress-up.
That's directing.
"I want what I want."
♪
[Marta] The contract between the viewer
and the photographer, that seeing is believing,
is-- is not-- does not hold in Muybridge's work.
[interviewer] Seeing is not believing.
No.
You cannot believe what you see.
[transcendent vocal music]
[Thomas] Leland Stanford says,
you know, the machine cannot lie.
You know, the machine just records what's there.
What I would say about that is,
of course it can't lie,
but it can't tell the truth either.
Machines don't say anything.
It's only how people
present the image of the machine, the photograph,
that is either a lie or a truth.
[gentle orchestral music]
[Marta] We have letters
back to Philadelphia from Muybridge,
who's on the road
trying to sell Animal Locomotion.
And he tries for a few years
in order, uh, to-- to make it work.
And he just doesn't.
He-- he sold maybe
37 full copies, as far as we know.
Don't know how many single images
or groups of a hundred he sold,
but it-- it wasn't a-- a commercial success
by any means.
♪
[transcendent vocal music]
He then has a booth at the Chicago World's Fair
that is also not a success.
Muybridge showed his zoopraxiscope,
but he couldn't compete
with the hoochie coochie girl
down the street.
[Gary] An old man with a beard turning a handle
these horses going around in a circle...
I don't know, might be boring
the pants off you, talking about...
you know...
[posh accent] "When the left fore foot is 85 inches,
the right hand foot on the vertical line--"
I-- I-- I mean, maybe these lectures
had... run their course.
♪
[reel whirring]
[Marta] December 1895 and 1896,
we have the motion picture projection
of the Lumiere brothers,
the beginning of the motion picture industry,
and of course, that leaves Muybridge
completely, completely behind.
So, he sets sail for home.
Muybridge, toward the end of his life
when he went back to Kingston,
you know, he felt like a failure
because he didn't really get credited for innovation,
you know, the development of the motion picture.
[Marta] He tells Lafeber,
the painter who colored his glass discs,
to destroy the disks
so that he will not be associated
with the zoopraxiscope.
[somber music]
I think he is still...
conscious of the name he made for himself,
and he doesn't want to be associated
with the technology that really doesn't lead
to the motion pictures, uh, that were on the world stage
at that point.
[dripping]
[Gary] He's diagnosed with prostate cancer.
It's like he didn't know what he had.
It was like he went out there one day,
took a great, big box of plates,
um...
You know, he's like, going through his things
and saying, "Oh, that's not good.
Chuck that out, oh, that's crap," you know?
And anything that could be left behind
that wasn't up to snuff,
I think he just smashed it, he just chucked.
[sentimental piano music]
[Marta] In 1904, when Muybridge dies,
he dies in a world utterly changed.
Muybridge has become forgotten.
♪
[birds chirping]
[footsteps crunching]
[Gary] Here we are.
[exhaling]
[grunts]
Mr. Muybridge.
All right.
Let's--
[gentle music]
"Loving memory..."
"In loving memory of Eadweard..."
Eadweard.
"Loving memory--
Eadweard Maybridge..."
M-A-Y.
Oh, the indignity
that you suffered. Betrayal and...
and even in death...
they got your name wrong.
You poor soul.
[sentimental piano music]
♪
["Lemon" by U2]
♪ Oh
[mysterious orchestral music]
♪
... time is gonna be unstable? What does that even mean?
[dramatic action music]
♪
[music ends]