A Brief History of Film

Part One:  Muybridge and His Trotting Horse

by Fr. John Wykes, OMV

To think the medium that produced such screen gems as David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia or Hayao Miyazaki’s The Boy and the Heron began with a barroom bet seems so outlandishly vulgar as to be unbelievable.  At yet that is how it happened – at least that’s what some people say.

It seemed simple enough – even for brains sufficiently dulled by a few drinks.  The question was – when trotting, does a horse ever have all four hooves off the ground at the same time?  Some said no.  Others, including Eadweard Muybridge, said yes.  He went about to prove his point using one of the most amazing technological advancements of the 19th Century – photography.

It was a summer day in 1878 when Muybridge set up his cameras, twelve of them, along the side of a racetrack.  Each camera had electrical wires extending across.  As the now-famous horse, Occident, trotted by, it tripped the wires which tripped the shutters.  Muybridge now had twelve still pictures of Occident trotting -- and proof that a horse can have all four hooves off the ground at the same time.

But this was just the beginning.  Muybridge soon discovered that the photographs, when passed by the eye in rapid succession, ceased to resemble separate images and became a “moving” image.  It was an amazing illusion – and not really a new one.  The French has developed the phenakistiscope back in the 1830s.  It provided drawn images that, when projected correctly, gave the entertaining illusion of motion.  Now with the advent of photography plus the capability of taking more than one photo in succession, the animation toys of yore suddenly became much more powerful, with fully realized actual photographic images of animals and people coming to life in a way that had never been possible.

Muybridge made the study of motion his life-long work, creating innumerable short “motion pictures” of animals, men, women, acrobats, athletes, and dancers.  By the time of his death in 1904, Muybridge had secured his place in film history.