The laziness along the way to the invention of films are many transitional fossils. Humans have experienced different ways of capturing images and manipulating the persistence of vision during the millennia before these techniques merge, culminating with the Lumière brothers wrongly accused of terrifying a crowd of Lyon With images of a train. Although the new graphic novel Muybridge is mainly a biography of the gilded age chronophotographer Eadweard Muybridge (which in fact intentionally I chose this name), the author Guy Delisle makes room for many other primordial cinema shepherds.
A gallery of figures relevant to history at the front of the book includes not only Muybridge and his family, but also the lights, Edison, Tesla, phenakistiscope Inventor Joseph Plateau, kinetoscope The developer William Dickson, and more. Some of the most interesting parts of the book follow the sons of the population with whom the people in Muybridge interacted, sometimes briefly. For example, after having undergone a serious head trauma, he was treated for a while in England by the Royal Doctor William Gull, who has been launched over the years A possible candidate for Jack the Ripper. The longtime boss of Muybridge, the baron / politician / founder of the university, Leland Stanford, has his own secondary intrigue. Not to say that the own story of Muybridge was not colorful – she understood the murder of his wife's lover and to be acquitted by a jury with the judgment of “justifiable homicide”.
As suggested above, Muybridge is as much a social history of photography and its relationship with culture during the 19th century as the history of the life of a man. With jackets of tastes Charles BaudelaireDelisle explains how the ability to reproduce life in the fingerprints affected everything in the world of art, as some painters have seen their job threatened, to commercial interests, as the demand for photographs increased. Muybridge entered the company in this context in California of the 1850s, becoming well known to document the “border” regions like the West and Alaska, satisfying market hunger for the perceived capacity of photography to offer the reality of distant places. The Cartoony style of Delisle, however, eliminates any pretension of realism. It is sometimes interrupted by reprints of photos or motion studies, marking a striking fracture between “daily” life, rendered by the pen and the life rendered by the camera.
Indeed, although Muybridge was the subject of a 1982 Philip Glass OperaA 1975 documentary by the trial of film Thom Andersen, and the 2015 Little-Observé Biopic 2015 Eadweard, A cartoon could be the most suitable medium to explore its work. While we often think of Muybridge Emblematic images of galloping horses or bare subjects In terms of loop movement, they were initially published in the form of fixed images sequences. It was not until later that Muybridge would put these series on Zoopraxiscopes to project them for the public in motion. Before they were the first films, they were the first comics.
At several important moments of this comic strip, such as the murder or death of Muybridge, Delisle invokes the “idle” by imitating the style of motion studies, by decomposing the action into a series of images with tiny differences. Arranging the panels next to each other on the page – their respective images occurring both sequentially and simultaneously – encourages the reader to consider each element of a scene, highlighting in particular the different ways in which comics and cinema organize time.
This is perfectly in line with the spirit of Muybridge's work. These galloping horses motion studies have been designed to settle a bet as to whether the four hooves leave the ground at a time. He proved that they did it, but the complete sequence of frames – first sewn by the imagination of viewers, then via zoopraxiscopes, flipbooks, trampling shows and other early film devices – have even more attracted the attention of the public. In MuybridgeThe subject's work and the form of biography make a perfect match.
Muybridge (2025)written by Guy Delisle, translated by Rob Aspinall and Helge Dascher, and published by Drawn and quarterlyis available for online purchase and bookstores.
