User Reviews

... that being the head trauma that Muybridge sustained in a stagecoach accident in Arkansas in 1860 being the catalyst for so much weirdness in his life from that point on. The driver and several passengers were killed, and those not killed were badly injured, with Muybridge being thrown from the stagecoach and landing with his head striking a rock. His injuries required a long convalescence, and afterwards his personality changed completely. He went from being a mild mannered bookseller to a photographer who liked to take risks.

It has been speculated that Muybridge suffered substantial injuries that extended into the anterior temporal lobes, which may have led to some of the emotional outbursts and eccentric behavior reported by friends in later years, as well as freeing his creativity from conventional social inhibitions. The accident is mentioned in the documentary, but not much is done to connect his risky behavior or the premeditated murder he later commits to this head injury.

Overall, the documentary goes into detail as to Muybridge's photographs and his later motion studies, but fails to explain some personal issues that are brought up but not explored in depth. For example, Muybridge finds out about his wife's infidelity by talking to the midwife who delivered their baby at the midwife's house. The woman reveals all kinds of details that would be sure to enrage Muybridge, so much that he kills the man implicated. But why was Muybridge there talking to the midwife in the first place? Why would she want to anger this guy with the details that she supplies? What would be her motivation? It is never mentioned.

Once Muybridge is acquitted it is then mentioned that his (maybe) child is deposited in an orphanage after his wife dies, knowing what kind of institutions those were in the 1870s, without a backwards glance. Again, the reasons behind this rather cold blooded act are not examined at all.

I'd say this is a very comprehensive work on Muybridge, especially regarding his work in photography and in helping birth the motion picture industry with his motion studies, but the personal picture of the man is incomplete.

For an hour-long television-show episode, "The Weird World of Eadweard Muybridge" does a good job of covering the life and work of the photographer. It especially covers his still photography and his murder trial well. Some demonstrations are made of the challenging wet collodion process that he used for most of his career and how its limitations led to the common 19th Century practice of touching up the images. They say, for instance, that the sky would appear white in the photographs, so clouds were added in for dramatic effect. Aside from Muybridge's photography and Zoöpraxiscope exhibitions, the most interesting part of his life is probably the fact that he killed a man who may've fathered Muybridge's wife's son and that he was acquitted on the basis of justifiable homicide.

Some of the right people are interviewed, too, especially Rebecca Solnit (author of "Motion Studies: Time, Space and Eadweard Muybridge" and "River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West"), Stephen Herbert (also an author and whose websites on Muybridge and Victorian cinema are wonderful resources that I visit frequently) and Marta Braun (author of "Picturing Time" and "Eadweard Muybridge"). Braun provides a brief overview of the enlightening observation she's made in her books that Muybridge's work, contrary to what others have thought and to how they were advertised, served little to no scientific purpose and, instead, he constructed "little stories". On the other hand, Jonathan Miller comes off as oddly dismissive. Andy Serkis (the Gollum from "The Lord of the Rings" movie trilogy) seems to be here only because the show wanted a celebrity to read Muybridge's writings and quotations; this is done in such an overwrought manner that it's sometimes unintentionally laughable.

Brief mention is made of the significant impact—covered better in some books on Muybridge—his photographs had on art—even if making the connection to Andy Warhol still seems a bit much to me. It's also suggested, although not well defended, that the animations of the Zoöpraxiscope discs influenced early cinema animation. A more interesting comparison is made between the battery of cameras Muybridge used for his instantaneous serial photography and the "time-slice photography", or "bullet time" visual effects, in "The Matrix" (1999). These comparisons also entirely undermine the host's dim comment when viewing the Zoöpraxiscope discs projected on a screen that, "It's really not cinema. You're only seeing about a half second of a story. It's not one point of view like cinema would be." Understanding, first, that cinema is not restricted by time, number of cameras, storytelling, or, as today's computer-generated digital films indicate, by the material used, one might find it more difficult to deny Muybridge's prominent place in the invention of cinema.