Eadweard Muybridge was a fascinating man. He was one
of the first to do landscape photography just after
the Civil War, and became justly famous for doing it,
thanks to his noteworthy photographs of Yosemite
Falls. He was the man whose motion-capture photographs
proved that a horse can have all four legs off the
ground simultaneously. (They used to think that was
impossible. God knows why.) For the purposes of this
site, which is an internet site about movie nude
scenes, he created the first animated .gifs and was
the first ever to film a movie nude scene back in
1884. But he is even more important in terms of the
broader cultural flow of humankind. Think about it.
1884? How could that date be correct? That means the
first movie nude scene occurred about 10 years before
movies were allegedly "invented."
If you are an old fart like me, you realize how time
has a way of singling out bits and pieces of history
in the process of compiling the popular version,
leaving other fragments, sometimes the most important
ones, on history's equivalent of the cutting room
floor. Many factors contribute to this. Some people's
roles in history are minimized because of political
incorrectness (Werner von Braun, e.g.), others are
elevated or reduced because of their own national
origin and the national origin of the storyteller,
still others are promoted or demoted by the official
version sponsored by corporate America.
The history of motion pictures is no exception to the
rule. Various historical icons like Thomas Edison and
the Lumiere brothers have been promoted to inventor
status for various reasons. The British, rejecting the
French and American choices, have their own champion,
a man named William Friese-Greene, who "was the first
man ever to witness moving pictures on a screen,"
according to some sources. He was not. He was not even
close. Friese-Greene beat Edison and the Lumieres, but
was about a decade behind the real champion.
The real "inventor" of movies was Eadweard Muybridge,
a crazy British expatriate who proved to be too
politically incorrect for the history books. Yes, he
not only "invented" movies, but movie nude scenes as
well. In fact, he was actually filming naked women
more than a decade before Edison or the Lumieres had
ever successfully completed their own systems.
Let's begin with a definition.
What is a movie? For the sake of our analysis here, it
is "projected motion photography." This definition
eliminates the peep show, which was clearly a
predecessor to movies, but not an actual movie.
Muybridge not only was the inventor of projected
motion pictures, but by the typical standards of
inventors, who normally compete to file the first
patent, he was figurative light-years ahead of the
rest of the world. On May 4, 1880, Muybridge projected
animal motion scenes for several objective spectators
in San Francisco. Everyone in that room saw projected
moving pictures nine years before Friese-Greene became
"the first man ever to witness" them! Although no
mention of Muybridge's demonstration - really
the first movie - is included in some current
published chronologies of the medium, the event was
reported in great detail at the time. Three San
Francisco newspapers reported the event the next day,
and a California weekly reported it in their May 8
edition.
The San Francisco Alta reviewed the exhibition in
great detail, and wrote: "Mr. Muybridge has laid the
foundation of a new method of entertaining the people,
and we predict that his instantaneous photographic
magic-lantern zoetrope will make the rounds of the
civilized world." That turned out to be the first, and
possibly still the most accurate, movie review ever
written.
By 1884, Muybridge was engaged in scientific research
of motion photography at the University of
Pennsylvania. His notebooks have been preserved in
great detail at the George Eastman House in Rochester,
N.Y. Here are some entries from 1885:
No. 406: two models pouring bucket of water over one
No. 977: relinquishing drapery for nature's garb
I'm not sure which one was filmed first, but on this page are four of his
compositions from the 1884-1886 period. One of those
may be the first nude scene ever filmed. The
tri-colored one is probably the first example of a
single scene filmed from multiple angles with several
cameras. That was in 1885, mind you. Muybridge was
filming nude scenes 10 years before the Lumieres were
filming anything! The Lumieres held their first public
exhibition in December of 1895, and they can probably
be credited with the first known instance of a filmed
fictional story. The previous efforts had been
scientific documentations of motion, often in
controlled studios with pure black or white
backgrounds marked by height grids, like a police
line-up. The Lumieres exhibited something called
"Watering the Gardener," which was a little staged
comedy.
As for Edison, he didn't even master peep shows until
a decade after Muybridge had demonstrated projection!
Lacking any projection technique of their own,
Edison's corporate people convinced Thomas Armat, a
Washingtonian who had successfully developed a
projector, to allow the Edison Company to market his
product as Edison's own work. They argued quite
persuasively that their marketing muscle and Edison's
reputation would ensure commercial success for the
product and make everyone more money in the long run.
Armat agreed to the deal, and an Edison employee named
W.K.L Dickson adapted Armat's Phantoscope projector,
renaming it The Edison Vitascope. Hailed as the latest
miracle from the Wizard of Menlo Park, the Vitascope's
highly publicized debut occurred at Koster & Bials
Music Hall in New York on April 23, 1896. It was
promoted as a revolutionary exhibition, despite the
fact that Muybridge had devoted an entire hall to film
projection at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893!!
What happened to Muybridge's place in history? A lot.
the French didn't want an insane Englishman to have
invented movies. The Americans wanted their man. The
Edison Company wanted their own version to become the
official history, because that was most profitable
version for them. The British rejected a tainted
expatriate in favor of a safer, more English
candidate, albeit one with an inferior claim. Nobody
wanted to give the credit to a confessed murderer who
collected images of naked prostitutes. Everybody just
wanted Muybridge to go away. And so he did, at least
until quite recently, when his accomplishments were
rediscovered and re-evaluated.
"Insane?" you think, "Murderer? Isn't that
melodramatic?"
He admitted to the latter, and his own lawyers claimed
the former.
Several years before his 1880 exhibition, Muybridge
stalked and killed his wife's lover at point blank
range with dozens of witnesses. He was jailed for
three months before his trial for first degree murder.
He acknowledged premeditation during his testimony.
His lawyers used a two-edged defense: (1) they used
the legal argument that he was not guilty by reason of
insanity; (2) they snuck in the utterly extra-legal
sympathy argument that killing one's wife's lover was
a justifiable act, especially in this case, since the
victim was a well-known cad and seducer. The jury
rejected the insanity argument, but Muybridge was
acquitted anyway - despite having no legitimate legal
defense after the insanity argument fell apart. He
owed his freedom to the unpredictability of the
American jury system in the 19th century West.
According to a word screen at the end of the movie, it
was the last instance of a murderer being found not
guilty in the USA based on the logic that the victim
deserved to die.
Muybridge became convinced that the victim was the
father of his child, and thus chose to have nothing to
do with his (possible) son, even though the allegedly
faithless Mrs. Muybridge died when the lad was still a
toddler. In the ultimate irony, it turned out that the
boy was probably his. As a man, "Floddie" almost
seemed to be a clone of Eadweard, according to those
who have studied the photographs of them both.
So it's a great subject for a movie, and a rollicking
good time, right?
Wrong.
Somehow, contrary to all logic, the filmmakers managed
to make a talky, tedious film that is barely
watchable. I am fascinated by this subject, and
struggled to keep my hands off the fast-forward
button.
It does have some plusses, however. The story is
beautifully photographed. It's filled with beautiful
naked women and men photographed in sunlight. It's
also quite historically accurate in portraying the
general outline of Muybridge's early years in public
life, having lovingly recreated details of Muybridge's
outdoor "studio" and other background elements by
using the master's own photos and animations. The
problem is that it seems to portray the wrong things.
Somehow it fails to hammer home the fact that
Muybridge is the Patient Zero and Mitochondrial Eve of
cinema. His legendary 1880 screening is not even
mentioned, and the fact that he was the first man ever
to project moving images is glossed over as a
throw-away conversation between Muybridge and his
wife. "Eadweard, I've never seen anything like this.
Nobody has."
Yeah. That was the point. Or at least it should have
been.
