Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer

Wednesday, April 13, 2016 - 7:30 pm

 

Thom Andersen’s extraordinary meditation on the nature of vision, a project that began as a UCLA film thesis for which the aspiring filmmaker re-photographed thousands of Muybridge images, is “at once a biography of Muybridge, a re-animation of his historic sequential photographs, and an inspired examination of their philosophical implications…The ‘zoopraxography’ of the title speaks to both Muybridge’s practice of motion study — as distinct from photography — and his 1879 device, which enabled the images’ projection. As such, it foregrounds Muybridge’s role in the invention of cinema, and cinema itself as an illusion arising from stillness” (Ross Lipman, UCLA). Preceded by a re-animation of some of Muybridge's protofilms, and by Horse (2012), a short film by British artist John Stezaker, one of the leading practitioners of contemporary photographic collage and appropriation.

 
Horse | John Stezaker/ UK 2012. 2:13 min loop. DCP
Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer | Thom Andersen/USA 1975. 59 min. DCP
 
Programmed by Michèle Smith
 
Courtesy of Thom Andersen and LUX, London; and John Stezaker and The Approach, London.