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Significantly, Muybridge’s objects of study were four-legged animals. NGA Images, Open access image in public domain.įigure 6: Eadweard Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope-Horse galloping, 1893, By The Library of Congress, via Wikimedia Commons. These appear to be the seeds of being able to materially capture and manipulate moving images.įigure 4: A hand-held, mirror-dependent, phenakistoscopeįigure 5: Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, Plate 626, 1887, National Gallery of Art. Later, Thomas Edison, who had developed many devices including a motion picture camera prototype, met Muybridge in 1888 to discuss the possibility of joining his phonograph with Muybridge’s Zoopraxiscope to produce simultaneous sound and pictures (Lubar, 1993). Muybridge was also inspired by Plateau’s Phenakistoscope (Prodger, 2003) and created an optical toy called Zoopraxiscope (see figures 3, 4, 5, 6). Within the other parallel strand of innovation, photographer Eadweard Muybridge used sequential images of captured animals’ movement to answer scientific and veterinary problems in 1860s. As I will discuss, scientists of the time were studying phenomena of the persistence of vision and invented multiple philosophical/optical toys around 1830s that exemplified this concept and in turn formed the key steps towards animation and cinema more broadly. Yet, in the nineteenth century, art and science were hybridized to produce cinema. Snow posits an absolute non-understanding and unbridgeable gap between the apparently opposing worlds of mid-twentieth century science and humanities, as well as between scientists and intellectuals (Snow, 1993). Snow’s 1959 identification of the “two (Quite Separate) cultures ”. There appears to be a constant interplay and intersection of the worlds of the arts and of the sciences that contradicts Chemist and novelist C.P. It is the contention of this paper that greater understanding about the pre-history of cinema will negate this downplaying of animation’s importance in moving-image culture. For example, there is no mention of the word ‘animation’ in the index of books such as InfoCulture written by Steven Lubar, 1993, which is devoted to detailing inventions of the information age.
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Indeed, general histories of cinema and other nineteenth century emerging communication technologies include no reference to animation at all. However, I argue that concepts of storytelling through the moving image can be seen in art much earlier than the late nineteenth century.įigure 1: Daguerreotype still life by Louis Daguerre, 1837,, via Wikimedia Commonsįigure 2: The oldest photographic image with Nicephore Niepce 1826,, via Wikimedia Commons, (The original is at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin.)Īnimated cinema is a form of filmmaking incorporating the second of these threads yet is often implicitly portrayed as a weaker artform vis-a-vis live action cinema, despite its purity of provenance. The Daguerrotype and Niepce images (see Figures 1 and 2) depict the way that the formative history of cinema is usually portrayed.
LONG PATH TOOL 5.1.6 KEY SERIES
The second is the exploration of making graphic images appear to move, encapsulated in a series of amusement devices, which became known as philosophical or optical toys (Wyver, 1989 and Nowell-Smith, 1997). The first is the capture of still photoreal images in a chemical medium, known as photography. Histories of cinema as an artform tend to start in the early nineteenth century and consider cinema as the convergence of two different practices that developed in parallel, only coming together at the end of the century.