Muybridge's Animal Locomotion

Abstract

In September 1927, Mr Alexander Wetmore, Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian, received a telegram from Mr I. N. Phelps Stokes in New York wanting to know if the Instirution was interested in a ‘Muybridge collection of moving-picture negatives and prints’. Wetmore answered immediately: ‘The National Museum will be very glad indeed to receive this collection of negatives, many of which will beyond doubt be important additions to our collection illustrating the history of the development of motion pictures’. The association of Muybridge's name with motion pictures was still relatively new in the 1920s. The history of cinema had begun to be constituted as a history of technological invention and development along nationalist lines, and as France, Britain, and America each vied to claim the inventor of the medium as a native son, Muybridge's 1884–86 experiments in sequential locomotion photography, carried out at the University of Pennyslvania and published in portfolio form in 1887 as Animal Locomotion, were held to be an important contribution to the American case. Muybridge's photographs, however, had very little to do with the technological development of motion pictures. He had used multiple cameras to make a series of sequential photographs on glass plates. But Wetmore's response was much more prescient than he could ever have imagined. The material that he received from Stokes a few months later - an immensely rich lode that enhanced the large collection of Muybridge material already in the Smithsonian - would show beyond a doubt that Muybridge was the first man to construct, direct, photograph, and edit the kind of narrative fantasies that are at the core of motion pictures.