Stills in Motion

Abstract

its lens. It was thereby possible to show that the horse did, at one instant, have all four feet off the ground. Photography did mechanically, chemically, and incontrovertibly what painters had been trying to do through the fallible observation of their naked eyes-plus varying degrees of technical proficiency-in recording on canvas or paper or cave walls, with paint or pencil or charred sticks, what they had seen. It pictured arrested movement. It was not by accident that Muybridge's experiment was followed in a short time by the invention of a means of recomposing a series of movements, arrested photographically, into an illusion of continuous movement. A toy called a zoetrope had been doing this with drawings of arrested movements in series long before the invention of photography. Thus Walt Disney has a longer lineage than movie makers who photograph real creatures or objects in motion. There is an obvious difference between the movement arrested