Eadweard Muybridge, Zoopraxographer

A fascinating investigation into the work of photographer and cinema pioneer Eadweard Muybridge, Thom Andersen's (Los Angeles Plays Itself, Red Hollywood, Reconversao) much-lauded documentary features more than 3,000 of Muybridge’s sequential images, re-photographed and then animated to bring new life to his experiments in recording motion. Andersen examines their aesthetic value, scientific significance, and impact on the development of cinema. Assisted by filmmaker Morgan Fisher and narrated by Dean Stockwell, the documentary draws on art history, sociology, and psychoanalysis in a rare feat of filmmaking as film criticism, connecting cinema’s earliest experiments to the broader history of Western representation.