"Film is a disease," said Frank Capra.
If the old moviemaker's diagnosis is correct, then Eadweard Muybridge was patient zero.
Because before Capra shot a frame of It's a Wonderful Life, before D.W. Griffith lionized the Ku Klux Klan and before Thomas Edison strapped boxing gloves on two feisty housecats and had them duke it out in a miniature boxing ring, there was Muybridge.
Eadweard Muybridge (pronounced Edward My-bridge) is the subject of the historical drama Eadweard, directed by Vancouver鈥檚 Kyle Rideout.
Rideout and co-writer Josh Epstein first became acquainted with cinema's father (if not father, estranged uncle, at least) while working on Electric Company Theatre鈥檚 play Studies in Motion, an examination of Muybridge.
"We'd be backstage and say, 'I can't believe this isn't a movie,'" Rideout recalls.
After acquiring the rights to the play, Rideout and Epstein began honing the story of Muybridge, a still photographer who couldn't bear the thought of his photographs sitting still.
Muybridge's obsession 鈥� what Capra called a disease 鈥� was capturing motion.
Back in the 1870s a debate raged about whether or not a horse ever had all four hooves off the ground at once. Unwilling to trust such a matter to a single camera, Muybridge lined up 12 cameras like Rockettes. The cameras flashed in sequence, settling a debate and igniting an obsession. (And for the record, horses do sometimes have all four hooves off the ground.)
The movie focuses on the next few years in Muybridge's life, as we watch him become professionally messianic and personally a mess in his attempt to compose something entirely new: a photographic encyclopedia of movement.
His days are spent training his dozen cameras on motion of all kinds (an attractive woman jumping over a chair, a dog trotting, an attractive woman climbing a ladder, two men wrestling, an attractive nude woman being nude and attractive) and his nights are spent justifying his work to his wife, Flora.
Muybridge, despite resembling a shopping mall Santa Claus at four whiskies past quitting time and having the bedside manner of Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood, proves irresistible to young Flora... for a while.
Their relationship is strained by Muybridge's work, infidelity, and his tendency to look at her and keep looking; as though he's having a staring contest with God.
Muybridge's obsessive eye became easier to comprehend during the movie's 24-day shoot, according to Rideout. "I felt like I kind of became Muybridge myself on set," the director says. In re-enacting Muybridge's motion studies, Rideout found himself on the brink of panic when his producer informed him the llamas weren't going to make it to set as scheduled. (The crew saved the day by picking up some goats who were willing to work on short notice.)
But like all obsessions, Muybridge's was ultimately alienating.
"He started to get very obsessed, more than I can understand," Rideout says. "He didn't know when to say, 'Enough is enough.'" Muybridge also never quite had the notion of using the camera to tell a story.
"He was so close," Rideout notes. But while Muybridge missed out on creating cinema, he had no trouble creating a behavioural blueprint for every taskmaster director that would follow. "He would pass out when he was in the middle of shooting and he would have fainting spells and he was sometimes difficult to work with," Rideout says. "It sounded like a director to us."
His work was largely eclipsed by more famous inventors, but while his name is largely forgotten and often mispronounced when it is remembered, Rideout believes his influence remains. "Every single one of us has a piece of what Muybridge created."
Eadweard screens at 聽International Cinemas on Oct. 2 and 麻豆传媒映画Playhouse Oct. 5. Details at .
