Guy Delisle’s Muybridge – the magic of the motion picture

Muybridge
Guy Delisle (translated by Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall)
Drawn & Quarterly, £20, pp208

You may already know the story of Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904), the pioneering English photographer who is regarded now as one of the fathers of the motion picture. In the 1870s, as debate raged over whether a horse lifts all four of its hooves simultaneously when it gallops – most people thought the notion ridiculous – it was Muybridge who finally developed shutter speeds fast enough to capture the moment when the animal did indeed make itself airborne. But even then, he wasn’t done. Having somehow “stopped time”, he soon started it again, using his “zoopraxiscope” to project photographs in sequence so their subjects miraculously seemed to move. For a time, this achievement made him famous across the world.

Knowing the bare facts, though, is no impediment at all to enjoying Muybridge (translated by Helge Dascher and Rob Aspinall), a zippy new graphic biography by the much-loved French-Canadian cartoonist Guy Delisle. For one thing, Muybridge comes with a backstory worthy of Hollywood (more of this in a second). For another, this is the perfect marriage of form and function. How better to illustrate the development of stop-motion animation than via the frames of a comic? While Delisle’s book groans with (wholly necessary) technical information, it’s all so lightly told. In this sense, it may be close in temperament to his subject’s work, which Delisle, like all animation students, discovered at college (there’s still no better reference for understanding the mechanics of movement). An awful lot of labour was involved in its making, and yet it’s so prodigiously fleet.

Cranky and eccentric, Muybridge wasn’t an easy fellow. In 1850, he left London for New York, where he found work as a bookseller. But after five years, a familiar restlessness set in. Having sailed around Cape Horn, a seven-month voyage, he arrived in California to make his fortune. There, he discovered the new science of photography. He also met the fabulously wealthy industrialist Leland Stanford (later the co-founder of Stanford University); it was Stanford, who owned hundreds of thoroughbreds, who funded to the tune of millions of dollars his efforts to photograph a horse “mid-flight”. Add to this Muybridge’s murder of his wife’s lover, a calamitous stagecoach accident that turns every hair on his head grey, and his intrepid adventures in Yosemite and other wild places, and you have a pretty much unputdownable comic. I was gripped, and amazed.

Delisle, still best known for his bestselling travelogues (Pyongyang, Jerusalem), periodically inserts himself into the narrative, a charming but unobtrusive everyman suddenly at the reader’s side. I relished this: a chance for a breather from the epic main event. Even better, he deploys dozens of Muybridge’s photographs, as well as paintings by artists such as Ernest Meissonier, whose craze for realism was spurred by the new science. The result is delightfully reminiscent of a leather-bound Victorian family album. Naturally, the book’s palette is suitably monochrome, except when Muybridge is in the darkroom, when frames are suffused with red light, or behind his projector, when a beam of pale yellow is cast. All in all, then, a huge and accomplished treat. Delisle just gets better and better. You never know these days what he’ll do next.

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Illustration by Guy Delisle