The movies, it can be argued, were born with a photographer named Eadweard Muybridge took a snapshot of a horse. Under the patronage of California railroad magnate Leland Stanford, Muybridge was trying to discern what happened when a horse galloped. Equestrians and scientists couldn't even agree at the time whether a horse always had one hoof on the ground or not. Muybridge's innovations allowed for a photograph to be taken with an exposure time short enough to capture the horse mid-stride. (It turns out that a horse does not have a hoof on the ground at all times.) As a revolution in sight, this was huge; as Solnit points out in her book River of Shadows, the nation's most accomplished painters of horses had to go back and rethink all the work of their careers. But more was to come, because when Muybridge put such snapshots together later in a sequence, the "motion picture" was born.
I found Solnit's biography of Muybridge to be incredibly fascinating. She captures some of what has made Muybridge himself a subject of fascination: he was an English weirdo who changed his name a half-dozen times and ended up killing his wife's lover in cold blood. But the strength of the book is in the way Solnit connects Muybridge's innovations to the changing technological landscape of the Western United States and the world as a whole. The motion picture, she shows, is deeply connected to the way that the railroad--that technology pioneered by Leland Stanford--transformed the lives of Americans. It's true, there's something about looking out a railroad window that is replicated in the experience of the frames being pulled hastily over the projector. But more convincingly, Solnit connects both technologies to the nineteenth century attempt to "annihilate space and time," to break down the barriers that separated people by time and distance.
Muybridge's achievements weren't only in motion photography; he was also known for pioneering large-scale landscape and cityscape photography, taking, for example, some of the earliest panorama shots of the city of San Francisco. Solnit takes these in, too, connecting Muybridge's time photographing the Modoc War in northern California to the rapidly shifting face of the West. (I chuckled a little at the academic attitude toward the word technology, which takes in both horses and the "Ghost Dance" of the nineteenth century West, and which certainly made making these connections easier.) Solnit does a good job, too, of making the case that Muybridge shows the centrality of California in the emergence of the modern world. It's the reason the railroads were built, after all, and Muybridge was at the center of the innovations by which California changed the world: Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
I don't know much about Solnit; I associate her with the book Men Explain Things to Me and a cultural flashpoint over stuff like "mansplaining." This book is, I'm pretty sure, much earlier, and perhaps a relic of a time when Solnit was less of a well-known name, but I thought it was really insightful and erudite, and I can easily imagine why such an intelligent and thoughtful writer would bristle at being spoken down to by male chauvinists. Really enjoyed this one.
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