Uncle Scoopy's Fun House

Friday

Eadweard

2015

Eadweard Muybridge was a fascinating man. He was one of the first to do landscape photography just after the Civil War, having become famous by photographing Yosemite. He was the man whose motion-capture photographs proved that a horse can have all four legs off the ground simultaneously. For the purposes of this site, which is an internet site about movie nude scenes, he created the first animated .gifs and was the first ever to film a movie nude scene, in 1884. But he is even more important in terms of the broader cultural flow of humankind. Think about it. 1884? How could that date be correct? That means the first movie nude scene occurred about 10 years before movies were allegedly "invented."

If you are an old fart like me, you realize how time has a way of singling out bits and pieces of history in the process of compiling the popular version, leaving other fragments, sometimes the most important ones, on history's equivalent of the cutting room floor. Many factors contribute to this. Some people's roles in history are minimized because of political incorrectness (Werner von Braun, e.g.), others are elevated or reduced because of their own national origin and the national origin of the storyteller, still others are promoted or demoted by the official version sponsored by corporate America.

The history of motion pictures is no exception to the rule. Various historical icons like Thomas Edison and the Lumiere brothers have been promoted to inventor status for various reasons. The British, rejecting the French and American choices, have their own champion, a man named William Friese-Greene, who "was the first man ever to witness moving pictures on a screen," according to some sources. He was not. He was not even close. Friese-Greene beat Edison and the Lumieres, but was about a decade behind the real champion.

The real "inventor" of movies was Eadweard Muybridge, a crazy British expatriate who proved to be too politically incorrect for the history books. Yes, he not only "invented" movies, but movie nude scenes as well. In fact, he was actually filming naked women more than a decade before Edison or the Lumieres had ever successfully completed their own systems.

Let's begin with a definition.

What is a movie? For the sake of our analysis here, it is "projected motion photography." This definition eliminates the peep show, which was clearly a predecessor to movies, but not an actual movie.

The inventor of projected motion pictures was Eadweard Muybridge and, by the typical standards of inventors, who normally compete to file the first patent, he was figurative light-years ahead of the rest of the world. On May 4, 1880, Muybridge projected animal motion scenes for several objective spectators in San Francisco. Everyone in that room saw projected moving pictures nine years before Friese-Greene became "the first man ever to witness" them! Although no mention of Muybridge's demonstration - really the first movie - is included in some current published chronologies of the medium, the event was reported in great detail at the time. Three San Francisco newspapers reported the event the next day, and a California weekly reported it in their May 8 edition.

The San Francisco Alta reviewed the exhibition in great detail, and wrote: "Mr. Muybridge has laid the foundation of a new method of entertaining the people, and we predict that his instantaneous photographic magic-lantern zoetrope will make the rounds of the civilized world." That turned out to be the first, and possibly still the most accurate, movie review ever written.

By 1884, Muybridge was engaged in scientific research of motion photography at the University of Pennsylvania. His notebooks have been preserved in great detail at the George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y. Here are some entries from 1885:

No. 406: two models pouring bucket of water over one
No. 977: relinquishing drapery for nature's garb

I'm not sure which one was filmed first, but on this page are four of his compositions from the 1884-1886 period. One of those may be the first nude scene ever filmed. The tri-colored one is probably the first example of a single scene filmed from multiple angles with several cameras. That was in 1885, mind you. Muybridge was filming nude scenes 10 years before the Lumieres were filming anything! The Lumieres held their first public exhibition in December of 1895, and they can probably be credited with the first known instance of a filmed fictional story. The previous efforts had been scientific documentations of motion, often in controlled studios with pure black or white backgrounds marked by height grids, like a police line-up. The Lumieres exhibited something called "Watering the Gardener," which was a little staged comedy.

As for Edison, he didn't even master peep shows until a decade after Muybridge had demonstrated projection! Lacking any projection technique of their own, Edison's corporate people convinced Thomas Armat, a Washingtonian who had successfully developed a projector, to allow the Edison Company to market his product as Edison's own work. They argued quite persuasively that their marketing muscle and Edison's reputation would ensure commercial success for the product and make everyone more money in the long run. Armat agreed to the deal, and an Edison employee named W.K.L Dickson adapted Armat's Phantoscope projector, renaming it The Edison Vitascope. Hailed as the latest miracle from the Wizard of Menlo Park, the Vitascope's highly publicized debut occurred at Koster & Bials Music Hall in New York on April 23, 1896. It was promoted as a revolutionary exhibition, despite the fact that Muybridge had devoted an entire hall to film projection at the Chicago World's Fair in 1893!!

What happened to Muybridge's place in history? A lot. the French didn't want an insane Englishman to have invented movies. The Americans wanted their man. The Edison Company wanted their own version to become the official history, because that was most profitable version for them. The British rejected a tainted expatriate in favor of a safer, more English candidate, albeit one with an inferior claim. Nobody wanted to give the credit to a confessed murderer who collected images of naked prostitutes. Everybody just wanted Muybridge to go away. And so he did, at least until quite recently, when his accomplishments were rediscovered and re-evaluated.

"Insane?" you think, "Murderer? Isn't that melodramatic?"

He admitted to the latter, and his own lawyers claimed the former.

Several years before his 1880 exhibition, Muybridge stalked and killed his wife's lover at point blank range with dozens of witnesses. He was jailed for three months before his trial for first degree murder. He acknowledged premeditation during his testimony. His lawyers used a two-edged defense: (1) they used the legal argument that he was not guilty by reason of insanity; (2) they snuck in the utterly extra-legal sympathy argument that killing one's wife's lover was a justifiable act, especially in this case, since the victim was a well-known cad and seducer. The jury rejected the insanity argument, but Muybridge was acquitted anyway - despite having no legitimate legal defense after the insanity argument fell apart. He owed his freedom to the unpredictability of the American jury system in the 19th century West. According to a word screen at the end of the movie, it was the last instance of a murderer being found not guilty in the USA based on the logic that the victim deserved to die.

Muybridge became convinced that the victim was the father of his child, and thus chose to have nothing to do with his (possible) son, even though the allegedly faithless Mrs. Muybridge died when the lad was still a toddler. In the ultimate irony, it turned out that the boy was probably his. He almost seemed to be a clone of Eadweard, according to those who have studied the photographs of them both.

So it's a great subject for a movie, and a rollicking good time, right?

Wrong.

Somehow, contrary to all logic, the filmmakers managed to make a tedious film that is barely watchable. I am fascinated by this subject, and struggled to keep my hands off the fast-forward button.

It does have some plusses, however. The story is beautifully photographed. It's also historically accurate in what it does portray, having lovingly recreated details of Muybridge's outdoor "studio." The problem is that it seems to portray the wrong things. Somehow it fails to hammer home the fact that Muybridge is the Patient Zero and Mitochondrial Eve of cinema. His legendary 1880 screening is not even mentioned, and the fact that he was the first man ever to project moving images is glossed over as a throw-away conversation between Muybridge and his wife. "Eadweard, I've never seen anything like this. Nobody has."

At any rate, the film provides the context for some awesome nudity. The following clips are in 1080hd:

Jodi Balfour. Rya Lefevre, Sarah Goodwill and Vanessa Walsh

Meisha Lowe

Rya Lefevre, Sarah Goodwill, Stephanie Izsak and Vanessa Walsh

Sara Canning (non nude)

The captures:

Lefevre

Goodwill

Izsak

Walsh

Lowe

Balfour

Ice

s2e7, 720p

Alyson Bath

Check Other Crap for updates in real time, or close to it.

Ruby Cairo

1992, 1440x1080

Andie MacDowell

Between Us

2016, 1080hd

Johnny's comments:

Gotta admit I gave up on Between Us about 15 minutes in when one scene was so annoying I just couldn't watch any more. Don't usually bail on movies but I just couldn't be bothered after this awful scene. And I only watched for Olivia Thirlby, but I wasn't going to make it to the end of this.

Analeigh Tipton film clip (caps below)

Olivia Thirlby film clip (sample below)

The Girl on the Train

2016, 1080hd

Johnny's comments:

The Girl On The Train is about an alcoholic disaster zone (Emily Blunt) who inserts herself into the disappearance of another woman (Haley Bennett) as she struggles to get over her ex-husband (Justin Theroux) who has a new wife (Rebecca Ferguson) and child. Not a bad adult drama based on a bestselling book that is more about hiding the story from the audience and doesn't really succeed at that either. Solid watch but hardly memorable.

Haley Bennett film clips (collages below)