The season starts with a multimedia courtroom western. “Bullet Time” by Alexander Kerlin tells of love, jealousy and the birth of cinema. Mixed.
Who was Eadweard Muybridge, born in 1830 near London? Leland Stanford, born six years earlier near New York, is probably better known by name. The lawyer and entrepreneur was one of the founders of the Central Pacific Railroad and Stanford University, and was an animal breeder and horse lover. Muybridge, on the other hand, was a photographer and a pioneer of the moving image. One of his works is particularly well known: he was the first to capture the individual phases of a galloping horse’s movement on photographic plates – “The Horse in Motion” – and thus founded chronophotography. This series of images led to many other cycles of movement sequences. Muybridge photographed other animals, athletes, dancers and actresses. He was first inspired to do this by Stanford, who wanted to know whether a horse had all four legs in the air during a gallop – in other words, whether it was flying – or not.
Acquittal despite guilty plea
In his private life, Muybridge encountered a problem that he quickly resolved himself – he cold-bloodedly shot his wife’s lover, Flora, who was also the biological father of a child that Muybridge had believed to be his own until shortly before the crime. Amazingly, Muybridge, who allowed himself to be taken to the nearest sheriff’s station without resistance by witnesses present and made a full confession of guilt, was acquitted by a jury – all male, of course. He was, however, the last defendant in California to have this luck. He went on to make the groundbreaking innovations of photography, and Flora died six months after the trial.
