Essential Films Essays

When Eadweard Muybridge trained his cameras on a buffalo in 1883, the species had already been reduced from sixty million to a few thousand. ‘Buffalo Running’ is no mere scientific record, it is cinema's earliest act of ecological conscience. In immortalising this noble beast at the edge of extinction, Muybridge laid the foundations of wildlife documentary film and changed forever the role of the moving image.

In 1882, Muybridge photographed two women sharing a kiss, and in doing so pushed the boundaries of what was morally acceptable to photograph. Revolutionary in technique and radical in subject, 'The Kiss' stands as a testament to human diversity, celebrating the purity of desire without prejudice. It is, above all, a glimpse of the extraordinary potential that moving pictures were to have in society.

Before cinema learned to tell stories, it had to learn to see. In 'The Slide', Émile Reynaud's 1878 Praxinoscope masterpiece, three boys on a snowy hill become the unlikely pioneers of perspective in motion — an achievement so quietly radical it anticipated the visual grammar of film itself.

In 'Athlete Swinging a Pick', Eadweard Muybridge does something stranger than capture motion — he performs it. Swinging a pick through empty air, with no rock in sight, he is not mining the earth but slashing through time itself: liberating photography from its stillness and, in doing so, inventing an art form. Is this the moment the film auteur was born?

Before film existed, Émile Reynaud's 'The Steeple-Chase' proved that animation could capture history itself. Created after the sport's French inauguration, this work demonstrates how moving images transcended mere curiosity to become 'a source of entertainment' through the 'ability to reproduce entertaining events.' By depicting 'actual sporting events in motion,' Reynaud revealed technology's profound power to reshape how audiences experience life.

"The rosette is magic in the sense that it resembles a flower, and yet, it acts as a star folding onto itself." Émile Reynaud's 1878 geometric masterpiece marked animation's first venture into abstract meaning, where "scientific knowledge" became "a passage towards fulfilment" through pulsing rings of divine light.

In 1878, Eadweard Muybridge's groundbreaking work 'Sallie Gardner at a Gallop' captured a horse in motion, challenging perceptions of reality and marking a pivotal moment in visual history. This experiment not only showcased the intersection of art and science but also laid the foundations for the film industry. As audiences witnessed what the human eye could not, Muybridge's images transformed our understanding of motion.