The Lady Rider

Émile Reynaud’s The Lady Rider (1878) is a precursor to his more polished work, The Steeple-Chase (1878). A lady in a riding habit gallops on horseback in and out of the frame within a brief loop. The specificity of the solitary rider draws attention to the function of the Praxinoscope, thereby limiting the viewer’s ability to accept the succession of images as continuous motion. Instead, the action is perceived as a repetition of the same gesture. Unlike scenes in which a character performs within a central field, the repeated entering and exiting of the frame exposes the narrative limits of the optical toy on which the strip was projected. This animation clearly indicates Reynaud’s experimentation with storytelling, later realised more fully in subsequent works.