The Mechanical Man

Étienne-Jules Marey had a towering impact on the development of cinema both technologically and aesthetically. His earliest work, The Mechanical Man (1885), is a curious and groundbreaking animation for its time. On the one hand, its tricks are meant to serve the technical purpose of reproducing movement; on the other, its visuals resemble the yet-to-be-discovered stylism of postmodern art. This precursor to arthouse film stimulates our imagination to recreate the movements of a human being, transforming the sticks on the canvas into a figure finding its path. Simultaneously, our thoughts begin to question how industrialisation has transformed us into a uniform army of people, each lacking individuality, each acting merely as a cog in the mechanised tapestry we call life itself.