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    Loops and joins: Muybridge and the optics of animation

    Leslie, Esther (2013) Loops and joins: Muybridge and the optics of animation. Early Popular Visual Culture 11 (1), pp. 28-40. ISSN 1746-0654.

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    Abstract

    Film is rightly understood to be an art of movement, but stasis plays a role too, from the first films which cranked into seeming life out of stillness to the mech- 5 anisms of contemporary animation, which is pervasive in cinema today. This article explores the relationship of stillness and movement in early cinema and pre-cinematic optical technologies, which demand a flick of the wrist to produce movement out of stasis. Muybridge’s sequential photographs found their way into some of these early and later technologies and provided the basis for such 10 demonstration of the emergence of movement out of stillness. If mobility and stillness are concentrated oppositions in Muybridge’s work, so too are the related themes of animation and inanimateness, a partnering that relates less to the analytical dissection of life and more to the evocation of a spirited magic.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Keyword(s) / Subject(s): phantasmagoria, phantasmagoric, Zoöpraxiscope, skirt dance, 15 circularity
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Creative Arts, Culture and Communication
    Research Centres and Institutes: Contemporary Literature, Centre for, Humanities, Birkbeck Institute for the (BIH)
    Depositing User: Esther Leslie
    Date Deposited: 11 Feb 2013 10:50
    Last Modified: 09 Aug 2023 12:32
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/6115

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