Etienne-Jules Marey's
chronophotograph images of a male body in motion flash onscreen, a ghostly relic of the first transformations of time and movement into cinema.
Impossible to count them--which isn't to say that they were innumerable, but one was blurred, one incomplete, one of them covered by another, and that one covered by the one following him, and so on, like in Etienne-Jules Marey's famous
chronophotograph, where you can see the repeated image of a hurdler and his flight path, just as repetitive, leaving a trace of four black dots and three white dots that the inventor used as reference points.
McFarland references another photographic icon--the pioneering Eadweard Muybridge, who in the late nineteenth century produced a now-famous series of
chronophotographs in an attempt to determine whether a galloping horse ever lifted all four feet off the ground at once.
"Copycats: Anschutz
Chronophotographs as Direct Source Material for Early Edison Kinetoscope Films." FH 28.2 (2016): 142-72.
In the late nineteenth century there was a flurry of devices and a parade of names, which all contributed more or less, depending on one's perspective, to the development of cinematic culture in forms that we might recognise today: praxinoscope, zoopraxiscope,
chronophotographs, biofantascope, kinetograph, kinetophonograph, Reynaud, Muybridge, Marey, Friese-Green, Edison, to cite just a handful.
(15.) Marcel Duchamp cites "
chronophotographs" as one