Figures in motion

Eadweard Muybridge was the pioneer photographer whose experiments in stop-motion photography helped develop the technology that resulted in motion pictures. In this sly and elegant short film, Muybridge forces his young wife to pose nude with his male lover. As the photographer begins to take his shots, he becomes more and more excited by the control he can exercise over both his lovers. An initially camp and light treatment of the erotics that forms the basis of voyeuristic desire in cinema, the film becomes progressively darker as Muybridge’s wife becomes the object of not only desire, but of appropriation and violence, signifying that even at the birth of cinema the male gaze was rapacious and pornographic.