The IMDB Canon, Vol. 2: Sallie Gardner at a Gallop (1878)

IMDB user votes (as of this writing): 919
Number of user reviews: 3
User score: 7.3

Eadweard Muybridge's experiment to see whether or not all four of a horse's legs leave the ground during a gallop is conventionally presented as the immediate prehistory of film, the first pictograph in the evolution of a filmic language's alphabet. Everyone who has cared to read on the topic knows the result; the horse does, indeed, briefly suspend itself in the air with each stride, and with this breakthrough, motion pictures found their purpose and blah blah blah, Star Wars.

What interests me about Sallie Gardner is not the anecdote that forms the introductory paragraphs to every history of film ever written; I am interested instead in its role as the successor to Passage de Venus (note that IMDB lists no entries in 1875, 1876, or 1877), with which it shares a number of traits, being both brief records of natural events unadorned by narrative, editing, or narration. But, these surface similarities aside, the two films are sharply opposed in their aims and effects. Whereas Pierre Janssen's purpose was observation--he used his "photographic revolver" to record and preserve an exceptional event that could otherwise be observed in real time--Muybridge's goal is virtually the opposite, aiming to discover the truth behind a commonplace event invisible to the human eye. It was with Sallie Gardner that film began to augment the eye, enhance it, enable it; the horse's gallop is everyday, but the anatomization of that gallop is possible only with the new technologies afforded by film. This is what Walter Benjamin views, 58 years later, as the empowering dimension of film; its ability to reveal the secrets of the mundane, to defamiliarize the everyday through manipulation of size and speed. For Benjamin, the goal of film should be to politicize art; that is, to spur mass action through the revelation of routine social injustice and inequality. But Muybridge has no socialist (or otherwise political) aims; he just wants to win a bet. His singular focus is reflected in the complete isolation of his subject; in Sallie Gardner, the horse and horse alone is what matters, while the human content (the rider, Domm--the first person ever filmed) is utterly irrelevant. So, while Muybridge follows Janssen's lead in eliding humanity from film, he does elevate the pertinence of both the quotidian and the living, in contrast to the far-away, dead cosmos that was Janssen's fixation. But that is not to say that Muybridge's approach is necessarily better; merely that his aims are different, that his focus on living things is compatible with his use of technology to extend the capabilities of the human viewer, who--while ignored as the subject of the film--is empowered, as spectator, to tame the horse with nothing but a gaze.

Sallie Gardner may be best, viewed, in this sense, as the first cyborg fantasy in film. I do not mean that it features cyborgs, but rather, that it turns the viewers themselves into cyborgs, by encouraging them to leave their limited bodies behind in favor of the liberating might of technology. This demonstration of power, is, after all, the entire point of Muybridge's experiment--it is the avenue by which the viewer gains mastery over nature, unravels its mysteries, dominates the beings within. While Sallie Gardner may be a record of the past, its purpose is not to ensure archival of the past, as with Passage de Venus, but to promise a future--a future in which not only does the viewer not have to wonder, "Do all of the legs leave the ground or not?", but in which that same technique can be applied to every other kind of rapid motion. The futurity of Muybridge's film is embedded into its very structure; the "truth" of the film is invisible during the filming of the event (i.e., the galloping of the horse in real life), and can be seen only when the film itself is examined. The film thereby becomes "truer" than the original event, for the original event is no longer the point--the point is, instead, the film's manipulation of that event for the benefit of the viewer. Hence the film's encouragement of the viewer to trust in technology, to trust in its ability to create a new event from an old one, an event that can occur only when one watches the film. This new event exceeds nature, creates reality--as aforementioned, a cyborg reality. Sallie Gardner may thus be viewed as the first example of techno-utopianism in film, the first example of its intoxicating ability not only to procure new knowledge from the world, but to transform that world, and thereby subjugate it, in an ever-more-elaborate phantasmagoria of sight and sound.

Other connections: Eadward Muybridge was an absurdly influential individual. He was, of course, one of the key influences on William Dickson, who invented the movie camera as we know it, and Thomas Edison, who effectively started the American film industry. But that's not all; Muybridge's experiments with multiple exposures also directly inspired Marcel Duchamp's early work, so yes, Muybridge pretty much invented Dada too, and was therefore one of the main progenitors of modernism in art.

Other most-voted films of 1878: Not yet. Sallie Gardner is the only IMDB entry for the year, and 1879, 1880, 1881, and 1882 are all completely empty.