Number of user reviews: 2
User score: 6.2
The third installment of IMDB's canon finds itself in a bit of a quandry. After 4 whole years (1879, 1880, 1881, 1882) without a single IMDB entry, one finally appears in 1883, and, well, Eadward Muybridge is back. Moreover, he is doing much the same thing that he was in the previous entry, recording another animal's gait, this time a buffalo's. The buffalo (or, more accurately, the American bison) was racing toward extinction at this time, being the target of widespread (and government-sponsored) culling campaigns, their population reaching its lowest point around 1890; by 1883, most younger Americans would know the buffalo only from stories of the frontier, the rare animals being as exotic to their 19th-century imaginations as panda bears and Bengal tigers are to us. But Muybridge's purpose is not one of preservation, not a means of saving a doomed animal; it may, in fact, be precisely the opposite, the final conquering of a savage beast, the ultimate symbol of a once-wild nature cowering before the might of man. Many of the same points I made yesterday are applicable again here; the filming of the buffalo shrinks and tames the animal, allowing the viewer to safely examine, and thereby dominate it. I could again argue that the film a prosthesis for the eye, enhancing its abilities beyond its natural limitations and transforming the viewer into a kind of cyborg, empowered by the promise of film technology to pacify the natural world, unlock its mysteries, and what have you.
But that would be redundant, and really, redundancy may be the more important aspect of Buffalo Running. For how else to explain the much lower level of interest from IMDB viewers for this film than for Sallie Gardner? Not only have the total votes declined from over 900 to a mere 128, but the average score, also has declined from 7.3 to 6.2. Does this disparity really indicate a gulf in the craftmanship between Muybridge's films? Did he lose his touch in between 1878 and 1883?
I argue no. The difference between Sallie Gardner and Buffalo Running is best explained by that nebulous but always-present factor in film critique: impact. Impact is best defined as, well, the level of importance that a film attains by being in the right place at the right time. Sometimes, that importance is defined by the level of influence it exerts on other films; other times, by the amount of retroactive praise it receives from critics; yet others, by being unusual or the first of its kind in some respect. Buffalo Running achieves none of those things; Muybridge is virtually always discussed in the context of Sallie Gardner. History remembers him as the "horse photographer guy"; his other experiments have resigned to obscurity, and indeed, Buffalo Running is so forgotten nowadays that it doesn't even have a Wikipedia article. Hence my insistence on discussing impact here, as, despite the inadequacy of the term, it is perhaps the only term that captures all of the valences relevant to a movie attaining the #1 spot for a given year on IMDB. Somehow, years later, a movie has to attract more votes than any of its contemporaries. Some will get there by making a lot of money at the box office and coasting on residual popularity from there; some by retaining a cult following for many years, long after the year's immediate zeitgeist hits faded away; some for being historical and/or technical milestones, particularly in the earlier years; and likewise, some will reach the top by being critical favorites from older eras to which viewers are unlikely to have much exposure beyond the most canonical classics. And Buffalo Running gets there not for any of those reasons, but because it's the only one to choose from. It will be the least-voted-on film in this entire project. The IMDB Canon has thus (ironically) canonized a film completely obscure and ignored, a film that would have continued to be ignored if not for this very act of arbitrary canonization.
Other connections: Muybridge, as discussed yesterday, directly or indirectly pretty much everyone involved in the early film industry and the early modernist art scene.
Other most-voted films of 1883: Buffalo Running, as with the previous two entries, wins by default, with an even lower vote total this time.
No comments:
Post a Comment