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Occident Airborne

Eadweard Muybridge at the racetrack, with his intricate system of trip wires, electric

triggers and twenty-four cameras, captures the moment when all of Occidents legs

leave the ground. I often think of this moment and the great excitement and suspicion itprovoked. Rodin was not impressed by the man who stopped time, pronouncing, It is

the artist who is truthful and it is the photography which lies, for in reality time does

not stop.

Occident airborne, such a beautiful coupling occidere, to fall like the setting sun, is

now floating in the ether as pollen, a horse carried by air. Repeated with speed, the

words are a galloping; whisper them slow and you become suspended above the

ground. Occident airborne.

While continuing my reverie, I hear the sharp report of a gun and imagine another

micro moment in time. October 17th 1874, learning that his wife has a lover, Muybridgearrives at the home of a Major Harry Larkyns and fires a pistol, thereby committing an

act of murder.

The script reads so:

"Good evening Major, my name is Muybridge and here is the answer to the letter you

sent my wife."

BANG!

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The inventor of the Zoopraxiscope shoots his wifes lover dead! But wait! In the space

between the barrel and its target I can freeze the bullet momentarily, just before

Larkyns heavy body hits the ground. Occident airborne. Night air. Halt fireflies.

Rotascope backward. Projectile suspended.

Why focus on this act? Muybridge is neither first nor last to commit a crime of passionand certainly not the only noted historical figure to have done so. I am drawn to it as

someone who has always felt that the existence of the moving image invites a discovery

and by doing so implies the necessity of a crime. My attraction is further assisted and

approved by moving image cultures long and enduring fascination with murder and

unsolved deaths: to use a word perhaps maladroitly, an undyingobsession. Unless one

has lived in a war zone, where else are more fatalities to be witnessed than those

vicariously experienced on screen? It seems more than apt that the father of motion

pictures should have been the defendant in a murder trial. We know well that all you

need to make a movie is a girl and a gun. Godard didnt mention the corpse, but he

knew it would follow, and happily supplied one, only for Antonioni to promptly erase

it. Take away the corpse, take away the girl, remove the firearm and the crime stilllingers somewhere between frames. Having given images movement, we seek further

clues in freeze-frames. Contrary and contradictory as ever, we attempt to locate death

and simultaneously disavow it.

I dont write of any real offense, more a felony of the imagination, a recurring virtual

misdeed. Is it an indwelling folly to believe one can control time and not merely

manipulate its representation? If so, we are all suspects.

The scene outside Harry Larkyns door returns and persists as a re-run on my late night

mind. Wriggling, like a stop-motion lizard in a tin, I occupy a space between Occidents

hooves in the air and the corpse on the ground. I draw comfort from being there. I want

to crawl right into the place where time has been stopped. It feels safe and familiar. As

a viewer of cinema and television, I used to feel I had escaped my own time-span in

entering another. There was often the dread that outside of this space I was lost. The act

of spectating stopped the clock. In editing and video making I felt like an alchemist

controlling durations, cycles, and time codes.

I lament the passing of analogue editing, for it was through the constant detective work

of fast-forwarding, and rewinding tapes, and through repeated viewing of long pre-rolls

that I would become familiar with my material. Not only aware of the action, but

increasingly aware of all the tics and shifts hidden in tiny movements. These microgestures revealed what was truly at issue within the image. It was through this time-

consuming and laborious process that time yielded up its secrets. Like many teenagers

in the 70s, I would derive the greatest pleasure from slowing the VHS image right down

frame by frame on the domestic video-recorder. Then speeding up and rewinding until a

secret loop revealed itself some portion of duration to play tricks with. For this reason

I have always found the works of Douglas Gordon utterly commonplace. Under the

right circumstances the ghost in the machine becomes readily apparent, although

finding it creates an unsettling feeling of power, like the sorcerers apprentice, who

cannot send the spirits back to whence they came.

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Muybridge is the Sorcerer Murderer; the man who stopped Time and got away with it.

Once again you are reminded: Time does not stop.Say it as a statement. Intone it as a

question. Make it become a litany.

Avant-garde filmmaker Hollis Frampton inverted Rodins sour grape remark into:

It is the photograph which is truthful, and the artist who lies, for in reality time does stop.

Time seems, sometimes, to stop, to be suspended in tableaux disjunct from change and flux.

Most human beings experience, at one time or another, moments of intense passion, during

which perception seems vividly arrested: erotic rapture, or extremes of rage and terror came to

mind. Eadweard Muybridge may be certified as having experienced at least one such moment

of extraordinary passion.

Frampton goes on to hypothesise that the Muybridges action, outside time, forced him

to later devise exhaustive incidences of halting time through the act of photography,

until he had drained the murderous moment of significance. Thus it is suggested that

Muybridges ongoing endeavour became a partly unconscious matter of re-balancinghis psychic equilibrium. He invites us to add another twenty-four imaginary images to

the archive,Man raising a pistol and firing.

We are asked to return to the scene of the crime.