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 Occident’s legs
leave the ground. I often think of this moment and the great excitement and suspicion
it provoked. 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,
Muybridge arrives 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!
The inventor of the Zoopraxiscope shoots his wife’s 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
passion and 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 culture’s long and enduring fascination with
murder and unsolved deaths: to use a word perhaps maladroitly, an undying
obsession. 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 didn’t
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 still lingers 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 don’t 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 Larkyn’s 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
Occident’s 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
micro gestures 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
sorcerer’s apprentice, who cannot send the spirits back to whence they came.
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 Rodin’s 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 Muybridge’s 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 Muybridge’s ongoing endeavour became a partly unconscious matter
of re-balancing his 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.