The Berthauds eagerly taught Muybridge the tricks of the young trade, from cameras to lenses to developing. While visiting Paris in an attempt to sell a patent for a printing process, he fell in with the brothers Berthaud, who ran a photography studio called Maison Hélios. He came to his eventual career late in life, after stints as a successful bookseller, an unsuccessful inventor, and a less successful venture capitalist. The son of a coal merchant, Muybridge - who was born Edward James Muggeridge and would modify his name multiple times over the course of his life, adding and rearranging letters seemingly at random (he is also frequently identified as Eadweard Muybridge) - hailed from England and traveled to America at age 20 in search of fortune. Edward Muybridge was a photographer and inventor whose experiments in motion-sequence still photography and image projection earned him the title “the Father of Motion Pictures.” He was also, in a plot twist perhaps only a filmmaker with Peele’s CV could appreciate, a stone-cold murderer. ![]() What we do know for certain about the personnel involved in that embryonic, GIF-like movie is who devised and shot it. “Did you know that the very first assembly of photographs to create a motion picture was a two-second clip of a Black man on a horse?” The question, posed by Emerald Haywood (Keke Palmer) early in Jordan Peele’s Nope, sets up a fiction by rooting it in fact: The clip in question, shown in the film’s opening credits (and in its trailer), is acknowledged by most historians as the first primitive example of the “motion picture” the fiction is the identity of the jockey, sadly lost to time, but proclaimed in Nope to be Emerald’s great-great-great-grandfather, founder of “Heywood Hollywood Horses.”
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