在瑞尔森大学教授玛塔·布劳恩（Marta Braun）开始我们的采访之前，她需要知道她将被询问的电影.如今，奥克兰电影制片人马克·沙弗（Marc Shaffer）的纪录片“揭露穆布里奇（Muybridge）”，讲述了英国出生的19世纪摄影师Eadweard Muybridge，他的开拓性动作研究长期以来为动画师和特殊效果艺术家提供了灵感。

布劳恩出现在那部电影中。但是，作为穆布里奇的传记作者和专家，她最近也一直在提出有关乔丹·皮尔（Jordan Peele）的问题最新的恐怖大片“ nope”，in which the main characters are descendants of a jockey from one of Muybridge’s motion studies at the University of Pennsylvania (a continuation of a project he began in Palo Alto under former California Gov. Leland Stanford).

在电影中，凯克·帕尔默（Keke Palmer）的角色祖母绿（Emerald）将她的祖先称为有史以来第一部电影。

“They essentially made a mistake,” Braun explains. “One, it was never made into a movie in Muybridge’s time. And two, it certainly wasn’t the first stop-action photograph that Muybridge made. There was a confusion between the earlier Stanford work and the later Pennsylvania.”

“Exposing Muybridge,” the winner of the Writers Guild of America’s 2022 documentary screenplay award, ends such confusion, as Shaffer presents Muybridge’s life and work in a film that tells the photographer’s story through his work and the testimony of historians, photographers, professors and other experts like Braun. As well as one knowledgeable collector of Muybridge’s work who has written a still-to-be-shot Muybridge biopic, actor Gary Oldman.

Shaffer’s own introduction to Muybridge came when the two-time Emmy nominee was making his 2013 documentary “American Jerusalem: Jews and the Making of San Francisco.” As he considered archival photos he might use, the work of one photographer caught his attention, in particular a photo taken at a bridge-less Golden Gate with a solitary figure taking in the view.

“I really felt like I was being drawn forward, pulled toward this distant vista,” Shaffer said. “There were things that caught me in terms of just finding them strange. For instance, the man’s back is to us. That seemed to be a very odd way to take a photograph, especially back in that period when I’m so used to seeing people posing very stiffly for pictures.

“The fact that the person was looking away to this vanishing point of an empty vista had a kind of romanticism to it for me. You see a lot of that in Muybridge’s work when you start looking at his landscapes.”

他的好奇心激动了，Shaffer转向Google，在那里他的搜索量超过150万次。Muybridge的名字不熟悉，但他的运动研究并非如此。Shaffer发现了更多：Muybridge是一位摄影师，即使在他的艺术期间，也正在操纵图像。在西部，他在海湾地区开枪射击和优胜美地，前往阿拉斯加拍摄因纽特人，并冒险前往南和中美洲。即使对于其中的专家来说，“揭露穆布里奇”也是一种学习经历。

“我知道阿拉斯加的布鲁里溃疡t not to the extent Marc found out,” said Braun. “Muybridge constantly presents me as a scholar with new areas to investigate, new stories to want to tell.”

Braun sat for eight hours of on-camera interviews, but her part inthe documentary went far beyond that. On and off for three years, she corresponded with Shaffer about the project, answering his questions and suggesting other experts.

That attention to detail carried over into how Shaffer shot the film. Many documentarians who use still photographs in their work find a way to animate them or otherwise alter them to create some kind of moving image. Shaffer didn’t completely eschew animation, but he aimed to present the work as Muybridge shot it.

“I wanted you to see what Muybridge made and if I over-filtered it or over-manipulated, it wouldn’t be Muybridge’s images anymore,” Shaffer said. “It would be my images.

“我必须找到一种向您展示他的作品的方法，这些作品具有足够的精力和视觉兴趣，以引起您作为观众的关注。另一件事是您试图向某人展示照片，因为您希望他们理解照片。您不能仅仅飞行并在12秒内连续制作10张图像。”

Shaffer的解决方案是以超高定义的4K射击，并以最高的图像质量以最高分辨率进行扫描或重新摄影的照片。他认为作曲家乍得·坎农（Chad Cannon）和编辑伊丽莎白·哈维兰德（Elisabeth Haviland James）进一步使静止图片更加活跃。

Shaffer also re-created Muybridge’s original horse-in-motion Stanford experiment, shooting on a ranch in Castro Valley with an array of 84 video cameras hardwired to a computer system. Over three days, horse and rider ran past the cameras over and over again, in an effort to capture the horse at just the right moment.

The sequence is not just a nod to Muybridge’s work but to how it has remained relevant in the more than century since. Among the films that bear his influence is “The Matrix,” its famous “bullet time” special effect taking its inspiration from Muybridge’s motion studies. The special-effects team took home an Oscar for work that continues to influence filmmakers.

“I got it stuck in my head that I would re-create the horse-in-motion moment — in bullet time.” Shaffer said. “It’d be this big meta reference nobody would get but me and maybe ‘The Matrix’s special-effects guys.”

“And I love that the rider is a woman and not a man, but a woman in male clothing because it was a male rider (in the original study) … Given the themes in the movie. I love the idea that there was something deceptive about what I was doing. It was representing something that it was not. That was very Muybridge to me.”

“Exposing Muybridge”(not rated) is out onvideo on demand Tuesday, Aug. 2, on iTunes, Prime Video and other major platforms. Also available on DVD and Blu-ray.