Commentaries on this Media

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Muybridge remediated

by Critical Commons Manager

Equestrian is a conceptual exercise as well as an art project. Instead of concealing the photographic apparatus by which a series of exquisite motion studies are carried out, van Bakel instead revels in them, evincing a 19th century-style fascination with the apparatus of cinema itself. This short film also cleverly invokes one of cinema's originary moments in the mythology of Muybridge and Leland Stanford using serial photography to prove that all four of a horse's hooves are off the ground at the same time when running at a gallop. In Equestrian, when this moment arrives, the "camera" virtually pans around the horse and rider in an ecstatic spiral of epistephilia.

An homage to Edweard Muybridge

by Critical Commons Manager

This overt homage to Muybridge's time-motion experiments makes no attempt to conceal the photographic array used to capture a horse and rider moving through space, creating an effect that is similar to bullet time, but revels in the artifice of temporal dissection.