Guy Delisle offers an offbeat portrait of a little-known pioneer of cinema!

Had you heard of Eadweard Muybridge before? Certainly not, or very little! Thanks to Guy Delisle – Quebec author famous for his autobiographical comics (including “Pyongyang”, “Burmese Chronicles”, “Jerusalem Chronicles” and “The Bad Father’s Guide”) – you will be able to find out more about this character, unjustly forgotten by history, who was the first man to tame the movement and project a film. Through this chronicle of an obsessive passion, Guy Delisle will, with a lot of humor and with his stylized caricature, recognizable at first glance, explain to you how a complex guy, with a bad character, even misanthropic in soul, will succeed in stopping time.

The year is 1885: long before Edison’s inventions and ten years before the Lumière brothers’ first public screening. Eadweard Muybridge is a young Englishman who emigrates to California. He first worked as a bookseller for five years in New York, then in San Francisco where he discovered photography: a technical process in expansion, but which was only in its infancy. Passionate about this field, he quickly became one of the most famous photographers of his time: his first photos taken in the great outdoors (where no one had yet had the idea of ​​taking photos, particularly in the valley of Yosemite or in the wild west) earned him an order from the army for a report in Alaska – which the United States had just purchased from the Russian empire – to introduce this new state to the Americans.

With the help of Leland Stanford (boss of the Central Pacific Railroad, which made it possible to cross the entire territory by rail from one coast to the other and who became the richest man in the country and the governor of California), he will tackle a problem that torments him: how to fix, on film, the course of a galloping horse. Indeed, before his research on the decomposition of the movement finally bears fruit – he will discover that, during certain phases, this animal is found without a single hoof touching the ground – and this man without any moral consideration succeeds in his catches in sight, no one had accomplished such a feat… His technique, which is still used today, was dazzling progress for photography and, by extension, for cinema: moreover, the proud and avant-garde goalkeeper Muybridge will also be the first to invent a searchlight.

This instructive, hectic and chaotic life, linked to the history of photography (certain photos have been included in numerous dictionaries and encyclopedias, and we can see the main ones reproduced between the different chapters of this successful graphic novel), with in parallel that of the 7th^e art, is a thrilling testimony to the race for invention of this pioneering era. This also demonstrates, once again, that Guy Delisle is a skilled narrator, as effective in terms of the text as the illustrations in this exercise.

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Gilles RATIER

“For a fraction of a second : the eventful life of’Eadweard Muybridge » par Guy Delisle

Éditions Delcourt (€23.95) — EAN: 9 782 41 308 585 0

Publication October 23, 2024