Inside Out Media’s documentary Exposing Muybridge, featuring Academy-Award winning actor Gary Oldman is now available on DigitalHD, Cable & Satellite VOD, Blu-ray and DVD from Gravitas Ventures. The latest documentary from award-winning filmmaker Marc Shaffer (“Marijuana Gold Rush”), Exposing Muybridge, was the recipient of The Writers Guild of America Award for Outstanding Documentary Screenplay, 2022.
Brilliant, ambitious, and mischievous, the 19th-century San Francisco photographer Eadweard Muybridge lived the lives of a dozen men before his breakthrough photographs of running horses set the course for the development of cinema and transformed the camera into a machine of unmatched perception and persuasion.
“Eadweard Muybridge changed the world with his camera,” Shaffer says. “That would be reason enough to make a documentary, but his story is so much more than that. He led a fascinating, dramatic life, and one full of delicious surprises.”
Far from a relic of the past, Muybridge marks a beginning of “now,” his work catalyzing much of our modern culture, inspiring cutting-edge artists, scientists, and innovators, people who continue to reshape how we interpret and experience our world. Muybridge’s powerful influence on pop culture can still be seen today, as in Jordan Peele’s hit horror film “Nope,” currently in theatres.
Few figures have played so seminal a role in our moving picture storytelling culture as Eadweard Muybridge. At the behest of his patron, the railroad baron and former California governor Leland Stanford, Muybridge produced those unprecedented images of running horses.
Mischievous, resilient, deceitful, proud — Muybridge was a complicated man, and his personal story is as melodramatic as his professional one is distinguished, imbued with ambition and success, loss and betrayal, even the cold-blooded killing of a romantic rival.
“The machine cannot lie,” Leland Stanford declared of Muybridge’s horse-in-motion images. But what about the photographer?
Exposing Muybridge reveals long-buried secrets hiding in Muybridge’s photographs that force us to ask, can we truly believe what we see in a photograph?
