Near the beginning of “Nope”, Emerald (Keke Palmer), who runs an animal wrangling service for Hollywood shoots with his brother Otis Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya), provided the pitch as a set. increase. (If you have seen trailer, I have heard the summary version. )
She cites a milestone in the development of the film. A series of famous 19th-century photographs depicting a moving horse. Emerald suggests that the crew she is addressing will know the name of the man and photographer Eadweard Muybridge who took those images. However, they cannot name the jockey on the horse. Emerald says that pioneering actor, Stuntman, was her great and great grandfather.
The last part is a little invention by writer / director Jordan Peele. His claim is that the identity of the black horse rider is probably unknown, and from the beginning of the movie, the camera has the power to see, leaving certain people and certain stories invisible. That is.
Muybridge is the guiding spirit of “Nope”, and the brothers, along with electronics store employees (Brandon Perea) and cinematographer (Michael Wincott), try to take pictures of the existence of elusive extraterrestrial life forms. increase. They are trying to capture impossible shots with subjects that are too fast to pin, like the horses in Mybridge. And UFOs scramble all the electricity in that path, so they have to innovate with analog technology, as Mybridge did. (My Bridge was also a chronicler in the western United States.)
However, the actual deployment of Mybridge’s experiments, and the question of whether the rider’s identity is really unknown, is complicated.
In the preface to his book “Animals in Motion,” Muybridge took a picture of the movement in 1872 when he tried to answer the question of whether all four feet were off the ground at the same time at any point in the horse’s stride. I remembered that the experiment had begun. According to his own explanation, he was able to capture the silhouettes of four aerial feet at the Sacramento racetrack with more or less ordinary photographic equipment. But that effort ignited his desire to make something more cinematic, as we now think. Images taken quickly and continuously at defined time intervals are good for a general understanding of animal movement.
In the late 1870s, on a farm in Leland Stanford, Governor of Palo Alto, California (and future senator and university founder), Mybridge conducted further experiments and installed a system for connecting carefully placed cameras to wires. Developed. The movement of horses along the track may trip. (In the meantime, Mybridge was tried to kill his wife’s lover and was acquitted for being a justifiable murder, but let’s leave it for a future peel movie. .)
Muybridge’s recollection of the series of photographs that became known as the “The Horse in Motion” was first published in 1878. The following year, he began holding presentations with a series of photographs, or technically their artistic reproductions. He works with a device called the Zoopraxiscope, the predecessor of the projector. And as far as “moving horses” are concerned A few (But Not all) Still image Shows the names of riders held at the Library of Congress.
However, those pictures are not the images shown in “No”. Mybridge works with an unnamed rider in the film.Plate number 626Part of a series of mobile studies after Mybridge started at the University of Pennsylvania in 1884 and published in 1887.
By then, he had access to photographic plates, a new process sensitive to light and detail. At Penn, he did what he described as a “more systematic and comprehensive study,” shooting different animals, men, and women of different shapes and sizes, often nude. After all, his goal was to see his body move.
Even “naked riders, male and female horses,” as the narrator of “Eadweared Muybridge, Zoopraxographer” (1975), an early documentary of Thom Andersen (“Los Angeles Plays Itself”), states. was. I want to learn more about Mybridge’s range of ambitions and see his photographs come alive. (the movie is Streaming on Mubi.. )
The rider who appears in “Nope” happens to be dressed and Public version of those images Indicates that the photo is meant to explain the gallop. According to the caption information, the horse was a Thoroughbred mare named Annie. It also shows the various times and measurements associated with her stride.
However, the rider’s name is not mentioned. According to Andersen’s film, that’s typical. Although the Mybridge catalog “lists the names of all horses, mules, and dogs,” the narration states, Mybridge generally “identifies human models only by number.”
Therefore, the images of “Nope” are, strictly speaking, the horseback riding that produced the movie, the pioneering actors shown in them, the animal wranglers, and the stuntmen are probably unknown. He sits with many other male athletes, women who imitate household chores, and children in Mybridge’s work: A cast of anonymous characters from early film history.
