Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey

by Marta Braun

Etienne-Jules Marey was an inventor whose methods of recording movement revolutionized our way of visualizing time and motion. Best remembered for his chronophotography, Marey constructed a single-camera system that led the way to cinematography. Picturing Time, the first complete survey of Marey's work, investigates the far reaching effects of Marey's inventions on stream-of-consciousness literature, psychoanalysis, Bergsonian philosophy, and the art of cubists and futurists.

Braun offers a fascinating look at how Marey's chronophotography was used to express the profound transformation in understanding and experiencing time that occurred in the late nineteenth century. Featuring 335 illustrations, Picturing Time includes many unpublished examples of Marey's chronophotographs and cinematic work. It also contains a complete bibliography of his writings and the first catalog of his films, photographic prints, and recently discovered negatives.

Genres: Photography, Film

472 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[Evan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A stunning effort, and a long overdue consideration of the career of the earliest cinema pioneer. I checked this out from the library a few years ago and was blown away by the thoroughness of the research and supporting illustrations. Like many of the "pre-cinema" film pioneers, Marey was not setting out to make motion pictures, he was trying to find ways to quantify and prove scientific phenomena, and his mechanical visual devices to capture images were devised to that end alone. Via later means, these sequential images could be set into motion.

kr, eg '19

[I am Clitterbox]

yeah. im so glad to get this in the mail... i hope it lives up...