Featuring Interviews With Marta Braun, Ryerson University, Philip Brookman, National Gallery of Art, Luther Gerlach, Wet-plate Photographer, Rebecca Gowers, Author, Thomas Gunning, University of Chicago, Richard Jackson, Kushakaak’, Tlingit Clan Leader, Mark Klett, Photographer and Arizona State University Regents’ Professor, Gary Oldman, Academy-Award Winning Actor and Muybridge Collector, Amy Werbel, Art Historian at the Fashion Institute of Technology, Richard White, Stanford University, and Byron Wolfe, Temple University.
Los Angeles, CA (AUGUST 2, 2022) – 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.
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.
Before his motion photography breakthrough, Muybridge produced one of the most celebrated early landscape catalogues of the American West. He made the first photographs of winemaking in Northern California, produced the first photographs of native Tlingit people and of Southeast Alaska, was the fourth to photograph Yosemite, the first to be hired by the U.S. government to photograph an Indian War (The Modoc War in Northern California), and his photographs of Central America are widely considered the most important early images of the region.
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?
Shaffer also serves as Producer on Exposing Muybridge, along with Producer and Editor Elisabeth Haviland James, and Producer Serginho Roosblad, Executive Producers Nion McEvoy and Leslie Berriman, and Co-executive Producer Dana O’Keefe. The talented team behind the film also includes Composer Chad Cannon; Directors of Photography James Ball, John Behrens, Andreas Burgess, Jay Dacey, Wesley Johnson, Chris Patterson, and Benjamin Pritchard; Creative Advisors Revere La Noue and Tim Macmillan; Animators Joe Fellows, Revere La Noue, Sarah Riazati, Juan Carlos Yanaura Sameshima, and Drew Takahashi.
Marc Shaffer is represented by Cinetic for domestic distribution, which negotiated the Gravitas deal on behalf of Exposing Muybridge. Bill Guentzler, Senior Director of Acquisitions, negotiated the deal on behalf of Gravitas Ventures. As previously announced, MetFilm represents the film for foreign sales, and has secured distribution in several territories, including with NonStop Entertainment (Scandinavia and Baltics), iWonder (Italy), Madman Entertainment (Australia/New Zealand), Filmin (Spain/Portugal), Against Gravity (Poland), PCCW (Hong Kong) and Bertha DocHouse (UK limited theatrical).
For Exposing Muybridge, Shaffer conducted interviews with Muybridge scholars, experts, and fans, including film and photography historians, a museum curator, a wet-plate photographer, authors, an Alaska Tlingit clan leader, an Academy-Award winning actor and Muybridge collector, and photographers.
