Pennsylvania, 1884: Having established himself first as a photographer of mountain landscapes and then as a pioneer in the study of motion, Eadweard Muybridge gets university support to pursue his experiments in recording animal and human movement. After his wife Flora becomes pregnant, Muybridge begins to suspect that she is having an affair. At the same time he starts requiring his human subjects to be photographed naked. The University is predictably scandalised by this turn of events, but an even greater scandal is about to engulf Muybridge…

We first meet Muybridge in 1868 — youngish, dark-haired, unshaven, and accoutred like a prospector — as he prepares the equipment he needs to take a picture of one of the mountain landscapes that will make him famous. In its rapt concentration this wordless prologue has some kinship with the opening of THERE WILL BE BLOOD, and Muybridge will certainly prove as obsessive as Daniel Plainview in achieving his aims.

By the time we see him again, only four years later, he is a strange, stooping, lemon-eating figure with a bushy white beard and a shock of white hair — these last two the result of an accident. His eccentricities, mixed no doubt with his renown, prove irresistible to the young woman, Flora, who will become his wife. It is she who makes all the running at the start of their relationship; Muybridge, with his apparent indifference to convention, seems to respond to the prospect of a smart, independent, sexually liberated woman who can be his equal. But when, some 12 years later, he begins his studies in earnest at the University of Pennsylvania, he treats her like a typical Victorian wife: he refuses to involve her in his work, even as a model, and resents her leaving the house or speaking to other men — in particular a somewhat attentive reporter called Harry Larkyns.

This ambitious, low-budget film has much to recommend it …

Although in reality Muybridge’s marriage and his work on motion happened at different times in his life, the director Kyle Rideout and his co-writer Josh Epstein bring these two important periods together, using the familiar rubric that the film is only ‘inspired by real events’. The changing relationship between Flora and Muybridge certainly gives the film a momentum that the scenes of his photography sessions, absorbing and amusing as they often are, may otherwise lack: for instance, Muybridge’s decision to start photographing his subjects nude seems to be brought on by his increasing sexual jealousy.

This ambitious, low-budget film has much to recommend it — not least because its subject’s technique of taking photographs of moving subjects in quick succession was a key precursor to cinema. It is attractively shot and designed, and the dialogue, though not without some grating modernisms, is witty and engaging. The film owes much to its two main actors. Michael Eklund as Muybridge gives a performance that manages to be both intense and relaxed and brings this rather inscrutable figure to life in a number of big and small ways. Sara Canning matches him all the way: she quickly establishes Flora as an intelligent and inquisitive young woman, and makes her love for Muybridge so palpable that his inability to see that she just wants to spend more time with him seems all the more baffling.

It has its faults. There is a kind of thinness of texture that renders some of the scenes unmemorable. The supporting actors often lack definition, though with two such strong central performances this is less of a problem than it might have been. The film also rejoices in a number of truly bizarre accents — not least Eklund’s own, adrift somewhere in the mid-Atlantic, though since Muybridge was born and raised in England this does at least have some logic behind it.

httpvh://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7VAds0GH_8E