Sallie Gardner at a Gallop (1878) on Netflix
TV-G18781mDocumentary
A jockey named Domm rides the mare Sallie Gardner at speed past a row of cameras. Twenty-four photographs taken in rapid succession make a moving picture when shown in a zoopraxiscope.
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- Netflix3.7/5
- IMDb7.4/104,530 votes
- Rotten TomatoesNot available
Plot summary
Leland Stanford, an industrialist and former governor of California, doubts the way painters show a running horse, with the forelegs stretched forward and the hind legs stretched back at the same instant. To settle the matter he has a track whitened, a background of white planks raised behind it, and a line of cameras set to fire one after another as a horse passes. The mare Sallie Gardner is sent across at a run with the jockey Domm on her back. Her stride is caught as a set of separate cards, and the pictures are joined into motion for a zoopraxiscope.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Sallie Gardner at a Gallop (1878)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The "instantaneous photograph" that Muybridge sent to newspapers was really a photo of a painting by Morse's gallery retouch artist John Koch, made from Muybridge's negative, with a cut-out photo of driver Tennant's face glued on.
- The Horse in Motion series was the first example of chronophotography, an early way to photographically record the passing of time. It was a very influential step in the development of motion pictures.
- Muybridge was not credited in the book except as a Stanford employee and in a technical appendix. Because of this, Britain's Royal Society of Arts withdrew funding it had offered, and his suit against Stanford for credit was dismissed out of court.
- Muybridge had the race track whitened and put up white planks at a slight angle behind it. A grid marked vertical lines at 21 in distances and horizontal lines 4 in apart, and wires from 12 cameras ran under the surface to be struck by a sulky wheel.
- On 15 June 1878, Stanford's racehorse Abe Edgington trotted a mile in 2 minutes and 20 seconds. As the sulky wheel tripped the wires one by one, the electrical circuit broke and each camera shutter opened in turn for a claimed 1/1000 of a second.
- A saddle girth broke while the running mare Sallie Gardner passed the cameras, and the break was distinctly registered on the resulting photographs, making the experiment deemed even more interesting than the first.
- Jordan Peele's 2022 film Nope made reference to Plate 626 from Animal Locomotion, with its main characters claiming to be descendants of the unknown jockey in the pictures, named Alistair E. Haywood in the film.
