Movements of Air: The Photographs from Étienne-Jules Marey’s Wind Tunnels 3035805121, 9783035805123

Table of contents :
Movements of Air
93 - Marey, Aeronaut
157 - The Dance of All Things
281 - Table of Figures
293 - Epilogue

Citation preview

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Movements of Air

The photographs from Étienne-Jules Marey’s wind tunnels With some further studies by Florian Dombois and Christoph Oeschger

DIAPHANES

Georges Didi-Huberman Laurent Mannoni

Imprint Authors : Georges Didi-Huberman, Laurent Mannoni Editors : Florian Dombois, Christoph Oeschger Graphic design : Viola Zimmermann, Zurich Translation : Aubrey Birch, Lucie Wright Copy editing : Catherine Lupton Image research : Mirjam Fischer, Zurich Lithography: Lutz Wendenburg, Mülheim Printing : Druckerei Odermatt AG, Dallenwil, Switzerland Binding : BuBu AG, Mönchaltorf, Switzerland

© 2023 Georges Didi-Huberman, Florian Dombois, Laurent Mannoni, Christoph Oeschger and diaphanes Zurich © for the texts : the authors © for the images : see image credits © Association Marcel Duchamp / 2023, ProLitteris, Zurich for the works of Marcel Duchamp © Bruce Nauman / 2023, ProLitteris, Zurich for the works of Bruce Nauman © Man Ray 2015 Trust / 2023, ProLitteris, Zurich for the works of Man Ray This publication is based on the French exhibition catalogue Georges Didi-Huberman, Laurent Mannoni, Mouvements de l’air. Étienne-Jules Marey, photographe de fluides, Paris: Gallimard 2004. Despite best efforts, we have not been able to identify the holders of copyright and printing rights for all the illustrations. Copyright holders not mentioned in the credits are asked to substantiate their claims, and recompense will be made according to standard practice. This publication has been realized with the kind support of FSP Transdisciplinarity of Zurich University of the Arts. First edition ISBN 978-3-0358-0512-3 diaphanes Zurich 2023

Contents

1 Étienne-Jules Marey Photographs from wind tunnels 1899–1901 93 Laurent Mannoni  Marey, Aeronaut 157 Georges Didi-Huberman The Dance of All Things 281 Table of Figures 293 Florian Dombois and Christoph Oeschger  Epilogue

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Laurent Mannoni

Laurent Mannoni Marey, Aeronaut From the Graphic Method to the Aerodynamic Wind Tunnel

97 The graphic method : movements of air and falling bodies 102 The flight of birds and insects studied through the prism of the graphic method 105 Flying machines 110 The flight of birds and insects studied through chronophotography 113 Bird flight and the zoetrope 116 The movements of waves studied through chronophotography 119 Studies on the movements of air : the idea of the wind tunnel 123 Marey’s first wind tunnel (1899–1900) 126 1901 : the new wind tunnel 133 Reconstruction of the smoke machine in 1999

135 Apotheosis of chrono, photo, graphy 137 Gustave Eiffel’s aerodynamic wind tunnel 149 Notes

I speak for those accustomed to finding wisdom in the falling leaf, gargantuan dilemmas in rising smoke, theories in the vibrations of light, thought in marbles and the most horrible of movements in stillness.1

Laurent Mannoni

Marey, Aeronaut

Honoré de Balzac, Theory of Walking (1833)

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Étienne-Jules Marey 2 (March 5, 1830, Beaune–May 15, 1904, Paris) [fig. 81 ]—a physiologist, doctor, biomechanical scientist, a fervent user of the graphic method since the 1850s, and designer, in 1882, of chronophotography, the technical basis of cinema—dedicated three years towards the end of his life, from 1899 to 1901, to photographing the movements of air. We have reason to consider these images a pinnacle of Marey’s oeuvre, not only because between 1902 and his death in 1904, the physiologist produced few other images, whether graphic, photographic, or chronophotographic. The wisps of smoke photographed by Marey still strike us today for their enigmatic beauty. They also raise legitimate questions regarding their substance—the mysterious “movements of air,” as the physiologist himself called them—and the return to photography at a time—between 1899 and 1902—when the techniques of chronophotography and cinematography developed by Marey were already widely used. Under what circumstances were these images produced ? What was their purpose ? How were they made and used ? In order to explain Marey’s interest in the “movements of air” and aerodynamics in general, we must travel back to the origins of a technique that dominated the physiologist’s life and work : the graphic method. It was thanks to this method, and then to chronophotography, that Marey played such an important role in French aeronautical theory.3

The graphic method : movements of air and falling bodies

Fig. 81 Unpublished portrait of Étienne-Jules Marey in 1874.

We might begin by recalling that the graphic method is a transcription on paper or another sensitive surface—often employing highly inventive methods—of the pulses, vibrations, undulations, tremors, quivers, and shudders produced by living beings and objects in movement. The resulting graphs are a form of spatial memory containing information about the variations in a movement over time, continuously or at chosen intervals. The graphic method allowed for the knowledge, analysis, and often mastery of myriad phenomena pertaining to medicine, physiology, the natural sciences, and the different branches of physics. In effect, for the first time in human history recording devices granted us a graphic representation of movements or phenomena usually invisible to the naked eye. The first known and surviving recording device4 that truly inaugurated the graphic method dates to 1734 ; the anemometer of Louis-Léon Pajot (1678–1754) [ fig. 82 ], Count of Ons-en-Bray, “unassisted, marks on a sheet of paper the various winds occurring over a twenty-four hour period ; at which hour each began and ended ; as well as their relative velocities and forces.” 5 So it was that from the very beginning we see a concern with recording the movements of air. The graphic method’s entire principle— registering movements in space and time—can be found, as early as 1734, masterfully applied and formulated in Pajot’s anemometer : a ribbon of paper, driven at constant speed ; the tracing stylus ; the simultaneous recording of different parameters including direction, force, and duration. Nonetheless, it would be more than a century before another device was invented that could simultaneously record the time elapsed, movement executed, and distance covered. Marey, a master in this domain, can certainly be ascribed a leading role in the history of French recording technologies ; still, it was not him who introduced the graphic method into the physiological laboratories of Europe. The complex history of the graphic method’s (re-)emergence in the nineteenth century clearly has a strong Franco-German axis, epitomized by the French physicist Arthur Morin, and later, of course, by Marey, himself a qualified doctor ; as well as by the members of the “1847 group” in Germany—Carl Ludwig, Hermann Ludwig von Helmholtz, Emil Du Bois-Reymond—and later by Karl Vierordt, who in 1855 invented the sphygmograph.6

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Undoubtedly, the most important graphic recording apparatus of the nineteenth century was that of Arthur Morin ; it would greatly influence both Marey and, later, Gustave Eiffel [ fig. 83 ]. More than three meters high,7 the apparatus was used to study the laws of gravity and measure the trajectories of falling bodies. Built by Pixii, it is currently on display in the chapel of the Musée des arts et métiers in Paris.8 In 1859, Marey wrote admiringly9 of the parabolic curves of this tracing apparatus, of their clear indication on paper of “all the laws of free fall so painstakingly elaborated in the experiments of Galileo, Atwood, and so many physicists.”10 And yet unlike that of the English physicist Atwood, Morin’s apparatus was unsuitable for direct research into the laws pertaining to velocity ; it measured only the distance traversed by the object, albeit with much greater precision. We might clarify, however, that Atwood’s device did not actually produce a graphic recording but a graduated scale of the speed of the falling body.11 Morin’s free-fall apparatus consisted of a large vertical cylinder covered with a sheet of white lined paper. The cylinder rotated on its axis by the action of a weighted motor driven by a clockwork mechanism and airvanes.12 A brush dipped in Indian ink was attached to the weight in such a way that its tip pressed lightly against the

Fig. 82 The anemometer of Louis-Léon Pajot (1734), the graphic method’s first apparatus.

paper ; contact with the cylinder was maintained by a pair of taut vertical wires that guided the falling body. When the cylinder attained a constant angular velocity the weight was released and the trace of its fall graphically recorded. In combination, these two perpendicular movements produced a parabolic curve. When read against the vertical lines of the paper, the curve indicated the distances traversed by the body under the force of gravity ; the number of lines it crossed gave a measure of time. The graphs obtained demonstrated that the motion of a free-falling body is uniformly accelerated. We know that different experiments were carried out : the fall of a body submitted to a vertical impulse in one direction or another ; a body set in motion at an angle, and so on. We must insist on the fact that Morin’s experiments on the laws of motion—conducted in Metz in the early 1830s and using the graphic method13—were decisive for Marey : the fall of a body through space, the shape of its trajectory, whether parabolic or not, whether a ball or a cat, would become archetypes of Mareysian iconography. In 1883, for example, one year after he developed chronophotography, Marey acquired a set of ivory balls in order to study falling bodies ; against a black backdrop and in front of his lens, he would throw a brightly lit ball into the air and record its parabolic trajectory. At times he would place a wire grid over the backdrop in order to more accurately analyze the movement. The resulting photographs made it possible to solve kinematic, aerodynamic, and ballistic problems, as well as to study the effects of gravity and air resistance. The shutterless camera produced images of a bright moving body in one steady, continuous stream. The grid allowed Marey to measure movements, but one essential element was still missing : the notion of time. “We know through which loci the bright point has passed, but we still do not know its path at each and every instant of its course.”14 And so Marey began to study falling bodies using chronophotography, the shutter now serving as an analyzer allowing him to record the successive phases of their trajectories. We might cite another example : in his Naples laboratory, Marey dropped an ivory ball (we know he requested these from his assistant Demenÿ on December 28, 188315) in front of a black backdrop with a white grid. The shutter was activated, then the ball launched horizontally ; this time, the resulting chronophotograph clearly reveals the parabolic curve of the fall. We now see more images in the upper

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part, when the object is moving more slowly ; and fewer in the lower part, as the falling body accelerates. We also find a second successful chronophotograph from this time that includes the rebound of the ivory ball. In a supplement to La Méthode graphique (The graphic method) published in 1885, entitled Développement de la méthode graphique par l’emploi de la photographie (Development of the graphic method through the use of photography), Marey did not include these two chronophotographs. He printed instead two graphic representations,16 the first of which, entitled Trajectoire chronographique d’un corps

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qui tombe après avoir reçu une vitesse de translation horizontale (Chronographic trajectory of a falling body having received an horizontal impulse), is in the collection of the Cinémathèque française [ fig. 84 ] ; we do not know if the unsigned work was executed by Marey, Demenÿ, or an unknown Neapolitan artist. The background is white and the ball rendered in black ink ; it is a “negative” of sorts, if we consider Marey’s first two figures—a white ball against a black backdrop—as its “positives.” Marey also chronophotographed the trajectory of a stick thrown horizontally in a vertical plane with a rotatory motion ; he threw and

Fig. 83 Recording device of Arthur Morin, translating the laws of falling bodies by a curve, ca. 1850.

photographed two balls bound together by string, from which he once again produced remarkable graphics. One of these, also conserved at the Cinémathèque française, shows the Trajectoire d’un projectile rapportée à deux axes (image négative) (Trajectory of a projectile related to two axes [ negative image ]). The evolutions of the ivory ball through space, the successive phases of its fall through the air, the fragmentation, and the “slowing down” represented in the graphic all served to satiate Marey’s hunger for recording rapid movements in space and time. He had indeed taken the path paved by Morin, illustrating through his chronophotographs laws of space, air resistance, velocity, and acceleration. Around 1892, Marey produced new “experimental photographs,”17 as he called them, this time consecrated to geometric forms. He wrote of his experiments as “a return to the origins of geometry,” a three-dimensional “materialization” of “geometric concepts.”18 He had drawn inspiration from a stunning collection of geometric figures, composed of threads stretched between brass frames, once used by professors at the Conservatoire national des arts et métiers to illustrate their courses ; they remain there to this day. As Marey points out, geometers maintained that such figures are engendered by the various displacements of straight lines or curves : It is not likely that the conception of a straight line was evolved from man’s brain as a purely abstract expression, but rather that it entered therein, on seeing a stretched thread, for instance, or some other rectilinear object. In the same way the conception of a plane or a circle found its origin from noticing a flat surface or an object of circular form.19 What interested Marey was to demonstrate the formation of geometric figures by the movements of lines—whose precise trajectories he hoped to document [ fig. 85–91 ] : [ ... ] let us suppose that the straight line, as it moves in space, leaves a record of its track at every point which it successively passes. Now, this purely imaginary supposition may become an accomplished fact, thanks to photography.20 This is how Marey came to chronophotograph the forms engendered by the passage of an illuminated thread against a black backdrop. To obtain a cylindrical form, he rotated a thread in parallel to a vertical central axis. If the rotating thread was set obliquely to its axis, the shape recorded by the camera was a magnificent hyper-

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boloid by revolution. If the thread touched the axis, it resulted in a cone. More impressive still, Marey produced stereoscopic and chronophotographic images of an asymptotic cone superimposed on a hyperboloid ; this three-dimensional overlay opened a new perspective in the domain of photographic special effects. Stereoscopy even allowed for the creation, using a pair of chronophotographs of a semi-annular wire in rotation, of an exquisite sphere. When he then photographed the wire without the shutter, he discovered on his glass plate a luminous sphere, a crystalline ball whose “strange and perplexing form”21 delighted him. In 1892 Marey published his first images of geometric forms in Paris-Photographe, a magazine published by his friend and fellow photographer, Nadar.22 To conclude the article, Marey announced plans for future experiments on the movements of water and air : Chronophotography allows us to observe movements barely discernible by the naked eye. In a future article we will give a demonstration of this method applied to truly invisible phenomena : the movements that occur in liquids and gases.23 While Paris-Photographe would never run the proposed article, it did publish, in 1894, his famous study of the fall of a cat.24 We might bear in mind here Marey’s fondness for both “experimental photography” and geometric forms, for they were to be the two principal characteristics of his future work, begun in 1899, on the movements of air. The “obstacles” placed in the way of those wisps of smoke would be, in effect, endless variations of geometric forms. The flight of birds and insects studied through the prism of the graphic method If we go back a few years to 1859, we find that Marey had imported—and then perfected—German mechanical recording devices used

Fig. 84 É.-J. Marey, Chronographic trajectory of a falling body after having received a horizontal impulse, original drawing.

in the field of physiology. With his improved devices (including a customized sphygmograph) he studied the workings of the human body and made several important discoveries relating to the circulation of the blood. We have here, of course, not a question of aerodynamics but of hydrodynamics, the laws of which had been applied to the study of blood circulation for centuries. Not long after, the graphic method would undertake, albeit not without trial and error, the conquest of the elements : electricity, air, light, and eventually even fire—it was, in a sense, a modern day biblical genesis. Relying on Doctor Charles Buisson’s 1862 thesis,25 which disclosed an entirely pneumatic transmission method applicable to graphic recording apparatuses, Marey was able to produce a new set of devices, including a cardiograph, polygraph, and pneumograph. Ushering in a new era, the pneumatic and elastic tubing and membranes of these devices meant that movement could now be captured and transmitted by air ; thus it was possible to record several different subjects simultaneously on a single cylinder. “So it was that Mr. Buisson became the creator of the recording method through air transmission.”26 This creation proved particularly important for the history of the graphic method, despite air transmission systems being later replaced by electric ones. From 1869 onwards, Marey studied bird flight using a dual pneumatic and electric system. And so it was that he pursued his vast mechanistic and physiological program, applying the graphic method to the nuts and bolts of human and animal mechanics. It meant, in this case, recording and subsequently analyzing a bird’s wing as it moved through space ; studying the effects of its periodic action on the air ; measuring the force that sustains the bird and the one that translates into forward motion ; it meant, in effect, knowing the order of magnitude of the resistance of the air. As we shall soon see, each of these questions was relevant not only to physiologists but also, and perhaps more importantly, to early aviation theorists. In the first of these experiments on bird flight, Marey attached a small apparatus to the wingtip that functioned as an electric telegraph, relaying the bird’s every movement. An electromagnetic arrangement placed on the circuit received these variations and transcribed them onto a revolving cylinder. A thin flexible cable with two conducting wires transmitted the signals from the bird to the recording device. Under the influence of air resistance, the wingtip

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apparatus acted as a valve : on the upstroke the valve opened, interrupting the current and tracing an ascending line. The downstroke closed the valve, reestablishing the current and tracing a descending line. This delicate, innovative system allowed Marey, in 1869, to determine the wingstroke frequency for different species of birds : the sparrow beats its wings thirteen times a second, the wild duck nine, the pigeon eight, the harrier five, the owl and the buzzard three times—although the frequency of course varies according to whether the bird is taking off, in full flight, or landing. Thanks to this first system, Marey was able to prove, contrary to common belief, that the downstroke is generally of a longer duration than the upstroke. The myographic method—pneumatic and not electric—allowed Marey to estimate the frequency of the wingstrokes relative to successive muscular movements without harming the animal. The transmission between the test subject and the recording apparatus passed through air tubes like those described by Charles Buisson : a pigeon was connected, by twelve meters of rubber tubing, to the recording apparatus in the center of a chamber that was fifteen meters square and eight meters high. Marey attached a customized corset to the bird ; he slipped a small capsule between the corset and its pectoral muscles that served to transmit muscular contractions to the recording apparatus. Later, in 1871, he would connect a bird to what he called a “frame-work,” installed in Room 7 at the Collège de France, where Gaston Carlet would also study human gait.27 Marey described the system as follows : There is a sort of frame-work of six or seven meters in diameter, in which the bird moves continuously, being thus able to furnish us with an observation of a circular flight of long duration. We give the

Fig. 85 É.-J. Marey, trajectory of a ball. Photograph, ca. 1892.

instrument a large radius, that its curve, being less abrupt, should modify less the nature of the movement which the bird may make.28 If every effort was made to reproduce “natural” flight, a remarkable armada of levers, elastic suspensions, and metal armatures was required to do so, as well as no less than three pneumatic lever drums and three transmitting tubes functioning at the same time. This apparatus allowed Marey to simultaneously record, on blackened paper, three curves indicating not only the trajectory of the bird’s wing but also its different inclinations at each phase of its flight [ fig. 92 ]. Likewise, in order to study insect flight, Marey in 1869 used a pneumatic machine to artificially reconstitute it. We can easily imagine the young aeronauts attending Marey’s classes feeling almost already airborne while observing the gyrations of this incredible “artificial insect.” Marey activated an air pump with a starting handle, which set the model wings—“a rigid frame-work in front, and a sort of flexible web behind ; such is the whole apparatus”29—of the mechanical insect in synchronous motion. The physiologist explained to his students that the figure eight movement of the insect’s flight was not driven directly by its muscles ; rather, it was the effect of air resistance acting on the wings’ upper and lower surfaces in their up and down motion.30 Since the original was lost, a replica of this “artificial insect” was created in 1999 by the Cinémathèque française ; on the same occasion, an equally captivating smoke machine was reconstructed after Marey’s 1899 version [ fig. 93 ]. Flying machines

Marey’s framework offered another advantage, whose significance the aeronautical theorists of the time—the obvious exceptions being Marey, his disciple Victor Tatin, and Clément Ader—may or may not have fully grasped : The design of these experiments is easy to comprehend. One after the other, a real bird and a mechanical bird should be harnessed to the frame-work, so that a line is traced by the wing movements, the bodily oscillations, or any other phenomena. We compare the two resulting lines, and correct the mechanical model until it perfectly matches the movements of the real bird. Only then should we release the counterfeit bird to complete its own flight.31

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Since the 1860s, engineers and scholars—most of them belonging to the Société française de navigation aérienne, of which Marey was vice-president in 1874—had set themselves the goal of developing a functional flying machine. They rejected the “popular aeronautics” of navigation in hot air balloons and other airships, pursuing instead

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a “modern aviation” in vehicles whose forms resembled those that nature had given to birds and which propelled themselves through the air using motor power. Three schools fought for dominance : the proponents of the ornithopter, which imitated bird flight ; those of

Fig. 86–91 É.-J. Marey, series of six photographs, ca. 1892  : hyperboloids, asymptotic cones, spheres engendered by the rotation of a bright semi-annular wire.

the helicopter, which sought airlift by one or more propellers ; and those of the aeroplane, a kite-like machine with one or more propellers producing a thrusting force. Marey’s early discoveries on the flight of insects and birds were assiduously documented throughout the 1860s and 1870s in Abel Hureau de Villeneuve’s magazine L’Aéronaute, which also published the works of the young and gifted Alphonse Pénaud, archivist of the Société française de navigation aérienne. In March of 1874 Pénaud penned some especially insightful and prophetic remarks on the advent of chronophotography.32 In the early 1870s Hureau de Villeneuve and Pénaud built small mechanical flying birds (not so different from the children’s toys still sold today) ; in August of 1871 Pénaud successfully launched, before the members of the Société française de navigation aérienne, a rubber-powered model aeroplane in the Tuileries.33 Pénaud, who was not shy in contradicting Marey on some points of precedence,34 did not, however, champion the mechanical bird ; his preference was undoubtedly for the aeroplane. On this point, history was on his side (but not so for the helicopter, which he had deemed unfeasible except as a small toy). In 1874, Victor Tatin, an engineer by training, followed in Hureau de Villeneuve and Pénaud’s footsteps and built a mechanical bird with a wingspan of twenty-four centimeters and weighing only five grams. Tatin’s model bird, driven by a twisted rubber band that upon release would cause the two small wings to move, could travel fifteen to twenty meters through the air. In early 1875, he built a new bird that weighed one kilogram and was powered by a small ether-fed steam engine ; it proved an outright failure. Refusing, however, to throw in the towel, Tatin got back to work and in March of 1875 launched a new bird, powered this time by compressed air. Once again his hopes were dashed : the machine plummeted to the ground. It was then that, having closely followed Tatin’s attempts, Marey invited the young engineer to use both his laboratory and equipment, including the framework to which the physiologist had harnessed in January of 1874 an artificial pneumatic bird. In the spring of 1875, Marey welcomed a thirty-two year old Tatin to his laboratory at the Collège de France, where the latter not only pursued his own aeronautical research but—proving quite adept with his hands— became Marey’s personal technician. Under Marey’s guidance at the Collège de France, Tatin produced graphs of a pigeon’s wing in full flight, of his rubber-powered me-

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chanical bird, and of his final bird driven by compressed air. The graphs demonstrated that the latter most closely resembled natural bird flight ; so why then did his machine not fly nearly as well as the pigeon ? Marey’s own experiments had shown that as a bird increases speed, the air resistance under its wing increases, and so does the solidity of its fulcrum ; Tatin’s mechanical bird had been too slow and its center of gravity incorrectly calculated. And yet, wishing to remain true to the form of a bird, he at first refused to equip his

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machines with the propellers already employed by his rivals for a number of years. In 1876, after numerous attempts, Tatin finally presented in Travaux du laboratoire de M. Marey (Studies in the laboratory of Mr. Marey) the machine that had given him the best results. Its sixty-gram weight carefully distributed, and its long narrow wings spanning eighty centimeters—resembling an albatross or seagull—the mechanical bird flew around the framework propelled by a more powerful compressed-air engine. The machine’s center of

Fig. 92 Bird attached to the framework, determination of the horizontal and vertical movements of the humerus, original watercolor by E. Valton, ca. 1869, and original graph by Étienne-Jules Marey.

gravity was now in front of the center of buoyancy. Its new center of gravity and considerably longer wings allowed the artificial bird to flap its wings and fly twenty to thirty meters around the framework. On April 5, 1877, Tatin flew, for Marey and the members of the Association scientifique de France, a mechanical bird still powered by a rubber band but whose wings were designed according to the physiologist’s findings. A modest sum of five hundred francs, bestowed upon Marey by the Association scientifique de France, permitted Tatin to continue his research ; and, thanks to Pénaud, he eventually came to realize that the future of aerial locomotion lay in the aeroplane. And here we discover, in the 1880 edition of the Travaux du laboratoire de M. Marey for the years 1878 to 1879, a striking engraving of an aeroplane equipped with two four-blade propellers. The arrangement of the main sections of his new machine, which weighed 1.75 kilograms, drew inspiration from an aeroplane drawn by Henson in 1843. In 1879, the machine—equipped with a compressed-air engine, mounted on wheels, and attached to a circular framework installed in the military aerostation at Chalais-Meudon35— managed to overcome gravity and rise into the air at a speed of around eight meters per second. This was probably the first time an aeroplane fitted with an engine rose from the ground by its propellers alone. For Marey, these attempts proved that it was indeed “possible to make a flying machine with the motors we have today”36 [ fig. 94 ]. From 1880 to 1884, Tatin lacked the means to continue his research. In 1889, after having read Marey’s latest work, Le Vol des oiseaux (The flight of birds), and met Marey’s colleague Charles Richet, he resumed his experiments with a larger steam-powered model aeroplane with a wingspan of 6.6 meters ; most models, however, were airborne for only a few dozen meters before they crashed to the ground or tumbled into the sea. In 1896, however, Tatin and Richet achieved notoriety (and here we must not forget to mention Samuel Langley, with whom Marey maintained a correspondence and who obtained similarly noteworthy results around the same time) with their thirty-three kilogram steam-powered aeroplane, which covered a distance of 140 meters at a speed of eighteen meters per second37 [ fig. 95 ]. One year later, in 1897, Clément Ader—who Marey and Tatin had met and admired38—managed to fly an even larger (and piloted) model, which had been under construction since 1894 in Ader’s Parisian ateliers on rue Jasmin. On October 14, 1897, this

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“Avion III” took off at the Satory army base ; it flew over three hundred meters before crashing. With a wingspan of sixteen meters, it weighed a mere four hundred kilograms, pilot, fuel, and water reserve included. It was powered by twin twenty-two horsepower steam engines, supplied by an alcohol-fueled boiler. This extraordinary bat-shaped machine is now exhibited in the Musée des arts et métiers. Not long after, in December of 1903,39 Orville and Wilbur Wright’s “Flyer 1” very nearly solved the “agonizing problem of human flight.” 40

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The flight of birds and insects studied through chronophotography We might once again go back a few years. Marey built his famous chronophotographic rifle in 1882, the device serving primarily to “capture” birds in full flight. One year later he built a miniature chronophotographic apparatus in order to analyze the movements of insect wings. Marey was constantly repeating himself—and not

Fig. 93 Schema of insect flight. Arrangement of the apparatus. As well as the possibility of pivoting on the vertical axis, this apparatus can oscillate vertically like the arm on a set of scales. It is also possible to give all the possible orientations on the level of wing oscillation. These arrangements allow for the isolable demonstration of the ascending force or the translation force. They also allow for the combination of the two forces in diverse ways. Original watercolor by E. Valton, 1869.

afraid to do so—by taking advantage of each new technique he invented to revise, verify, confirm, or disprove his previous research. And so despite having already extensively studied the flight of insects using the graphic method, he returned to it but this time using chronophotography. We know Marey never lost sight of the problem, fundamental in his view, of aerial navigation. In Naples in January of 1884, he embarked upon a series of unique chronophotographs of aeroplane-like systems. The 1885 supplement to La Méthode graphique contained the “chronographic trajectory of a glider in free fall.”41 We see around twenty-five successive images of a small glider, against a black backdrop, dropped in its vertical position and righting itself, through all its planar variations : “The knowledge of these movements is of the utmost importance in illuminating the gliding mechanisms of certain birds.” 42 One can find, at the Musée Marey in Beaune, a paper print from a chronophotographic glass plate shot at the Physiological Station, which shows the trajectory of a glider built by Albert Bazin.43 The glider, chronophotographed at a rate of twenty images per second, describes a sinuous curve through the air. There is something particularly noteworthy here : since the original image did a poor job of highlighting the glider’s successive phases, the contours of every position were redrawn in ink. It was certainly this drawn outline that allowed for a copy to be made that more clearly depicted the glider’s trajectory. The original print was of such mediocre quality it was deemed unpublishable given the printing processes of the time ; it was Georges Demenÿ’s drawing that was presented (and later published) by Marey as part of his lecture at the Académie des sciences on November 9, 1891.44 This particular image, and another published in the 1885 supplement to La Méthode graphique, tell us something of Marey’s growing interest in gliding. If we return to his earliest research in the 1860s, it is clear that Marey believed the future of aerial locomotion lay in a machine that imitated the flight of rowing birds, that is to say, birds capable of beating their wings. It was an idea that the physiologist Félix Giraud-Teulon, who was in general hostile to Marey’s ideas, rightfully deemed impossible. In his preface to Le Vol des oiseaux,

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penned in July of 1889, Marey tempered his earlier conviction, despite not forgetting Tatin’s and even Pénaud’s small motorized models, which had well and truly taken flight before his eyes by beating their wings : An expression dear to aviators is that birds fly, and so too will man. In this respect, we must express some reservations, for the most perfect types of locomotion created by man are usually obtained through means quite different from that of Nature.45

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Applying the same method of superposing a tracing over a chronophotographic print, Marey was able to present on January 24, 1887,46 his elegant representations of a flying gull to the Academy of Sciences. If the inked figures in the images (now conserved at the Cinémathèque française) call to mind Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex on the Flight of Birds, the originals, taken at 1/2000th of a second, are no less remarkable. By recording his flying gull at a rate of fifty images per second—thanks to a flat disc with five slits, rotating at ten turns

Fig. 94 Victor Tatin’s airplane, 1877.

per second—Marey laid the technical foundations for high-speed imaging [ fig. 96, 97 ]. And yet the image sequence of the bird in vertical flight did not entirely satisfy Marey : he sought a three-dimensional representation of movement, as in his study of human gait (and eventually his 1892 hyperboloids). It was clear to him that stereoscopy could be of no use in this instance ; he chose instead to make three series of images representing his bird from different angles, following the animal snapshots that Eadweard Muybridge made in Philadelphia.47 Marey had decided to point three chronophotographic cameras at the bird, their shutters functioning in perfect synchrony thanks to electromagnetic triggers : one of them was destined to be hung fifteen meters in the air to shoot the bird from above. Unfortunately there was only one chronophotographic camera at the Station (another was in Naples) and the “considerable expense entailed by such an installation [ would ] exceed [ his ] budget.” 48 He proceeded in any case to install his only camera fourteen meters above the ground, atop four fir beams solidly driven into the floor, and chronophotographed the bird against black velvet (he would revisit this system for his studies on human gait) ; he made two further series of the gull both from an angle and from the side at a rate of fifty images per second. Despite trying to identify synchronies in the three series, he was unable to match the near-perfect synchronism of Muybridge’s images. Despite the drawings—presented to the Academy on February 7, 1887—being convincing, they were for Marey tinged with regret : The inadequacy of our system prevented us from recording simultaneously three types of chronophotographs, so we do not expect to find perfect concordance between three images bearing the same sequence number.49 These intricate series of ink drawings, likely made by Demenÿ— who was, it must be said, at his apogee—are today in the collection of the Cinémathèque française. Bird flight and the zoetrope In September of 1886 Marey planned to create sculptures of his flying bird. Writing to Demenÿ from Labergement-les-Seurre, in his native Burgundy, he claimed to have found “an artist interested in human and animal locomotion,” 50 and yet we know the project came to nothing. We know too that the Neapolitan sculptor found short-

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ly afterwards clearly struggled to satisfy Marey’s demands ; in all fairness, the physiologist was seeking a form of sculpture entirely new to the history of the depiction of movement. The resulting work was sent from Naples to the Academy on March 21, 1887 : a series of ten bronze statuettes representing the gull in the ten consecutive positions previously recorded from three different angles at fifty images per second. Still, Marey’s most daring artwork is unquestionably the complex figurative abstraction, today in the collection of the Musée Marey [ fig. 98 ], consisting of an imbrication of the flying gull’s body in its successive positions : a single head in front, the two wings multiplied and compressed to their limits. It is a representation of high-speed flight, an analytical decomposition before the advent of futurism. Undoubtedly, no one before Marey had attempted such a form. When Marey first outlined his plan to Demenÿ in a letter from February of 1887, he was clearly already aware of the sculpture’s novelty : I am now making a second series wherein the bodies are fused together and the twenty-four birds are melded into a single piece. It is a bold design and I am unsure of its success.51 The several sculptures of the flying bird [ fig. 99 ] caused a great stir within the scientific community : Marey lent them to colleagues52 for conferences and even agreed to exhibit them in Berlin in 1894.53 Unveiled in Paris in March of 1887, the sculpted birds sparked a scholarly debate in the pages of L’Aéronaute, spearheaded by Émile Veyrin, who suspected Marey’s theories of not being nearly as solid “as his bronze birds.”54 Essentially, Veyrin noted significant differences between Marey’s previously published

Fig. 95 Charles Richet and Victor Tatin’s steam-powered aeroplane, 1890–1897.

drawings, made from the chronophotographs representing the successive phases of bird flight, and his bronze sculptures. At stake here was the crucial problem of the three-dimensional materialization of a chronophotograph. We still do not know exactly how Marey’s sculptures were made. Did he use the proportional compass advocated in the eighteenth century by Goiffon and Vincent,55 and later by Canova ? Did he use a kind of pantograph ? The mystery remains. The attempts to materialize graphic or chronophotographic images in three dimensions yielded, in the nineteenth century and by other hands, captivating results : one thinks of Braune and Fischer’s 1895 sculpture of a walking man,56 or the incomprehensible surrealist “stereogram” from 1881 that André Breton kept in his Wunderkammer at 42 rue Fontaine.57 In any case, from its first exhibition on March 21, 1887, Marey revealed the ultimate goal of his groundbreaking work. Having completed the sculptural analysis of the flying bird, he now wished to synthesize the frozen representation by animating it. This “reanimation” would rely on the zoetrope, a device the physiologist had already employed to synthesize human and horse locomotion. And so in 1887, Marey asked his resident technician Victor Tatin to build a large slotted drum, inside of which he placed at equal distances the ten sculpted birds. It was enough to simply rotate the ensemble and peer through the slots to witness an enchantment. The gull flew in three dimensions and its speed could be slowed thanks to the stroboscopic effect ; modifying the number of slots resulted in the bird hovering, or thrusting forward through the air. It was with this object that Marey reached an apogee, a kind of perfection : a living apparition, in three dimensions, in slow motion, in color (some versions of the bird, such as the one presented to the Academy of Sciences on June 13, 1887, were painted58 [ fig. 100 ]). In 1889, Marey reviewed his findings relating to the kinematics of flight : this would result in Le Vol des oiseaux, published one year later, a work encompassing twenty years of research conducted using both the graphic method and chronophotography. Immediately after the book’s release, Marey sent out copies to the world’s leading aeronauts, amongst them the French-American engineer, Octave Chanute. Chanute had just returned to Chicago after spending time in Paris, where he likely would have seen Marey’s zoetrope at the 1889 World’s Fair ; he had previously met its creator at an aeronautical congress. Chanute had become a renowned avia-

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tion theorist after publishing, in 1894, his passionate Progress in Flying Machines,59 in which Marey’s name often appears ; he would go on to design various experimental gliders. He later acted as an adviser to the Wright brothers who, as we have seen, achieved manned flight in 1903 aboard a two-propeller aeroplane powered by an internal combustion engine. The Wright brothers, following Chanute, would acknowledge Marey as an essential reference in their research.

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The movements of waves studied through chronophotography

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Marey, a professor at the Collège de France, the director of the Physiological Station, and the president of various institutions (including the Academy of Sciences, the Société de navigation aérienne and the Société française de photographie) was a tireless researcher : this much his bibliography makes abundantly clear. For all that, in 1870, having acquired the splendid Villa Maria in the Posillipo quarter of Naples, Marey would adopt a new way of life. From then on he seldom taught at the Collège de France, having found his disciple Charles François-Franck a worthy successor ; his assistant, Georges Demenÿ, did a remarkable job of managing the Physiological Station in his absence. Marey installed himself in Naples—with his partner Marie-Antoinette Vilbort, and Francesca,60 their daughter born out of wedlock—where he created a new research laboratory. The physiologist frequently spent half the year away from Paris, either in Italy or in Chagny, at his Burgundy estate. In 1891, two years after the summer he first inserted a celluloid film into his camera, Marey recorded under the Neapolitan sun the movements of waves on the Tyrrhenian sea.61 These films are among the most beautiful of the six hundred or so that were shot by Marey

Fig. 96 É.-J. Marey and Georges Demenÿ, Flying gull, 25 images per second, 1887. Ink drawing.

between 1889 and 1904.62 In 1892, he developed an interest in the movements of clouds, chronophotographing them at a rate of one image per minute63 (and thus foreshadowing slow-motion cinematography) ; his cloud films unfortunately no longer exist.64 In early 1890, Marey made several chronophotographic series in Naples on a subject that was particularly difficult to study using the graphic method : the movement of fish. He was able to present to the Academy of Sciences, on July 28, 1890,65 a number of films illustrating the locomotion of different fish species. In his Neapolitan laboratory, he had improvised a rather rudimentary aquarium consisting of “two glass walls set into a window opening”66 that overlooked the Gulf of Naples. What captivated him most was decelerating motion, recording forms that had never before been seen. He was convinced that these studies could improve the propellers used in sea navigation, and even help resolve the problem of aerial flight. We have seen that Marey began his research in the 1850s revisiting the laws of hydrodynamics, laws that previous physiologists (including Hales of Britain, Poiseuille of France, and Volkmann of Germany) had revealed to be particularly useful in the study of blood circulation. Decades later, Marey returned to this first area of interest, presenting to the Academy of Sciences on May 1, 1893, a paper on “the motion of liquids studied through chronophotography.” This time he wanted to understand the way liquid reacts to the passage of a body. To this end, he built a glass-walled aquarium in his Naples laboratory. Black velvet was hung behind the glass, a (chrono) photographic chamber was set up opposite the aquarium, and a mirror, placed underneath the tank, directed sunlight to the liquid from below. First he recorded the “changes in shape of fluid waves,”67 including the regular oscillations of rippling water : The lens of the camera should be left permanently open, so that the bright line may leave a track corresponding to all the positions assumed, but with greatest intensity where the velocity is least.68 Marey assessed the “neighborhood of nodes” and “dead points” in the water’s oscillation. His camera recorded waves of translation, billows and breakers, revealing the speed at which they traveled, as well as their changes in shape or size. He created waves and then immersed a cylinder in the water to measure their “agitation” : At first there was a progressive series of depressions visible along the surface of the water, corresponding to the moment at which the

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cylinder was lifted up, and then a marked upheaval at the moment the cylinder was again plunged into the water.69 He dispersed a large number of bright pearls in the water : buoyant, illuminated by the sunlight, these pearls were a mixture of wax and resin that had been carefully coated in silver. The trajectory of the silvered pearls through the disturbed water offered an unusual and poetic spectacle, unexpected and oneiric forms. Inside the water, Marey wrote, “the pearls are seen oscillating, vertically in the ventral seg-

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ments, horizontally at the nodes, and obliquely in the intermediate positions.”70 He immersed a small screw into his tank and recorded at a rate of forty-two images per second the effects of placing an obstacle in the current : this system ultimately inspired him to reproduce the experiment, albeit with airstreams in a wind tunnel. He completed his series of hydrodynamic images by propelling water toward an obstacle : [ ... ] the water rises up in a heap, and falls down on the other side in a cascade. This transient phenomenon, the details of which are not

visible to the eye, can be registered in all its phases by chrono-photography.71 This laboratory method—photographing bright objects dropped into water currents—is used in fluid mechanics research to this day.

Fig. 97–98 97: É.-J. Marey and Georges Demenÿ, Gull flying in an oblique direction towards the camera, twenty images per second, 1887. Ink drawing. 98: É.-J. Marey, Decomposition of a gull’s flight, 1887. Bronze.

Studies on the movements of air : the idea of the wind tunnel “To comprehend the mechanisms of flight, one must first understand the resistance of the air,” writes Marey in Le Vol des oiseaux.72 It was not a new subject : Newton, Borda, d’Alembert, Avanzini, Joessel, and others had already analyzed air resistance. Newton proposed the following laws : 1) Resistance is perpendicular to the surface area ; 2) it is proportional to velocity squared ; 3) it is proportional to the density of the fluid in which the moving body is immersed ; 4) it is proportional to the square of the sine of the angle of incidence ; 5) it is proportional to the surface area. In Marey’s time, some of these laws had already been confirmed or refuted (for instance, the fourth was disproved by Duchemin in 1842, and later by Langley). Marey had already built in 1870 a rather complex manometric device capable of indicating pressures at various points on the surface of a rotating disc73 [ fig. 101 ]. As we can see in the etching, which was published in the same year, a clockwork-driven cable (moved by a weight and controlled by a Foucault regulator) caused an “aerodynamic carousel” 74 to rotate. The latter consisted of a vertical axis bearing a metal framework coupled with a thin wooden disc, as well as a counterweight. Along the same axis was a manometric tube whose open end came into contact with the specific areas under study on the front or back of the disc. The pressure exerted at the end of the manometric tube was transmitted by air to a highly sensitive manometer. This device allowed Marey to observe that a drop in pressure occurs on the edge of surfaces moving through the air, and that this loss is proportionally greater for small surfaces than for larger ones : From this we can conclude that, proportionally speaking, smaller birds flying at the same speed will experience less lift than larger ones. Consequently, they must compensate for this disadvantage by increasing the frequency of their wingstrokes.75

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Following Marey’s attempts, other graphic devices were invented to measure air resistance : for example, the engineer Antoine Rédier’s76 sensitive recording scales, which in 1878 his son Louis suggested combining with a fan : [ ... ] This device can be used to study air resistance phenomena. By vertically attaching to the beam [ ... ] a rod that supports the plane under study, we obtain the horizontal pressure. If [ ... ] we attach it to the scale pan, we obtain the lift pressure. By changing the surfaces and their inclinations, one can conduct all experiments pertaining to air pressure on slanted surfaces. The air current may be produced either by using a centrifugal fan equipped with a wide nozzle, such as those found in various factories, or a wind tunnel.77 However, it seems that this advice would not be heeded right away. Thanks to the aerodynamic and manometric system he developed in 1870, Marey was able to formulate in Le Vol des oiseaux, in 1890, a principle of relativity to which he appended a rather interesting idea, apparently borrowed from Louis Rédier : From the point of view of the resistance undergone, it is irrelevant whether the solid body is moving through still air, or whether it is immobile in a moving air current. This proposition is of utmost importance : it will allow us to revisit the matter of sailing flight in light of the test results obtained for different forms made to move through still air. It is hardly possible, in effect, to study the resistance endured by bodies subjected to a wind of constant and known speed ; only the most powerful wind tunnels could meet such requirements, which are almost never met in atmospheric motions.78 Marey also devoted a chapter in Le Vol des oiseaux to the “resistance of the air to the movements of variously shaped bodies.”79 In particular, he described an experiment conducted in 1885 by the German mathematician and aeronaut Emile Müller,80 wherein a thin

Fig. 99 Plaster sculpture of the flight of a pigeon by Étienne-Jules Marey, 1887.

column of smoke, produced by burning cotton thread, rendered visible the movements of air formed by a bird’s wingstroke.81 Marey became aware of Müller’s method in 1886, according to a letter he sent to Demenÿ on December 7 of that year : A memoire on the action of a wing beating the air has interested me very much. The author has made the air visible by means of wisps of smoke or phosphorous vapors, a method for seeing the invisible which quite seduces me.82 To see the invisible : this is the leitmotif of all Mareysian thought. Prior to Müller’s experiments, Pénaud and Hureau de Villeneuve had already advocated using smoke or fine suspended particles to detect how the wingstroke affected their direction. When, in 1893, Marey threw himself into his hydrodynamic experiments (pearls in a current or upon wavelets), he had remarked : Chronophotography may be used to study the movements of air and identify the behavior of wisps of smoke as they meet variously shaped obstacles. A glass-walled wind tunnel, which produces an airflow able to keep aloft fine brightly lit particles, would create the necessary conditions for such studies.83 That same year, while Marey was busy recording wave motions, Ludwig Mach, the son of German physicist and philosopher Ernst Mach, built a wind tunnel illuminated by an arc lamp. The underlying principle of Marey’s future wind tunnel could already be found in Ludwig Mach’s machine, which the former described as follows : [ The author used ] an inhaling turbine, passing a steady current of air into a quadrangular prismatic tube, whose section was eighteen by twenty-four centimeters. The face of this tube, turned toward the observer, was formed of transparent glass ; the opposite face was blackened to form a dark chamber, and an arc lamp projected its light into the interior of the tube. Mr. Mach placed bodies of different forms and made of transparent substances in the air current, and used different ways to render the movements of the air in the vicinity of the bodies visible. Sometimes he projected light bits of paper or silk in the air current, sometimes fine dust, sometimes smoke, and sometimes he hung flexible silk threads, which the current moved along ; while sometimes he explored the direction of the air movements by means of little gas flames, which he applied at different points of the bodies that were in the tube. [ ... ] Mr. Mach measured the speed of his air currents by means of an anemometer, regulating the indications of the instrument by an acoustic method devised by his father,

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Prof. E. Mach. The vibration caused by a Koenig flame introduced into the air current gives the appearance of a cluster of little clouds, which move on while keeping their respective distance, and as the latter correspond to known intervals of time they enable one to measure the speed of the current.84 We might recall that in 1887 Ernst Mach, Ludwig’s father, had been one of the first ballistics experts to photograph air phenomena around a moving bullet.85 We might also recall the work of the Paris-based Prussian acoustician Rudolph Koenig, who in 1862 had begun analyzing sound and phonetics through the movements of air and flames.86 His extraordinary manometric flame apparatus was known to the whole scientific community. Marey would discover Ludwig Mach’s studies in 1901 : These studies were not known to me when I presented to the Academy the result of experiments where I had studied the action of different bodies in an air current placed in conditions identical to those which I had studied with the liquid currents.87 At the beginning of his research, Marey was also unaware of the experiments conducted by Professor Henry Selby Hele-Shaw of Liverpool, who for a number of years had been studying hydrodynamics by photographing colored glycerin threads.88 Hele-Shaw’s photographs would later inspire two of Max Ernst’s paintings (one of which, The Blind Swimmer from 1934, also integrates a motif from Marey’s wind tunnel).89 Mach himself drew inspiration from the methods of another German, Schlieren, which rendered streams of air visible by changing their refractive index : [ This ] is done by sending a current of hot air into a colder current. The small streams or threads, which are warmed, then show either

clearer or darker than the surrounding air, and the magnesium flash light permits us to photograph the phenomenon.90 The idea had been floating around for some time, so to speak, and yet it was only between 1899 and 1900 that Marey, despite being especially preoccupied, truly committed to studying aerodynamics through photography.91 Not with gas, or fine particles, or dust, but with the smoke produced by a specially designed machine : a modern wind tunnel. Marey’s first wind tunnel (1899–1900)

Fig. 100 Étienne-Jules Marey’s zoetrope, 1887.

In 1898, Marey gave up his research on flying machines that imitated the wings of birds. He had instead become a staunch supporter of the aeroplane, after having visited Clément Ader’s ateliers together with Victor Tatin. And yet there was one subject that had remained virtually unstudied : the crucial problem, for aviation in particular, of how air flows around a surface. Marey addressed it in 1901 : The problem is of great significance. At a time when so many researchers are growing interested in aerial locomotion, there is a need to understand the behavior of the air through which we are launching bodies of various forms : balloons, aeroplanes, and so on ; and even in order to truly understand bird flight, we must know not only the movements of the wing, already revealed by chronophotography, but also the behavior of the air which sustains it.92 And so it was to promote the progress of aviation that Marey built his first wind tunnel in 1899, a time when the shocking death, in 1896, of the German engineer Otto Lilienthal was still fresh in memory. Since Lilienthal’s first attempts in 1890—suspended under a glider,93 he launched himself off an artificial mountain—he had not only succeeded in flying through the air but also in maneuvering and steering by inclining his wingtips. He at times even managed to reach a higher altitude than the one he had launched from. On August 9, 1896, Lilienthal tested a new biplane model that he had just finished building. Coasting at around twenty meters, the upper plane of his glider suddenly folded in on itself and Lilienthal hurtled to the ground. Marey presented his first photographs to the Academy of Sciences on July 16, 1900.94 He had begun to experiment in earnest a year earlier, aided by one of his technicians, Miltiade Kossonis.95 In 1900, another technician, Lostalot, came to lend a hand.

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Marey claimed that his first photographs presented to the Academy in 1900 could further the knowledge of the action of a bird’s wing upon the air : It was important to conduct experiments that would demonstrate the direction taken by air currents as they meet the wing’s surface at different angles and presenting different curvatures. Such is the purpose of these experiments.96 Marey explained his project as follows : To produce, in an enclosed space with transparent walls, a consistent air flow ; to place within this flow parallel and equidistant wisps of

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smoke ; to place along their trajectory diversely shaped surfaces, against which they deflect in different ways ; to brightly illuminate them and take a snapshot of their appearance. Such was the program.97 A camera was set up opposite one glass wall through which one could see the wisps of smoke as they passed in front of a black velvet backdrop. As the photograph was taken, a magnesium flash located to the right of the chamber illuminated the wisps of smoke—these, Marey noted, became especially distinct when lit in such a way. The smoke, produced by burning cotton and tinder inside a metal container, was guided through an evenly-spaced row of small lead tubes

Fig. 101 É.-J. Marey, manometric device allowing for the indication of pressures upon the different surfaces of a turning disk, 1870.

located at the top of the box. Drawn downwards by an electric ventilator, the wisps of smoke, which Marey described as “very fine and parallel, like the strings of a lyre,”98 descended vertically at a velocity of approximately 0.3 meters per second.99 Activating the ventilator caused the wisps of smoke to form a white layer of longitudinally striated air, taking on the appearance of strings stretched over the fingerboard of a musical instrument. They remained entirely distinct over a distance of twenty to thirty centimeters, only to gently unfurl as they mingled with the surrounding air. A pair of fine-meshed cloths acted as filters and the smoke—as well as the cloud of magnesium powder released by the flash, which fired at around one fiftieth of a second—was evacuated by further pipes. Once these conditions were met, an obstacle was placed in the middle of the path : a thin blade of mica whose form and dimensions could be endlessly varied, or a round-tipped object. The photographs—taken with the simple photographic chamber opposite the wind tunnel and in synchrony with the flash— portrayed the behavior of the wisps of smoke as they encountered a surface inclined at various angles. Marey named the surface which faced the air stream the “leading surface,” and the edge which this stream hit first the “leading edge.”100 In 1900,101 Marey described a first version of his machine as having twenty tubes, and a second as having fifty-eight. And yet if we look more closely at the original photographs taken by Marey between 1899 and 1902, we recognize not two, but four different systems : 1) A machine equipped with thirteen non-equidistant tubes. The obstacle was held in place by a rod that emerged not from the black velvet backdrop but from the right hand side of the box, itself serving, in principle, to transmit the light of the magnesium flash. We likely have here a first attempt whose mixed results Marey deemed unsatisfactory. Three negative glass plates representing the thirteen wisps of smoke are in the collection of the Cinémathèque française. 2) A machine equipped with eleven equidistant tubes. This apparatus can be seen in several enlarged paper prints held at both the Musée Marey in Beaune102 and the Cinémathèque française. 3) A machine described by Marey in 1899 as having twenty emission tubes, but which was in fact equipped with twenty-one. 4) Finally, the last iteration of the wind tunnel from 1900 that, according to Marey, counted fifty-eight tubes ; we counted no more than fifty-seven.

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We have, in the end, four different versions ; Marey, by gradually transforming his first machine, by adapting each with an eye to the next, demonstrated once again his great technical capabilities. From the first photographs, Marey had noted similar results to those obtained through his experiments on wave motion. By placing a pisciform or fish-shaped object, with its obtuse head and tapered tail [ fig. 49 ], into the current of smoke, he could assess the advantages of leading with the widest extremity, since this created very little turbulence at the rear. Another photograph of an obstacle with an inclined plane confirmed mechanical data previously established by a number of physicists : the image showed that the air’s center of pressure on the inclined plane did not coincide with the midpoint of its surface but instead approached its leading edge the more acute the angle of attack. The wisps of smoke split as they collided with the inclined plane ; some moving along the leading edge, others following the trailing edge [ fig. 15 ] : If the plane is at a right angle to the airflow, the split occurs at the midpoint of its surface ; when the plane is inclined we see this split occur closer and closer to the leading edge, in such a way that the wisps recoiling from this edge end up reversing course, whilst yet others stream along the surface from front to rear.103 To our knowledge, Marey, who was probably not entirely satisfied with his earlier methods, never published any photographs from his first three smoke machines.104 Indeed, a problem had arisen with the “prismatic chamber” that contained the emission tubes : because it was too narrow, it hindered airflow when the obstacles reached a certain width. It was not until June 3, 1901, that the physiologist finally presented a new series of images, in the Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Sciences (Proceedings of the Academy of Sciences), after having built a wind tunnel that was at last to his satisfaction. 1901 : the new wind tunnel Despite the various wind tunnels built by Marey between 1899 and 1901 having sadly been lost, an original photograph (a glass-plate negative) of his last and most advanced model is held in the collection of the Cinémathèque française. During his first presentation of the wind tunnel on July 16, 1900, Marey, dissatisfied with the results, had informed the Academy of

future experiments with “more sophisticated equipment.”105 Nevertheless, making a new and improved wind tunnel was an expensive endeavor, and his money quickly ran out. Marey was at the same time in the process of creating a costly Institute bearing his name, situated near the Physiological Station (which itself always lacked for funds). It was finally thanks to the American aviation pioneer Samuel Pierpont Langley that Marey obtained a grant from the Smithsonian Institution in 1901.106 Langley and Marey had become acquainted in 1895 through the photographer Davanne107 ; Langley, then acting as secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, had been interested in acquiring his own chronophotographic camera. The physiologist’s reply is held in the Smithsonian’s archives : For eight years I have been using another camera that passes a sensitized film behind the lens. [ ... ] I have made different modifications to the chronophotographe in these last years, and I am happy enough with the way it works. [ ... ] I can have one constructed for you with the modifications you desire if they are not too substantial. The price would be from two to three thousand francs. [ ... ] It would make me very happy if my cameras could assist you in your excellent aviation research. These cameras in effect permit one to follow the movement of different forms moving in the air.108 As far as we know, Langley did not purchase a camera but the two men maintained a long epistolary relationship. In February of 1897, Marey wrote to the Smithsonian to seek financial assistance, which would allow him to continue his experiments at the Physiological Station. Langley’s response, dated April 5, 1897, indicated that there was a possibility of granting him five thousand francs (one thousand dollars) provided that it be used for “the investigation of the properties of atmospheric air.” 109 This grant, however, would only be awarded at the end of 1900, after Marey and Langley met in Paris in August at the Congrès international d’aéronautique110 : Dear Mr. Marey, When I had the pleasure of seeing you in Paris last August, you spoke of some interesting experiments you were making on air currents, and asked whether these fell in a class which the Smithsonian could assist. I am of the opinion that they do, and I think that some aid might be rendered from the Hodgkins fund. The amount at the disposal of the Institution, however, is a strictly limited one but I think a sum

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not exceeding five thousand francs might be assigned for this purpose. Will you kindly let me know whether such a sum would be acceptable to you in your work, under the conditions mentioned in the accompanying circular ? If it would be of any use to you, I should personally be very glad to be the means of associating this Institution with your eminent research.111 Marey seems to have been somewhat discouraged by a circular (now lost) attached to Langley’s letter, which specified that the new version of the machine must be sent to the Smithsonian following its use. Langley, in a letter dated December 10, 1900, reassured him on this point and confirmed the transfer of 5,150 francs for his “experiments on air currents.”112 In 1900, 5,150 francs was roughly equivalent to 16,880 euros today, a relatively large sum. It is doubtful whether the physiologist could have accessed as much from the French government, still fuming over the relative failure in 1897 of Clément Ader’s “Avion III,” which had initially been funded by an enormous subsidy of 300,000 francs,113 granted by the French War Office in 1891—a sum considerably larger than the one given to Marey by the Americans ten years later. So it was thanks to the Smithsonian’s financial support that in 1901 Marey built a machine equipped with fifty-seven emission tubes, whereas those developed in 1899 counted only eleven, thirteen, and twenty-one. The air chamber was expanded from twenty to fifty centimeters, the cloth replaced by fine-meshed silk gauze ; a twenty centimeter scale provided a measure for the distance traveled by what Marey called the “molecules of air.” It was possible to increase or diminish the velocity of the current thanks to the electric ventilator’s controller. Another important addition was made : an “electric vibrator” (in fact, a standard electric bell that emitted no sound) shook the emission tubes ten times per second, causing the wisps of smoke to form sinusoidal curves instead of straight parallel lines. This chronographic system (the principle of which had long been used by Marey

Fig. 102 Portrait of Marey, ca. 1890. Photograph.

in the context of the graphic method) was used to indicate air velocity. When these periodic vibrations were imparted to the row of tubes, the descending wisps of smoke formed waves, their wavelengths corresponding to the distance traveled by the air every tenth of a second. A new superior system allowed for the rapid evacuation of the combustion byproducts released by the magnesium flash : a wooden crate with one transparent side opposite the emission tubes was crossed by the ventilator’s outlet chimney. The room in which the machine was installed, both at the Station and the Institute, was steeped in darkness. The magnesium flash went off and the camera caught “the wisps of smoke in their capricious meanderings where the eddies form.”114 Obstacles of various shapes and sizes were placed in the center of the currents : concave triplanes, surfaces inclined at 20, 30, 60, or 65 degrees, parabolic arcs, triangular prisms, V-shaped surfaces, cylinders, bodies with oval cross-sections, very elongated fusiform bodies, the list goes on. On June 3, 1901,115 Marey presented four photographs to the Academy of Sciences, along with a description of his new wind tunnel. On October 21, 1901, Langley acknowledged receiving several photographs sent by Marey to the Smithsonian.116 In 1902, the Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution published an article on Marey’s chronophotography117 followed by two images of smoke from the new machine. This wind tunnel would allow Marey, together with his disciple Pierre Noguès, to establish the following findings : — The wisps of smoke expand as they meet an inclined plane, indicating a loss of velocity and an increase in pressure [ fig. 60 ]. — The wisps of smoke separate above the inclined plane, dividing themselves into two layers which move in opposite directions [ fig. 22, 64 ]. — If the inclined plane is perpendicular to the air stream, the two layers of air are of equal size, each rolling around one side of the obstacle ; beyond the edges, their speed increases [ fig. 58–62 ]. — If the plane is inclined, the two layers of air are of unequal proportions ; the narrowest of the two falls off the surface’s leading edge. This layer becomes narrower as the angle of incidence is more acute [ fig. 22–28, 63–68 ]. — Inclined plane : the demarcation line between the two layers, which is also the demarcation line between two equal and opposite pres-

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sures, moves further towards the leading edge as the angle of attack is more acute. This indicates that the center of pressure moves ever closer to the leading edge the more acute the angle [ fig. 22–28, 63–68 ]. — “An important problem for aviation is to know how currents of air behave against three neighboring and parallel planes inclined at a given angle.”118 One of the images, showing the wisps of smoke with three neighboring and parallel planes, inclined at an angle of 30 degrees, effectively answers this question. We notice that when the superior layer hits the third superior plane, it is influenced less than when the obstacle is a single plane [ fig. 29–30, 75 ]. — Three parallel concave planes, angled at 30 degrees : the low pressure area at the rear is greater than when using a plane surface [ fig. 76 ]. The experiments on multiple concave planes were requested by Langley in his letter to Marey dated October 21, 1901.119 — Concave plane, angled at 36 degrees : the two layers comprise many eddies but the low pressure area at the rear is very pronounced [ fig. 69 ]. — Concave plane with a lateral vibratory movement : the wisps from the superior layer seem to maintain a relatively regular velocity, whilst those from the inferior layer, on the convex side, decelerate significantly after having passed the low pressure area [ fig. 35 ]. — Plane measuring ten centimeters wide, positioned horizontally : the wisps become increasingly wider after having surpassed the obstacle, indicating the low pressure area at the rear [ fig. 62 ]. — Plane measuring twenty centimeters wide, positioned horizontally : we observe uneven eddies and curls of smoke that return towards the rear of the plane, under the influence of the low pressure area (these observations were made by Pierre Noguès, from an image he took in 1903, with a current velocity of one meter per second120 [ fig. 60 ]). — Plane measuring thirty centimeters wide, placed horizontally : below the plane, we observe clouds overlaid with smoke which seem to originate from small tip vortices, and tend to fill up the low pressure area (as above, but made in 1904 [ fig. 58 ]). — Same thirty centimeter wide plane, but with the lateral vibratory movement : the wisps crash against the plane. They elongate significantly having surpassed the edge. The speed increases gradually and then slows [ fig. 59 ]. — Parabolic arc, its concave face impacted at a 7 degree angle : strong low pressure area propagates far behind the obstacle [ fig. 71 ].

— Same obstacle, but placed at a 10 degree angle : the layer of smoke deviates slightly at the side facing the convexity. The width of the wisps shows that the resulting low pressure area is much weaker than in the previous shot [ fig. 73 ]. What these images revealed undoubtedly saved many an aviator’s life ; for the first time the invisible could be seen in the behavior of air around solid forms. And with this, the mistake made by Lilienthal in 1896 had been scientifically confirmed : So long as Lilienthal used his monoplane he had no accidents, whilst he suffered many with his stacked wing models. Enticed by the examples of Stringfellow, Hiram Maxim, and Hardgrave, he too wished to employ stacked planes, expecting that this would offer him a greater airfoil surface with a shorter wingspan. He had however overlooked the fact that the center of gravity in birds is very near the point of sustentation, and that the superior plane, located too far from the center of gravity, received highly variable pressures from the horizontal current ; further, the velocity varies significantly at different successive points of the same air current : this significantly worsened his machine’s stability.121 Interestingly, after having published his aerodynamic images, Marey left very little in the way of theoretical interpretation. Unlike Gustave Eiffel, who (applying almost identical principles) went on to establish a whole series of laws that would be taught to future engineers, Marey seemed essentially indifferent to the scientific results derived from these images. The few reports that the physiologist devoted to them were mostly descriptions of his machines and the processes by which the photographs were obtained. Granted, he did point out similarities to his earlier hydrodynamic experiments and referred to some ancient theories confirmed by his images ; and yet in his first communication on this subject in July of 1901, he immediately urged his colleagues to “assist [ him ] in the mathematical interpretation of figures which represent only the kinematic data of the problem I am trying to solve.”122 The pursuit of a solution to this “problem” meant for Marey the improvement of his wind tunnel—which became possible, as we have seen, thanks to the financial support of the Smithsonian in 1901—rather than something to be carried out on a theoretical level. The penultimate article Marey devoted to his machine, published on September 7, 1901, in La Nature, concluded with an indication that the physiologist was ready to move on—and this was effectively the case, as Marey’s at-

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tention had been turned to the construction and organization of his Institute123 : We know that many problems may be solved using this method, which we have set out here in all its detail so that it may be applied by those concerned with aviation, propulsion in fluids, ventilation ; in effect, all that is connected to the movements of air.124 Such an attitude should not surprise us. Marey was a voracious polymath, tackling any subject orbiting his primary obsession : movement. Everything that moved interested him, whether it be blood circulation, bird flight, human gait, animal locomotion, the free fall of a cat or an object, the circumvolutions of fluids, the attitudes of a dancer, the a priori invisible vibration of sounds, and more. His first mission was to record, through graphic or chronophotographic means, the traces of these movements : to make them visible. He needed then to analyze the resulting images : at times, when the subject matter was familiar to him, he performed this difficult task with ease ; at others, he left it to more competent scholars. This is what we find when Marey presented his 1894 films showing the fall of a cat to the Academy of Sciences : he immediately called for engineers and mathematicians to explain the mechanism that allowed the cat to right itself. As we know, a great discussion ensued, lasting many weeks and introducing complicated theorems and equations. Marey’s greatest weakness in this particular case, but also regarding the “peculiar trajectories” of his wisps of smoke, was his lack of mathematical knowledge. He admitted as much in a letter to Langley written in 1899 : My insufficient knowledge of mathematics prohibits me from leaving the experimental field. Sometimes I am even quite embarrassed by my inability to interpret certain experimental results like those of the wisps of smoke in the experiments that I have spoken to you about. They proceed very slowly.125

Fig. 103 Reconstruction of Marey’s wind tunnel by the Cinémathèque française, 1999. Photograph.

If Marey chose to hire Georges Demenÿ in 1881 it was because the young man was an expert in physical education, an excellent draftsman and technician, but also a skillful mathematician. Demenÿ would on many occasions correct Marey’s articles, particularly when these involved algebraic calculations or formulas. When Marey published Le Vol des oiseaux in 1890, the entire mathematical section was left to the engineer Charles de Labouret—unfortunately, Labouret’s contribution would be severely criticized by a number of experts. And certainly aerodynamic analyses required this type of skill—we need only leaf through Gustave Eiffel’s works on the same subject, as we will soon see. His mathematical shortcomings aside, Marey had in any case always struggled to adopt the approach of a physicist. He seems to us mostly mesmerized by the sight, the hypnotic beauty of the photographs produced by his machine—as in truth are we. And although he quickly moved on from his wind tunnel project, he had nevertheless and once again invented a technique that proved fundamental for future scientific research. Reconstruction of the smoke machine in 1999

Of all Marey’s smoke machines, none remain to us today. We do not know exactly when the wind tunnels were dismantled or destroyed ; we do know that, in 1904, shortly after Marey’s death, his loyal disciple Pierre Noguès was still using the last model.126 In 1979, to widespread indifference, both the Physiological Station and Institut Marey were levelled by bulldozers.127 One half of the archives went to the Musée Marey in Beaune, the other to the Collège de France (which, in November 1964, had off-handedly sold the physiologist’s personal library to Parisian booksellers). In the midst of this outrageous dismantling, much was broken, lost, even stolen. Were fragments of these smoke machines found, were they thrown into dumpsters along with other apparently unfathomable devices preserved at these two historical sites where cinema was born ? Save for a few photographs, nothing of Marey’s wind tunnels remains to us. It was thanks to Pierre Noguès, who decided to sell his archives in June of 1959, that the Cinémathèque française took possession of thirty-seven original glass-plate negatives from the smoke experiments conducted between 1899 and 1901. Along with these thirty-sev-

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Fig. 104 Lucien Bull, phases of a sphere falling in water, at a rate of 1250 frames per second on glass plate, dated June 23, 1934. Chronophotograph.

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en glass plates were seventeen old five-by-nine centimeter contact prints, and two panels, one bearing eight and the other thirty-six original prints. In 1999, thanks to an exceptional subsidy from the Centre national de la cinématographie, the Cinémathèque française reconstructed Marey’s first wind tunnel (with twenty tubes) [ fig. 103 ], almost one hundred years after the original. The replica was made, with the assistance of the visual artist and sculptor Laurent Albouy, for the exhibition É.-J. Marey, le mouvement en lumière (É.-J. Marey, Movement in Light) in the Espace Électra of the Fondation Électricité de France.128 In 2004, the Musée d’Orsay reconstructed four more models, all different, in conjunction with the exhibition Mouvements de l’air, É.-J. Marey photographe des fluides (Movements of Air : É.-J. Marey, Photographer of Fluids), co-produced by the Cinémathèque française. We found the 1999 wind tunnel129 without a doubt the most difficult machine to reconstruct, since it needed to function continuously during the day (which was not, of course, its original intent) ; additionally, the public was to be invited to handle the obstacle placed in the smoke currents. Finally, we also wanted to include two later elements : the twenty centimeter scale and the electric vibrator incorporated by Marey in 1901 to measure the velocity of the moving smoke. The old furnace, which burned tinder and fabric, was by necessity exchanged for the type of liquid fog used in theatrical productions. In keeping with the original wind tunnel, the wisps of smoke were sucked downward by a ventilator ; however, given the modifications, the liquid fog condensed and clogged the emission tubes. The condensation could simply have been avoided by drawing the smoke upwards, but such a measure was out of the question since our goal was to remain true to Marey’s invention. The reconstruction of this huge machine (measuring almost two meters high) was nevertheless worth the trouble : we were, after turning it on for the first time, quite literally spellbound at the sight of its strange and powerful beauty. Apotheosis of chrono, photo, graphy It may seem peculiar, as we have said before, that after having invented chronophotography on glass plates and on film, Marey returned at the end of his life to conventional photography. In fact, once

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again Marey foreshadowed a certain aesthetic and technical trend in both narrative and scientific films in modern cinema. Marey was, in effect, an early adopter of high-speed imaging. In the early 1890s he achieved frame rates of one hundred images per second, which allowed him to analyze, with an unprecedented level of detail, the movements of humans or animals in slow motion. At least since Jean Epstein’s The Fall of the House of Usher—and up to Scorsese’s Taxi Driver, without forgetting more recent films exploring the languid effects of slow motion (one thinks, for instance, of the remarkable study of walking offered by Wong Kar-wai’s In the Mood for Love)—high-speed imaging has invaded our screens, all thanks to Marey. In the domain of scientific films, Marey’s former assistants, Pierre Noguès and Lucien Bull, continued his work. Pierre Noguès managed to record at a rate of three hundred frames per second, imbuing his images with a majestic slowness ; Lucien Bull went further, defying the very laws of cinematographic technique [ fig. 104 ]. Lucien Bull’s reel of film never moved ; rather, a prism rotating at a great speed—nine thousand revolutions per minute—allowed him to capture high-frequency images. Bull spent his entire life perfecting his method, endlessly increasing the recording frequency, as though caught in an infernal spiral. Like Marey he studied the resistance of air (we think of his experiments on shock waves130) and at the end of his life had invented a device capable of recording at a rate of one million frames per second. This spiral seems to know no limit. In the span of just one century, from Marey’s first slow-motion films in 1891, the recording of the ephemeral has gone from a rate of one hundred to ten billion frames per second, thanks in particular to electronic imaging.131 Herein lies a paradox : by multiplying the frequency by millions or billions, we seem to return to the ultra-rapid snapshot that Marey had favored, at the end of his life, to capture flowing movements of air. There is perhaps another explanation for Marey’s interest in aerodynamics in the years before his death : the photographs taken between 1899 and 1901 inside his wind tunnels profoundly echo the iconography of the graphic method ; that is, undulating lines, white on black. On several occasions, Marey dubbed his images of smoke not “photographs” but “chronophotographs,”132 despite the latter defining until then his sequential studies of movements. To confuse things further, Marey used two techniques to produce these images ;

some are in fact slightly blurred [ fig. 26, 36 ], offering softer and brighter, albeit less precise, images. In 1900, Marey described this particular technique as follows : By burning a magnesium wire for one or two seconds, one obtains a more intense image, but whose lines are less sharp where the eddies form, as it is not the ephemerality of the smoke that acts on the plate, but a series of variable states succeeding each other during the time of exposure and blending together.133 In 1901 Marey was able to capture “the average state of an air current”134 through a prolonged illumination of around seven seconds, produced by the combustion of a magnesium wire. Pierre Noguès described these images in 1933 as “long exposures.” If we accept Noguès’ terminology, we would be left with “rapid exposures” [ vues instantanées ] and “long exposures” [ vues posées ], although we know that Marey referred to both kinds of images under the generic term “chronophotographs.” Given Marey’s meticulous mind, it was clearly not by chance that he used the word “chronophotograph” to describe his images of smoke. Indeed, it is plain to see that these images of the movements of air contain chrono, photo, and graphy in equal parts : chrono, given the electric chronograph that vibrated the wisps of smoke ; photo, of course, since the machine implied the light of a flash and the camera ; graphy because the luminous striations left by the wisps of smoke on the photographic plate could be read and analyzed in much the same way as his tracings on lampblack. In a way Marey had returned to his roots a master, crowning fifty years of graphic research and its mysterious black and white world. Henri Langlois inaugurated the first exhibition dedicated to Marey (at the Cinémathèque française in 1963) with the following statement, which rings true of both the graphic method and the physiologist’s photographs and chronophotographs of the movements of air : There is nothing more secret, lyrical, or explosive, nothing more contemporary than the silence of his blacks and the weightlessness of his whites. Gustave Eiffel’s aerodynamic wind tunnel The technique of the wind tunnel was perfected at the turn of the twentieth century by engineers, aircraft designers, and car manufacturers alike. The most famous of these wind tunnels was Gustave

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Eiffel’s aerodynamic laboratory in Auteuil, built not long after those of Marey. We might mention here that Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923) was just two years younger than Marey, and also born in Burgundy, in the town of Dijon. In the course of his studies on air resistance and the fall of bodies, Eiffel followed a similar path to Marey : starting out with the graphic method and winding up with the wind tunnel. But we might first go back a few years. In 1880, Eiffel was awarded the construction of the Garabit Viaduct in the Cantal region. Built between 1882 and 1884, 122 meters above the river Truyère, the viaduct was 564 meters long including its principal wrought-iron arch spanning 165 meters. Its biggest problem lay in wind resistance ; indeed, a major concern for the engineers designing these novel metal structures. On December 28, 1879, strong winds had brought down the Tay Bridge, killing dozens of people ; in 1884, a section of the Tardes Viaduct’s deck truss, one of Gustave Eiffel’s most spectacular constructions, was swept away by a violent storm : The design and construction of the Garabit Viaduct raised the problem of strong winds and, as Eiffel himself would repeatedly say at the time he was designing his “300 Meter Tower,” it was his response to this challenge that had guided the Tower’s shape and technical characteristics. [ ... ] One need look no further to understand the root of Gustave Eiffel’s passionate interest in meteorology and aerodynamics, to which he would devote himself for the last thirty years of his life.135 In June of 1884, five months before the Garabit Viaduct’s completion—and the bridge was to be a resounding success—Eiffel’s two structural engineers, Nouguier and Koechlin, presented him with

Fig. 105 Laboratory of Cailletet and Colardeau for the study of falling bodies installed in the second platform of the Eiffel Tower at an altitude of 120 meters. The technician readies himself to cut the end of the cord attached to a moving body that will fall 120 meters to the ground, 1892.

the first blueprint of the Eiffel Tower. Maurice Koechlin, who would assist Eiffel in designing both the Garabit Viaduct and his Tower, graduated from the Polytechnikum in Zurich, where he was taught by one of the world’s most renowned masters of calculus and graphs applied to metal structures, Carl Culmann. Culmann was the author of Die graphische Statik136 (Graphic statics), published in Zurich in 1866, which exposed new methods of calculus and “graphic statics” applied to architecture, which was to some extent a modern version of the French engineer Léon Lalanne’s nomographic device, the “abac.”137 It is well known that the 300 meter Tower elicited some rather hostile reactions. Eiffel claimed in response that his creation would greatly benefit science. And indeed, once built it hosted a great number of researchers. Eiffel himself published in 1900 a large book entirely dedicated to the Travaux scientifiques exécutés à la tour de trois cent mètres de 1889 à 1900 (Scientific operations conducted at the three hundred meter Tower between 1889 and 1900).138 He ran his meteorological experiments using graphic recording equipment provided by the Maison Richard Frères. Founded in 1845 and located at 8 impasse Fessart in Belleville, Paris, the company was first headed by Félix Richard and then transferred in 1876 to his two sons, Jules (inventor of the verascope in 1893) and Félix-Max. They would go on to establish, on July 3, 1882, a company that manufactured precision instruments and recording devices in particular, as their 1886 catalog makes clear.139 Meteorological and climatological instruments were their great specialty : barometers, thermometers, psychrometers, hygrometers, pluviometers, evaporimeters, anemometers, actinometers, aeroscopes, tide gages, and so on. They supplied the industry with manometers, pyrometers, chronographs, and Wattmeter dynamometers ; they were also advocates of the graphic method : The graphic method has been universally adopted ; it was rightfully found that representing various physical phenomena using diagrams was the only way of seriously studying them.140 In July of 1882, the great ballistics expert Colonel Hippolyte Sebert wrote a glowing report of the graphic instruments built by the Richards.141 The report mentioned that, as of May 1, 1886, more than three thousand meteorological recording devices had been sold

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(barometers, hygrometers, thermometers). In reality, almost all the devices built by Richard Frères were based on graphic inscription and would have merited the suffix -graph. Their pluviometer, for instance, better suited to the name “pluviograph,” collected rainwater in a funnel, which then ran through a tipping counter whose changes in position were recorded on squared paper by an ink stylus. The Richard Frères anemometer, which recorded wind velocity and force, undoubtedly reminds us of Pajot’s eighteenth century device. On November 29, 1891, Jules and Félix-Max Richard decided to part ways. For 300,000 francs, Félix-Max signed away his rights to

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create or run any trade or business manufacturing similar goods. Nonetheless, on February 2, 1892, Félix-Max used the money to purchase a photographic shop, the Comptoir général de photographie ; in response, Jules Richard immediately pressed charges against his brother for breaking their contract. On October 5, 1893, the courts prohibited Félix-Max from continuing his commercial activities ; despite an appeal, on May 28, 1895, the judgment was upheld. Forced to close shop, the director of the Comptoir offered to sell his business to one of his young employees, Léon Gaumont. The sales transaction was signed by Gaumont and Richard on July 6, 1895 ; on August 10,

Fig. 106 Gustave Eiffel’s apparatus for measuring air resistance, taken from the second floor of the Eiffel Tower before the fall, 1907. Photograph.

the general and limited partnership, L. Gaumont et Cie, was created at 57 rue Saint-Roch, Paris.142 And so it came to be that what is now known internationally as the Gaumont Film Company, one of the major French film studios, was born out of a factory specialized in graphic recording devices. Léon Gaumont would also go on to commercialize, in 1895, Georges Demenÿ’s chronophotographic devices (cameras, phonoscopes).143 There were also strong ties between Gaumont and Eiffel, since the latter was one of the first backers (alongside Joseph Vallot, director of the Mont-Blanc observatory) of L. Gaumont et Cie.144 Not only did Gaumont maintain a correspondence with Eiffel (and his son-in-law Adolphe Salles) between 1895 and 1899, but the two were both alumni of the Collège Sainte-Barbe in Paris. When the Eiffel Tower installed its scientific equipment in 1889, a recording anemometer, a thermograph, a barograph, and a hydrograph were provided by the Richard brothers, who at this time were still in business together. The rotating cylinder on which Eiffel recorded variations in temperature and humidity the Richards had dubbed a cinémographe :145 For the duration of the [ World’s ] Fair, the receiver apparatus was placed in the windows of Messrs Richard, in the Palais des Arts libéraux. In November of 1889, it was transported to the Tower’s machine room, at the base of the South pillar.146 And so we discover that the graphic method was intimately connected, almost umbilically, to that symbol of fin-de-siècle modernity, the Eiffel Tower. It was probably due to lack of space that the recording devices, provisionally housed in November of 1889 in the machine room, were transported exactly one year later to a ground floor room of the Bureau central météorologique on rue de l’Université, which was connected to the Eiffel Tower by a twenty-wire electrical cable. Thanks to this wide array of devices, the Tower would long be a hub of meteorological research, a subject that greatly interested Eiffel who, we may add, was a frequent editor of the journal Comparaisons graphiques des valeurs mensuelles, saisonnières et annuelles des principaux éléments météorologiques147 (Comparative graphs of monthly, quarterly, and annual values of the primary meteorological elements). His work Travaux scientifiques exécutés à la tour de trois cent mètres de 1890 à 1894 contained comparative tables for temperatures recorded between 1890 and 1894 from the top of the Tow-

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er and in the Saint-Maur park, as well as in the courtyard of the Bureau on rue de l’Université. And yet what remains most interesting to us is his research on air resistance and the fall of bodies—two subjects of great importance both for Marey and for aeronautical science. Gustave Eiffel would also develop his passion after having hosted in the Tower the two physicists Louis Cailletet and E. Colardeau. In 1892 they installed a research laboratory on the Tower’s second floor, 120 meters off the ground. Funded by Eiffel, Cailletet was able to install such recording devices as a revolving cylinder moved by a clockwork motor equipped with a Foucault regulator, a stylus, and a chronograph with an electric tuning-fork [ fig. 105 ]. It was Marey, who clearly had in mind Arthur Morin’s graphic device for measuring the free fall of bodies, who helped the two physicists install the apparatus. Cailletet and Colardeau presented their findings to the Academy of Sciences, on July 4, 1892 : A very small number of experiments have hitherto been carried out regarding the free fall of bodies that have taken into consideration the effect of air resistance on their motion. [ ... ] We believed that the Eiffel Tower offered particularly advantageous conditions to further explore this interesting problem and to directly study rectilinear movement. We have been encouraged in this regard by the gracious advice of our eminent colleague, Mr. Marey.148 To determine the laws of motion governing a falling body, one must identify its position in space at any given moment. Arthur Morin achieved this in the 1840s with his recording apparatus, now conserved at the Musée des arts et métiers ; Samuel Langley—thanks to whom Marey was able to construct his second smoke machine— had also conducted research on this subject, but it was Cailletet and Colardeau who truly refined it. The observation was no longer carried out over a distance of three meters, as in Morin’s apparatus, or within the nine meter radius of Langley’s framework, but over a distance of 120 meters and with a considerably more sophisticated recording method. A weight was attached to the end of a long thin wire that was drawn behind it with only the slightest traction. The wire, subdivided into twenty meter sections, was wound around a horizontal arrangement of wooden cones, their tips pointed downwards ; their conical shape allowed the wire to unwind with minimal friction. When each twenty meter section had fully unraveled, an electrical

current activated the stylus of the tuning fork, which inscribed this point in time on smoke-blackened paper : this allowed the physicists to measure how much time the object took to travel twenty, forty, sixty meters. To verify that the wire did not impact the velocity of the falling object, comparative measurements were collected with the wire and without. In the latter case, the fall was recorded by a spring-supported wooden platform located on the ground ; upon the slightest contact an electric current was triggered, thereby activating the recording device. Whether the object was circular, square, or triangular, almost no difference in velocity was recorded. Once again, Newton’s laws were put to the test : was the air resistance experienced by a falling plane proportional to its surface ? After having carried out various experiments, Cailletet and Colardeau reported to the Academy of Sciences on July 4, 1892, that such proportionality exists : Assessing, in kilograms per square meter, the air resistance to a moving surface as a function speed is quite simple ; indeed, during the first moments of its fall, the speed of the object increases, and so does the resistance the air opposes to it, until it becomes equal to the weight of the object itself.149 Despite garnering some interest, Cailletet and Colardeau’s experiments were not further taken up, to the disappointment of Eiffel, who in 1903 decided to tackle the subject himself. He first thought to string a cable between the Tower’s second floor and a mast erected five hundred meters away on the edge of the Champ-de-Mars, upon which entire aeroplanes or other flying objects could be made to slide thanks to a moveable carriage that would be equipped with a graphic recording device. The project for an Eiffel Tower “aerodrome” was presented to the Aéro-Club’s scientific commission on November 30, 1903, to apparently little response.150 And so Eiffel resolved to continue his research alone, up in his Tower, using another technique that relied, like those of Cailletet and Colardeau, on the graphic method. As we have seen, the two physicists studied air resistance by releasing an object into the void and observing how its motion, slowed down by air resistance, became uniform as the resistance became equal to the object’s weight. In the experiments that Eiffel conducted up to 1907, a test plate (or another kind of surface) was attached to a heavy mass with very low air resistance ; only at the end of its fall did it reach approximately the same velocity as it would in a

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vacuum, attaining a speed of forty meters per second after falling ninety-five meters. The apparatus designed by Eiffel and constructed by Jules Carpentier (who also manufactured the Cinématographe Lumière) consisted of a heavy mass that pushed the plate in front of it by means of springs. Dropped from the Tower’s second floor, it slid along a vertical cable in quasi free fall. To avoid deteriorating the apparatus an internal brake system was activated twenty-one meters above the ground : a gradual thickening of the cable caused the object to slowly come to a standstill.151 A stylus, attached to a tuning-fork vibrating one hundred times per second, was secured to the object and inscribed the time elapsed on a vertical revolving cylinder covered with smoke-blackened paper. The stylus recorded not only time but also the relative motion of the moving part for each of the positions occupied by the apparatus. Eiffel never cited Marey, who had of course also studied falling bodies (using admittedly more modest methods : dropping a ball or rod, for example, and chronophotographing its trajectory), and yet he perfectly assimilated the physiologist’s techniques. His diagrams single-handedly represented time, movement, pressure, and space. At every given moment the falling apparatus recorded : 1) The time elapsed since the origin of the fall, through the number of vibrations. 2) The space traversed—in other words, the height of the fall— measured by the x-coordinates of the curve. 3) The tension of the dynamometric springs, measured by the y-coordinates. These three values allowed him to determine the air resistance against the test plate :

Fig. 107 Gustave Eiffel’s apparatus for measuring air resistance, equipping the apparatus before its reascent, 1907. Photograph.

The resulting curve is a thin sine wave that directly registers time, while the y-coordinates of its midline indicate the air resistance. And given that the x-coordinates are proportional to the spaces traversed in the fall, the diagram furnishes, by one and the same curve and at any moment of the fall, the three values that interest us.152 The apparatus was located at a height of 115.73 meters on the Tower’s second floor ; a two-flap hatch was fitted into the floor. A photograph [ fig. 106 ] allows us to see the flat surface of the test plate, the two springs, and the cylinder covered with blackened paper. At the conclusion of each experiment, a technician removed the apparatus from the cable ; the brake blocks, burned in the process, were replaced ; the stylus and tuning fork were adjusted ; the blackened paper removed. To accomplish this, a two square meter scaffold with a large central opening descended the cable until reaching its target [ fig. 107 ]. There were ten in the research team, including Eiffel and his collaborator Léon Rith (an engineer from the École centrale). The worker on the scaffolding carefully removed the recording cylinder from the apparatus and brought it to Eiffel : The paper was [ ... ] detached from the cylinder and the lampblack set by submerging it in a basin containing a fixative of shellac dissolved in alcohol. We measured the x-coordinates corresponding to the different heights of the fall, and counted the vibrations of the tuning fork as they appeared on the diagram. For the y-coordinates, we employed another method. [ ... ] Unintended friction caused some of the oscillations on the diagram’s general curve. We made these oscillations more manifest by retracing the median curve without the tuning fork’s vibrations, in such a way that its four parts were continuous with each other. Irregular curves were discarded. These oscillations were very rarely entirely absent, that is to say, very few diagrams were of an absolute regularity : and so we would trace another more uniform curve near the original, which deviated from the latter as little as possible.153 As with Marey’s wind tunnel, different kinds of surfaces were attached to the apparatus, allowing for comparative tables of measurements to be drawn up : square or rectangular plates of various dimensions, circles, single or double lattices, cylinders, cones, inclined planes, dihedral shapes, and so on. To facilitate the calculations, a coefficient correction diagram was set up, as well as an abacus. The velocities measured were limited to a range of between eighteen and forty meters per second, enough for Eiffel to resolve issues relating

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to the stability of large structures and the air resistance relative to high speed vehicles. Despite publishing, in 1907, a lavish compendium summarizing his experiments on air resistance, Eiffel wished to pursue the matter further still. In August of 1909, following in Marey’s footsteps, he ordered the construction of a wind tunnel near the foot of his Tower in the Champs-de-Mars. The principle remained the same, but the wind tunnel bore little resemblance to that of the physiologist [ fig. 108 ]. For one thing, it emitted no smoke. Instead, the air was drawn into a 1.5 meter cylinder, which would be extended to two meters in 1910 : The air leaving the fan undergoes various tumultuous movements that are difficult to control enough to obtain regular and constant directions and velocities at each of the section’s given points. This is what led us to suck in the air rather than blow it out [ ... ]. The chosen arrangement therefore consists in sucking the air from a vast hangar into an evenly curved, large scale ajutage. [ ... ] We use the largest model of Sirocco fans : the diameter of the mobile rim measures 1.75 meters and the whole apparatus stands at 3.36 meters high, or 5.5 meters if one includes the block of stone supporting it. It is driven by a 50-kilowatt or 70-horsepower generator, powered by the Eiffel Tower’s own machines. The number of revolutions is regulated by a rheostat, going from 40 to 200. The velocity of the air current can vary from between 5 to 20 meters per second with the 1.5 meter ajutage [ ... ]. The hangar measures 20 by 12 meters, with a height of 9 meters. The T-shaped test chamber in total measures 43 meters square.154 The object or surface (aeroplane, propeller, diverse forms) was placed into the current, attached to both an aerodynamic scale and manometers which registered the magnitude of the force, direction,

Fig. 108 Gustave Eiffel’s wind tunnel at the Champ-deMars, ca. 1910. Photograph.

and point of application. They measured both the velocity and the pressure at various points on the surface. From 1909 to 1911 more than five thousand tests were conducted by Eiffel and his team in this first wind tunnel, many of them using the graphic method. The iconography born of Eiffel’s aerodynamic experiments was undoubtedly remarkable from a scientific perspective, and yet it lacked the dreamlike quality of those undulating wisps of smoke Marey had photographed just a few years earlier. Eiffel’s images were in reality nothing more than simple line drawings, traced from photographs representing the fine threads attached to different points on the plane placed in the wind tunnel. Local residents eventually began to complain about the noise produced by the wind tunnel and Eiffel was forced to leave the Champ-de-Mars. He set up a new machine, which was inaugurated on March 19, 1912, at 67 rue Boileau in Auteuil. The wind attained a velocity of 144 kilometers per hour, well above the sixty-seven of the previous version : An air column measuring 1 meter in diameter runs through the room at a speed of 40 meters per second, that is 144 kilometers per hour. The collector, 1.65 meters in length, has a diameter of 2 meters at one extremity and 1 meter at the other. The diffuser measures 6 meters long. It leads to the Sirocco fan (the same one as used in the Champs-de-Mars) whose mobile rim has a diameter of 1.67 meters and is set into motion by the same 50-horsepower motor as before. The wind effect obtained by this new system is approximately five times larger than at the Champs-de-Mars. This double installation is placed inside a hall measuring 30 meters in length, 13 meters wide and 10 meters high.155 Eiffel’s results quickly entered the education system—at the Sorbonne, for instance, or the École supérieure des travaux publics, where Colonel Espitalier gave his lectures on aerodynamics.156 They also proved to be useful in aviation : Eiffel’s wind tunnel was used to test model aeroplanes on behalf of the Wright brothers, Farman, Nieuport, Hanriot, Breguet, Clément-Bayard, and Blériot amongst others. More than seventy different models, as well as a large range of propellers, were tested to determine which forms were best suited for flight. During World War I, Eiffel made his Auteuil laboratory available to the Ministère des Armées. In 1919, he published his Résumé des principaux travaux exécutés pendant la guerre au laboratoire

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aérodynamiques Eiffel 1915–1918157 (Summary of the experiments conducted during the war at the Eiffel aerodynamic laboratory, 1915–1918), which reprinted his aerodynamic studies on sails, airship hulls, aeroplane mounts, propellers, and even aircraft bombs. An entire chapter was dedicated to the “graphic methods used in the laboratory for both the representation and practical application of aerodynamic test results,”158 including manuals to build an abacus to compare sails, to choose and determine surface dimensions, and to represent aircraft flight speeds. On Christmas Day, 1920, the eightyeight year old Eiffel ceded his aerodynamic laboratory to the Service technique de l’aéronautique de l’État ; he died three years later. Wind tunnels like those invented by Marey and Eiffel are still found in today’s scientific and industrial research laboratories. Occasionally even high speed chronophotography is used to study their effects.159 And as in Gustave Eiffel’s time, all sorts of model planes are placed in these powerful wind tunnels to study wing strength— was it not the profession of François Truffaut’s hero in the film The Man Who Loved Women ?—and fluid mechanics. We still build our aerodynamic wind tunnels in much the same way Marey did, albeit with more advanced and costly methods ; we find examples at the École nationale supérieure de techniques avancées (ENSTA, in Palaiseau) and the École nationale supérieure de mécanique aéronautique (ENSMA, in Poitiers). And they too still produce breathtaking images, all but echoes of those made by Marey at the very beginning of the twentieth century.

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Notes 1

H. de Balzac, Théorie de la démarche (Paris : Eugène Didier, 1853), p. 19. 2 Many works have been devoted to Marey’s considerable oeuvre, including C. François-Franck, L’œuvre d’É.- J. Marey (Paris : Octave Doin, 1905) ; M. Frizot, É.- J. Marey 1840– 1904, la photographie du mouvement (Paris : Centre national d’art et de culture Georges Pompidou/Musée national d’art moderne, 1977) ; M. Frizot, Avant le cinématographe, la chronophotographie : temps, photographie et mouvement autour de É.- J. Marey (Beaune : Association des Amis de Marey/Ministère de la Culture, 1984) ; F. Dagognet, Étienne-Jules Marey, La passion de la trace (Paris : Hazan-collection 35–37, 1987) ; M. Braun, Picturing Time, The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904) (Chicago, London : The University of Chicago Press, 1992) ; M. Leuba (ed.), Marey, pionnier de la synthèse du mouvement (Beaune : Musée Marey/Réunion des musées nationaux, 1995) ; L. Mannoni, Étienne-Jules Marey, la mémoire de l’oeil (Milan, Paris : Mazzotta/La Cinémathèque française, 1999) ; M. Frizot, Étienne-Jules Marey chronophotographe (Paris : Nathan Delpire, 2001). Also see the correspondence between Marey and his assistant Demenÿ edited by T. Lefebvre, J. Malthête and L. Mannoni, Lettres d’Étienne-Jules Marey à Georges Demenÿ 1880–1894 (Paris : Association française de recherche sur l’histoire du cinéma/Bibliothèque du Film, 2000). 3 The Marey Museum in Beaune devoted an exhibition and a catalogue to this theme : M. Leuba and D. Rouvier, Aérodynes, les débuts de l’aviation (Beaune : Musée Marey, 1999). 4 Conservatoire national des arts et métiers (CNAM), inventory number 5608. 5 M. d’Ons-en-Bray (L.- L. Pajot), Histoire de l’Académie royale des sciences, année 1734, Mémoires (Paris : Imprimerie Royale, 1734), p. 123–124. 6 K. Vierordt, Die Lehre vom Arterienpuls in gesunden und kranken Zuständen : gegründet auf eine neue

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Methode der bildlichen Darstellung des menschlichen Pulses (Braunschweig : Druck und Verlag von Friedrich Vieweg und Sohn, 1855) ; L. Mannoni, L’enregistrement du mouvement au XIXe siècle : les méthodes graphique et chronophotographique, doctoral thesis under the supervision of Michel Marie, (Paris : Sorbonne Nouvelle University Paris 3, 2003). 7 This device, made of wood, copper, iron and cast iron, measures 337 cm in height, 122 cm in width, 134 cm in length, and weighs 527 kg. It entered the collection of the CNAM in 1850. 8 Inventory number 04558-0001. The Musée des arts et métiers keeps in its collection several graphic method devices invented by Morin (let us remember that he was the director of the Conservatoire for a number of years). Among these devices, mention should be made of the device to determine the laws of friction (inv. 07408, manufactured by A. Clair, Paris), the two devices to study the laws of free fall (inv. 08005 and 8288, both manufactured by A. Clair), a dynamometer with a stylus, four blades, and a chronometric engine (received in 1840, inv. 02631, manufactured by E. Bourdon), an anemometer recorder (received in 1865, inv. 07414, manufactured by E. Hardy, Paris) which corresponds to the description given by Morin in 1864 : “Note sur un anémomètre totalisateur à compteur électrique,” Annales du Conservatoire impérial des arts et métiers publiées par les professeurs (Paris : Eugène Lacroix, 1864). 9 É.- J. Marey, Recherches sur la circulation du sang à l’état physiologique et dans les maladies (Paris : Rignoux, 1859), p. 29. 10 É.- J. Marey, La Méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et principalement en physiologie et en médecine (Paris : G. Masson, 1878), p. 169. 11 For a description of Atwood’s machine see C. Delaunay, Cours élémentaire de mécanique théorique et appliquée (Paris : Garnier frères/Victor Masson et fils, 1870), p. 100–102.

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The system of the vertical cylinder rotating on its axis was later used by Marey for his odograph (1878). 13 One of the graphic method’s first technical manuals was published by A. Morin in 1838 : Description des appareils chronométriques à style, propres à la représentation graphique et à la détermination des lois du mouvement, et des appareils dynamométriques propres à mesurer l’effort ou le travail développé par les moteurs animés ou inanimés et par les organes de transmission du mouvement dans les machines (Metz : S. Lamort, 1838). 14 É.- J. Marey, Développement de la méthode graphique par l’emploi de la photographie, supplément à la Méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales (Paris : G. Masson, 1885), p. 42. 15 Lettres d’Étienne-Jules Marey à Georges Demenÿ 1880–1894, op. cit., p. 123. 16 É.- J. Marey, Développement de la méthode graphique par l’emploi de la photographie, op. cit., p. 43–44. 17 É.- J. Marey, “Photographie expérimentale,” Paris-Photographe, revue mensuelle illustrée, 1893, p. 95–104. 18 Ibid., p. 100. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., p. 104. 22 Marey would furnish more images in his 1894 work, Movement. See P.- A. Michaud, “Étienne-Jules Marey et la question des mobiles : sur Le Mouvement (1894),” Cinémathèque, Paris, no. 10, Fall 1996, p. 104–116. 23 É.- J. Marey, “Photographie expérimentale,” op. cit., p. 104. 24 É.- J. Marey, “Des mouvements que certains animaux exécutent pour retomber sur leurs pieds, lorsqu’ils sont précipités d’un lieu élevé,” Paris-Photographe, no. 11, November 30, 1894, p. 403–406. 25 P.- C. Buisson, Quelques recherches sur la circulation du sang à l’aide d’appareils enregistreurs (Paris : Rignoux, 1862). 26 F. C. Donders, “Examen du cardiographe,” Archives néerlandaises des sciences exactes et naturelles II, The Hague, 1867, p. 230–246.

27 G. Carpet, Essai expérimental sur la locomotion humaine, Étude de la marche (Paris : d’É. Martinet, 1872). 28 É.- J. Marey, “Mémoire sur le vol des insectes et des oiseaux,” Bibliothèque des Hautes Études, Section des sciences naturelles V, article no. 2, laboratoire d’Histoire naturelle au Collège de France (Paris : G. Masson, 1872), p. 35. 29 É.- J. Marey, “Collège de France. Histoire naturelle des corps organisés, cours de M. Marey, III. Mécanisme du vol chez les insectes. Comment se fait la propulsion,” Revue des cours scientifiques de la France et de l’étranger VI, March 20, 1869, p. 253. 30 Ibid., p. 254. 31 É.- J. Marey, “Mémoire sur le vol des insectes et des oiseaux,” op. cit., p. 45. 32 G. Turpin, “Aux sources de la chronophotographie, première partie : le phénakistiscope renversé,” La Cinémathèque française, Paris, no. 28, December 1987, p. 11–13 ; no. 29, January 1988, p. 10–13. 33 A. Pénaud, “Locomotion aérienne, appareils de vol mécanique,” La Nature, no. 99, April 24, 1875, p. 328–329. 34 A. Pénaud, “Le nouveau mémoire de M. Marey,” L’Aéronaute, no. 2, February 1874, p. 39–45 ; “Physiologie. Histoire de la question du glissement de l’oiseau dans l’air,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences LXXVIII, no. 5, February 2, 1874, p. 329–332. 35 V. Tatin, “Navigation aérienne. Appareils plus lourds que l’air,” La Nature, no. 595, October 25, 1884, p. 328–331. 36 É.- J. Marey, École pratique des Hautes Études, Physiologie expérimentale, Travaux du laboratoire de M. Marey, années 1878–1879 (Paris : Masson, 1880), p. III. 37 V. Tatin and C. Richet, “Expériences faites avec un Aéroplane mû par la vapeur,” Les Sciences populaires, revue mensuelle internationale d’astronomie, de météorologie et des sciences d’observation, July–August 1897, p. 213–214. 38 V. Tatin, Théorie et Pratique de l’aviation (Paris : H. Dunod & E. Pinat, 1910), p. 109. It was Marey who presented Ader’s note to the Academy

of Science in 1898 : C. Ader, “Mécanique appliquée. Sur des appareils d’aviation, note de M. Ader, présentée par M. Marey,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CXXVI, no. 22, May 31, 1898, p. 1553– 1555. It is worth mentioning that Ader owned a copy of Marey’s Le Vol des oiseaux : see P. Lissarrague, Clément Ader inventeur d’avions (Toulouse : Privat, 1990). 39 V. Tatin, Théorie et Pratique de l’aviation, op. cit., p. 3. 40 On the early days of aviation see in particular, C. Dollfus and H. Bouché, Histoire de l’aéronautique (Paris : éditions de l’Illustration, 1932) and R. Chambe, Histoire de l’aviation (Paris : Flammarion, 1948). 41 É.- J. Marey, Développement de la méthode graphique par l’emploi de la photographie, op. cit., p. 46. 42 Ibid., p. 44. 43 Albert Bazin’s studies of gliding are quoted by Marey as early as 1889. Bazin was living in Marseille at the time, and the two researchers maintained a correspondence between 1889 and 1890, as testified by a number of letters kept at the Cinémathèque française and the Musée Marey in Beaune. 44 É.- J. Marey, “Mécanique appliquée. Emploi de la chronophotographie pour l’étude des appareils destinés à la locomotion aérienne,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CXIII, no. 19, November 9, 1891, p. 617. 45 É.- J. Marey, Physiologie du mouvement. Le vol des oiseaux (Paris : Masson, 1890), p. VIII. 46 E.- J. Marey, “Physiologie. Le mécanisme du vol des oiseaux étudié par la Chronophotographie,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CIV, no. 4, January 24, 1887, p. 210–215. 47 Muybridge’s gigantic and beautiful work, Animal Locomotion, has been happily republished in reprint form : Muybridge’s Complete Human and Animal Locomotion, All 781 Plates from the 1887 Animal Locomotion by Eadweard Muybridge (New York : Dover Publications, 1979). 48 E.- J. Marey, “Physiologie Expérimentale. Mouvements de l’aile de l’oiseau représentés suivant les trois

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dimensions de l’espace,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CIV, no. 6, February 7, 1887, p. 324. 49 Ibid., p. 329. 50 Lettres d’Étienne-Jules Marey à Georges Demenÿ 1880–1894, op. cit., p. 192. 51 Ibid., p. 222. 52 See for instance, R. Soreau’s conference in 1897 : “The eminent professor has kindly allowed me to bring to our Society several bronze collections…,” in R. Soreau, “Le problème général de la navigation aérienne,” Mémoires et comptes rendus des travaux de la Société des ingénieurs civils de France, no. 8, August 1897 (Paris : Hôtel de la Société, 1897), p. 129. 53 Dr. Müllenhoff, “Marey’s Modelle fliegender Mowen in Berlin,” Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins zur Förderung der Luftschifffahrt XIII (Berlin : 1894), p. 246–247. 54 É. Veyrin, “Les oiseaux de bronze de M. Marey,” L’Aéronaute, no. 5, May 1887, p. 94. 55 G. Goiffon and A.- F. Vincent, Mémoire artificielle des principes relatifs à la fidèle représentation des animaux, tant en peinture qu’en sculpture (Alfort : chez l’Auteur/École Royale Vétérinaire, 1779). 56 L. Mannoni, “Méthode graphique et chronophotographie tridimensionnelles : la marche de l’homme vue par Wilhelm Braune et Otto Fischer (1895),” in Images, science, mouvement, Autour de Marey, Études, documents (Paris : L’HarmattanSémia, 2003), p. 49–78. 57 H.- C. Randier, André Breton, 42, rue Fontaine, 14 avril 2003, Arts populaires (Paris : Calmels Cohen, 2003), p. 86–87. The object was acquired by the Sainte-Genevieve Library. 58 É.- J. Marey, “Physiologie. Figures en relief représentant les attitudes successives d’un pigeon pendant le vol. Disposition de ces figures sur un zootrope,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CIV, no. 24, June 13, 1887, p. 1669–1671. 59 O. Chanute, Progress in Flying Machines, Being a facsimile of the whole of the first 1894 edition including original illustrations (Long Beach : Lorenz & Herweg, 1976).

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Francesca was born in Naples on October 10, 1869. 61 Marey published ten images taken from this film in “La chronophotographie : nouvelle méthode pour analyser le mouvement dans les sciences physiques et naturelles,” Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées, no. 21, November 15, 1891, p. 698. 62 Marey’s work La Vague is held the Archives françaises du film at the Centre national de la cinématographie (Bois d’Arcy). The Cinémathèque française holds 410 original films made by Marey and his disciples ; the Archives françaises du film has around 150 more. 63 Lettres d’Étienne-Jules Marey à Georges Demenÿ 1880–1894, op. cit., p. 410. 64 This experiment would be repeated by Mézin : “La Cinématographie des nuages,” La Météorologie, no. 122, July 1935, Société météorologique de France, p. 325–335. 65 É.- J. Marey, “Physiologie animale. La locomotion aquatique étudiée par la Photochronographie,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CXI, no. 122, July 28, 1890, p. 213–216. 66 É.- J. Marey, “La locomotion dans l’eau étudiée par la photochronographie,” La Nature, no. 911, November 15, 1890, p. 375. 67 É.- J. Marey, “Le mouvement des liquides étudié par la Chronophotographie,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CXVI, May 1, 1893, p. 4. 68 Ibid., p. 4. 69 Ibid., p. 6. 70 Ibid., p. 7. 71 Ibid., p. 11. 72 É.- J. Marey, Le Vol des oiseaux, op. cit., p. 202. 73 É.- J. Marey, “Collège de France. Histoire naturelle des corps organisés, cours de M. Marey. Du vol chez les oiseaux, III,” Revue des cours scientifiques de la France et de l’étranger VII, no. 40, September 3, 1870, p. 626–630. 74 The expression was coined by Pierre Noguès, Publications scientifiques et techniques du ministère de l’Air, service des recherches de l’aéronautique, Recherches expérimentales de Marey sur le mouvement dans l’air

et dans l’eau (Paris : Blondel La Rougery/Gauthier-Villars, 1933), p. 91. 75 É.- J. Marey, Le Vol des oiseaux, op. cit., p. 218. 76 Antoine Rédier built the second model of Jules Janssen’s revolver in 1874. 77 L. Rédier, “Un appareil pour mesurer et enregistrer la résistance de l’air,” L’Aéronaute, no. 3, March 1878, p. 79–80. 78 É.- J. Marey, Le Vol des oiseaux, op. cit., p. 218. Emphasis added. 79 Ibid., p. 219. 80 In 1885, Müller sent from Tashkent (in central Asia), to the Academy of Sciences, a brief entitled “Considérations sur la propulsion dans les fluides. Causes de la puissance exceptionnelle de l’aile, complément indispensable à la théorie du vol,” published in Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences C, May 18, 1885, p. 1317. Letters written by Müller to Marey are kept in the Noguès collection at the Cinémathèque française – Bibliothèque du Film. 81 É.- J. Marey, Le Vol des oiseaux, op. cit., p. 260. In 1886, Marey gave a presentation on one of Müller’s experiments : “Physiologie. Étude sur les mouvements imprimés à l’air par l’aile d’un oiseau. Expériences de M. Müller,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CII, no. 21, May 24, 1886, p. 1137–1139. 82 Lettres d’Étienne-Jules Marey à Georges Demenÿ 1880–1894, op. cit., p. 202. 83 É.- J. Marey, “Le mouvement des liquides étudié par la Chronophotographie,” op. cit., p. 202. 84 É.- J. Marey, “Changements de direction et de vitesse d’un courant d’air qui rencontre des corps de formes diverses,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CXXXII, June 3, 1901, p. 2. 85 E. Mach, P. Salcher, “Photographische Fixirung der durch Projectile in der Luft eingeleiteten Vorgänge,” Journal de physique théorique et appliquée VII, 1888, p. 500–501. 86 R. Koenig, Quelques expériences d’acoustique (Paris : Rudolph Koenig, 1882). 87 É.- J. Marey, “Changements de direction et de vitesse d’un courant d’air qui rencontre des corps de formes diverses,” op. cit., p. 3.

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H. S. Hele-Shaw, “The Motion of a Perfect Liquid,” (A discourse delivered at the Royal Institution on Friday, February 10, 1899), Nature, a Weekly Illustrated Journal of Science LX, London, September 7, 1899, p. 446– 451 ; L. Bull, “La photographie des mouvements invisibles, expériences de M. Hele-Shaw,” La Nature, no. 1477, September 14, 1901, p. 247–250. A. Scharf, “Max Ernst, Étienne Jules Marey, and the poetry of scientific illustration,” in One Hundred Years of Photographic History : Essays in Honor of Beaumont Newhall, ed. V. D. Coke (Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 1975), p. 117–126. É.- J. Marey, “Changements de direction et de vitesse d’un courant d’air qui rencontre des corps de formes diverses,” op. cit., p. 2. Marey organized an exhibition on chronophotography at the World’s Fair and filmed the international competitions of physical exercise and sport, among other things. É.- J. Marey, “Les mouvements de l’air étudiés par la chronophotographie,” La Nature, no. 1476, September 7, 1901, p. 232. “The device, made of wicker and covered with fine cloth, has a shape similar to that of a bat. The wings do not flap, but they may be folded for ease of transportation. The wings have a span of seven meters, and a width of two and a half meters from front to back. The bearing surface is fourteen square meters. The device weighs twenty kilograms, M. Otto Lilienthal weighs eighty, such that it is a total of one hundred kilograms to be carried by fourteen square meters.” (A. Hureau de Villeneuve, “L’homme volant M. Otto Lilienthal,” L’Aéronaute, no. 1, January 1894, p. 8.) É.- J. Marey, “Des mouvements de l’air lorsqu’il rencontre des surfaces de différentes formes,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CXXXI, n° 3, July 16, 1900, p. 160–163. Miltiade Kossonis and Lucien Bull filed a patent for a stereoscopic film viewer in 1898. É.- J. Marey, “Des mouvements de l’air lorsqu’il rencontre des surfaces de différentes formes,” op. cit., p. 160.

97 Ibid. 98 Ibid., p. 161. 99 P. Noguès, Publications scientifiques et techniques du ministère de l’Air, op. cit., p. 97. 100 É.- J. Marey, “Des mouvements de l’air lorsqu’il rencontre des surfaces de différentes formes,” op. cit., p. 162. 101 É.- J. Marey, “Changements de direction et de vitesse d’un courant d’air qui rencontre des corps de formes diverses,” op. cit., p. 3. 102 These photographs of smoke were reproduced for the first time by Clément Chéroux, “La mécanique des fluides selon Marey,” in A. Pélenc (ed.), Vision machine, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, 13 mai–10 septembre 2000 (Paris : Somogy Editions d’art, 2000), p. 68–71. 103 É.- J. Marey, “Des mouvements de l’air lorsqu’il rencontre des surfaces de différentes formes,” op. cit., p. 162. 104 In 1910, Marey’s disciple, Victor Tatin, published two images taken from the third smoke machine (“Plan se mouvant des filets de fumée,” “Le même à une moindre incidence”), in Théorie et Pratique de l’aviation (Paris : H. Dunod & E. Pinat, 1910), p. 35–36. Pierre Noguès would later publish six images from the first and third machine in Publications scientifiques et techniques du ministère de l’Air, op. cit., p. 95. 105 E.- J. Marey, “Des mouvements de l’air lorsqu’il rencontre des surfaces de différentes formes,” op. cit., p. 163. 106 On Samuel Langley’s experiments in aeronautics, see G. Tissandier, “Locomotion aérienne, description du vol mécanique,” La Nature, no. 1201, June 6, 1896, p. 2–3. Abel Hureau de Villeneuve published a report of Langley’s book, The Internal Work of the Wind (Washington : Smithsonian Institution, 1893), in L’Aéronaute, no. 6, June 1894, p. 126–128. Langley also wrote Experiments in Aerodynamics (Washington : Smithsonian Institution, 1891), and with C. M. Manly, Langley memoir on mechanical flight (Washington : Smithsonian Institution, 1911). 107 Louis-Alphonse Davanne (1824–1912), was a chemist, a photographer and a founding member of the Société française de photographie, as well as the author of numerous articles and

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photographs. He was the grandfather of painter Francis Picabia, who would become the friend of Marcel Duchamp (the creator of the Nude Descending a Staircase, [1912–1913]). Davanne worked with Marey on the photographic section of the 1900 World’s Fair, where the physiologist exhibited his chronophotographs. 108 Letter from Marey to Langley, June 10, 1895, kept at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record unit 31, book 46, folder 2. 109 Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record unit 34, book 25.5, folder 2. 110 Jules Janssen was the president of this Congrès de l’aéronautique, whilst Marey was vice-president. During his visit to Paris, Langley also met with Clément Ader. 111 Letter from Langley to Marey, November 9, 1900, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record unit 34, book 25.5, folder 350–351. The circular in question was not preserved with Langley’s letter. 112 Letter from Langley to Marey, December 10, 1900, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record unit 39, book 25.5, folder 364–365. 113 P. Lissarrague, Clément Ader inventeur d’avions, op. cit., p. 132. 114 É.- J. Marey, “Des mouvements de l’air lorsqu’il rencontre des surfaces de différentes formes,” op. cit., p. 160. 115 É.- J. Marey, “Changements de direction et de vitesse d’un courant d’air qui rencontre des corps de formes diverses,” op. cit. 116 “I think they indicate an extremely fruitful and instructive research,” Letter from Langley to Marey, October 21, 1901, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record unit 34, book 20.8, folder 355. 117 É.- J. Marey, “The History of Chronophotography,” Annual Report of the Board of Regents of the Smithsonian Institution ; Showing the Operations, Expenditures, and Condition of the Institution for the Year Ending June 30, 1901 (Washington : Government Printing Office, 1902). 118 É.- J. Marey, “Le mouvement de l’air par la chronophotographie,” Société française de physique, January 17, 1902, Journal de physique, théorique et appliquée, March 1902, p. 134.

119 Letter from Langley to Marey, October 21, 1901, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record unit 34, book 20.8, folder 355. 120 P. Noguès, Publications scientifiques et techniques du ministère de l’Air, op. cit., p. 99. 121 L. Desmarest, “L’avant-dernière expérience d’Otto Lilienthal,” L’Aéronaute, no. 1, January 1897, p. 12. 122 É.- J. Marey, “Des mouvements de l’air lorsqu’il rencontre des surfaces de différentes formes,” op. cit., p. 162. 123 This is confirmed by a letter dated January 18, 1902, from Marey to Langley : “[...] I continue my studies on the movements of air, which the Smithsonian Institute encouraged. Moreover, I have resumed my research on the wing (insect type) by seeking to determine, through photography, the various forms of the trajectory according to the speed of the wing and its inclination. I propose to investigate the action of these movements on air. But my main concern currently is the organization of the International Institute for the Control of Recording Instruments [the future Marey Institute]. If financial subsidies come to me from all over the world, the tools that I hope to create will allow me to carry out all kinds of research. [...]” (typed letter, copy kept at the Musée Marey in Beaune). Another letter, dated January 3, 1903, indicates that the research is still (“slowly”) going on that year : “My experiments on the movements of air continue slowly since I am not in great health. [...] However, we have been studying the shapes of different hulls, both for ships and for aircrafts. Are you acquainted with M. Spear of Boston ? He has sent me a note where he says that the conchoid form is the one of least resistance. The definition is rather vague, but I will conduct some tests.” (Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record unit 31, book 46, folder 2). 124 É.- J. Marey, “Des mouvements de l’air lorsqu’il rencontre des surfaces de différentes formes,” op. cit., p. 162. 125 Letter from Marey to Langley, November 19, 1899, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record unit 31, book 46, folder 2.

126 P. Noguès, Publications scientifiques et techniques du ministère de l’Air, op. cit., p. 97. 127 For a chronological account of these two institutions, see J. Malthête, “Repères pour une histoire administrative de la Station physiologique, de l’Institut Marey et de l’Association de l’Institut Marey,” in Images, science, mouvement, Autour de Marey, Études, documents, op. cit., p. 111–136. 128 January 7–March 19, 2000. 129 Within the framework of this exhibition we also reconstituted the artificial model of insect flight and the zoetrope of bird flight, among other devices. 130 In 1938 and for the next twenty years, as evidenced by his laboratory diary now kept in a private collection, shockwave photography was the main focus of Bull’s research. From June 1938 onwards, he drew electrical diagrams and sketches of devices where bulbs, voltmeters, lenses, sparks of 4000 volts, crossed each other in all directions. The shockwave in question was first produced by the burst of paper primers. The spark camera recorded them as early as July of that same year, but it was in February 1940 that Bull would finally be more or less satisfied with his results, after having encountered many adjustment problems : “Modified the installation to use a paper primer to produce the shockwave. Many difficulties with adjusting the synchronism ! Shockwaves visible on two or three of the first images. Speed around 385 m/second on the first film, and 420 meters on the second where the wave is closer to its origin. Film speed 25 m/second. Image frequency approx. 7000.” 131 P. Mercier, “Une cinématographie rapide et ultra-rapide. Application en détonique,” Images, science, mouvement, Autour de Marey, Études, documents, op. cit., p. 191–254. 132 See for instance, Marey’s article entitled “Les mouvements de l’air étudiés par la chronophotographie,” op. cit. 133 É.- J. Marey, “Des mouvements de l’air lorsqu’il rencontre des surfaces de différentes formes,” op. cit., p. 161–162.

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134 É.- J. Marey, “Changements de direction et de vitesse d’un courant d’air qui rencontre des surfaces de différentes formes,” op. cit., p. 5–6. 135 M. Carmona, Eiffel (Paris : Fayard, 2002), p. 194. 136 C. Culmann, Die graphische Statik (Zurich : Meyer und Zeller, 1866) ; C. Culmann, Anwendungen der graphischen Statik (Zurich : Meyer und Zeller, 1888–1900). 137 L. Lalanne, “Méthodes graphiques pour l’expression des lois empiriques ou mathématiques à trois variables, avec des applications à l’art de l’ingénieur et à la résolution des équations numériques d’un degré quelconque,” Exposition universelle à Melbourne en 1880, France, Notices sur les dessins, modèles et ouvrages relatifs aux services des ponts et chaussées, des mines, des bâtiments civils et palais nationaux réunis par les soins du ministère des Travaux publics (Paris : Imprimerie nationale, 1880), p. 350–419. 138 G. Eiffel, Travaux scientifiques exécutés à la tour des trois cents mètres de 1889 à 1900 (Paris : L. Maretheux, 1900). 139 Richard Frères, Notice sur les instruments enregistreurs construits par Richard Frères comprenant le rapport de M. le Colonel Sébert à la Société d’encouragement pour l’Industrie nationale et l’exposé des perfectionnements et applications nouvelles (Paris : Richard Frères, 8, impasse Fessart, 1886). 140 Ibid., p. 1. 141 See for instance, Du calcul des trajectoires d’après les expériences de M. Bashforth sur la résistance de l’air, par M. Seber, chef d’escadron d’artillerie de la marine (Paris : Ch. Tanera, 1874) ; Etude des effets de la poudre dans un canon de 10 centimètres, par H. Sebert, lieutenantcolonel d’artillerie de la marine, et Hugoniot, capitaine d’artillerie de la marine (Paris : Librairie militaire de J. Dumaine, L. Baudoin & Cie, successeurs, 1882). 142 L. Mannoni, “1895 : Léon Gaumont prend la direction du Comptoir général de photographie,” in M.- S. Corcy, J. Malthête, L. Mannoni, J. -J. Meusy, Les premières années de la société L. Gaumont et Cie, Correspondant

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commerciale de Léon Gaumont 1895– 1899 (Paris : AFRHC/Bifi/Gaumont, 1999), p. 25–27. 143 L. Mannoni, M. de Ferrière le Vayer and P. Demeny, Georges Demeny pionnier du cinéma (Douai : Editions Pagine, 1997). 144 The founding act of the Gaumont company is published in full in reprint, see L. Mannoni, D. Pesenti Campagnoni, D. Robinson, Light and Movement : Incunabula of the Motion Picture 1420–1896, Luce e movimento : Incunaboli dell‘immagine animata 1420–1896, Lumière et mouvement : Incunables de l‘image animée 1420–1896 (Gemona, Paris, Turin : Le Gionarte del Cinema Muto/Cinémathèque françaiseMusée du cinéma/Museo nazionale del cinema, 1995), p. 430–437. 145 G. Eiffel, Travaux scientifiques exécutés à la tour des trois cents mètres de 1889 à 1900, op. cit., p. 57. 146 Ibid. 147 See for instance, G. Eiffel, Comparaisons graphiques des valeurs mensuelles, saisonnières et annuelles des principaux éléments météorologiques dans diverses stations françaises pour l’année 1910 (Paris : J. Mourlot imprimeur, 1911). 148 L. Cailletet, E. Colardeau, “Recherches expérimentales sur la chute des corps et sur la résistance de l’air à leur mouvement ; expériences exécutées à la tour Eiffel”, Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CXV, July 4, 1892, p. 13–14. Oddly enough, when Eiffel reproduces Cailletet and Colardeau’s communication in his book, Travaux scientifiques exécutés à la tour de trois cent mètres de 1889 à 1900, he leaves out the sentence devoted to Marey. 149 Ibid., p. 18. 150 G. Eiffel, Projet d’aérodrome à la tour Eiffel, s.l.n.d. (Paris : Maretheux, 1904). 151 This machine is still kept at the old Eiffel laboratory in Auteuil. 152 G. Eiffel, Recherches expérimentales sur la résistance de l’air exécutées à la tour Eiffel (Paris : Maretheux, 1907), p. 4–5. 153 Ibid., p. 17. 154 G. Eiffel, Installation d’un laboratoire d’aérodynamique (Paris : Société des ingénieurs de France, 1910), p. 4–5.

155 G. Eiffel, Les nouvelles recherches expérimentales sur la résistance de l’air et l’aviation faites au laboratoire du Champs de Mars et d’Auteuil, extrait des mémoires de la Société des ingénieurs civils de France (Bulletin de juillet 1912) (Paris : Société des ingénieurs de France, 1912), p. 19. 156 Ibid., p. 16. 157 G. Eiffel, Résumé des principaux travaux exécutés pendant la guerre au laboratoire aérodynamiques Eiffel 1915–1918 (Paris : Librairie aéronautique/E. Chiron éditeur, 1919). 158 Ibid., p. 193. 159 A. Magnan, A. Saint-Laguë, Publications scientifiques et techniques du Ministère de l’air, Service des recherches de l’aéronautique, no. 9, Etude des trajectoires et des qualités aérodynamiques d’un avion par l’emploi d’un appareil cinématographique de bord (Paris : Ed. Blondel La Rougery/Gauthier-Villars, 1932) ; J. Valensi, “Quelques applications de la photographie ultra-rapide à l’étude des mouvements dans l’air,” in Photographie et cinématographie ultra-rapides, Actes du 2e congrès international de photographie et cinématographie ultra-rapides, Paris, Septembre 1954, ed. P. Naslin and J. Vivier (Paris : Dunod, 1956), p. 357–361.

157

The Dance of All Things

Georges Didi-Huberman

Georges Didi-Huberman The Dance of All Things

160 The movement of all things Beauty in the process of making and unmaking itself. “To incorporate into the image what is fluid and ever-changing” : epistemological problem, esthetic problem. Marey through the eyes of Nadar : the scientist that makes us “see the invisible.” Science, wonderland, strangeness.—“Animal mechanism” : every living movement is a transformation of physical forces. The biomechanical tradition, from Borelli to the Weber brothers.— Building sensitive automata : tactility without subject, inscription, imitation. The experimental method, from Claude Bernard to Marey : instrumentalize the observation, amplify the inscription, simplify the phenomenon, measure the result. New instrumental responses to ancient Aristotelian questions : time as the “number of motion.” Continuity and discontinuity.

171 The curve of all things White lines against black background : all movement must culminate in its curve. Historicity of the graphic method : from Pajot’s anemometer and Engramelle’s tonotechnie to Binet’s inscription of states of the soul. Innovation in the graphic method : Marey reinvents the image. An épistémè of traces and graphs. Reduce the event to magnitude, then to number and line.—From chronography to chronophotography. Advantages of photography : a faithful transcription, a manageable translation, a controllable result.—The geometrization of movement : forms, forces, durations. Chambre noire, Pandora’s box : excesses of sensitivity. Reduce the image to its “photographic curve” : the visual diagram. Anthropomorphism subverted : geometrized appearances, animalized geometries. Pathos of “vital curves.”

187 The duration of all things What Marey couldn’t see. Alphonse Allais’ ridicule and Auguste Rodin’s critiques. Movement cannot be reduced to its positions according to the before and after. State of the philosophical debate : Bergson.—Bergson against Marey : movement is indivisible, irreducible to its trajectory, to the line and to points given as momentary positions. “Mov-

158

ing continuity” and duration. Geometry and measure, artifices of juxtaposition. Time is intensive, life is inventive. Two ways of denying movement : characteristic attitudes (the Parthenon friezes) and the random instant (Marey’s chronophotographs).—The “cinematographic illusion,” according to Bergson, seeks less the art of cinema than a chronophotographic science. Vital movement versus mechanical movement : the flow and not the thing, becoming over form.

202 The trail of all things The indeterminate margins of the “open machine.” Images that go beyond their axioms. Movement captured, movement freed : a heuristics of play with regard to obturation and intermittence.—Unfurled-horse or ghost : when time deconstructs appearances. All things in movement leave a visual trail. Chronophotography used against (in principle) or with (in spite of) the trail. All superpositions are not confusions, but images of complexity. Trails of time, traces of transit : virtualities become visualities. The drapery of the phenomenon.—Marey with Bergson  : from the spatial trajectory to the “temporal envelope.” Imbrications, intervals, nuances. Trailing the instant, or how to prolong movement. The “indistinct fringe” of the phenomenon : difference and inherence, alteration and interpenetration.

213 The flow of all things Image-wake : wing and air, wave and sea, form and flow. Inscribe the durational relation between a moving body and a fluid medium. From aquatic locomotion (the skate) to hydrodynamics (eddies), from aerial locomotion (the gull) to aerodynamics (turbulence). Movement-matter.—Flow, materialization of duration. Hidden flows (blood), diaphanous flows (water, air). The aerodynamic wind tunnel, miniature theater of the movements of air. Marey with Bergson : flowing reality and its memory. The unstable relation between moving body and moving environment. Bergson’s “two orders” coexist in Marey’s work : through juxtaposition and interpenetration. To measure movement and take the measure of that reality which flows : positive knowledge and intuitive knowledge. Bergson’s experimental ideas and Marey’s experimental images.

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227 The expansion of all things What is an “integral experience,” an integral experiment ? How does the notion of “experiment” change with Marey and with Bergson ? The qualitative expansion of perception : reconfiguring experience. The paradigm of art. From the puzzle-image to the expansion-image : the two meanings of technè.— Marey and the “artistic physiology” of movement. Chronophotography and art : tool or arbitrator ? Beyond accuracy : instability and strangeness. Academic debates : truth or plausibility ? Bergsonian questions : how, thanks to the image, does the method produce both the system and its excess ?—A poetical notion of the method : Marey with Mallarmé ? Paul Valéry and the method according to Leonardo da Vinci : the movement, curve, duration, trail, flow, expansion of all things. How does Leonardo “fix the air in the wake” ?

238 The dance of all things Aristotle, Leonardo, Bergson. Graphs of grace, or the curve beyond itself. Chronophotography and choreography.—What dances in dance : body, space, and time. Gesture, symptom, rhythm. The drapery of all things, or the “frills” of phenomena : rethinking matter and femininity in the nineteenth century. Pathos and its formula. Balzac’s Theory of Walking : science and folly. Mallarmé’s theory of dance : form and suspension. Valéry’s theory of drawing : trace and undulation. Loïe Fuller, or the “photo-choreography” of moving space. From Marey to Duchamp : speed and delay. From Marey to the futurists : trailing and fanning out. From Marey to Man Ray : L’Étoile de mer, the scientific film and the “undulating feminine.” Rethinking, after Marey, thread, flow, and film : from Hollis Frampton to Bruce Nauman.

263 Notes

I speak for those accustomed to finding wisdom in the falling leaf, gargantuan dilemmas in rising smoke, theories in the vibrations of light, thought in marbles and the most horrible of movements in stillness. I stand at the very place where science touches madness, and I find no safeguard. Honoré de Balzac, Theory of Walking (1833)

[ ... ] the excessive leaps of our gaseous form around a halt [ ... ] Stéphane Mallarmé, “L’action restreinte” (1895)

Like eddies of dust raised by the wind as it passes, the living turn upon themselves, borne up by the great blast of life​[ ...​ ] forgetting that the very permanence of their form is only the outline of a movement. At times, however, in a fleeting vision, the invisible breath that bears them is materialized before our eyes. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907)

Georges Didi-Huberman

The Dance of All Things

The movement of all things

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It would be futile to resist the feeling that the marvelous curls of smoke, photographed by Étienne-Jules Marey between 1899 and 1901, first elicit from us. We have the impression of witnessing a pure beauty in the process of making, unmaking, and remaking itself incessantly before our eyes. It is a supreme flow—images of flow and a flow of images all at once—from which approximately fifty instants have been randomly “drawn,” all formed differently and likewise admirable. Such simple beauty ! Marey of course built several machines to properly capture it, but for us it is enough to light a good cigar in order to observe it at any time of day. Such complex beauty ! Frets of curling smoke, precious openwork, ephemeral scallops, contrasting light ; elusive law of this morphogenesis, of these elegant tresses of endlessly unfurling air. There is something Baudelarian in such modern simplicity, in this new genre of lyricism. But there is also something of Mallarmé in its complexity, haunted by “ulterior-resemblances” of spectral femininities and timeless ornaments. How could we leaf through this series of photographic plates other than as a great anthology of visual poems, evoking all times at the same time, from Greek drapery to laboratory imagery ?

Upstream, we find the repeating undulations so dear to Leonardo da Vinci [ fig. 109 ]—wings of birds in flight, women’s tresses, draperies, eddies in the air, wakes in the water. Downstream, we find those other masterpieces of photography, including the Equivalents of Alfred Stieglitz [ fig. 110 ], the “photodynamic” experiments of the Bragaglia brothers [ fig. 144 ], and, more recently, Adam Fuss’s photograms of smoke or water in motion [ fig. 111 ].1 We must therefore accept a paradox : the appearances, captured by Marey for precise scientific and historical reasons, let loose such a flow of resemblances that these images find themselves altered, enriched, and poeticized, reminiscent or anticipatory of something they wish to know nothing about and yet cannot help but enact. Should we not once again follow the lesson of Walter Benjamin, so apt a listener—particularly with regard to nineteenth century France, which served in his eyes as a model—to the temporal “harmonics” of the image and of language, to their anachronisms and untimely virtues, beyond their necessary historical determinations ? Although the signs have a fixed connection and form on the paper, the many “resemblances” they contain set them moving. Expressed in every stroke of the brush, these virtual resemblances form a mirror where thought is reflected in this atmosphere of resemblance, or resonance. Indeed, these resemblances are not mutually exclusive ; they become intermingled, constituting a whole that solicits thought the way a breeze beckons to a veil of gauze. An essential feature of the image is that it incorporates something eternal. This eternal quality expresses itself in the fixity and stability of the stroke, but it is also manifest, more subtly, thanks to the fact that the image incorporates what is fluid and ever-changing.2 To incorporate into the image that which is fluid and ever-changing : this might characterize Marey’s entire endeavor, right through to these curls of smoke : photographic stills whose serialization, through repetition and difference, awakens the feeling of one great flux, of one great “film” whereupon wisps of air are outstretched, rendered visible, and dramatized by the obstacle against which they are each time broken into tousled strands. There is clearly a concern with fluids in these photographs by Marey. And yet the word lends itself, if not to misunderstanding, at least to slips, inflexions, drifts : it is a word central to Mallarméan poetic lyricism transposed to the art of dance (one need only recall the remarkable text dedicated, around 1893, to Loïe Fuller : “The only

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thing that matters is that it be fluid…”).3 And yet it was also a key nineteenth century notion designating the psychic powers of the occult, the return from the dead, the beyond.4 Finally, it is a common concept in physics : “Unlike solids, it describes those bodies whose molecules are so loosely bound together that they move easily between each other, as in water, mercury, air. Fluids are classified as liquid or elastic (the latter being gases).” The Littré dictionary went on to add that fluids also designate “hypothetical substances imagined by physicists in order to account for certain phenomena : caloric, electric, and magnetic fluids ; imponderable fluids.”5 Admittedly, Marey always used photography in order to observe, and he always used observation in order to measure. The imponderable no more interested him than the pure invisibility of those “hypothetical substances” : there was enough to make of what is visible (smoke as a movement of air rendered observable) and what is measurable (smoke has a direction, a weight, a behavior). How then can we look at these photographs from the standpoint of a “lyricism,” however new ? And how can we legitimately recognize in them such “tresses,” “dances,” or “ghostly femininities” ? Would it not be improper to transpose these images from the domain of science to that of art ? If we give in to aesthetic fascination, are we not inventing a fantastical supplement, an after-effect, a quality that has nothing to do with the epistemic norms determining their creation ? Given his countless observations, measurements, schematics, diagrams, machines, and experimental protocols, is not Marey the least lyrical author there is ? Yet the question of the supplement remains—the “resemblances” referred to by Walter Benjamin as a “setting in motion,” or at least a traversal of signs by the “breeze” of virtuality—, which these images let slip in spite of themselves, despite the norms that constrain them. Already in the nineteenth century Nadar had portrayed Marey more

Fig. 109 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of water, ca. 1509. Pen and ink.

as a magus than a scholar, more as a genius in the manner of Balzac’s The Quest of the Absolute than a bureaucrat of scientific accuracy. His character study describes “a thirst for knowledge, a methodical mind, the need for absolute certitude, an acuteness of perception, generous mental resources, an extreme ingenuity [ such that he was ] resolutely active, relentless in verifying what is certain through what is indisputable—the proof of the proof.”6 As for his laboratory, it could have passed for the fantastical atelier of the painter Frenhofer in The Unknown Masterpiece, or, more troubling still, for the cabinet of some Doctor Caligari : And here we are in front of the inexhaustible, imaginative, interminable, surprising litany of all the machines of investigation, apparatuses of observation reproducing life outside of life, recording mechanisms, schematic equipment of the micrographic instantaneity in the animal organism, tactile, optical, acoustic : [ ... ] There are only probes, springs, cogwheels, tubes, coils, pedals, release mechanisms, connecting rods, gears, cylinders, id est headache of all sorts : Pandora’s box is wide open to migraines ; but Marey does not care. The instruments that are not there, he creates : those which are there, he perfects, always advancing one by one, deaf to the fanfare of his discoveries, always unfulfilled in his quest for the better over the worse through sphygmoscopes, sphygmometers, sphymographs, sphymophones : what else ? [ ... ] Is it over ? Never ! ! ! On his polygraph, he superimposes another, a new one [ ... ], charged to verify the controls of the first. And he continues to push ahead, always searching, always finding, less breathless himself from its overzealous proliferation than we from its enumeration. But when will he stop ? 7 Behold, finally, “that incredible Marey who makes us see the invisible, and will soon, in time, make us fly like a bird.”8 For our purposes, it is important to understand that these photographs of smoke reveal the invisible trajectory of air as it moves around an obstacle, making them a meaningful contribution to the development of aeronautical science, a field in which Marey remains a renowned pioneer for his experiments in aerodynamics—their practically unparalleled images comparable only to results obtained in today’s laboratories [ fig. 112 ]—, which logically followed his earlier work on the flight of birds. Indeed, the man who made us “see the invisible” and would ultimately “make us fly” belonged, in Nadar’s mind, to a new class of scientist that opened the physical world onto inconceivable perspectives, or in any case perspectives only imagined

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in the realm of metaphysics : “the poet Charles Cros dreams of the phonograph, Lissajoux, with his sound waves, makes us see [ ... ] sound [ ... ] ; Charcot opens the mysterious door of the hyperphysical world, intuited by Mesmer [ ... ] ; Marey, who had just stolen the secret of rational aeronautics held down by weights from birds, reveals to man in the immensities of the ether the new domain that will be his from tomorrow on.” 9 So it was that the science of the nineteenth century appeared to its contemporaries as a veritable wonderland, both enchanting and disturbing. It amplified, often to the point of delirium, the sensationalization of knowledge that began in the fifteenth century with the Wunderkammern, and continued into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as the convolution of the theater and the laboratory, itself perfectly exemplified by the “theater of nature and art” described in a feverish state, one night in 1675, by Leibniz.10 And was not the bizarre “machine” designed by Marey for his photographs of smoke both a laboratory apparatus and a miniature theater staging the drama of two clashing protagonists, the (immobile) obstacle and the (moving) wisps of smoke ? We must bear in mind that at the end of the nineteenth century the scientific world had become a genuine “Internationale.” (Marey, who knew of both Hele-Shaw’s hydrodynamic experiments and Mach’s studies of smoke, was not an isolated figure). Through the World’s Fairs (where Marey, in 1900, tended to the “Chronophotography” booth), science staged and even hyped its devices, experiments, and results.11 This all-conquering science, engaged in a process of popularization, unrestrained vulgarization, and museumization, was at the same time troubled by its own advancements ; the edges of its field of intelligibility had begun to blur, to fray : we have, on the one

hand, a triumphal wonderland (as science performed its miracles onstage) and, on the other, a creeping anxiety (as science, even onstage, encountered the powers of the occult).12

Fig. 110 Alfred Stieglitz, Equivalent W3, 1929. Photograph.

Marey’s oeuvre at first appears a positive wonderland : a capacity to re-enchant knowledge, not through the discovery of new, incongruous, or unfamiliar organisms or things, but through the renewed observation of the simplest and most common of movements carried out by things (spinning, falling, vibrating) or organisms (walking, swimming, flying). Marey was of course a prominent physiologist, the third-generation successor of Cuvier to the Chair of “Natural History of Organized Bodies” at the Collège de France, and Claude Bernard’s immediate successor to the presidency of the French Academy of Sciences. And yet the main objective of his research was not life as such—why, otherwise, would he have applied so much of his genius to photographing the trajectory of a ball, the rotation of a curve, the morphology of a wisp of smoke—but rather the movement of all things, animate or inanimate (and yet aren’t all things, in their own way, animate ?). A science of the “movement of all things” is not invented without first embracing a fundamental line of reasoning seeking to objectify life, that is, to think it on the model of all movements that affect supposedly inanimate objects. In Du mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie, published in 1868, Marey begins with the premise that “in most of the classical treatises of physiology, the study of movement per se is more or less reduced to the chapter on locomotion” ; in short, the classical perspective seemed unaware that “movement is the most important activity [ of life ], in that all functions fullfil their purpose by it,”13 down to the very circulation of the blood, the subject Marey chose for his medical thesis in 1859.14 And so Marey embarked on a path paved by Claude Bernard, arguing that “muscular movement represents the primary animal function and, as a result, the center of all phenomena displayed by living beings.”15 Once the primacy of the mechanical vector in the general study of vital movements had been established—if only to submit “sensitivity” itself to “muscular function”16—Marey could guide his analysis in physical terms of “tremor,” “contractility,” or “elasticity.”17 This was naturally a way to reject any vitalist speculation and to reiterate, in the words of Claude Bernard, “that the laws of physics and chemistry are found in all manifestations of life,” and may even

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be enough to account for them.18 Marey radicalized his approach in 1873 when, in Animal Mechanism, he asserted the pre-eminence of movement in both the physiological notion of life (“motion is the most apparent of the characteristics of life ; it manifests itself in all the functions ; it is even the essence of several of them”), and in the physical notion of force (“all those [ physical and physiological ] forces tend to reduce themselves to one only : that which engenders motion”).19 This is why it became legitimate to speak of an animal mechanism : “To every function, so to speak, a special machinery is attached.”20 This is why life, in the perpetual interplay of organs and their functions, only implements forces, a concept the physical sciences continued to refine by reducing their apparent diversity : In the first ages of science the number of forces was almost infinitely multiplied. Each particular phenomenon was regarded as the manifestation of a special force. But by degrees it was recognised that divers manifestations might result from a single cause ; and thenceforth the number of forces which were admitted diminished considerably. [ ... ] In our own time a grand conception has arisen [ after Newton, Ampère, and others ], once more to change the face of science. All the forces of nature are reduced to one only. Force may assume any appearance ; it becomes, by turns, heat, mechanical work, electricity, light.21 This is why solid and fluid mechanics, thermodynamics, the study of periodic, electric, or luminous phenomena, eventually imposed their laws on the entire biological kingdom : each vital movement is a transformation of physical force involving “heat,” “work,” or “electricity.”22 From the outset, Marey looked at living organisms in the way a physicist of fluids might observe a wave on the surface of water or an aerodynamic wake in a wind tunnel :

Fig. 111 Adam Fuss, Untitled, 1988. Photogram.

It has been long since observed that there are formed upon living muscles at the points where they are excited, lumps or nodosities which run along the whole length of the muscle, with more or less rapidity, like a wave on the surface of the water. Aeby has shown that this is a normal phenomenon, and, under the name of muscular wave, he has described this movement, which, from the excited point, passes to the two extremities of the muscle at the rate of about a meter a second.23 It should come as no surprise then that Marey took an interest throughout his life in the physico-geometrical problems of animal morphology and even “morphogenesis.”24 Nor that one of his last publications appeared in Mécanique, a volume (which in itself contains more than one thousand pages) in the enormous Traité de physique biologique, which he co-edited a few years before his death.25 Of course, the idea of a biological mechanics was not in itself new : the Ancients had often compared the living body to an ensemble of levers, pulleys, ropes, pumps, and valves. And yet “life” remained in the background, a metaphysical principle as inexplicable as it was supreme. “It is only in the present day,” wrote Marey at the start of Animal Mechanism, “that the bearing and the justice of these comparisons is fully comprehensible.”26 Marey could thus view his own work as the culmination and completion of a biomechanical tradition that had its roots in the Aristotelian corpus and that underwent its modern refoundation when Descartes asserted that “the body is a machine similar to our own,”27 that is to say, to the mechanisms and automata in fashion since the sixteenth century and which the philosopher had himself enjoyed designing : “In seeking to verify by experiment what he thought of the animal soul, he had invented a small machine that animated a man dancing on a rope and by hundreds of minor adjustments could imitate, rather naturally, the tricks performed by acrobats.”28 In 1680, Giovanni Alfonso Borelli’s De motu animalium was posthumously published ; the founding essay of the so-called school of “iatrophysics” sought to describe all the movements of animal locomotion in terms of “wedges,” “ropes,” or “springs.” Baglivi would convince himself, shortly thereafter, that the heart is nothing more than a spring of the flesh.29 By the nineteenth century, biomechanics had of course benefited from the advancements in kinematics : between 1826 and 1836, Jean-Victor Poncelet, often quoted by Marey, gave his advanced

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Cours de mécanique appliquée aux machines ; in 1861, Arthur Morin developed a typology of movements (rectilinear, continuous, circular, alternating, intermittent, among others) alongside machinic models (gear, axis, cogwheel, pulley) ; he stated that every movement could be characterized geometrically ; in 1877, Franz Reuleaux presented his great synthesis on the “fundamental principles” of kinematics.30 In parallel, physiology was becoming geometric, thoroughly “mechanical” : in Germany, for instance, as early as 1836, the brothers Eduard and Wilhelm Weber published their impressive Mechanics of the Human Walking Apparatus, which Marey would study in detail.31 In France, Claude Bernard described the animal organism as a veritable hydraulic machine.32

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Marey’s genius lay, firstly, in taking literally these comparisons and obstinately drawing from them all sorts of instrumental conclusions. A physiologist, a medical intern since 1854, he himself would never auscultate, autopsy, or vivisect. There was something of a tactile taboo in Marey’s work, as if the human hand was a fundamental obstacle to a nuanced understanding of phenomena. He therefore devoted his intelligence to the fabrication of sensitive automata—reasoning that if an organism is a machine, one must know how to create, in turn, machines endowed with organic traits, possessing a sort of tactility without subject—capable of retracing all vital movements : this would be a way to both analyze (providing an inscription as direct as possible) and synthesize them (providing an imitation as precise as possible). Marey thus radicalizes, in a very specific sense, the “experimental method” he derived from Claude Bernard, who had stated in a wellknown dictum that “experiment is fundamentally only induced observation,” well aware that inducing an observation generally consists in instrumentalizing it correctly :

Fig. 112 ENSTA, unsteady flow around an oscillating profile, 1974. Photograph.

Only within very narrow boundaries can man observe the phenomena which surround him ; most of them naturally escape his senses, and mere observation is not enough. To extend his knowledge, he has had to increase the power of his organs by means of special appliances.33 The experimental method involves, at the very least, a triple task : one must first amplify tactility, sensitivity : the capacity to objectively inscribe what is perceived. At the same time, one must simplify the phenomenon, separating it from its “noise” : “to have determinism for phenomena in biological as in physico-chemical sciences, we must reduce the phenomena to experimental conditions as definite and simple as possible.”34 This allows one to measure, to reduce intensities, which are by definition beyond our control, to extensive— that is, manipulable—magnitudes : In the experimental sciences, measurement of phenomena is fundamental, since their law can be established by quantitatively determining an effect in relation to a given cause. In biology, if we wish to learn the laws of life, we must therefore not only observe and note vital phenomena, but moreover must also define numerically the ratios of their relative intensity one to another. The application of mathematics to natural phenomena is the aim of all science, because phenomenal law should always be mathematically expressed.35 The measurements, statistical calculations, and curves that permeated Marey’s work corresponded more or less to the scientific program of modern physiology (despite occasionally breaching the limits laid down by Claude Bernard himself, and despite Marey making very little progress in the mathematization, stricto sensu, of his experimental results). But since the object of Mareysian science was movement, we must recast and reformulate these questions : how can one amplify the capacity to objectively inscribe movements that the hand or the eye fail to grasp naturally ? How can one simplify the movement under observation, assign it coordinates, separate it from interference ? Finally, supposing it has been isolated, how can one measure such a movement ? This was Marey’s genius : to have built, or cobbled together, the instrumental answers to questions that had tormented science and philosophy since Aristotle had identified, in Books III and IV of his Physics, the stakes and challenges of a natural science of motion : “for if [ motion ] is not known, it must be that nature is not known either.”36 These stakes and challenges might be summed up—at least

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for Marey’s purposes—by stating that a science of motion can only be established by taking a position on time. It is striking that Marey dedicated his entire life to observing that which in language metaphorically describes the course of time : its “march,” its “line,” its “flow,” even its “flight.” Marey’s greatest inventions may therefore have inherited their distant theoretical principle from the Aristotelian assertion that “we not only measure movement by time but also time by movement,

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for the reason that they are determined reciprocally,” so that time ends up being understood as the “number of motion” (arithmos kineseôs).37 Might we not then consider the chronometer, often visible in Marey’s photographs of moving bodies—just as the scale rule accompanies the archaeological artifact—, an instrument for visually producing the “number of motion” ? But Aristotle had not only provided solutions, he also raised a number of crucial and formidable problems : he wrote, for instance, that “time is neither motion nor

Fig. 113, 114 113: É.-J. Marey, Changes in direction and speed of an air current colliding with different shapes, 1899. Photograph. 114: É.-J. Marey, Measurement of the duration of a current flowing from an electric ray by successive explorations with a frog muscle as feedback indicator. Figure taken from La Méthode graphique, 1878.

independent of motion.”38 How then should we consider the relations between time and motion in each instance they are incarnated in a choreography, hand gesture, folded wing, or convolution of smoke ? Aristotle would ultimately raise a problem fraught with consequences : “time is both continuous, by virtue of the now, and divided at the now.”39 What, then, would be the status of the “now” [ l’instant ] in the myriad “snapshots” [ instantanés ] Marey produced in his laboratory, his “physiological station” ? How do these advance the crucial question, both visual and temporal, concerning the mix of continuous and discontinuous found in each phenomenon, in each movement he studied ? There is no doubt that Marey devised each of his instruments, each of his “methods,” as an attempt to illuminate a particular aspect of this problem so central to the knowledge of time and movement. So while the graphic method endorsed “continuous inscription devices”—whose images offered, paradoxically, a radical discontinuity between the recognizable form (the white line) and the background (the dark field)—, chronophotography returned to the principle of discontinuous inscription (the intermittence of the snapshot) to arrive, no less paradoxically, at images able to embrace a continuity of motion, that is, something akin to a flow, a curl of smoke, a dance of traced time. The curve of all things

It is troubling to discover, in these movements of smoke that we first admire for their singularity, certain formal characteristics that place them in the long lineage of Mareysian instrumentation. We might say that with these images Marey pushes to its limits a visual style he elaborated for over twenty years. White stripes, curved lines, black backdrops : we witness here a sort of mannerist explosion of the schemata that had already in 1878 struck the readers of La Méthode graphique, wherein nearly all analytical results were to be “read” in so many white lines, generally curved, scratched on soot-blackened paper by the stylus of the inscription device [ fig. 113–114 ]. Indeed, it seemed that for Marey all things—meaning, all movements—must culminate in a curve. Let us not forget the Aristotelian premises evoked earlier : magnitude “accompanies” time and time “measures” motion. It is not surprising then that physics and then

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physiology attempted the joint geometrization of time and movement through a graphic figuration first developed by Parisian scholasticism in the fourteenth century—Oresme being the first to represent “continuous change” in the form of a graphic curve—, long before Descartes and Galileo were to outline its modern principles.40 Mareysian scholarship has alternately insisted on the historicity and the novelty of his graphic method : Laurent Mannoni, for example, has shown that its roots lie in a scientific tradition—and indeed a philosophical one, given that Auguste Comte had advocated in his own system “the use of artificial devices destined to perfect our natural senses”—harking back to the eighteenth century. Notable precursors include Pajot’s anemometer in 1734, Engramelle’s Tonotechnie, and even Goiffon and Vincent’s fascinating treatise on the observation of horse locomotion through its ground prints.41 In 1827, Charles Wheatstone invented a “kaleidophone” capable of tracing the undulating figures of certain sounds ; in 1840, he introduced his “chronoscope,” a device capable of inscribing and measuring the duration of an electrical current.42 In 1838, Morin published a treatise on inscription chronometers ; in 1861, Lissajous obtained a graphic and geometric transcription of sounds, while Tisley and Spiller produced their remarkable figures of combined oscillations [ fig. 115 ].43 In 1867, Admiral Pâris invented the ingenious “wave-tracer” and “roll-tracer,” capable of “directly tracing all that happens to a buoy” given over to the movements of the ocean.44 At the close of the century, Alfred Binet made use of a technique, designed by Marey for recording the pulse, in order to “inscribe the states of the soul” and to obtain from his experimental subjects graphs of fear and even angst.45 These examples firmly establish the roots of the graphic method in what Michel Foucault called a general épistémè particularly concerned with developing indexical figures for a material knowledge of phenomena.46 But it is also legitimate to insist, as Michel Frizot has done, on the specificity and the novelty of the procedures that

Fig. 115 Curves of oscillatory movements, based on Tisley and Spiller. Figure taken from La Méthode graphique, 1878.

so often resulted in the strange abstract figures we are now familiar with. In this regard, the graphic method reinvented the meaning of the image : “The graphic representation calls for an expansion of the notion of image [ according to ] a reference at once iconic and mental that displaces the questions of language, signification, interpretation,”47 and representation more generally. By pushing the representation of time, movement, and intensity to its limits using only the spatial dimension, the Mareysian curve transformed both the idea of the phenomenon and its possibility as an image. It was “completely new” in that it “transposed a phenomenon—characterized by a force, a pressure, a movement—into [ ... ] a very simple image, constituted for the most part by continuous and supple lines, more accessible to perception and observation than the phenomenon itself.” 48 But the question then arises as to the epistemic content of the image thus obtained. What kind of truth does it reveal ? What can it tell us of phenomena more generally ? What does it conceal ? What constitutes its particular visual status ? Needless to say, the amplification concerned enlarges our observable field : thanks to its range of high-precision sensors, the graphic method emerged “as the best for most biological studies,” since it “eliminates the fallacies of the observer, the protracted descriptions, the factual confusions.”49 It allowed for the automatic inscription of movements, but also of forces and their variations, and even simultaneous functions within a single organism.50 Not only did Marey see all things in movement, he also believed that all movement could be identified by the curve—indeed, must identify with the curve—that represented it. And that is why the monotonous lines in La Méthode graphique first exhaust us, then awe or in any case intrigue us as the remarkable variety of their simple curves is revealed, curves able to express physical movement, evolution over time, or intensity of energy : curve of ocular accommodation over different stages of life ; curve of nerve elasticity ; curve of the combustion speeds of various powders ; curve of the increase in steam power between 1840 to 1869 ; curve of the four hooves of a horse at different gaits (walk, amble, trot, gallop) ; curve of water level variations of the Seine ; comparative curves of variations in sunspots, magnetic declination, and the aurora borealis ; proportional curve of oxygen in unbreathable air at different pressures ; solubility curve of water vapor in air ; statistical curve of cholera ; curve of the pubis of a man walking…51

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And yet the amplification allowed for by these “automated sensitivities” must necessarily entail (or risk further confusing the perpetual interference of phenomena) a simplification of which the curve—as uncontaminated trace—is as much the emblem as the result. Between a distorted perception of the phenomenon and the

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curve recorded by the stylus, there existed a whole chain of instrumentalization that Marey needed to put in place : capturing, transmitting, and subsequently inscribing the data—and doing so with as much “sensitivity,” as much “lightness,” as possible. It is for this reason that pneumatic, electric, and luminous transducers successively replaced mechanical ones.52 And yet such transmission trans-

Fig. 116 É.-J. Marey, Original plate for the photographic rifle, 1882. Chronophotograph.

lates by schematizing. Effectively, the whole graphic method was founded on the principle by which “any magnitude, distance, weight, temperature, and so forth, if compared to a magnitude of the same order, taken as a whole, will be converted into a number and expressed as a line of variable length.”53 The phenomenon may thus be expressed by a curve on the condition that it submits to the conversion of all events into magnitudes, all magnitudes into units, all units into numbers, and of all numbers into lines. It is under this condition that the graphic method claimed to “explain the most varied phenomena, transform obscure statistics into a luminous display, encapsulate before our eyes and encompass in a blink an enormous quantity of documents” ; it is under this condition that it assumed the role of “scientific evidence,” peerless in its capacity to “assemble indisputably accurate documents which the mind can readily comprehend, fluidly compare, and easily remember.”54 It is under these conditions, finally, that it claimed credit for removing what Marey described as the “two obstacles” to any scientific approach : “the defective capacity of our senses” and the “insufficiency of language” ; to his mind, the curve offered “a clarity that language does not possess.”55 Might this not be an exaggerated confidence in the instrumental image as transparency, the pure transmission of a pure “number of movement” ? Do we not find this same positivist hyperbole in the words of commentators like François Dagognet, for whom “we simplify in order to better restitute,” while “losing nothing”? 56  And yet something is undoubtedly lost in the instrumental approach : Marey so clearly understood the tradeoff that he resolved himself—his images of smoke being the clearest example—to relinquishing the singularity of phenomena. It would be nonetheless just as naive to believe that this “loss” of phenomenality engendered by the graphic curve was no more than privation. Strange though it may seem, when images, by traces too material or by graphs too abstract, wear the signs of this loss and disrupt the representation of things, we are gifted with a paradoxical supplement. Indeed, as we will see, this supplement—this excess— permeates the whole of Étienne-Jules Marey’s experimental imagery. In Marey’s work we find something of a quest for the absolute—the absolute image of the movement and time of all things. But how can one purify a line of all interference from the phenomenon it records ? How can one ensure the immediate transmission—free of all material burden, of all “noise,” of all cacophony—between the phenomenon

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and the curve it records in real time ? Marey sought to find a mode of inscription—a “stylus,” un style, as he called it—that was “weightless [ ... ], perfectly flexible along the direction in which it meets the paper, and perfectly rigid in the other direction, [ which does ] not snag on the paper [ and yet ] is always connected to the writing surface.”57 Elsewhere he explained that “the principle difficulty in producing graphic measurements of time is to create, in order to hone the signals, a surface driven at a perfectly regular or precisely known speed.”58 It is telling that, faced with the technical problems which emerged from the graphic method—the sensitivity of the sensors, the mechanical drive of the inscription surface, the acuteness of the stylus— Marey considered a philosophical perspective ultimately necessary to guide any investigation into those “short-lived or periodically recurring phenomena” that proved so difficult to observe and describe. This “philosophical” approach involved a reflection on the limits of our visual perception, the persistence of retinal images, and upon

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the “outstanding method of successive explorations invented by Plateau and referred to as the stroboscopic method.”59 To dispel the optical illusion created on the retina by excessively quick movements, it was necessary, according to Marey, to know when to relinquish continuous inscription—hitherto the mainstay of chronographic precision—“by making objects visible for a short period of time through flashes of light,” as Savart had done in his observation of “a stream of apparently static liquid in mid-fall [ or ] drops of water forming a series of alternatively elongated and flattened spheroids.” Marey, ever the good instrumentalist, concluded : “Since photography now permits us to fix the optical image on paper, we can foresee that in many cases stroboscopic images might also be transformed into written documents.” 60 In this way, “by means of a series of images, we can perceive the serial phases of a given phenomenon, provided we investigate it in successive instants,” as Worthington was able to do with the splash of a drop of mercury decomposed into its characteristic phases.61 In

Fig. 117 É.-J. Marey, Studies of the skate’s fin movements, 1891. 60 mm film.

1885, Marey republished La Méthode graphique with a supplement on the Développement de la méthode graphique par l’emploi de la photographie, previously published as a separate work.62 Here he sings the praises of his predecessors : Jules Janssen for his photographic “revolver,” Eadweard Muybridge for his experiments on horse locomotion, and even Francis Galton for his “composite portraits” obtained by the superimposition of different snapshots.63 But he is above all interested in listing the methodological advantages of photography for studying the movements of all things : [ Photography ] makes it possible to approach highly complex problems and reach a practical solution with remarkable ease. [ ... ] Thus, when a moving body is beyond reach, as in the case of a star whose trajectory we desire to follow ; when it executes movements in multiple directions, or of so great a range that they cannot be directly inscribed on a sheet of paper, photography supplements the mechanical processes with great ease ; it reduces the amplitude of a movement, or amplifies it to a more convenient scale.64 What strikes us in this description is that all the advantages attributed to photography concern modes of spatialization occasioned by this new instrument. In the first instance, photography is understood as a graphic—but not a mechanical— instrument of direct transcription, that is, an instrument faithful to the information it gathers : Marey admired its “sincerity” because “in a photograph, all is represented,” and because this representation, easily reproducible, constitutes “a faithful memory that preserves unaltered the impressions it receives.”65 Next, photography is presented as an instrument of translation, meaning a modulable instrument : it is not by chance that Marey’s first technical challenge, in 1882, was to develop Janssen’s “revolver” into a real “photographic rifle,” thanks to which its operator could follow a bird in flight—this “inaccessible moving body [ that ] moves in multiple directions [ and ] within such great range that they cannot be directly inscribed on a sheet of paper”—and capture the beating of its wings [ fig. 116 ]. And yet the principal advantage of photography for Marey was in its nature as an optical instrument capable of correction : its results—the images—could be manipulated in their very “sincerity.” With photography, observation and experimentation become indissociable, just as the amplification (of scale) and simplification (of amplitude) of an uncontainable movement are indissociable, or easily coexist. “Photography possesses a marvelous ability to aug-

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ment or reduce the image of an object,” he writes in the same pages.66 Furthermore, being a kind of “abstraction,” this optico-geometric manipulation does not alter the nature of the image as “immediate trace.” For this reason, it is “the most perfect form of the graphic method.”67 It is, then, a spatializing magic. But what of time ? “To fully express the characteristics of movement,” Marey acknowledged, “one must introduce the notion of time into the image.”68 But time resists or it flees, it is always making trouble. Indeed, the very progress of chronophotography coincided completely with the instrumental solutions Marey found to the question of time : how to activate it, represent it, measure it within the image ? Let us list a few : the photographic rifle and fixed-plate chronophotography (1882), a turntable device (1883), multiple lenses (1883– 1884), investigations into instantaneity (1885), a fixed disk with rotating mirror or mobile-band (1888), all culminating in the actual cinematic apparatus [ fig. 117 ]… Marey explored in all directions, experimented with every method of incorporating time in the image of movement.69 “Marey’s great innovation,” writes Michel Frizot, “resides in the articulation of time and forms on the surface of the image, whether in graphic or photographic terms. This translates quite simply to the fact that the chronological instant is not the same from one end of the image to the other [ ... ] and that this temporality is rigorously quantified.” 70 Let us understand this “innovation” : it certainly

Fig. 118, 119 118: É.-J. Marey, Simple trajectory and chronophotographic trajectory of a bright ball moving in front of a dark background. Figure taken from Le Mouvement, Paris, 1894. 119: É.-J. Marey, Trajectory of two balls tied together, 1888. Chronophotograph.

does not reside in the “articulation of time and forms on the surface of the image,” since this articulation exists in a great number of images from every era (in an Annunciation from the Renaissance, for instance, the surface of the image is a “typological” and exegetical articulation of the past time of the Fall through to the eventtime of the Incarnation and towards that distant future time of the Redemption). Even a daguerreotype can present, on a single surface, different moments successively recorded during the time of exposure, even successively recorded and destroyed by accident.71 The Mareysian innovation does not then reside in the fact that “the chronological instant is not the same from one end of the image to the other.” Nor does it lie in the way heterogeneous times are articulated on the same surface (this anachronic condition might be said to define the image more generally).72 But it does reside in the fact that the articulation is constantly being instrumentalized in terms of quantification. The pre-eminence of the “curve” in Marey’s work likely falls under this procedural rule—whose philosophical roots we have identified : time must become the “number of motion”—a rule Michel Frizot painstakingly describes as the “method of the image” and its six fundamental “operators” : the “zero-point” (or the immediacy condition of the desired temporal cuts) ; “ultra-rapid exposure” (the technical means of the immediacy in question) ; “periodic intermittence” (which decomposes and recomposes time into individual, “discrete” elements) ; “control synthesis” (or the experimental reversibility of the process) ; “translation” (or the fact that the curve is obtained by moving the inscription surface) ; and, finally, what he names the “iconicity of the data,” which brings us to the question of the visual coherence of Marey’s images, as well as to their strangeness.73 Marey’s “graphic method” finds its raison d’être in chronography—a writing of time conceived as the “number of movement”—and its figurative vocation in the graphic itself, that is, in the curve of the phenomena under study. “Full knowledge of a movement,” he writes in La Méthode graphique, “supposes we know, at each instant, the position a moving body occupies in space.” 74 The spatial transfer of each of these positions establishes the curve as a visual quantifier wherein all “instants” of a movement can be “articulated” within the same image.

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The Mareysian device—like the sphygmograph for tracing the pulse—was thus able to produce a chronographic image that easily met the double criteria of indiciality (the “sincerity” of the trace, as though the phenomenon itself wrote the division of its movement) and symbolicity (since the line geometrizes, quantifies, renders legible and conceptualizable the phenomenon’s immediate trace). This was one way to achieve the geometrization that physics had taken upon itself with regard to forms of movement : Even if a force produces the same quantity of work, whether lifting a weight or tensing a spring, there is a considerable difference between the two actions, and this difference resides in the form of the movement produced. The graphic method lends itself perfectly to the characterization of these different forms of movement.75 The graphic method is able to give form to both the forces and durations of phenomena in movement. It can, following the principles established by Poncelet and Morin, force a moving body “to trace its path in the form of a curve.”76 Chronophotography, for its part, extends the limits of this method since it is able, on the one hand, to “represent the different positions in space occupied by a moving object, i. e. its trajectory, as well as define the various positions of this body on the trajectory at any particular moment.” 77 But might not photography bring in fact too much to the graphic method ? Marey certainly did not doubt its “sincerity” : in a photograph, the phenomenon traces—luminously, subtly—its own visible configuration. All is inscribed, all is visible (or so we are led

Fig. 120 É.-J. Marey, Double ellipse created by a luminous point waved in the dark, undated. Photograph.

to believe). But does not this generosity risk bringing to the image the very confusion proper to natural perception ? For this would make it impossible to handle the results in a scientific manner. Marey is not at all curious to revisit in photography what he sees with his own eyes : it is not the legendary mimicry of the photographic device that interests him but its indiciary capacity for instant recording, measurement, revelation, as well as symbolic manipulation. It’s not so much the “image” in the usual sense that Marey is looking for, not the photographic icon : it is instead a paradoxical photographic curve of phenomena. And in order to create it, the use of this new technique required a method. This was to be, in the strictest sense of the term, experimental photography.78 This is the reason Marey devoted himself, early on, to formalizing his photographic practice, that is, to reducing the exuberance of the visible appearances the darkroom—that Pandora’s box— was known to exacerbate. Marey wanted most of all to maintain the epistemic primacy of the curve in the photographic domain : it was necessary, then, to amplify the trace of the movement and simplify the rest. In spatial terms, it was necessary that the object “be brightly illuminated [ its amplification ] and the background absolutely dark [ its simplification ].”79 In terms of time, it was necessary to push the shutter speeds and frequencies towards greater instantaneity (the amplification of the instant as singularity, as unit) but also towards periodicity, intermittence (the simplification of instants as innumerable and inextricably embedded multiplicities). All this was in order to obtain a global curve that included, in each of its sample points, the local, photographic, aspect of its transformation : Let us suppose that an ordinary photographic camera is directed towards a dark background, that the lens is uncovered, and that a ball, brightly illuminated by the sun, is thrown across the field of the lens. During its passage this ball leaves an impression on various parts of the sensitized plate, and on examining the plate there is found a continuous curved line which exactly represents the path taken by the luminous ball [ fig. 118 ]. If we repeat this experiment, but only admit light into the dark chamber in an intermittent fashion, and at regular intervals of time, an interrupted trajectory will be obtained. This represents the successive positions assumed by the moving object at each moment

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when light is admitted. This is the chronophotographic trajectory [ fig. 118–119 ].80 Founded upon a relatively simple technical principle—“take, at regular and known intervals, images of a lit object moving across a dark field”81—, chronophotography cast light on the movement of all things in a new way. It amplified and explained them, it detailed and at the same time simplified them, revealing their fundamental curves.

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It traced an original experimental path in the knowledge of phenomena : instead of passing from the sensible to the intelligible, cutting loose from the empirical in favor of the ideal, it became possible to remain intractably in experience (Marey, in any case, was said to be a poor mathematician and an even poorer philosopher), but already formalizing it, modifying the very conditions of its perception (apparatuses for moving bodies, black backdrops, intermittent exposures).

Fig. 121, 122 121: É.-J. Marey, Study of a man walking with a white rod fixed along his spine, 1886. Chronophotograph. 122: The trajectory of the pubis of a man at a walking pace. Figure taken from Le Mouvement, Paris, 1894.

It was by tinkering, by modifying photographic instruments with their attendant theaters of operations—laboratory, aquarium, physiological station, wind tunnel—that Marey the “mechanic” breathed life back into the fundamental problems of physics and geometry : “We know that in order to discover and demonstrate that bodies under the influence of gravity fall in a uniformly accelerating motion, the genius of a Galileo [ ... ] and numerous experiments [ were needed ]. With chronophotography, this demonstration became extremely simple.” 82 As did the observation of the “movements of a curve in space” and its attendant figures [ fig. 120, 142 ].83 Even in physiological research—his first and primary domain of competence—Marey did not waive the primacy of the “chronophotographic curve.” Given that the aim was to study not the man who walks but the walk of the man, it was necessary, photographically, to retain the walk (or even amplify it) and simplify the man (or even delete him) : However rapid the gait, be it walk, run, or jump, this device easily captures all phases, resolving a problem that the most capable observers could not. We must not hope to obtain, by way of chronophotography, complete images of the subject under observation, since they merge inextricably, but we must reduce these images to their strictly necessary elements.84 The most obvious method consists in artificially reducing the surface of the object under observation. Such parts of the object as are not wanted in the photograph are blackened and thus rendered invisible ; on the other hand, those portions, the movements of which are to be studied, are picked out in white. Thus a man dressed in black velvet, with bright stripes and spots on his limbs, is reproduced in the photograph as a system of white lines, which indicates the various positions assumed by the limbs.85 This visual diagram had the heuristic advantage of allowing the analysis of particular aspects or phases of a more general, and thus more complex, movement : “For instance, in running it may only be necessary to observe the phases of oscillation of the legs— this can be done by limiting the diagram to the movements of the extremities in question.”86 Or, by attaching a white rod to the spine of a man entirely dressed in black (who becomes invisible against the black background of the physiological station), fixed-plate chronophotography could restitute its exact geometric rhythms

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[ fig. 121 ]. Marey once again sought, in photography, the curve, which he even had his collaborators redraw in order to derive mechanical models from it ; we see this clearly in the example of the horse or in the extraordinary rhythmic line delineated in three-dimensional space by the pubis of a man walking [ fig. 122 ]. One consequence of these procedural choices—a consequence at once epistemic, aesthetic, and cultural more broadly—is that the status of anthropomorphism in the image finds itself completely subverted. It would be insufficient to see here merely another “origin” of abstraction in modern art, of cubist constructions and futurist deconstructions. In persistently chasing down the curve of phenomena, Marey geometrized appearances by treating their metamorphoses, their movements, as purely formal variations. He was willing to use every possible artifice to do so, and “man” ended up being erased for the sake of a swinging limb. Marey did not take up photography in order to faithfully render appearances but rather to obtain a directly geometrizable indicial tracing. Recall how the physiologist introduced photography within the strict confines of his “graphic method” : Photography, like all graphic representations, is a memory that preserves unaltered the impressions it receives. [ ... ] Photography possesses a marvelous ability to augment or reduce the image of an object, all while conserving its proportions in such a way that two animals of very different sizes may be reduced to two equal figures whose every part is represented at the same scale, just as two geometrically similar figures may be brought to equivalence and become super-

Fig. 123 Record of two airs played on the keyboard of a harmonium. Figure taken from Le Mouvement, Paris, 1894.

posable one upon the other. This geometric method, which consists in an artificial superimposition of two figures in order to demonstrate identity, may be effectively applied within the natural sciences by means of photography.87 The “abstract” traces that saturate Marey’s works cease, in turn, to be enigmatic—we read the legend, we understand the instrumental procedure, we know that these undulating parallel lines [ fig. 121 ] or tridimensional sinuosities [ fig. 122 ] imply and constitute the diagram of the human body in movement—, all the while, anthropologically speaking, remaining mysterious. Why is this ? Since their geometry is animalized, even humanized by degrees, we are compelled to view it through the prism of organic movement and according to the scale of our own bodies, despite the lack of a “human figure.” We “see” neither the spine nor the pubis of the walking man ; we do not even see his silhouette, let alone his appearance ; but we do see the living rhythm that gives these curves something like a strange mortal beauty. Marey tells us, for example, that “at one of the scientific soirées at the Sorbonne, during a conference on animal movement, one of our associates, a celebrated organist, kindly played some pieces of music [ on the harmonium ] which recorded themselves before the eyes of the audience [ thanks to chronographic equipment ]. [ ... ] Instead of the conventional method of expressing the duration of different sounds by minims, crotchets and quavers, and the duration of silence by rests and crotchet-rests, the graphic method conveys the same impression by the length of the stroke, that is to say, by a natural graphic expression.”88 At first glance, the result [ fig. 123 ] seems especially abstract for an eye habituated to classical musical notation ; but soon the real-time inscription and the simple correspondence between length of time and length of stroke convinces us of the natural character of the signs that appear on the scrolling black background. It was not by chance that, in La Méthode graphique, Marey used the language of beauty when lauding Koenig’s “manometric flames,” which were able to produce a precise inscription of the “timbres of different vowels” spoken by a test subject.89 Nothing moves us more than the curves of life. In 1869, with the help of the photographer Édouard Baldus, Charles Ozanam was able to capture an image of the “pulse of a young woman of eighteen” [ fig. 124 ]. If today the horizontal line of a flat electrocardiogram can move us to tears, it is quite probably due to the visual culture inau-

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gurated by Marey. It is not by chance that Nadar described Marey’s strange and troubling curves in terms of an essentially anthropomorphic pathos. The artist had understood—following Balzac—that these traces, these lines, these coils, constituted a sort of seismic or symptomological archive of vital movements, that is, of our agitations between life and death : [ ... ] these fundamental archives [ ... ] are of an absorbing charm, these sheets where, in white lineaments on the funerary blank of the tableaux, the infinite variations of the hymn of life, that is, the lament for our misery, are delineated. [ ... ] There are only waves, curves, steps, trepidations, leaps, jolts, sudden ascents and precipitous or gradual falls, twists similar to the jagged peaks of some volcanic chain. Amid these symptomatic diversities of the stigmata of our existence, rhythms of all human suffering, every disease, every poison has its own personal gamut. The choppy spasms of lead poisoning are not the thrusts of typhoid fever, the effect of belladonna is marked differently than that of curare. The pulse of the child vibrates, soars, frolics : in that of the old man, the lifeline, significantly diminished, settles, crushes [ … ] From these images, the most pathetic, the most striking, seems to me that in which, at a glance, we can read the last breath, the final temperature of a man with cholera : I have never encountered a staging, a painting, or a written page as dramatic as the unique filament of this diagram in its lugubrious simplicity.90

The duration of all things

Fig. 124 Charles Ozanam and Édouard Baldus, Pulse of a young woman of eighteen, 74 pulsations per minute, 1869. Albumen paper, pulsograph.

Given the coherence and internal logic of his work, Marey had no use for the strangeness, the “dismal simplicities,” or the new kind of pathos that his obscure diagrams conjured up for some of his contemporaries. He certainly only saw in his images the reason for their production : instrumental images belonging to a positive, experimental science of movement, time, and life. In order to exist and provide clear results, this science called for movement to be reduced to the positions and trajectories of the moving object ; for time to be considered as the pure and simple “number” of this movement, that is, its measurement ; and for life to be reduced to an ensemble of mechanical phenomena. As is the case with any experimental science, the object is none other than that which is brought to light by the conditions—namely, the instrumentalization, even the dramatization—of the experiment. It is hardly surprising that Marey justified the primacy of muscular function over physiological sensation solely from the perspective of the experimenter : “[ ... ] this sensation reveals only itself to the experimenter through the motor reaction it provokes. How does the biologist know he has produced a sensation in an animal ? It is through the phenomenon of [ muscular ] movement in reaction to sensory pressure. Without the movement that reveals it, sensation would remain wholly subjective and mostly elude experimental study.”91 Does this not create a vicious circle with regards to the method itself ? Must we limit ourselves to the idea that sensation does not exist without muscular reaction, because muscular reaction alone is “observable” ? Are there not other dimensions to reality, other methods of observation than those that measure movement ? Did Ernst Mach not state, during this same period, that “greater confidence is placed in our experiences concerning relations of time and space ; that we attribute to them a more objective, a more real character” while mechanics, after all, discloses “only (one) aspect” of the world in question ?92 Marey’s images are entirely reliant on a method : this requires us to examine its internal coherence (and it is to this coherence in particular that Michel Frizot’s interpretative work is consecrated).93 This method, however, must also be questioned in its “harmonics,” in both what it presupposes and what it cannot conceive, beyond its

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mere execution, beyond its own internal coherence. The question had already been raised at the end of the nineteenth century, when philosophers and scholars—for instance, Ferdinand Brunière on one side, Marcelin Berthelot and Charles Richet on the other—debated the potential “bankruptcy” of positive science.94 It grew in importance—to the point of provoking a critical shift in both psychology and physiology—when Freud challenged the etiological models devised by Charcot in the experimental context of the Salpêtriere,95 or when Erwin Straus refuted Pavlov’s physiological concepts by deconstructing all the instrumental situations of which these concepts were the consequence and certainly not the basis.96 The question then becomes : do not the “methods” or instrumentalizations that Marey applied in order to render visible movement, time, and life, surreptitiously act as straitjackets on movement, as little machines that kill time, as images that paralyze life ? That is what Alphonse Allais suggested in a short sarcastic text published in 1895, which serves as a perfect counterpart to Nadar’s vivid narrative. “A Bit of Mechanics” opens with : “Ah ! There is never a dull moment at the Academy of Sciences ! Let me tell you what these fellows get up to instead of working !” The humorist goes on to quote, word for word, the session of October 29, 1894, in which Marey exhibited his chronophotographic studies of a falling cat.97 Allais comments : “I did not attend this session, to my regret, for it must have been wildly farcical to contemplate all these old men gravely posing the question of how cats land on their feet when dropped from one and a half meters.” And to conclude : “Since we are dealing with mechanics, I should like to submit to Mr. Marey and other scientific minds a question which falls within their expertise [ ... ] : when three quarters of a man works, what does the remaining quarter do in the meantime ?”98 Though caricatural, this critique nevertheless reveals that at the turn of the century there were a number of skeptical responses to the experimental enterprise of chronophotography, famous in its time and very much situated between the Collège de France and the Academy of Sciences. The question hung in the air as to what kinds of secret manipulations, divisions, or even mutilations Marey must have orchestrated in his laboratory to create such oddities of movement, time, and life. Let us not forget that, in the aesthetic realm, works posterior to Marey’s images of human locomotion greatly contradicted the results of chronophotography—Rodin’s

Walking Man or Saint-John, for example, their two feet firmly planted on the ground : [ ... ] it is likely that a photograph, taken of a subject performing the same movement, would show the back foot already lifted and moving towards the front. Or, conversely, if the back leg occupied, in the photograph, the same position as it does in my statue, the front foot would not yet be on the ground. Yet, it is precisely for this reason that such a photographic subject would present the bizarre aspect of a man suddenly struck with paralysis and frozen in his stance. [ ... ] Indeed, if the figures in photographs, despite being captured in full action, seem suddenly suspended in mid-air, it is because all the parts of their bodies are reproduced exactly at the same twentieth or fortieth of a second. In contrast to art, here there is no gradual unfolding of the gesture. [ ... ] It is the artist who is truthful and photography that lies ; for in reality time does not stop : and if the artist succeeds in giving the impression of a gesture accomplished in several instants, his work is certainly more unconventional than a scientific image, in which time is abruptly suspended.99 We may no doubt conclude that Marey and Rodin do not refer to the same experience, nor to the same movement. Scientific observation requires measurement and so must think movement in terms of discernable positions that can be situated in relation to a before and an after. Artistic creation—at least according to the viewpoint expressed by Rodin—thinks movement in terms of metamorphosis and the perpetual indiscernibility between what already is and what is yet to come : Movement is the transition from one attitude to another. This simple statement, which has the air of a truism, is, to tell the truth, the key to the mystery. You have certainly read in Ovid how Daphne was transformed into a bay tree and Progne into a swallow. This charming writer shows us the body of the one taking on its covering of leaves and bark and the members of the other clothing themselves in feathers, so that in each of them one still sees the woman which will cease to be and the tree or bird which she will become. You remember, too, how in Dante’s Inferno a serpent, coiling itself about the body of one of the damned, changes into man as the man becomes reptile. The great poet describes this scene so ingeniously that in each of these two beings one follows the struggle between two natures which progressively invade and supplant each other. It is, in short, a metamorphosis of this kind that the painter or the sculptor effects in giving movement to his personages. He represents

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the transition from one pose to another—he indicates how insensibly the first glides into the second. In his work we still see a part of what was and we discover a part of what is to be.100 Where, then, should we situate this epistemological debate ? To what reasoning must one submit Marey’s methods in order to understand what is truly at stake ? The answer lies in the philosophical work—contemporary with the experimental sciences, but also chronophotography and early cinematography—of Henri Bergson. Again we must return to what has been written. Every monograph published on Marey mentions Bergson—and with good reason : The Creative Mind (La Pensée et le mouvant) seems to rhyme or counter-rhyme with Movement (Le Mouvement), just as Creative Evolution (L’Évolution créatrice) might correspond to Animal Mechanism (La Machine animale) and Matter and Memory (Matière et mémoire) to The Graphic Method (La Méthode graphique). And yet the commentary tends to skip over one problem, made all the more arduous because it strikes at the heart of our understanding of movement, time, and life. François Dagognet, the most ruthless of these commentators, believed the matter could be resolved in a few words, declaring Bergson “disqualified” by Marey and even caught in a blatant “lie” regarding the notion of continuous time.101 Others wondered whether, in this particular case, to oppose the two notions of time to the very end, or whether to see in Marey’s images the only possible visualization of Bergon’s concept of “simultaneity.”102 Others suspected, without really knowing if this was heresy, that the “mental synthesis” of movement theorized by Bergson in the psychological realm found its physical counterpart in the experimental syntheses of Mareysian chronophotographs.103 Within philosophy, Marey’s figurative production was systematically overlooked, reduced solely to what was self-evident in its claims. And Merleau-Ponty found reason, in the name of art, to extend Rodin’s ruling : Here Rodin’s well-known remark reveals its full weight : instantaneous glimpses, unstable attitudes petrify movement, as is shown by so many photographs in which an athlete-in-motion is forever frozen. We could not thaw him out by multiplying the glimpses. Marey’s photographs [ ... ] do not move ; they give a Zenonian reverie on movement. The photograph [ ... ] destroys the overtaking, the overlapping, the “metamorphosis” of time which painting, in contrast, makes visible.104

It is, therefore, as difficult as it is necessary—as arduous as it is self-evident—to confront Bergson’s thought with Marey’s method. This much is evident : Marey is to Bergson what the aridity of a laboratory report with its black and white diagrams is to the beauty of the literary language, full of nuances, timbres, “colors” (the philosopher was a colleague of Mallarmé at the Collège Rollin and was married to Marcel Proust’s cousin) ; Bergson mused on Turner, Marey dialogued with Meisonnier ; Bergson’s glory outstripped Marey’s notability ; women, artists, and even metaphysicians fell for Bergson, he responded to Einstein on the subject of fundamental concepts ; Marey seemed relevant only to sphygmograph manufacturers and aircraft engineers. These two men, evidently, were not meant to get along. This much remains mysterious : Marey never mentioned Bergson and Bergson never mentioned Marey. And yet they knew each other. They taught in the same institution—the Collège de France—and they convened in the same inner sanctums. They even co-signed experimental research projects, fashionable in those years, on hypnotism.105 They failed to quote each other, pretended to be unaware of each other, even though the same problems affected them. And so each was aware of the other. Marey avoided this by never situating his work on an explicitly philosophical level. Bergson’s writing, on the other hand, is teeming with allusions to Marey’s experiments, as though they provided endless opportunities to reorient the engagement with the nature of movement, time, and life. Bergson, like Marey, made movement the essential motif—the motive, the very motor—of his thought.106 Refusing any spontaneous Aristotelianism, thus any biomechanical evidence, Bergson initiated a critical review of the canon : he meticulously scrutinized Aristotle’s “dialectical definition” of place, which was known to define, in turn, the concept of movement in his Physics.107 Meanwhile, he translated and interpreted Lucretius’ De rerum natura, an early reflection on the “diverse and ever-changing phenomena” of nature.108 It is in Matter and Memory, published in 1896, two years after Marey’s Movement, that Bergson most clearly states his first major thesis on the subject : movement is indivisible. A proposition whose corollaries include a philosophical critique of Zeno’s famous paradoxes (with regard to the past) and a technical critique of photography’s famous instantanés, its “snapshots” (with regard to the

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present) : in other words, a critique of any model that would reduce movement to the line of the trajectory or to the sum of points representing the positions occupied at each instant by the moving body : When I see the moving body pass any point, I conceive, no doubt, that it might stop there ; and even when it does not stop there, I incline to consider its passage as an arrest, though infinitely short, because I must have at least the time to think of it ; but it is only my imagination which stops there, and what the moving body has to do is, on the contrary, to move. As every point of space necessarily appears to me fixed, I find it extremely difficult not to attribute to the moving body itself the immobility of the point with which, for a moment, I make it coincide ; it seems to me, then, when I reconstitute the total movement, that the moving body has stayed an infinitely short time at every point of its trajectory. But we must not confound the data of the senses, which perceive the movement, with the artifice of the mind, which recomposes it. [ ... ] We discover here, at its outset, the illusion which accompanies and masks the perception of real movement. Movement visibly consists in passing from one point to another, and consequently in traversing space. Now the space which is traversed is infinitely divisible ; and as the movement is, so to speak, applied to the line along which it passes, it appears to be one with this line and, like it, divisible. [ ... ] But these points have no reality except in a line drawn, that is to say motionless ; and by the very fact that you represent the movement to yourself successively in these different points, you necessarily arrest it in each of them ; your successive positions are, at bottom, only so many imaginary halts. You substitute the path for the journey, and because the journey is subtended by the path you think that the two coincide. But how should a progress coincide with a thing, a movement with an immobility ? 109

Fig. 125 É.-J. Marey, Study of a man running, 1886. Chronophotograph (detail).

Marey hoped chronophotography would correct the illusion of our senses, which prevents us from seeing the exact positions of a man running [ fig. 125 ]. Bergson took a philosophical approach to the “artifice of the mind,” which recomposes movement into imaginary positions to the point of denying its very essence, that is, its mobility. Movement is “progress” or “journey.” But the mind—bootstrapped with a technical apparatus like photography—often makes it a “thing,” a simple “path.” To think movement in terms of points or lines is akin to viewing movement through immobilities and time through discontinuities. This is a way, Bergson writes, to “shut up motion in space”—that “abstract space, where there is never but a single instant and where everything is always being born anew.” It is a way to relegate movement to the graphic abstraction of its path (the line), itself divisible into as many positions (points) as desired.110 Bergson introduces here a radical critique of the primacy of space—that “diagram of infinite divisibility”—into the problem of movement : this philosophical illusion had persisted since Zeno of Elea claimed to have pinned the journey of the moving body to the path it travels ; persisted all the way up to the illusions of positivistic science which claimed to solve problems by measuring things ; and persisted throughout the theoretical framework of the Kantian categories.111 In fact, Bergson writes, spatial continuity is a “moving continuity [ ... ] in which everything changes and yet remains,” in such a way that “all division of matter [ ... ] is an artificial division” if we fail to take into account its temporal, dynamic— even fluid—aspects.112 When Bergson described space as a “diagram of divisibility,” he was questioning the geometrization of the moving world : “For the geometer all movement is relative : which signifies only, in our view, that none of our mathematical symbols can express the fact that it is the moving body which is in motion rather than the axes or the points to which it is referred”113—and to which Marey sought to reduce his running man all draped in black [ fig. 121 ]. A world properly perceived, in Bergson’s view, is a world that never stops moving. It is thus a paradoxical world for thought—which spontaneously seeks out permanent things, entities—, an exhausting world made of “numberless vibrations, all linked together in uninterrupted continuity, all bound up with each other, and traveling in every direction like shivers.” Conversely, the world of Mareysian curves suggests that “the multitudinous successive positions of a runner contract into a single symbolic attitude [ … ] which becomes

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for us all the image of a man running.” And it is not by drawing up the great catalog of successive positions, as Marey wanted [ fig. 125 ], that we will resolve this aporia : “The change is everywhere, but inward,” writes Bergson. “We localize it [ for instance, in a chronophotograph of human locomotion ] here and there, but outwardly,” which results in the reduction of movement to “a mere change of place.” This amounts to overlooking the “universal transformation” that nevertheless made it possible.114 Bergson will go on to clarify, in Creative Evolution, his critique of the spontaneous geometrization that our intellect resorts to—always wanting to grasp, to get closer—when faced with the elusive mobility of all things. Ever since Hellenic metaphysics, our understanding of movement has always been “backed by an eternity of immutability” ; since Zeno, it is “of immobility alone [ that ] the intellect [ forms ] a clear idea” ; ever since Plato, our reason, “incorrigibly presumptuous,” creates concepts “on the model of [ geometric ] solids” and thereby becomes incapable of “representing to [ itself ] the true nature [ ... ] of movement.” To say that “all the operations of our intellect tend to geometry, as to the goal where they find their perfect fulfillment,” is to express the artificiality, according to Bergson, of the geometrical and metrological approach to movement.115 We cannot insist too strongly that there is something artificial in the mathematical form of a physical law, and consequently in our scientific knowledge of things. Our standards of measurement are conventional, and, so to say, foreign to the intentions of nature : can we suppose that nature has related all the modalities of heat to the expansion of the same mass of mercury, or to the change of pressure of the same mass of air kept at a constant volume ? But we may go further. In a general way, measuring is a wholly human operation, which implies that we really or ideally superpose two objects one on another a certain number of times. Nature did not dream of this superimposition. It does not measure, nor does it count. Yet physics counts, measures, relates “quantitative” variations to one another to obtain laws, and it succeeds.116 When Bergson writes that science—with its measurement protocols—is “artificial,” he does not mean to say it is illegitimate or “false,” that it should be cast aside. His purpose is not to reject science, as has often been believed. Let us not forget the praise Bergson bestowed, in 1913, upon Claude Bernard and his experimental method.117 So what was his purpose ? It was to interrogate the limits that nine-

teenth century science, in its desire for conquest, habitually forgot itself bound by : measurement is an artificial superimposition or juxtaposition of two separate objects ; it only exists according to a recognizable scale, such as the experimental theater in which it occurs ; according to Bergson, measurement can only ever unveil quantitative variations.118 These criteria become problematic as soon as the object to be measured is no longer a stable thing but a movement. This supposes an “uninterrupted continuity” rather than spatial juxtaposition. The experimental scale does not last long if it is true that, with moving things, “all the molds crack” eventually.119 Furthermore, a movement is defined as much—if not more—by intensities or qualities than simply by quantitative criteria. It took the notion of duration for Bergson to liberate movement from the grip of spatiality and introduce into his understanding of phenomena a second crucial thesis : time is intensive. Time seen as intensity, that is, as duration, would henceforth be central to the whole understanding of the moving world. Both our intelligence and our measuring devices deceive us because they ask us to think of time “like the beads of a necklace” : for “never can these solids strung upon a solid [ these fixed points on a plotted line ] make up that duration which flows.”120 The duration implied by all moving things—a fortiori all living things—must be understood as a fluid “hyphen,” and different from the fixed “extremities” required by the metrologist to conduct his measurements.121 And even when Marey tried to investigate the “intervals” between a runner’s successive positions, for instance, by increasing the shutter speed, he treated these intervals as new “extremities,” between which a new interval raised the question of continuity once more. By immobilizing intermittency, chronophotography only confirms, in Bergsonian terms, “our belief in objects [ and ] systems that science isolates, [ which ] rest in fact on the idea that time does not bite into them.”122 The duration of all things would go on to shape the central object of all Bergsonian thought. As early as 1889, in Time and Free Will, the philosopher had castigated “the mistake of those who regard pure duration as something similar to space, [ capable ] of forming a chain or a line.”123 For Bergson, each “oscillation” of time must be approached and thought of “one in the other, each permeating the other and organizing themselves like the notes of a tune, so as to form what we shall call a continuous or qualitative multiplicity.”124 He went on to specify, on the same page :

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In a word, pure duration might well be nothing but a succession of qualitative changes, which melt into and permeate one another, without precise outlines, without any tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one another, without any affiliation with number : it would be pure heterogeneity.125 This outlines a whole philosophy of implication and heterogeneity, a philosophy that symmetrically refutes the scientific pretension to explain all things according to a homogenous scale of measurement. The Eleatics, who had claimed all duration to be measurable by confusing the “space traversed” with the “motion” that allows one to traverse it, have no place here.126 Even Kant, whose “great mistake was to take time as a homogeneous medium,”127 falls short. As for Marey, he is but one of those “mechanics” who notes the “exact moment at which the motion begins,” then “the moment at which the motion ends,” and finally “the space traversed, the only thing, in fact, which is really measurable”—but without realizing that this operation has handled neither motion nor duration, but only “space and simultaneities.”128 From movement and time, Bergson’s epistemological critique naturally moved on to the very notion of life. Here again, Marey’s research on human locomotion, and organic motion in general, found itself—implicitly—at the center of the debate initiated by the philosopher. Life is not measured by the length covered between birth and death or the curve between diastole and systole traced by a sphygmograph. It is “like a current” : a transformation rather than a translation ; an evolution, made up of “insensible variations” and “sudden variations,” in which we can recognize the all-too notorious élan vital.129 And with this, Bergson reorients his critiques of mechanistic bias—which is unable to grasp the meaning of duration—toward biological evolution : That life is a kind of mechanism I cordially agree. But is it the mechanism of parts artificially isolated within [ ... ] the real whole ? The real whole might well be, we conceive, an indivisible continuity. The systems we cut out within it would, properly speaking, not then be parts at all ; they would be partial views of the whole. And, with these partial views put end to end, you will not make even a beginning of the reconstruction of the whole, any more than, by multiplying photographs of an object in a thousand different aspects, you will reproduce the object itself.130 Bergson concludes by even denying Marey the abstract curve : “life is no more made of physico-chemical elements than a curve is

composed of straight lines.”131 It bears repeating that the question here was not to reject what can be learned from the physico-chemical analyses of living phenomena. It was simply—but this is crucial for any philosopher—not to reduce life to results that rely entirely upon the instrumentalization of measurement ; because this almost always amounts to a negation of time and of movement, what Bergson defined as a “substitution of time-length for time-invention.”132 Positivist philosophy, from Comte to Spencer, betrayed, through the word evolutionism, the true meaning of evolution : it “consists in reconstructing evolution with fragments of the evolved,”133 which is indeed what Marey did, at his own level, when he recomposed movement by fixing the positions of the moving object with his device and threading them together like “the beads of a necklace.” It is particularly significant that in order to exemplify the two essential eras which negated movement, that is, Greek metaphysics and modern physics, Bergson made use of two examples, two images—more precisely, two regimes of the image. To Greek metaphysics corresponded the characteristic attitude—or, as Warburg named it around the same time, the “Pathosformel”—, which suspended movement in a sort of symbolic acme best exemplified by the Elgin marbles [ fig. 126 ] ; to modern physics corresponds the random point in time captured by the intermittent exposures of Marey’s devices [ fig. 127 ] : [ ... ] ancient science thinks it knows its object sufficiently when it has noted of it some privileged moments, whereas modern science considers the object at any moment whatever. [ ... ] There is the same relation between these two sciences as between the noting of the phases of a movement by the eye and the much more complete recording of these phases by instantaneous photography. It is the same cinematographical mechanism in both cases, but it reaches a precision in the second that it cannot have in the first. Of the gallop of a horse our eye perceives chiefly a characteristic, essential or rather schematic attitude, a form that appears to radiate over a whole period and so fill up a time of gallop. It is this attitude that sculpture has fixed on the frieze of the Parthenon. But instantaneous photography isolates any moment ; it puts them all in the same rank and thus the gallop of a horse spreads out for it into as many successive attitudes as it wishes instead of massing itself into a single attitude, which is supposed to flash out in a privileged moment and to illuminate a whole period. From this original difference flow all the others.134

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In short, there are two historical ways of misunderstanding movement, time, and life : the Greek or metaphysical way (which dissolves duration in a fiction of eternity) and the modern or scientistic way (which dissolves duration in a fiction of instantaneity). Phidias’s way, Marey’s way. To counter this, Bergson summons a third viewpoint that could be defined as “hypermodern,” organized entirely according to dynamic and energetic models : if movement is indivisible (first thesis) and if time is intensive (second thesis), then (third thesis) one must understand how life is indivisible and

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intensive, mobile and temporalizing, all in all, inventive. Life appears not as an objectifiable thing but a perpetual explosion. Life unfolds not as a measurable line but as an eddy. That is, as a sort of fluid and rhythmic dance : Life in general is mobility itself ; particular manifestations of life accept this mobility reluctantly, and constantly lag behind. It is always going ahead ; they want to mark time. Evolution in general would fain go on in a straight line ; each special evolution is a kind of circle. Like eddies of dust raised by the wind as it passes, the living turn upon themselves,

Fig. 126, 127 126: The Parthenon Sculptures, ca. 438 BC–432 BC. Templerelief. 127: É.-J. Marey, Study of a horse’s gallop, 1886. Chronophotograph.

borne up by the great blast of life. They are therefore relatively stable, and counterfeit immobility so well that we treat each of them as a thing rather than as a progress, forgetting that the very permanence of their form is only the outline of a movement. At times, however, in a fleeting vision, the invisible breath that bears them is materialized before our eyes. [ ... ] It allows us a glimpse of the fact that the living being is above all a thoroughfare, and that the essence of life is in the movement by which life is transmitted.135 If we reduce this movement—this dance, this élan—to no more than a gearing mechanism, we obtain something between the extremes of error and laughter. By fixing a rod to the back of the test subject and reducing all his vital movements to the oscillations of the rod [ fig. 121 ], Marey literally “[ encrusts ] something mechanical [ ... ] on the living.”136 The resulting chronophotographic series is erroneous as abstraction, but laughable in its more vaudevillian version, wherein between eight and fifteen Ripolin brothers, all absolutely identical, appear to be pursuing some unknown creature off-screen, or maybe it is—an even more Kafkaesque situation—one man running away from himself without, naturally, ever succeeding [ fig. 125 ].

Humor aside, Marey’s chronophotographic enterprise could, in effect, be defined as the figurative collection of an “arrangement of acts and events [ ... ] which gives us, in a single combination, the illusion of life and the distinct impression of a mechanical arrangement” ; “the same effect [ ... ] assumes ever subtler forms as it passes from the idea of an artificial mechanization of the human body, if such an expression is permissible, to that of any substitution whatsoever of the artificial for the natural.”137 An artificial arrangement of life or a mechanical arrangement of duration : from 1902–1903, in his course on the “History of the idea of time”138 at the Collège de France, and in the last chapter of Creative Evolution,139 published in 1907, Bergson would denounce both as the cinematographic illusion of thought : The intellect [ ... ] is limited to taking, at intervals, views that are instantaneous and by that very fact immobile of the becoming of matter. [ ... ] Thus, we pluck out of duration those moments that interest us, and that we have gathered along its course. These alone we retain. And we are right in so doing, while action only is in question. But when, in speculating on the nature of the real, we go on

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regarding it as our practical interest requires us to regard it, we become unable to perceive the true evolution, the radical becoming. Of becoming we perceive only states, of duration only instants, and even when we speak of duration and of becoming, it is of another thing that we are thinking. Such is the most striking of [ the ] illusions we wish to examine. It consists in supposing that we can think the unstable by means of the stable, the moving by means of the immobile.140 The “cinematographic illusion” designates the form of the reductions applied by the intellect (which favors stases, entities, shapes, homologations) to reality (which is primarily made of instabilities, processes, forces, heterogeneities). The “cinematographic illusion” is at play in the friezes of the Parthenon and in Plato’s thought, no less than in Marey’s diagrams or in Spencer’s writings. Thus it must be recognized that Bergson’s cinematographic knowledge does not relate to the cinematographic art popularized by the Lumière brothers or Georges Méliès ; it does appear, however, that Marey’s chronophotographic science probably constituted, in Bergson’s eyes, the quintessential modern form of what he denounced as this “illusion.”141 Bergson plainly expressed this in a letter to Floris Delattre : “Much attention has been given to my concept of duration,” he complains, “but very little focus has been given to its fundamental point, to what came to be the guiding principle of all my research.” This guiding principle is a dazzling idea : movement is more real than immobility. But human thought typically proceeds counter-clockwise, defining movement as a crisis of immobility or, at most, a collection of immobilities arranged along a straight line. To do so is a negation of movement through a cinematographic recomposition, lining up “stills, in the photographic sense of the word,” and believing that the resulting sequence will respect, restitute the reality of movement.142 Wasn’t Marey guilty of exactly this by printing his chronophotographic sequences in the pages of Movement ? Most certainly. Even his recourse to physical film [ pellicule ]—that is, to light-sensitive strips moving through the camera (as analysis) and through the projector (as synthesis)—wouldn’t have met with Bergson’s approval, because the apparatus itself is endowed with mechanical movement and therefore unable to do justice to the heterogeneities and singularities of vital movement. Bergson compares the “cinematographic” with the pellicular [ pellicule is both the light-sensitive material, photographic film, and a pellicle, a thin layer or membrane—Trans. ] :

“one might as well discourse on the subject of the cocoon from which the butterfly is to emerge, and claim that the fluttering, changing, living butterfly finds its raison d‘être and fulfillment in the immutability of its pellicle.”143 In Creative Evolution, Bergson compares the man of “cinematographic illusion”—more than ever one thinks of Marey—to a child trying to lay hold of a wisp of smoke : But with these successive states, perceived from without [ ... ], you will never reconstitute movement [ ... ] ; multiply the number of them as you will, let the interval between two consecutive states be infinitely small : before the intervening movement you will always experience the disappointment of the child who tries by clapping his hands together to crush the smoke. The movement slips through the interval, because every attempt to reconstitute change out of states implies the absurd proposition, that movement is made of immobilities.144 Bergson rejected in chronophotography what can be epistemologically defined as a mechanistic illusion veiling the phenomena of time and movement. By isolating his subjects against a black backdrop, Marey tried to make movement itself into an observable thing. But the thing itself is but a cut in the flux of movement : “things and states,” declares Bergson, “are only views, taken by our mind, of becoming. There are no things, there are only actions. [ ... ] Things are constituted by the instantaneous cut which the understanding practises, at a given moment, on a flux.”145 By arranging photographic snapshots in a linear sequence, Marey tried to replace the idea of becoming with a form that emerges as an atemporal collection of “elementary movements” : for Bergson this was simply another way of “[ solidifying ] into discontinuous images the fluid continuity of the real.”146 Where Marey sought to create a great visual catalog of positions, Bergson called for a more foundational thinking of transition.147 Where Marey tried to experimentally reduce the indeterminacy of phenomena, Bergson recognized in causality itself not a positivist law but rather a “psychological belief.” 148 Whereas Marey wanted to constrain the temporal flux to measurement protocols, Bergson opened up duration to the unpredictable exuberance of its blind gropings : movement is “alive,” so it is never completely predictable, “precisely because it is continuously elaborating what is new and because there is no elaboration without searching, no searching without groping [ tâtonnement ]. Time is this very hesitation, or it is nothing.”149

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And yet has the debate truly been settled ? Bergson denounced the “cinematographic illusion,” stated the indivisibility of movement, and introduced the notion of a duration without measure—and all of this in sumptuous open phrases : “time is what hinders everything from being given at once. It delays, or rather it is delay. [ ... ] Would not the existence of time prove that there is indetermination in things ? Would not time be this very indetermination ?”150 To this, Marey seemed unable to offer an answer. Yet this debate, at the junction of two regimes of knowledge and two regimes of the image, still has a few surprises in store. The small dialectical wonder is that Marey, who perhaps understood nothing of Bergson’s objections and who probably held scant interest, still answered them perfectly : not with arguments and counter-arguments, word for word, but with images, his sumptuous open images. Why open ? Because the specificity of Marey’s images cannot fully account for their singularities. Because the experimental framework—within which each image found its coherence in turn—was constantly shifting. Of course, each of Marey’s experimental protocols aimed for the utmost rigor, eliminating chance and indeterminacy as much as possible. Yet in multiplying his protocols to such an extent, Marey’s approach, viewed from afar, more closely resembles a subtle play of variations—luminosities, velocities, stagings— in short, an art of nuances (an essential notion for Bergson). If each Mareysian image would likely have appealed to a Meissonier or a Bartholdi, their ensemble revealed something like a Bergsonian groping, more likely to have appealed to a Cézanne or a Medardo Rosso. It was, in any case, a heuristic of experimental variables always opening onto the realm of possibilities. The chronophotographic machines invented by Marey are supple, light : they never entirely alienate the body being instrumentalized. They are therefore neither “bachelor” nor psychotic machines.151 They meet the exact requirements of what the philosopher of technique, Gilbert Simondon, named the open machine. The main characteristic of such a machine is that it does not sacrifice the range of its possibilities to automatism, meaning that it can only be truly “perfected”—“sensitive,” wrote Simondon—if it harbors in its functionality a “certain margin of indeterminacy” :

The true progressive perfecting of machines, whereby we could say a machine’s degree of technicity is raised, corresponds not to an increase of automatism, but on the contrary to the fact that the operation of a machine harbors a certain margin of indeterminacy. It is this margin that allows the machine to be sensitive to outside information. Much more than any increase in automatism, it is this sensitivity to information on the part of machines that makes a technical ensemble possible. A purely automatic machine completely closed in on itself in a predetermined way of operating would only be capable of yielding perfunctory results. The machine endowed with a high degree of technicity is an open machine [ ... ].152 It is relatively easy to conceive of a closed machine ; some of Marey’s protocols—particularly from the period he developed his graphic devices—probably align with such a conception. The open machine, however, requires the addition of imagination : a certain capacity to follow or guide, as in a dance, the very movement of the experimental reality in the process of inventing itself. It is very likely that Marey was now and again surprised by the results obtained by his chronophotographic instruments. His imaginative genius was to extend, to heuristically re-instrumentalize the surprise, disregarding the initial rule that had been axiomatically assigned to the experimental apparatus. According to Simondon, this would be one way to place faith in the “dynamic ground [ ... ] through which the system of forms exists [ on the understanding that ] the ground is the system of virtualities, of potentials, forces that carve out their path, whereas forms are the system of actuality. Invention is the taking charge of the system of actuality through the system of virtualities, the creation of a unique system on the basis of these two systems.”153 By fully integrating both the “ground” and the “virtualities” of the experiment, Marey was indeed an inventor. We must now accept the hypothesis that by ceaselessly inventing—by immediately adding virtualities to the results obtained—Marey produced images that surpassed his ideas, his axioms, his doctrinal and even methodological positions. And this production was always the result of new technical configurations that investigated the relationships between visibility and time.154 Marey’s method appears entirely in line with the photographic apparatus he most favored : a shutter that perpetually opens and closes. It closes and the movement of all things is captured (knowable, but also frozen) ; it opens and the movement of all things is freed (taking flight, but fleeing too).

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Let us detail this movement. Firstly, the importance of closure : Marey would never have invented chronophotography without the arrival on the market of “ultra-rapid” silver-bromide gelatin emulsions. Marketed from around 1878, dry-plate emulsions inaugurated what Michel Frizot named “the era of the snapshot” allowing exposures of one hundredth to one thousandth of a second.155 Are not the first “Mareysian operators” founded on the principle whereby the “eyelid” of the photographic chamber opens only in order to immediately close again, creating an image with an ideal magnitudinal “zero point”—the instant—whose existence is determined by “ultra-rapid exposure” ? 156 Before the “era of the snapshot”—at any rate before the mid-nineteenth century—every photograph was subject to the waiting time of the long exposure. This resulted in a “congenital opposition between sharpness and movement whereby one element could be satisfied only to the detriment of the other. [ ... ] The entire history of the medium would become a race against time, with its attendant detours and dead-ends, seeking to outwit the temporal snare, to emancipate itself from the long exposure, to find the physico-chemical means to loosen the grip of time.”157 In a photograph, then, one must truncate duration in order to render visible moving bodies : extend duration and the image blurs. Visibility comes at the price of eradicating from movement the very duration that constitutes it. We know Marey’s answer to this dilemma : “one must introduce the notion of time into the image”158—but on the condition that this notion be properly manipulated, reduced to a discontinuity of surface appearances juxtaposed in a sequence. Within this analytical approach, which would eventually give rise to cinema, time is made “visible” only by being simultaneously segmented (intermittence of appearances) and edited (coherence of discontinuities).159 Marey knew that to “introduce time” into the image of a movement he must “multiply the number of images” : but how does one achieve this “without creating confusion” ?160 The answer consisted in “alternating” or “separating” the images [ fig. 116–119, 125 ].161 Or in accepting the diagram : one must surrender both surface appearance and space in order to gain time, as in the chronophotographs of the man draped in black [ fig. 121 ]. “In the diagram thus obtained, the number of images may be considerable and the notion of time very complete, while that of space has been voluntarily limited to what was strictly necessary.”162 In this way did Marey hope to rescue his images from confusion.

And yet the confusion remains : albeit sumptuous, nuanced, dangerous—albeit open, bearing new experimental virtualities. So Marey sought to retain the spatiality of the movement, respect the moving body while incorporating the time that underlies it : he captured the somewhat cloudy image of a white horse, fanned out, its thirty hooves interlacing [ fig. 128 ]. So he sought to hone the analysis by increasing the shutter speed : he captured the specter of a horse vibrating eerily around the base of its hooves. So he decided to gamble with the diagram, to restrict both body and space, blacken the horse against the black backdrop, expose only the geometric markings on a few well-chosen joints : he gave rise to a whole new species of confusion that required a whole new set of analytical tools [ fig. 129 ]. These images, wherein time deconstructs appearances, seem at first glance to be simply replaying the dilemma of sharpness and movement faced by photography before 1850. One thinks of the iconic blurriness in the work of Charles Nègre ; of photographic mistakes—traces, streaks, solid bodies as so many wisps of smoke ; of the recurring spectrality of “shaky” images, reminiscent of the phantasmagoria that stirred up so many ghosts in the nineteenth century.163 One imagines the perceptual experiences, before the advent of photography, undergone by the first train passengers who suddenly saw all things as trail of movement, owing to the fact that the visible world was, in a real sense, lagging behind their moving eyes : It is a magnificent movement that one must experience to appreciate. The speed is extraordinary. The flowers by the side of the road are no longer flowers but flecks, or rather streaks, of red or white ; there are no longer any points, everything becomes a streak ; the grain fields are great shocks of yellow hair ; fields of alfalfa, long green tresses ; the towns, the steeples, and the trees perform a crazy, mingling dance on the horizon ; from time to time a shadow, a shape, a specter appears and disappears with lightning speed behind the window…164 When the visible world moves, everything appears “a streak,” a wake, a visual trail. Marey mostly used photography to counteract this “trailing” effect, but he was aware of the photographic dimension of the problem, that is, the complicated relationship between the speed of the thing to be seen and the duration of the exposure. If the subject moves too slowly in relation to the shutter speed the resulting figure is drowned out ; if the photographic plate is exposed too long, it becomes saturated and the image is flooded with infor-

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mation (which is to say that past a certain threshold, an open shutter will wipe out the legibility of the inscription). Marey admitted as much : “the confusion of images by superimposition constitutes the limit of fixed-plate chronophotography.”165 Yet he continued to push the limits of technical intelligence, tackling and then overturning the problem on a heuristic level : [ ... ] each image must be spread over a considerable surface if it is to show the various positions assumed by the head, arms and the legs. Now, the larger the space covered by the image, the smaller must be

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the number that can be taken on one plate without superposition and confusion. [ ... ] In different speeds of translation, the number of images which can be taken in a given time without producing confusion, increases as the former becomes greater.166 Marey’s heuristic genius revealed itself when the confusion of images—which remained what the scientist must, by necessity, avoid—became, in spite of all, a fertile experiment in virtuality that led to a new way of knowing :

Fig. 128, 129 128: É.-J. Marey, Study of a horse’s gait, 1886. Chronophotograph. 129: É.-J. Marey, Study of a horse’s trot (black horse with white markings on the joints), 1886. Chronophotograph.

Sometimes, such a superposition of images can be put to practical use. Thus, it gives greater intensity to those images that represent the movements of least rapidity. One of the very first applications of photography to the study of movement was suggested by Messrs Onimus and Martin, in the year 1865. These investigators exposed the heart of a living animal, and took a photograph of it by leaving the lens permanently uncovered. The photograph was found to have a double outline representing the two polar forms of contraction and dilation. At these two polar moments, the heart remains momentarily motionless and its configuration is imparted to the sensitized plate, whereas no clear impression is left of it during the intermediate phases of motion.167 These remarks are of great theoretical importance. They demonstrate that contiguous—even imbricated—images within a chronophotograph do not share a single status, even if the shutter speed, and thus their intermittence, remains the same. The superimposition of images does not result in total confusion because the movement itself exhibits a certain irregularity. This is precisely what endows certain images—Marey called them “polar forms” or “polar moments”—with a greater intensity than others. We seem suddenly far from the neutral mechanics of Bergson’s “random point in time.” Through Marey’s observations we discover instead that all movements, including regular movements such as those of the heart, possess distinctive moments that correspond to slight syncopations, decelerations, rhythmic suspensions. When movement slows slightly, its photographic image intensifies. This simple and majestic law was never explored by Muybridge, for instance, who rarely ventured to vary his experimental protocols. Yet it is often found in Marey’s work—in, for instance, his experiments with the elastic force of membranes ; his assistant, Robert Demenÿ, would later explore it in his study on the thrust speeds of fencers.168 Marey’s brilliance lay in exceeding the limits imposed by the principle of the sequentialization of instants (which may explain why his work didn’t entirely tend towards cinematography). A fixed-plate chronophotograph shows all moments at the same time : the superimposition of images is another way—“more innovative and disturbing,” as Michel Frizot puts it169—to reveal the effect of time on a moving body. Moreover, Marey maintained that confusion is for the most part a matter of legibility. At a certain number of images per second, the

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chronophotographs of birds in flight admittedly take on the appearance of multiplied and confused organisms, whose flurried remiges surprise us with their continuities and ruptures, the law of which eludes us [ fig. 130 ]. And yet : In spite of the confusion resulting from so many images (twenty-five per second), the curious positions of the wing at different moments are clearly shown. The various positions can easily be distinguished when we have become habituated to recognise them in series of lower frequency.170 The confusion of images in a fixed-plate chronophotograph remained, to Marey’s mind, an illegible profusion. And yet, as strange as it may seem, the visual trail generated by the flying gull [ fig. 130 ] is not a simple “blurring” of the image but an authentic image of complexity, of the morphological fecundity offered by any vital movement seen up close. The loss of legibility is only temporary : these images are so novel that in order to understand their paradoxes we must first retrain our whole way of seeing. They are so legitimate and so necessary precisely because they emerged from the considerable risk taken by Marey with regard to visible knowledge : he risked giving up entirely the appearance of the moving body in favor of inscribing the trail of its movement. Bergson, had he recognized it—had he but seen these images—would likely have delighted in such risk. “Visual trails” were characteristic of fixed-plate chronophotography ; they proliferated around 1886. Technically and epistemologically, they strove to join two contradictory positions that were both important to Marey’s heuristics : on one hand, the graphic method, which renounces the appearance of the body in order to retain the continuous inscription of its movement ; on the other, the photographic technique, which waives the continuous inscription of the moving body, preserving only its discontinuous appearance. In short, to “introduce the notion of time into the image” was for Marey to introduce discontinuity into the graphic curve and continuity into the photograph. This is tantamount to introducing intensity into the abstract magnitude of the curve and heterogeneity into the figurative appearance of the photograph. The result is never a synthesis, but a figural turbulence that seems both to explode the curve and deconstruct surface appearances. Because the gull’s “visual trail” tries to have it both ways, because it embraces two experimental rules at once, it destroys the curve’s pursuit of ideality (the curve

becoming no more than imbricated and bristling singularities) ; at the same time, it destroys photography’s pursuit of reality (the image becoming no more than an aberrant form wherein the bird itself seems to disappear). The “visual trail” in Marey’s chronophotographs gives us something utterly new : it is neither the accident-image of the blurred snapshot, nor the substance-image to which the snapshot, at that time, might have falsely laid claim. It is neither the blur of the botched photograph, nor the focus of the still image ; neither disappearing confusion, nor reduction to appearances ; neither the pure phantom of a continuous time that drowns the sensitized surface and generates invisibility, nor the pure recording of surface appearances through the disjunct time of the “ultra-rapid exposure.” It is a force-image which succeeds in bringing together something of the moving body and something of the movement. Time has indeed been “introduced” into these images, not to be reduced to a simple game of disjointed positions, but to endlessly reign. The visual trail is a genuine temporal trail that displays in the very vacuum of its imbrication—which prevents us from entirely separating one position from the other—the trace of the passage itself. We see both the materiality of the moving body and the memory of the movement, as if the pace of the gull was weighed down by the persistence or the drag of its own anterior states. In its very dynamism—meaning its orientation towards the ensuing movement—the “visual trail” leaves in its wake the vibrant remains of its earlier passage : virtualities made visible over the whole (proliferative, complex, confused) surface of the image. Moving bodies can only describe curves insofar as they are restricted temporally and spatially for perception ; by opening the eye—or the camera’s shutter—a little wider, we discover not a line or set of points that the mind brings together but trails, reminding us of sashes, whirls, frills : the drapery of phenomena. So it was in creating the possibility of an optical machine that condensed time—using what Gilbert Simondon called its margin of indeterminacy—that Marey was able to invent images endowed with new possibilities, capable of making visible their own temporalizing wake. Rodin was doubtless right to defend “transition” and the “gradual unfolding of the gesture” against the immobile cut of the snapshot, and even against all Marey’s declarations in Movement ;

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but fixed-plate chronophotographs are more than lifeless collections of snapshots, that is, they do much more than what their inventor intended. Given that movement is, at the very least, the passage from one form to another, the image of movement should logically, as Rodin expected, “indicate how insensibly the first glides into the second.”171 This is precisely the role assigned to the “visual trail” in Marey’s fixed-plate chronophotographs : just as one fluid blends with another, the image proves itself capable of incorporating—practically “insensibly”—several successive times of one gesture. Marey’s contemporaries occasionally broached the problem, as evidenced in a letter by Georges Guéroult, published by Laurent Mannoni, where the writer called for less sharpness and less instantaneity in the photographic images of moving bodies : Snapshot photography is a marvelous way to analyze movement, but [ ... ] the most prominent, the most distinctive characteristic of the feeling of an object seen in motion, is that the image is not sharp, it forms something like a shroud containing a series of successive images. And this image loses sharpness as the movement gains speed, as with the wheel spokes of a car, and so on. [ ... ] Your stick fighters are marvelous but so sharp that they seem to be posing for the Académie. Likewise, I saw some time ago a snapshot of a train racing at ninety kilometers per hour. It looked absolutely motionless. I believe that by resigning ourselves to the lack of sharpness—this lack naturally arising from the speed itself—we would arrive at a more accurate sensation. And you will see that in the twentieth century, the painters who already melded the spokes of a wheel, will flood or rather surround their subjects’ moving silhouettes with a kind of cloud formed by the shroud of successive positions.172 There are indeed two chronophotographic ways of producing images of movement : the first offers us a curve, a spatial trajectory deducible from disjointed positions and according to a sequential,

Fig. 130 É.-J. Marey, Study of a gull’s flight (side view), 1886. Chronophotograph.

discontinuous time [ fig. 116–119 ]. The second offers us both less and more : it is a trail, a temporal shroud defined by inextricable imbrications and according to a derealized space since, within these imbrications, the very image of a position is doubled, clouded by that of the others and by the trace of all their transitions [ fig. 127–130 ]. By subtly disrupting the relationship between the velocity of the moving body and the shutter speed, Marey succeeded—beyond his own statements about the kind of images he sought—in unlocking an authentic iconography of the interval rendered more visible than to the natural senses. At this point, with its emphasis on the in-between, the chronophotographic image gained the ability to create what Guéroult so aptly named “the shroud of successive positions.” Faced with Marey’s experimental—and, frankly, relatively marginal—production, Bergson’s objections against chronophotography’s “cinematographic illusion” lose much of their force. Marey shares with and in fact anticipates Bergson in the conviction that movement is more real than immobility. And while it is true that Marey often reduced “progress” to the “thing” and “moving continuity” to “partial views put end to end,” it is equally true that in a great number of his fixed-plate chronophotographs, intensity takes precedence over measure, quality over magnitude, implication and imbrication over explanation and juxtaposition. The “visual trail” in Marey’s oeuvre is therefore characteristic of the power of heterogeneity as it was defined by Bergson, since it renders visible that indistinct temporal zone where “movement slips through the interval.” In producing the image of this “trail,” the chronophotographer did not try to “crush the smoke” : he liberated it instead, returned its visual power, tried never to reduce it. When Bergson targeted, in Matter and Memory, the “photographic model” of perception in order to call us back to its “lines of force” and “zones of indetermination,” and to emphasize the role played by “virtual action”173—should he not have looked more closely at the visual trail formed by the flying gull, with its unprecedented enactment of force, indetermination, and virtuality ? If the “solidarity of the present with the past” is the “very essence” of movement, and assuming the present is only the “invisible progress of the past gnawing into the future,” was it really necessary to confine the “condensing [ temporal ] cloud” to the moment of adjustment [ moment tâtonnant ]—the “focusing of a camera”—and never to its unexpected result ? Was it always necessary to counter this essential groping

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[ tâtonnement essentiel ] with the clearly factitious certainty of the snapshots juxtaposed as so many “inert elements” ?174 Did not Marey, at times—those being the most beautiful, the most nebulous, the closest to smoke—know to trail the instant, allowing us to see how a movement endures ? Was this not a way for the image to immediately “install [ itself ] within duration,” as Bergson called for in Creative Evolution, against all our common patterns of thought ?175 Do not the “visual trails” of fixed-plate chronophotography show us a “real duration,” that is, a “duration which gnaws on things, and leaves on them the mark of its tooth,” putting all stability and all fixed forms at risk ? Do they not offer us an image—a materialization—of the indistinct fringe that, according to Bergson, duration leaves on all things : Real duration is that duration which gnaws on things, and leaves on them the mark of its tooth. [ ... ] [ Yet, ] solely preoccupied in welding the same to the same, intellect turns away from the vision of time. It dislikes what is fluid, and solidifies everything it touches. We do not think real time. But we live it, because life transcends intellect. The feeling we have of our evolution and of the evolution of all things in pure duration is there, forming around the intellectual concept properly so-called an indistinct fringe that fades off into darkness. [ ... ] Indeed, if the fringe exists, however delicate and indistinct, it should have more importance for philosophy than the bright nucleus it surrounds.176 To produce the image of a trailing movement means introducing duration into the act, thereby accepting the loss of some aspects of the moving body. To accept this loss was for Marey a way of letting time do its work and of giving up the certainties of measurement, at least temporarily. It was a way of being unconsciously Bergsonian. It was a way of knowing not through “detachment” and distance but, as Merleau-Ponty said of Bergsonism, through “inherence,” an attitude that amounted to—against a whole philosophical tradition—“seeking the profound in appearances and the absolute beneath our eyes.”177 What Merleau-Ponty named “inherence” Gilles Deleuze would call “difference” : “Being is the difference itself of the thing, what Bergson often calls the nuance [ ... ] : its essence is nuance.”178 There is no contradiction between these terminological choices : nuance aesthetically outlines what difference ontologically outlines ; and this difference, being non-reducible to contradiction, negation, or even alterity, should be thought of as an “internal difference,”179 in other

words, an inherent difference. Or else, as that fundamental alteration that Deleuze discovers in Bergsonian duration and in the very thought of all movement : Movement is qualitative change, and qualitative change is movement. In a word, duration is what differs, and this is no longer what differs from other things, but what differs from itself. [ ... ] Real time is alteration, and alteration is substance. [ Thus, ] movement is no longer the characteristic of something, but has itself acquired a substantial character.180 The trail-image of the flying gull perfectly suits this novel way of seeing alteration in any movement, and duration—time itself—in any alteration or “internal difference.” Can we not see, in Marey’s image, that it is the bird itself which causes, through the dance of its wings, the alteration of its resting appearance, the precise alteration that allows it to fly ? Do we not recognize, in the same image, this interpenetration or “virtual coexistence”181 indicative of movement insofar as it puts into play its own memory at every moment ? Do we not discover here the visual alteration which any movement involves, what Gilles Deleuze would later name the disparate [ dispars ], that “difference in itself ”182 inherent to any image ? The flow of all things Peering once again at the extraordinary image of the flying gull photographed by Marey in 1886 [ fig. 130 ], we understand that the “trail” is formed by the complex relationship between the wings and the air over time. Just as the curls of smoke would, later, be formed according to a certain relationship between the obstacle and the air. The wake-image of the gull indeed appears as the “inherent difference” described by Bergson : it is difference because it implies a dialectic, almost a struggle, separating the gull from its familiar appearance ; it is inherence since the gull creates the alteration of its appearance while airborne by its own movement. The “inherent difference” should thus be understood on the model of a wave that emerges from the sea without ever separating from it : a differentiated, conflictual form, and yet inherent to its physical environment. The model of the trail can thus be found in a certain relationship between form and flow. This might well shift our entire understanding of Marey’s images : rather than restituting—photographically, absolutely, or instanta-

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neously—the form of “some thing,” they instead show us the durational or momentary relationship between a body in movement and the fluid environment in which the movement occurs. Let us not forget that Marey had begun with the analogue problem of blood circulation within the animal body.183 Let us not forget either that his study of internal organic movements logically expanded to the whole domain of animal locomotion, which also dealt with the dynamic relations between a body and an environment serving both as obstacle and foothold for its movement : the air for the insect and the bird, or the water for the eel and the skate, are what the earth is for the locomotion of horses or of men. In his studies on the fall of a cat—remarkable despite being ridiculed by Alphonse Allais—Marey examined the hybrid movement of an animal bridging two situations : one in the air and one on the ground. That the cat was able to right itself using only its own movement seemed at first to contradict Newton’s laws of mechanics ; and yet Marey’s chronophotographs proved beyond doubt that as it falls the cat’s body becomes plastic, flexible, if not fluid.184 Having established animal locomotion as a reciprocal setting-in-motion of bodies and environments, Marey’s explorations logically followed a process of theoretical amplification leading into more general problems pertaining to physics and even geometry. Indeed, analogies—and thus opportunities for generalization—were rapidly emerging from his experiments, especially with regard to two fundamental fluids, water and air. Having concluded, in 1890, his analyses of bird flight,185 Marey devoted an entire section of Movement to the flight of insects as well as his effective but often rudimentary tech-

Fig. 131 É.-J. Marey, Partial tracings of the trajectory of an insect’s wing in flight. Figure taken from La Méthode graphique, 1878.

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niques for mechanically recording the movements of their wings :186 one needed only, for example, to stabilize the insect so that its wings grazed a blackened roll of paper driven at a constant speed [ fig. 131 ]. These experiments served as an opportunity to find in the wing structure the double condition—flexibility and rigidity— already evoked in relation to the “stylus” of the inscription device, as if inscribing and flying shared the same physical requirements, that of resistance (knowing how to struggle against the motion of the environment) and that of flexibility (knowing how to meld into that very same motion) : The wing, in its to-and-fro movements, is bent in various directions by the resistance of air. Its action is always that of an inclined plane striking against a fluid, and utilizing that part of the resistance which is favorable to its onward progression. This mechanism is similar to that of a bargeman’s scull which, as it moves to-and-fro, is obliquely inclined in opposite directions, each time communicating an impulse to the boat. [ ... ] [ But ] the flexible membrane which constitutes the anterior part of the wing presents a rigid border, which enables the wing to incline itself at the most favourable angle. The muscles merely maintain the to-and-fro motion, the resistance of the air does the rest.187 Similar things occur in aquatic environments, where the locomotion’s fulcrum is a “displaceable liquid,” meaning a second moving environment :188 flexible moving bodies against—and inside— fluid moving environments. The relationship between the work of the muscles and mobility thus pertains to fluid mechanics, the sole branch of physics able to account for the progress “by reaction” of octopuses, jellyfish, and other bivalve mollusks ; progress “due to the effect of waves that propagate along the body” common to eels and elongated fish [ fig. 132 ] ; or progress “by propulsions of a flexible appendage” observed in aplysia, carinaria, and most fish endowed with a caudal fin.189 Without forgetting the skate and the endless wave formed by its extraordinary aquatic flight [ fig. 117 ] : The undulatory movements commence at the anterior end of each fin and are propagated in a posterior direction, increasing in amplitude as they proceed. As fresh portions of the fins are raised, those behind are lowered, so that the center of the wave, namely, the most elevated part, travels rapidly from the head towards the tail. Having run its course, the wave elevates the posterior extremity of the fin and then disappears. But another wave is already commencing

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at the anterior end, growing larger, and travelling along in the same way as the one that preceded it, and so on ad infinitum.190 It is a marvelous description : we witness here less the swimming behavior of a fish than a purely morphogenetic drama involving a fluid environment, an undulating movement, and the flexible geometry of the fins. It slowly dawns on us that Marey analyzed the body’s movement in its environment in terms of the movement produced by the environment itself. The bodies almost erase themselves in his beautiful images : each time lighter, subtler, more evanescent. It is as though the initial question—the movement of all things, their curves—had reoriented towards a great matter-movement, stirring each thing into its particular dance. Already in 1878, Marey had seamlessly transitioned from an account of blood flow to the question of “atmospheric movements.”191 In 1894, in Movement, he no longer hesitated to situate the heuristic value of chronophotography at the most fundamental level : his devices were indeed capable of resolving—visually, and with disconcerting ease—certain “fundamental problems in dynamics,” which since Galileo had proved difficult to establish mathematically.192 So, Marey made a point of showing the characteristics of “aerodynamic resistance to variously inclined surfaces,” and of making clear “all the bizarre inflections” that specific objects—both rigid and flexible—produce when surrendered to air currents ; he coupled this with the study of all sorts of oscillations— those moving geometries produced by flexible rods—and their applications to the roll of ships and the vibrations of metal bridges ; he catalogued methods for observing the “movements of fluids,” the “patterns of waves,” their crests, their troughs, their “dead points,” their “sudden intumescences,” their eddies, all the way through to their geometric structures (which generally came down to tracing so-called “trochoidal” figures [ fig. 133 ]).193

Fig. 132 É.-J. Marey, Study of the movements of the eel, undated. Chronophotograph.

Two centuries after Leibniz’s Essay on Dynamics—which, according to Michel Fichant, was not entirely lacking in aesthetic criteria (notably in the plenum ornatus that Leibniz saw in all movement)194—and in step, first with Henri Poincaré and his Théorie des tourbillons 195 and then with Pierre Duhem and his Recherches sur l’hydrodynamique,196 Marey drew up a sumptuous iconography of fluid movements. We begin to suspect, leafing through these photographs, that the image in general reaches its apogee only when it is made to be an image of flow, an exemplary materialization of duration. The oldest problems that Marey tackled involved, as we know, recording organic flows : he soon noticed significant variations between the “theoretical curves” obtained by simple calculations— founded on a theorem of resistance proportional to the square of speed—and the “experimental curves” traced by his own measuring devices.197 He tackled the difficulty of “pulse delay” at the body’s extremities, trying to identify the wave effect of blood flow in relation to the environment—meaning the “canals,” veins, and arteries endowed with variable lengths and elasticities—through which it propagates.198 He picked up on “muscular waves” and discovered their similarity to sound waves ; he ended up giving himself the task of inscribing all movements of flux, every kind of flow and vibration.199 Having studied the different modalities of aquatic locomotion down to the microscopic scale,200 Marey turned to observing the “movement of liquids.” And in order to do so—given that studying the movement proper to a transparent environment is not self-evident—he needed to establish a “method [ which ] lends itself to expressing movements that occur in the liquid itself.”201 This method consisted in asymptotically bringing the density of the diaphanous environment—impossible to photograph as such—closer to the density of the visible bodies that were yoked to its every current, eddy, or turbulence [ fig. 133 ] : Any internal displacement of the water can be made visible by suspending small and brilliant objects in the water, and illuminating them by the sun’s rays. For this purpose pieces of wax and resin are mixed in the required proportion, the former being less dense than water, and the latter of greater specific gravity. From this solid material a number of small balls are molded, and then silvered over, in the same way that pills are silvered by the chemist. These bright balls should be slightly heavier than water, so that when they are dropped in it they slowly sink to the bottom. If a small quantity of

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salt water be afterwards added, the balls gradually rise up and remain in unstable equilibrium.202 Marey ended his account of “experimental hydrodynamics” by suggesting that “physicians might use this method to control certain aspects of the theory of waves and currents, and even to study the actions of different types of propellers according to the movements they transmit to the liquid in which they move.”203 This was a way of calling attention to the technical dimensions of these experiments

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(and their potential application in engineering new “propellers”) as well as their theoretical dimensions (understanding the interaction between the moving body and the moving environment that underpins all movement). What occurs in water more or less corresponds to what occurs in that other fluid medium, air. From the 1860s, Marey sought to record respiration in parallel to his chronophotographs of blood flow.204 Later, “aerial locomotion”—of insects and, above all, of birds—confronted him with the problems of “air resistance and movement

Fig. 133 É.-J. Marey, Study of the movement of fluids, undated. Chronophotograph.

during the wing’s downstroke.”205 This was a way of observing that the fulcrum, in this case, had its own dynamics.206 It was a way of extending the experiments conducted by Ludwig Mach in Germany (which resulted in remarkable photographs of air movement) and Hele-Shaw in England (which synthesized the analogies between hydrodynamic and aerodynamic forms).207 But in order to correctly observe such things it was necessary to invent new devices, new experimental systems. The underlying principle was, as usual, relatively simple : “To produce, in an enclosed space with transparent walls, a consistent air flow ; to place within this flow parallel and equidistant wisps of smoke ; to place along their trajectory diversely shaped surfaces, against which they deflect in different ways ; to brightly illuminate them and take a snapshot of their appearance. Such was the program.”208 In this way it was possible to obtain “accurate images of the way air behaves when it comes into contact with solid objects of different shapes.”209 However, faced with more technical constraints than originally envisaged, the development of the system proved tricky. Laurent Mannoni has determined that it took no less than four versions to finally obtain, in 1901, a working wind tunnel that emitted fifty seven wisps of smoke.210 Here is how Marey described, in 1902, the miniature “theater” for the movements of air : I employed a device consisting of a rectangular prismatic vitrine measuring fifty by seventy-five centimeters. The front wall is made of transparent glass, the back wall is covered with black velvet, the left wall is white to reflect the light, the right wall is transparent and contains within it a lantern with a magnesium flash. The lower portion of the vitrine extends as far as a box inside which an electric ventilator creates an inflow of air. Emerging from the ventilator, the air leaves through pipes which cross in front of the magnesium flash. In order to regularize the air current within the glass vitrine, the air must be filtered through two frames of fine, tightly-stretched and regularly-spaced silk mesh. One of these frames is placed atop and the other below the prismatic vitrine. The air flows are rendered visible by introducing, from the upper section of the vitrine, very fine wisps of smoke. These pass through the upper gauze and are sucked downward through the vitrine where they remain parallel to each other until they cross the lower gauze to reach the ventilator.

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To make these wisps of smoke, one must proceed as follows : burn tinder and cotton in a closed furnace ; guide the resulting smoke through a curved vitrine towards a series of very thin parallel nozzles that rest on the surface of the upper gauze. When an obstacle is placed along the trajectory of the air flow within the vitrine, one may observe the wisps of smoke bend against the obstacle and split into two flows ; one ascends and the other descends the slope of the inclined plane. [ ... ] Upstream of the obstacle eddies form and unfurl around a space where the air appears to be entirely still.211 If I speak of a “theater,” it is because the whole Mareysian system ultimately strikes us by its complexity, by the sheer number of tricks and artifices it required to function. The first of these is that Marey never intended to photograph the natural movement of smoke, which ascends, but rather chose to capture it in downward motion, heavily instrumentalized by the suction of the electric ventilator. Marey also recognized that in order to reveal its movements “it is necessary to in some way filter the air.”212 A reiteration of the schematization that his whole visualizing apparatus imposed on phenomena : let us not forget that the black velvet backdrop repeats here the figural choices both within the graphic method (continuous inscription on blackened paper) and at the Physiological Station (multiple exposures against a dark field). At the same time, Marey’s theatrical wind tunnel remained an “open machine,” allowing for the kind of variation that underpinned all serial work in his experiments. We find variation in the movements of air, obtained most obviously by modifying the configurations of the obstacle (the whole bearing of the experiment on aerodynamics lies in the interpretation of these configurations) ; obtained, too, by changing from the very start the direction of the smoke : hence the use of that unusual “vibrating device” which transmitted “waveforms whose sinusoidal inflections are preserved over their whole course.”213 We discover variation in durations in the different results obtained by an exposure of a fiftieth of a second (fig. 64) using a magnesium flash or exposures of one, two, or even seven seconds (fig. 26). In the latter case, “we obtain a more intense image, but whose outlines are less defined around the eddying smoke, for we cannot record its true ephemerality, but only a series of varied states succeeding each other during the exposure and merging together.”214 And so the visual trail naturally formed by these wisps of smoke expands into a tem-

poral trail that delays and differentiates—albeit in an inherent way—their appearance. We need not detail the typologies of smoke captured in Marey’s wind tunnel to understand that these experiments visualizing “invisible movements” in fluid mediums were of considerable significance.215 It is probably fair to say that the study of the movements of air constituted “a culmination” or “fulfilment” of Marey’s entire oeuvre through something like a true “aesthetic apotheosis.”216 But there was also in this apotheosis a reaction to the “paradigmatic crisis” engendered by the visual perception of duration in the late nineteenth century : a reaction aligned with “an ever greater interest for phenomena that defy geometry : mechanics of fluids, the amorphous, smoke, vortices.”217 In other words, “it is when a concept changes in meaning that it makes the most sense.”218 What at this time changed in meaning was indeed movement itself : movement considered in relation to matter (bodies, but also environments) and time (instantaneity, but also duration). The nineteenth century was the era of a generalized “graphology,” encompassing material phenomena themselves,219 as if each of Marey’s snapshots would be able to restitute the wisps of smoke “writing” themselves on the black backdrop of his small experimental theater. It was as if each vibration in space and time—sound waves being a benchmark— begged to be recorded on some sheet of paper, table, or chart.220 In 1877, Gaston Tissandier presented a typology of “aerial streams” and rain dust.221 In 1892, Marey filmed drifting clouds.222 In 1911, Lafay used acetylene to render air currents more visible and obtain “aerograms” of the wind.223 Alongside these technical achievements, physics was rethinking fluids, vortices, and turbulences along the lines of a matter that no longer separates its space from its time.224 That is to say, matter considered with its memory. Isn’t it possible that Bergson was in fact always hiding in the wings of this experimental theater devoted entirely to movement, if not to that duration which flows [ au mouvant ] ? It is telling that at the same time Marey was photographing his marvelous movements of air, he and Bergson—along with Arsène d’Arsonval, Edouard Branly, and Georges Weiss—belonged to the Study Group of Psychic Phenomena at the​​ Psychological Institute of Paris.225 This is not to say that the scientist gave in to the philosopher’s arguments ; far from it. But henceforth the graphic method sought—in the sphygmograph transformed into

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“plethysmograph”—to “inscribe the states of the soul,” that is, the relationship between bodily movement, sensory affection, and psychic memory.226 In an obvious sense, Marey was still opposed to Bergson. He opposed him on each and every point except those “margins of indetermination” that his own method permitted. Still, these margins were to be found everywhere and in great number : parerga haunted each aspect of Marey’s ergon, his lifework. And from within the scope of these margins came some of chronophotography’s most beautiful experimental images. When Marey constructed a curve, movement was, certainly, understood to be a trace of the positions of the moving body : a purified juxtaposition subtracted from the fundamental mobility of the environment and the blind gropings [ tâtonnements ] of duration. And yet when Marey allowed a trail to appear, movement was liberated, since the moving body was affected—taken over, troubled, modified, overwhelmed—by the mobility of duration. Likewise, when he explored a flow, Marey widened his notion of movement to the unstable dialectic between the moving body and the mobility of the environment. And so his sumptuous open images made tangible the philosophical notions that Bergson was formulating at the same time. From this perspective, Marey’s experimental practice united Bergson’s “two orders,” the philosopher’s resolution of the aporia between order and disorder. In Creative Evolution, Bergson describes these as “two species of order, [ ... ] two contraries within one and the same genus.”227 There is order by the “necessary reciprocal determination of elements externalized each by relation to the others” : meaning order by the juxtaposition of elements isolated by the intellect through some artifice or device. There is otherwise order by “progress in the form of tension, continuous creation” : by the interpenetration of parts in an indivisible whole. The first order is “automatic” and deterministic, the second “vital” and unpredictable.228 In the former, time is schematized according to spatial homogeneity ; it is negated. It is characterized in the latter by an “unshrinkable duration, which is one” with all things and “makes succession, or continuity of interpenetration in time, irreducible to a mere instantaneous juxtaposition in space.”229 Bergson situates the first “order” on the side of “geometrical” identity, and the second on the side of “vital” resemblance.230 Marey worked squarely inside the first order when he measured movement :

such was the positive, even positivist, nature of the knowledge he produced. His images and curves sought not resemblance but identity, according to an axiomatics that predefined the experiment’s instrumentalization. Yet in taking the time to modify the brightness of the magnesium flash, the color of the backdrop, the exposure time, in carrying out what Claude Bernard described as experiments of adjustment [ expériences de tâtonnement ], “experiments in order to see,”231 he did something entirely different. Here we find a mode of knowledge immersed in change and the unexpected, loosened from its axiomatics, ample in resemblances, given over to the fecundity— and the perils—of heuristics. We discover within these “trails” and “flows” that Marey did not measure movement so much as grapple with the moving reality of all things. He turned to face what Bergson called “one of the essential characters of materiality,” namely that things unmake themselves creatively before our eyes.232 In going beyond the mere observation of this mobile reality, in patiently developing its photographic iconography, however paradoxical—the confusion of images, for example— Marey ventured into a mode of knowing that eclipsed positivism and “scientism” to enter the realm of what Bergson would call intuition. Marey was able to unite the two “orders” that Bergson appeared to violently oppose—despite, remember, belonging to the “same genus”—in the essentially unpredictable, mobile arena of his experimental images. It is there we find, over time and all together, the geometric with the amorphous, the predictable with the unpredictable, the system with intuition (which, Bergson tells us, “is worth more than the system and survives it”).233 It is unlikely Marey would have appreciated such an “unscientific” description of his method. And yet by listening closely to what Bergson intends when he speaks of intuition as a mode of knowledge, we may better appreciate the richness and paradoxicality inherent to Marey’s images of movement. Intuition is above all a knowledge that explores what we might call the other side of experience, or even of the experiment [ the French expérience denotes both experience and experiment—Trans. ]. Marey devised apparatuses to predict, analyze, and measure the movement of all things : in this regard, he formulated a “kind of clarity” founded on a “new order [ of ] elementary ideas which we already possessed”: 234 physical laws, physiological knowledge, recording techniques. But when he worked on or played with these systems—in other words, when he explored their margins of

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indetermination—Marey brought forth another clarity from phenomena, which appeared “radically new” and of which our first “impulse is to say it is incomprehensible.”235 This was surely the impression given by the first fixed-plate chronophotographs in which these “trails” appeared [ fig. 127–130 ]. The first kind of clarity so distances us from the object that we can discern it ; the second brings us close enough to touch or, in other words, unmake its appearance. Bergson considers intuition a knowledge immanent to the movement it observes. It possesses a “precision,” which “clear and distinct” knowledge lacks, because it “fits tightly to its object.”236 And yet we pay a price : with intuition, intellect and the predictability of phenomena become temporarily inaccessible to us, because knowledge is fused to duration in the process of “making itself ” : Let us try to see, no longer with the eyes of the intellect alone, which grasps only the already made and which looks from the outside, but with the spirit, I mean with that faculty of seeing which is immanent in the faculty of acting and which springs up, somehow, by the twisting of the will on itself, when action is turned into knowledge, like heat, so to say, into light. To movement, then, everything will be restored, and into movement everything will be resolved. Where the understanding, working on the image supposed to be fixed of the progressing action, shows us parts infinitely manifold and an order infinitely well contrived, we catch a glimpse of a simple process, an action which is making itself across an action of the same kind which is unmaking itself, like the fiery path torn by the last rocket of a fireworks display through the black cinders of the spent rockets that are falling dead.237 This Bergsonian image—a quintessentially chronophotographic object, which we actually find in the work of Albert Londe—reveals the instability of intuitive knowledge. This amounts, on one hand, to throwing oneself into the flow of moving things, as Bergson writes in these remarkable pages that pose the philosophical problem of “throwing” oneself into the water and “swimming” when reason would say swimming is impossible.238 On the other hand, intuition follows a wavelike motion—difference, inherence : oceanic undulations—in other words, a rhythm of apparitions and evanescences, an intermittence : Intuition is there, however, but vague and above all discontinuous. It is a lamp almost extinguished, which only glimmers now and then, for a few moments at most. But it glimmers wherever a vital interest

is at stake. [ ... ] These fleeting intuitions, which light up their object only at distant intervals, philosophy ought to seize, first to sustain them, then to expand them and so unite them together.239 What is true of intuition can also be said of the eye itself when submitted to the intermittence of light and darkness. “When I open and close my eyes in rapid succession,” Bergson writes, the “visual sensation [ ... ] is the condensation of an extraordinarily long history.”240 Indeed, the subtle dialectic between seeing and memory applied just as well to Marey’s images. The magnesium flash exploded and died out ; the shutter opened, closed, reopened, before closing one last time. The moment the lamp was extinguished and the moment the shutter closed were no less important—no less crucial—than those of illumination and aperture. For it was in these moments that the image had taken, as though exploiting the darkness to preserve a memory of all it had intermittently “seen.” Marey’s chronophotographs combined all the Bergsonian characteristics of intermittence and duration (when one temporal position “bites” into another within a single image), of matter and memory (the first unmaking the appearance of things so the latter can exist), of thought and moving reality [ de la pensée et du mouvant ] (since Marey’s methodological choices, in order to obtain his images of movement, proceeded each time from a thought and a decision to act). Bergson posits one last feature of intuitive knowledge : it is a knowledge through images, on the condition that these images are understood as both singular and fluid : fluid because able to conform, to slide through the interstice of each movement of matter 241 (whether body or environment). It is meaningful that Bergson chose to situate this essential condition of knowledge squarely between a metaphysics concerned with putting scientism in perspective, and a homage to the pragmatism of William James, on the one hand, and Claude Bernard’s experimental method, on the other. We then understand that if metaphysics serves to reproach positivism from the outside and in the name of fundamental principles, the experimental method—of which Marey was a true master—could very well, in Bergson’s eyes, perform this role from within. The pragmatic philosopher knows that every new truth is an invention rather than a discovery. Of course, “it does not follow,” Bergson reminds us, “that the truth is arbitrary.”242 One should, then, initiate oneself gradually into an aesthetic of truth. We might say that science itself is a matter of style (to this effect, one need only

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compare Muybridge’s images to Marey’s). The epistemological issue is rather in knowing what genre of “theater” we want to invent in order to make sense of the “superabundance of reality”: While our intelligence with its habits of economy imagines effects as strictly proportioned to their causes, nature, in its extravagance, puts into the cause much more than is required to produce the effect. While our motto is Exactly what is necessary, nature’s motto is More than is necessary—too much of this, too much of that, too much of everything. Reality, as James sees it, is redundant and superabundant. Between this reality and the one constructed by the philosophers, I believe he would have established the same relation as between the life we live every day and the life which actors portray in the evening on the stage. On the stage, each actor says and does only what has to be said and done ; the scenes are clear-cut ; the play has a beginning, a middle and an end ; and everything is worked out as economically as possible with a view to an ending which will be happy or tragic. But in life, a multitude of useless things are said, many superfluous gestures made, there are no sharply drawn situations ; nothing happens as simply or as completely or as nicely as we should like ; the scenes overlap ; things neither begin nor end ; there is no perfectly satisfying ending, nor absolutely decisive gesture, none of those telling words which give us pause : all the effects are spoiled. Such is human life. And such, no doubt, in James’s eyes, is reality in general. [ ... ] From the point of view taken by James, which is that of pure experience or of “radical empiricism,” reality no longer appears as finite or as infinite, but simply as indefinite. It flows without our being able to say whether it is in a single direction, or even whether it is always and throughout the same river flowing.243 The experimental method’s greatest strength is in never claiming to “shrink reality to the measure of our ideas,” since “it is for our ideas, as they grow larger, to mold themselves upon reality.”244 It is for this that Bergson admired and extended Bernard’s claim that “philosophy and science should not be systematic.” Both must be precise and rigorous, but in another way : they must become supple, plastic to the point of fluidity : “[ ... ] an idea, no matter how flexible we may have made it, will never have the same flexibility as a thing. Let us therefore be ready to abandon it for another, which will fit the experiment still more closely.”245

Philosophy would then be the art of abandoning our ideas when faced with each new experience, each new experiment. This requires, in turn, the invention of a new idea : philosophy “is strictly itself only when it goes beyond the concept, or at least when it frees itself of the inflexible and ready-made concepts and creates others very different from those we usually handle, I mean flexible, mobile, almost fluid representations, always ready to mold themselves on [ ... ] fleeting forms.”246 And is this not exactly what Marey did when he varied the shutter speed according to the specificity of the gull’s flight ? Where Bergson produced authentic experimental ideas, so Marey’s experimental images functioned as an approach to reality that upheld the true vocation of all thought : a knowledge, according to Bergson, that “has nothing in common with a generalization of experience, and yet [ ... ] could be defined as the whole of experience [ expérience intégrale ].”247 The expansion of all things But what exactly is this integral experience [ expérience intégrale ] ? How could an experimental image, inevitably local since it results from a specific instrumentation applied to particular phenomena, be capable of globally modifying our perception of the world ? Michel Frizot rightfully claims that Marey, “without really intending to, raised the stakes of our perception of images,” uncovering “a new temporality,” and through it “the unknown, the never before seen.”248 So what then is the meaning of experimental when the brush of an insect’s wing against blackened paper, when photographs of small waterborne wax pearls [ fig. 131, 133 ], when a few marvelous wisps of smoke are enough to radically transform both our vision of the world and our relationship to the image (modifying the latter, in effect, amounting to disrupting the former) ? The simplest way to approach this question is to go back to the meaning of the word “experimental” in the scientific culture of the nineteenth century regardless of its popularization. “Experimental” is defined in Littré’s dictionary as “based in experiment” ; it is in this sense that we speak of “experimental physics,” “experimental medicine,” or “the experimental method,” which, the Littré warns us, should not be confused with empiricist philosophy.249 One would be hard pressed to find, in this context, a meaning of the word “experimental” that is not directly attached to the realm of “scientific in-

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strumentation.”250 It is for this that Michel Frizot writes, “Marey’s images are ontologically determined and characterized by the instrument, and may only be understood in relation to its specificities. Their novel iconicity was instrumental, representing a radical rupture with fine arts and illustration more generally.”251 In short, “experimental” means here that new technical instruments allowed for the existence of “new images” (as do our digital devices today). These images, at first independent of the existing visual arts, wound up anticipating their pictural, photographic, and cinematographic futures. It is a teleological vision : as if the aesthetic invention of forms could only ever be an afterthought of the technical invention of instruments ; as if the graphic method could only realize itself, in the Hegelian sense, through chronophotography, which in turn must culminate in cinema.252 Of course, things are more tangled, more anachronistic. This is already evident at a technical level : Marey’s curves possess a “chronographic” dimension—no less than the continuous recording of phenomena—that, far from “realizing” itself, disappears in chronophotography. What’s more, Marey invented for himself a cinematography that wholly rejected—in contrast to Edison and the Lumière brothers—the reconstitution of natural movements, since only the extremities of speed interested him : slowing down a bird’s flight—and later a bullet—or accelerating the crawl of starfish at the bottom of a tank. It is for the needs of science that chronophotography was invented. This method [ ... ] rapidly spread to the rest of the world [ as cinematography ] ; however, its acquired popularity is not due to its genuine value : it had the good fortune of gaining the public’s interest through the delightful illusion it delivers. Indeed, there is nothing more striking than the way in which it puts before us scenes from ordinary lives, or nature’s greatest shows. [ ... ] And yet this is perhaps not the true value of chronophotography.253 Are we then not surprised that Marey completed his life’s work with a relatively simple machine—the aerodynamic wind tunnel, with its tinder burning in a small furnace—producing images that were, after all, only conventional snapshots ? A simplistic instrumental reading of the experimental nature of Marey’s images would thus be limited by certain internal contradictions (the most “experimental” images are not necessarily the most heavily “instrumentalized”) as well as by certain common simplifications often found in historical accounts of the relationship between art and science.

It would be, in other words, historically reductive to postulate that Marey invented an entire world of specific, “unartistic,” technical images, whose dissemination then created a “technical imaginary” of sorts—as Michel Frizot and others termed it—that would provide, by way of “visual culture,” the formal material for future artistic images such as we see in the works of, among others, Meissonier, Degas, Seurat, Braque, Picasso, Kupka, Villon, Duchamp-Villon, Duchamp, Boccioni, Carrà, Balla, Russolo, Bragaglia, Malévich, Goncharova, Székely, Max Ernst, or Man Ray.254 We even sometimes go so far as to paint Marey as a precursor to our modern day “culture industry,” to the work of Hartung, Vasarely,255 and even Jackson Pollock.256 To nuance these points of view—and to steer away from trivializing these “artistic images,” seen as simple social consequences of “scientific images”—one must return to chronophotography itself and the cultural context of its expérience intégrale. It is Bergson, once again, who will illuminate the status of what its inventor named experimental photography.257 Let us hypothesize that between 1885 and 1900 Marey’s experimental images radically changed the meaning of the word “experimental,” which arose from the canon of Bernard’s scientific method in the domains of physiology and medicine. Let us go further in saying that Bergson’s experimental ideas, developed at the same time, are likely the best theoretical tool to understand the nature of this radical change. What is “experimental” in both Marey’s photographic tinkering and Bergson’s philosophical hypotheses is the way they reconfigure a familiar reality (the walk of a man, for instance) to the point of a sudden dilation that renders it strange, nearly absurd (whenever the man’s walk becomes a game of spillikins or an undulating wire thread [ fig. 121–122 ]) ; and upon the condition that this strangeness is accompanied by an often unpredictable heuristic effect, a qualitative enlargement of our perception. For Bergson, all great branches of knowledge—philosophy, science, art—have a stake in enlarging our sense experience. They are therefore dedicated to generating a heuristic “dilation” of the real as knowable. Axiomatics, however, never renounces its prerogative, continuing to mark its territory with overly broad concepts and overly pure ideas : The insufficiency of our faculties of perception—an insufficiency verified by our faculties of conception and reasoning—is what has given birth to philosophy. [ In Greece ], philosophy started off along

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the road it has since travelled, the road leading to a “supra-sensible” world : one was to explain things henceforth with pure “ideas.” [ ... ] But all of them, ancient and modern, are agreed in seeing in philosophy a substitution of the concept for the percept. They all appeal from the insufficiency of our senses and consciousness to the faculties of the mind no longer perceptive, I mean to the functions of abstraction, generalization and reasoning. [ ... ] But the examination of doctrines shows us that the faculty of conceiving, as it advances in this work of integration, is forced to eliminate from the real a great number of qualitative differences, to extinguish in part our perceptions, and to weaken our concrete vision of the universe. [ ... ] The method, therefore, goes contrary to the purpose : it should in theory extend and complete perception ; it is obliged in fact to require that many perceptions stand aside so that some one of them may become representative of the others.258 Bergson and Marey both take the opposite epistemic path, because enlarging perception, for them, never amounts to weakening it by generalizing it, erasing it by exceeding it, abstracting it by bolting it down. To dilate perception, one must “plunge into it for the purpose of deepening and widening it.”259 This is only possible by reshaping the experience and making the reshaping itself conceptually fecund and operative. And so, from now on, we define the experimental as follows : an enrichment, a proliferation, an expansion of experience capable of making “us see what we do not naturally perceive.”260 In fact, for Bergson, the paradigm that truly makes us see—and that Marey wishes to know nothing about, despite his whole enterprise in some way reflecting it —is none other than the practice, or better still, the experience of artists : What is the aim of art if not to show us, in nature and in the mind, outside of us and within us, things which did not explicitly strike our senses and our consciousness ? [ ... ] As [ poets ] speak, shades of emotion and thought appear to us which might long since have been brought out in us but which remained invisible ; just like the photographic image which has not yet been plunged into the chemical bath where it will be revealed. The poet is this photographic developer [ révélateur ]. But nowhere is the function of the artist shown as clearly as in that art which gives the most important place to imitation, I mean painting. The great painters are men who possess a certain vision of things which has or will become the vision of all men. A Corot, a Turner,—not to mention others,—have seen in nature many an aspect

that we did not notice. [ ... ] Art would suffice then to show us that an extension of the faculties of perceiving is possible.261 Let us make no mistake : Bergson does not lay out here his program for an “aesthetics” understood as a philosophy of artistic beauty. He speaks of truth and reality through a philosophy of knowledge of which art constitutes a fundamental paradigm. Why is that ? Because one must harmonize knowledge and intuition. This is why the artist, according to Bergson, doesn’t invent the world according to an idiosyncratic fancy, but rather reveals the world to perception in a form that can be shared by all. The primacy of painting and, even more so, the model of the chemical révélateur used in photography give us insight not only into the possibility of reading Marey’s work along these lines but also into Bergson’s way of painting the true scholar as an artist and the true artist as a photographer or phenomenologist of things [ hitherto ] unperceived : [ ... ] now and then, by a lucky accident, men arise whose senses or whose consciousness are less adherent to [ a life of action ]. Nature has forgotten to attach their faculty of perceiving to their faculty of acting. When they look at a thing, they see it for itself, and not for themselves. They do not perceive simply with a view to action ; they perceive in order to perceive—for nothing, for the pleasure of doing so. [ ... ] It is therefore a much more direct vision of reality that we find in the different arts ; and it is because the artist is less intent on utilizing his perception that he perceives a greater number of things.262 Insofar as philosophy must raise itself to the level of such perceptual dilation—by the artist as révélateur—one may wonder how Bergson forgot, in his 1911 essay on “The Perception of Change,” to place Marey alongside Corot and Turner. Of course, we know full well the reason for this omission : Bergson saw in chronophotography nothing more than a puzzle-image, founded on a “work of recomposition and rearrangement” of common perceptions, in opposition to the duration-image, a category to which all artworks belong because they “enlarge” perception.263 And yet, did not Marey produce this very dilation, this expansion-image, when he forewent his quantitative curves in favor of qualitatively trailing the movements, when he devoted himself to the flux by leaving matter to unfurl ? Did he not “wholly” [ intégralement ] practice that experimental activity the Greeks called technè, without distinguishing the artistic and poetic dimensions of the doing from the technical and scientific dimensions of its results ? We now more fully understand why Marey’s images fall within an

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“integral experience” : by playing on various local differences—for instance, by swapping a standard lens for a macroscopic lens, one shutter speed for another, or a moving plate for a fixed—Marey generated a global expansion of the visuality of all things. It is here that chronophotography reveals itself as an experimental method, both an art and a science : “[ My images ] reveal attitudes which the eyes are not accustomed to see,” he boasts in Movement.264 Having said that, Marey nevertheless distanced himself from artistic guilds, despite the fact that his use of chronophotography provided for those “rarer cases, in which artistic effects are the chief aim.”265 And despite the fact that, following the model of the artistic clinic promoted in 1887 by Charcot and Richer, Marey co-signed in 1893, with Georges Demenÿ, a volume of artistic physiology, a study of animal and human locomotion that compared the “syntheses” of art to the “analyses” of photography.266 Marey of course defended the veracity and the utility of the latter against the potential beauty and fancy of the former. With more modesty did he point out photography’s documentary role : the value, for instance, of “choosing, from a series of successive images, those attitudes that best express the act one wants to represent.”267 What’s more : Photographic documentation has already provided significant contributions to the arts. Some artists openly admit it, and many more make use of it, as may readily be seen by comparing their most recent works with those of earlier date. It is more especially instantaneous photography that has had such an influence, because it has afforded reliable pictures of phenomena of very short duration, such, for instance, as of sea waves, or even of the attitudes of men or animals during the performance of the most rapid movements.268 A banality indeed : scientific photography generously places itself at the service of art. Marey takes a harder line when he proposed that “one should be able to choose nature herself as arbiter [ of the arts ], and ask photography to reveal the actual attitudes assumed by a runner.”269 Elsewhere, Marey, ever the positivist, dreamed of a situation wherein “art and science join hands when they search for truth”270—despite his own “trails” and “flows” in some way following an opposite path. His detailed logs once again suggest that it was when Marey grappled with the experimental situation itself that he avoided platitudes and commonplaces, and instead discovered new perspectives : for instance, in making chronophotography a privileged access to

the “unstable equilibrium” of moving bodies ; or in claiming that “the modeling of a limb does not simply translate the action as it unfolds, but allows us, up to a certain point, to predict the actions that will follow” ; or again, when he named “the most visible attitudes of a movement” its “dead points.”271 Or, finally, in discovering ugliness— and what he so aptly named strangeness—at the heart of all expressive human movements : And now from an artistic point of view. What is to be the outcome of this new method of reproducing the movements of speech ? Painters have hitherto apparently paid no attention to the subject. In the most animated scenes, it is the general expression of the features that conveys an idea of what the individuals are supposed to be saying [ ... ] We wanted very much to know what sort of expressions a man’s features would assume when he uttered a loud exclamation. The attendant at the Physiological Station was the subject of our experiment. He was placed in front of the lens, and told to shout at us several times in succession at the top of his voice. The series of photographs thus obtained showed the periodical repetition of the facial expression, but so curiously contracted were the muscles of expression that the appearance was rather that of an ugly grimace. And yet simply to watch him, there was nothing extraordinary in the man’s expression. The peculiarity of the photographs was due to the fact that they caught exceeding fleeting expressions of the face—movements which were really ones of gradual transition and none of which were seen as isolated expressions. And indeed, if one were to place these same images in a zoetrope and watch them as they pass in succession as the instrument revolves at a suitable speed, all strangeness dissipates, and we behold nothing but a man articulating in a perfectly natural way. What does this mean ? Is it not that the ugly is only the unknown, and that truth seen for the first time offends the eye ? 272 These questions, as we know, were widely debated in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. No matter how hard Eugène Véron, in 1878, pleaded the case—against Turner notably—for a “scientific,” “exact,” even “microscopic” art ; no matter how well he identified the “line of beauty” and the “line of life” on the basis of a physiological interpretation of aesthetic pleasure ; he was forced, in the chapter on “multiplex attitudes” in his Aesthetics, to recognize the discrepancy between photography’s “stationary attitudes” and pictorial art’s “composite movement.” 273 In 1882, Georges

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Guéroult recognized the nature of moving objects as “floating, continuous, trailing, in some way, on the eye” ; he thus saw the artist caught on the horns of a dilemma : whether to “trace the shroud of successive positions” or “capture the model at a specific moment in time” ? His answer was a compromise between the “trail” and the snapshot, the instantané : “paint the moment when the object is at its slowest and when, therefore, the eye may appreciate its outline most accurately.”274 In 1884, Jean Marie Guyau claimed to have invented an unromantic and, since it was inspired by Spencer, “evolutionist” definition of aesthetic grace : it would be the moment—easily identified in a chronophotographic series—of lowest mechanical force, when “all muscular effort seems to have disappeared, and the limbs move freely, as though carried on the air.”275 As for Paul Souriau, he had pleaded the case, in 1889, for an “experimental aesthetics” based on the serial accumulation of “observations of detail” taken from scientific research ; citing Marey, he spoke of an “animal mechanism” and, consequently, of a “mechanical beauty” that would be the “exact adaptation of a movement to its purpose” ; he recognized the “physiological laws” of postures, and strictly followed Mareysian typologies of terrestrial, aquatic, and aerial locomotion ; and yet he was still reluctant, in the name of a classical plausibility, to apply chronophotography’s lessons… A horse, hindquarter in mid-air, standing on a single front leg ? Let us find “more balanced stances.” Let us make neither a “sea of zinc, as does snapshot photography,” nor the “sea of plaster” we see in Courbet’s famous Wave.276 It remained only for Robert de La Sizeranne, in 1904, to coldly summarize the debate by proclaiming, like so many others, “photography’s excessive claims” regarding both art and movement.277 Bergson radically circumvented these academic debates : the issue, for him, was not to safeguard “the artist’s eye” against the “scholar’s retina,” or pictorial craftsmanship against photographic technique. By posing a problem of method, Bergson avoided the problem of domains : indeed, a method is only effective if it breaches, experimentally, the limits of its domain. Taken in its strongest sense, a method, according to Bergson, is capable of connecting a system (the “formidable array of theorems with the close network of definitions, corollaries and scholia” found in Spinoza, for example) to an intuition (“something subtle, very light and almost airy, which flees at one’s approach, but which one cannot look at, even from afar, without be-

coming incapable of attaching oneself to any part whatever of the remainder”278). In fact, Bergson states, one can only make the connection between these two aspects of knowledge by bringing forth and holding “a certain intermediary image between the simplicity of the concrete intuition and the complexity of the abstractions.”279 We have just two means of expression, concept and image. It is in concepts that the system develops ; it is into an image that it contracts when it is driven back to the intuition from which it comes : so that, if one wishes to go beyond the image by rising above it, one necessarily falls back on concepts, and on concepts more vague, even more general than those from which one started in search of the image and the intuition. Reduced to this form, bottled as it were the moment it comes from the spring, the original intuition will then become superlatively insipid and uninteresting : it will be banal in the extreme.280 The method’s meaning “is less a thing thought than a movement of thought, less a movement than a direction,” even a species of vortex.281 Indeed, Marey’s method seems to us the very picture of this vortex of images and concepts. Armed with scientific doctrines, and inventor of technical devices intended to stage them, Marey saw himself solely as a creator of system-images. Fortuitously, his method drags him instead into an experimental vortex, that is, into the expansion of his system. It is then that Marey liberates these sumptuous intuition-images that appear to us “almost airy,” the most “subtle” and “light” in his work : visual trails and flows, the flight of the gull and undulations of the skate, waves in water and gyres in air. To consider a method as both a work of expansion and the possibility of producing systemic excess implies proposing a poetic notion of method. Mallarmé explicitly situated his vis-à-vis Descartes’s Discourse on the Method, that is, to a modern notion of knowledge.282 That Marey was almost certainly unaware of this did not stop his later commentators seeing something of Mallarmé in his application of the scientific method and in his “diagrammatic” chronophotographs ; “this scientist,” wrote Siegfried Giedion, “sees his objects with the sensibility of a Mallarmé.”283 So it was that in the very same year Movement was published, a poet, a disciple of Claude Bernard and reader of Bergson, composed a whole collection of thoughts on an ancient graphic method fused to a truly “integral experience,” framing all knowledge in a manner at once scientific and poetic,

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technical and artistic : we speak of Paul Valéry and his Introduction to the Method of Leonardo da Vinci. Marey must have felt at least vaguely concerned.284 In Valéry’s analysis (and in his notes and digressions published thereafter), Leonardo appears first and foremost as the master of the movement of all things : let us recall Leonardo’s rather “Mareysian” Codex Huygens, and of course his studies into the flight of birds and the movement of water [ fig. 109 ].285 According to Valéry, “whatever is fixed deceives us, and whatever is made to be looked at changes its appearance, becomes nobler.” It is “while they are moving, unresolved, still at the mercy of a moment” that all things appear and are thought.286 But each vital movement also pertains to a specific mechanical law : “the support of the body, its propulsion, and its respiration were problems in mechanics. [ ... ] To paint, for Leonardo, was an operation that demanded every form of knowledge and almost all the scientific disciplines : geometry, dynamics, geology, physiology. A battle to be portrayed involved a study of vortices and clouds of dust.”287 Leonardo then becomes, as a matter of course, the master of the curve of all things, which Valéry seems to evoke from a Mareysian present day : The great invention that consists in making the laws of science visible to the eyes and, as it were, readable on sight has been incorporated into knowledge ; and it has in some sort overlaid the world of experience with a visible world of curves, surfaces, and diagrams that translate properties into forms whose inflexions we can follow with our eyes, thus by our consciousness of this movement gaining an impression of values in transition. The graph has a continuity of movement that cannot be rendered in speech, and it is superior to speech in immediacy and precision. Doubtless it was speech that commanded the method to exist ; doubtless it is now speech that assigns a meaning to the graphs and interprets them ; but it is no longer by speech that the act of mental possession is consummated. Something new is little by little taking shape under our eyes ; a sort of ideography of plotted and diagramed relations between qualities and quantities, a language that has for grammar a body of preliminary conventions (scale, coordinates, base lines, etc.), and for logic the relative size of figures or portions of figures and their relative situations on a chart.288 But Leonardo was no less a master of the duration of all things : “here we should be entering an area of extremely delicate psychic mechanics, in which particular durations play an important part, are

included one in another.”289 These durations, Valéry writes, reveal the very “secret” of the “relations among things of which we cannot grasp the law of continuity” ; they form that time which alternately “reveals” or “hides” the “patterns made by the wind on water or sand.”290 It is then that the artist will discover the flux and flow of all things : he witnesses the vanishing of “particular features of the images [ leaving ] only their succession, frequency, periodicity, varying capacity for association” ; he ends up isolating “an environment, [ ... ] continuity, velocities, properties of displacement, [ ... ] mass and energy.”291 He is now able to observe the trail of all moving things : Remembering a precedent, he perfects the given space. Then, at his pleasure, he can arrange or undo his successive impressions. He can appreciate the value of strange combinations : a group of flowers, or of men, a hand or a cheek seen by itself, a spot of sunlight on a wall, a gathering of animals brought together by chance—all these he regards as complete and solid beings. He feels a desire to picture the invisible wholes of which he has been given some visible parts. Thus, he infers the planes designed by a bird in its flight, the trajectory of a missile, the surfaces delimited by our gestures, and the extraordinary fissures, the fluid arabesques, the formless chambers created in an all-penetrating medium by the grating and quivering of a swarm of insects, by trees that roll like ships, by wheels, the human smile, the tide. Traces of what he imagined can sometimes be seen on water or on rippled sand ; and sometimes his own retina, as the moments pass, can compare some object with the form of its movement. From such forms, born of movement, there is a transition to the movements into which forms may be dissolved by means of a simple change in duration.292 Through this great morphogenic vision of the world, Leonardo da Vinci sought ultimately to understand the expansion of all things : always striving to “see more than we know” and methodically proceeding to the “extension of the given quantity.”293 Is it not significant that Valéry paid homage to Leonardo by situating his graphic research at the level of what the scientific photography of movement demonstrated during the 1880s ? And could one not recognize Marey’s gull [ fig. 130 ] in these lines, where Valéry finds in Leonardo’s “precise imagination” the “sort of effects that photography has since revealed as fact,” in particular when he “vivifies, [ ... ] molds the water around a swimmer into clinging scarves, draperies that show the effort of the muscles” ? Or else when he transfixes “the air [ ... ] in the wake of soaring larks as ravelings of shadow”? 294 

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Marey’s work, begun squarely within the rules of instrumentalized experiments on bodily movement, became an expérience intégrale only when the curves of movement became—as in Leonardo da Vinci’s oeuvre—an extension, an expansion of all things to be henceforth seen in flows and rhythms, in vortices and gyres. The curves of movement thus became curves in movement : as if an image of movement could only be germane by becoming animate. This is why the graphic curve was destined to unfold on a scrolling ribbon ; this is why the photographic perspective developed into the chronophotographic series and then celluloid unreeling through a camera. In this respect, Marey’s work remains authentically Aristotelian, in the sense that Bergson credits Aristotle with inventing an experimental method that no longer “[ diluted ] his thought in the general,” as did Plato : its scientific nature comes from its aesthetic capacity to contemplate the world in its singularities, so that “the contemplation of an antique marble can spring more concentrated truth, in the eyes of a real philosopher, than is to be found in the diffused state, in a whole philosophical treatise.”295 Yet Aristotle remains a “systematic genius if ever there was one” ; “he did not build up a system” because his genius remained analytic and intuitive, always allowing for the “fluidity of [ ... ] images.”296 Not incidentally, Bergson summons Leonardo da Vinci to bridge modern philosophy and science (Ravaisson on one hand, Claude Bernard on the other). He summons him specifically to highlight the need for a line that would neither be the curve of the movement nor its graph, but indeed a moving curve, a line given to us in the act, in the tracing, in the dance of its own inflexion : There is, in Leonardo da Vinci’s Treatise on Painting, a page [ ... ] where the author says that the living being is characterized by the undulous or serpentine line, that each being has its own way of undulating, and that the object of art is to render this undulation distinctive. “The secret of the art of drawing is to discover in each object the particular way in which a certain flexuous line which is, so to speak, its generating axis, is directed through its whole extent, like one main wave which spreads out in little surface waves.” It is possible, moreover, that this line is not any one of the visible lines of the figure. It is not in one place any more than in another, [ and yet ] the visible lines of the figure rise toward a virtual center [ which is ] the movement

the eye does not see, [ and ] behind the movement itself [ is ] something even more secret. [ ... ] [ It is an ] art which neither emphasizes the material contours of the model, nor tones them down to the advantage of an abstract ideal, but simply centers them around [ ... ] latent thought.297 What strikes us from this perspective is that the drawing [ dessin ] is no longer, as we find in Vasari for instance, the product of the designer’s [ dessinateur ] intention—his supreme “design” [ dessein ]— that we find drawn on the paper. The drawing here becomes a “virtual center” common to both the living form and the form needed to construct its curve and, beyond this, its flows, trails, and morphological expansions. Marey inadvertently makes these “virtual centers” visible : such would be his graphic method’s “latent thought,” more Leonardesque than he himself would have admitted through his interest in the flight of birds.298 So it was that the graphic method produced its many graphs of grace, in the Bergsonian sense of the word : Beauty belongs to form, and all form has its origin in a movement which outlines it : form is only recorded movement. Now, if we ask ourselves which are the movements that describe beautiful forms, we find that they are the graceful movements : beauty, said Leonardo da Vinci, is arrested grace.299 Bergson had already laid out, in his first book, published in 1889— as if all his philosophy flowed from here—a remarkable analysis of grace as a paradigm of intensity eluding any quantitative reduction of movement : its form carries a duration since each phase of the graceful gesture is memorized and anticipated by the other ; its form follows a curve because the latter has the power to “change its direction at any moment” ; its form manifests a rhythm since it liberates itself as duration and as music ; finally, its form calls for empathy since it involves both the moving body and the kinesthetic attraction this moving body produces in the body that gazes upon it : [ ... ] the feeling of grace [ ... ] is at first [ ... ] only the perception of a certain ease, a certain facility in the outward movements. And as those movements are easy which prepare the way for others, we are led to find a superior ease in the movements which can be foreseen, in the present attitudes in which future attitudes are pointed out and, as it were, prefigured. If jerky movements are wanting in grace, the reason is that each of them is self-sufficient and does not announce those which are to follow. If curves are more graceful than broken

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lines, the reason is that, while a curved line changes its direction at every moment, every new direction is indicated in the preceding one. [ ... ] A third element comes in when the graceful movements submit to a rhythm and are accompanied by music. [ ... ] [ Finally, ] in anything which we call very graceful we imagine ourselves able to detect, besides the lightness which is a sign of mobility, some suggestion of a possible movement towards ourselves, of a virtual and even nascent sympathy. It is this mobile sympathy, always ready to offer itself, which is just the essence of higher grace.300

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We find all this in Marey’s work, even if it was to subvert the explicit vocation of his system. It is as if the graphic method and chronophotography ultimately aimed to make us see and understand the dance of all things. When Marey, for instance, describes in Movement the “alternate swinging of our lower limbs in walking or running,” he explains how “the leg oscillates around the knee and the foot around the ankle,” like a pendulum whose simple movements begin to “combine and react to each other [ to the point where ] they produce extremely complicated results.”301 The figure

Fig. 134, 135 134: É.-J. Marey, Jointed pendulum  : an oscillation to left following on a half oscillation from left Figure taken from Le Mouvement, Paris, 1894. 135: Diagram of a horse’s movements (gallop), undated.

from right to right. É.-J. Marey, Ink drawing.

that illustrated his demonstration is not only a geometric reduction of the oscillatory movement : it also represents a sort of imaginary expansion of movement, since the oscillation suddenly takes on the appearance of a skirt flaring up in the wake of the walk described [ fig. 134 ]. Even though Marey’s chronophotographic “diagrams” proceed, in the words of Michel Frizot, from a “reduction of the signifying surface of the physiological elements,”302 we are still struck by the fact that their results often resemble a sort of drapery of movement, a swathe of fabric, gathered, pleated, fanning out before us [ fig. 135 ]. Not only did Marey produce—like Muybridge—a few photographic series devoted to the forms of drapery in movement [ fig. 136 ], he also situated the origin of his “diagrams,” if not his luminous “trails,” in a photographic study of choreography : L. Soret was the first to make use of this arrangement [ of photographing bright objects in darkness or under red light ]. At night, on the stage of a theater illuminated only by a few red lanterns, he studied the movements of dancers by attaching small incandescent lamps to their heads and feet. In this manner, Soret obtained most peculiar trajectories in which curves intertwined with elegant regularity.303 Marey had in fact supervised—with the help of a ballet master from the Paris Opera—a stunning chronophotographic series dedicated to choreography [ fig. 137 ]. The movements of the drapery coupled with the gestures of Greek dance, reconstituted by Maurice Emmanuel : it was, in some sense, the instrumentalization of rather unreliable archeological hypotheses. And yet it was much more than that : “On looking at these photographs,” writes Marey, “one cannot help recognising a sort of general suggestiveness of the particular movement of the dance by the fall of the drapery.”304 This was a way of saying that, between the movements of the dancing body and the great morphological variation in the fabric’s folds, we find the same relationship as exists between the movements of wisps of smoke and the great morphological variation in the turbulence born from their obstruction. The dancer is seen not only through her movements but as a great textural mobility, while the smoke can be seen, in turn, not only through its arabesques but as a little dance of materiality.

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Fig. 136, 137 136: É.-J. Marey, Study of the movements of drapery, 1885. Chronophotograph. 137: É.-J. Marey, Study of the movements of dance and drapery (detail), before 1894. Chronophotographs. Figures taken from M. Emmanuel, La Danse grecque antique d’après les monuments figurés, Paris, 1896.

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Why a dance ? Because dance is something entirely different from the more or less skillful steps of a dancer. Dance is undoubtedly the performance of a series of steps, a body that dances. But it also comprises a wake, namely a space that dances with the body, around the body, a space insofar as it is globally modified, reconfigured by the gesture ; hence the crucial role played by drapery as an “accessory in motion”—in the words of Aby Warburg— of the dancing body. There is, finally, the rhythm : namely, a time that dances with both body and space. Indeed, one must consider all these together within the notion of dance, and it is all these together that I believe Marey was able to photograph, whether it was a gull dancing upon the air, a skate dancing in the water, luminous dots dancing in the darkness, a man’s pubis dancing in the virtual space of his walk, or a few wisps of smoke dancing in a glass vitrine… Nature, in the nineteenth century, was supposed to unveil herself to science. But looking upon the allegory, charming if not a little stiff, that Barrias sculpted on this theme in 1895 [ fig. 138 ], we understand that it is more a complex dance of veils that nature performs in the face of human knowledge : an elusive dance, since it takes over all things, participates in the environment of all things in movement [ fig. 139 ]. The gesture in particular is emancipated from the physiognomic ideal, interrogated in its symptomatic dimension—from the hysteric’s “pavane” in Charcot to Freud’s analysis of Gradiva’s gait, by way of the dance and the Pathosformel of Aby Warburg’s Ninfa.305 But the essential rhythmic dimension of the gesture is also put to question, from Charles Féré’s physiological and clinical studies to Gilbreth’s neo-Mareysian photographs on the productive optimization of movement, by way of the new rhythmic aesthetics of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze and Rudolf Laban.306 Marey was deeply engaged with this new research trend : the symptomatological dimension of movement informs the very foundation of his graphic method. As for rhythm, it consumes every curve, every photograph, every series, every film. The importance of the “trails” and “flows” within his experiments also teaches us that when Marey believed he had discovered a skhēma, more often than not he had constructed a rythmos ; 307 when he thinks he is establishing a chronos (an indivisible time), he liberates a rheuma (an indivisible

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flow) ; where he believes he is measuring a topos, it is often a chora and, already, a choreography that he stages. The lyrical—even the erotic or empathic—dimension is not absent from the Mareysian universe. To admire certain resemblances to feminine tresses in Marey’s studies on the movements of air seems less fantastical when we consider that Marey himself compared the wisps of smoke to a “capricious meander,” the “teeth of a comb,” or the “strings of a lyre.”308 To the extent that Marey’s practice was experimental—heuristic, inventive, intuitive—the eidos ended up confused—in the mind of an experimenter hungry for new facts and new forms—with something like the eros of phenomena. The curve of course furnishes an eidos, meaning a drawing thought of as a conceptual form. But it is soon doubled by its “trail,” a drawing thought of as a wake, a flowing and fleeting form, both material and extravagant. It is no longer the form’s idea, but matter’s eros that comes into play. It is no longer the pure line purged of its accidents but an experimental accident transformed into the drapery of the phenomenon, its frills,309 so to speak. It is something like an eroticized understanding of the movement’s “noise,” its impure resonance, its turbulent vocation. We should then, in all reasonableness, recontextualize Marey’s images within the great cultural movement that at the close of the nineteenth century reimagined the structure of moving matter—of-

Fig. 138, 139 138: Louis-Ernest Barrias, Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science, 1895. Polychrome marbles and onyx. 139: Pierre Roche (Fernand Massignon), Loïe Fuller, 1904. Gypsotype.

ten from the standpoint of fluid patterns—and reformulated, in parallel, its relationship to femininity : the “tragic myth of Eros” that went hand in hand with the “living machine” that itself embraced all biomorphisms, fluid images, and other “pan-feminizations” of the world, as Claude Quiguer and others have clearly shown.310 It was an epoch that sought to preserve both the movement’s pathos and the possibility of its formulation : the latter was intrinsic to the numerous attempts at choreographic notation composed throughout the nineteenth century ;311 the former can be seen from Baudelaire’s “Dancing Snake” to Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy, from Théophile Gautier’s articles on dance, to the poetry of Mallarmé, Valéry, and Rilke.312 It was the epoch when Isadora Duncan claimed that her art stemmed from the contemplation of waves, and Mary Wigman in turn professed to “weave [ through dance ] the fabric of time.”313 It is likely that Marey disregarded the crucial status of dance in the aesthetics of his era. At the very least, he was unaware that he contributed to it in his own way. And yet he surely paid heed to one of the founding texts, in France, of this whole aesthetics of movement : Honoré de Balzac’s Theory of Walking, written in 1833, in which science found itself examined by the sort of madness adjoined to every bodily gesture and dance : A madman is one who sees the abyss and falls in. The man of knowledge hears him fall, takes his fathom stick and measures the distance, makes a staircase, goes up and comes down, rubbing his hands. [ ... ] God only knows who of the madman or the scholar came closer to truth. Empedocles was the first to combine both. There is no single movement, no single action that might not be seen as an abyss where even the wisest man might leave his reason and which might not provide the man of knowledge with the occasion to take his ruler and measure infinity itself.314 Every human gesture would then be nothing more than a dance secretly outstretched between madness and knowledge, the possibility of pathos and the possibility of its formulation. The savant was right to see the “body’s physiognomy” in walking ; but he soon learned of the “sublime prodigality” of movement as an “exorbitant” thing.315 There is a “psychic fluid” in each slight gesture ; a “frightening meaning” in each curve, each fold, each twist of our bodies :

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Fig. 140, 141 140: Isaiah West Taber, Loïe Fuller in the Dance of the Lily, 1902. Photograph. 141: Anonymous, Loïe Fuller’s Serpentine Dance, 1894. Kinetograph comprising 90 photographs dyed with a stencil.

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“a simple gesture, an involuntary trembling of the lips can become the terrible denouement of a long-hidden drama.”316 But Balzac’s point of view cannot be reduced to either psychology (the side of pathos) or physiology (that of formulation). It constantly interlaces different orders of thought : it eroticizes the world (allowing us to see the dance of all things) to better depersonalize the human (allowing us to see fluidity in all bodies) : “Where goes the force expended by a nervous woman who cracks the powerful and delicate joints in her neck, who wrings and shakes her hands, having waited in vain for something she dislikes having to wait for ?”317 Marey himself will propose a Balzacian fiction—his chronophotographic Unknown Masterpiece, inspired by Mach—in the form of a series of photographs taken of an individual at equal time intervals “from his early childhood to his extreme old age” : one could then see—“will see,” Marey writes—“under the guise of a strange and marvelous metamorphosis, all the phases of a human life unfold before one’s eyes.”318 Dance concentrates all this in each moment, each gesture, making it a quintessential object for chronophotography, this temporal art that visualizes all things in movement. And no-one better expressed the paradoxes of gesture, time, and the visible than Stéphane Mallarmé. The very year—1886—that Marey poeticized his experimental practice by letting movement “trail” on his fixed plates, the poet unfolded his own shawl of words over the gestures and draperies of certain dancers he admired : movements kindling a “wafting of reveries” as the body itself became, like the wing of a gull or a thread of smoke, a “form taking flight,” a “presence [ ... ] called into the air [ until it ] sustains [ itself ] there.”319 It was, in a way, Mallarmé’s formula : the dancer is less a “woman who dances” than a materiality, even a milieu—body, space, and time intermingled in a single “exquisite confusion”—whose movements were formalized onstage like smoke in an experimental wind tunnel. Dance, writes Mallarmé in a philosophical and almost Bergsonian manner, is a “mobile synthesis, in its incessant ubiquity, of attitudes” and gestures, which are impersonally executed before our eyes.320 This impersonality, however, remains vital : conveying a pathos, even an eros, which transforms the dancing body into a “divination mingled with animality,” both “the visual incorporation of the idea” and the “entire adventure of sexual difference.”321 And all neatly stitched together in a visual and temporal suspense—“yes,

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Fig. 142, 143 142: É.-J. Marey, Luminous spots moving in the dark, undated. Photograph. 143: Marcel Duchamp, The Box of 1914, Standard Stoppages, 1913–1914.

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Dance’s suspense, contradictory apprehension or desire to see too much and never enough”—whose emblem will be, precisely, the trail, this “transparent wake” accompanying the dancer as she moves the drapery of her veil around her own moving body.322 Paul Valéry went on to summarize all these motifs in several wellknown texts. On the one hand, to “deify” the Balzacian walk—“a simple walk and, lo, she is a goddess”323—and, on the other, to complete Mallarmé’s impersonalization : the dancer belongs neither to life, nor death, nor to herself, but to the “whirlwind” of all things ; “being a thing [ she ] burst into events [ ... ] she is the pure act of metamorphosis.”324 How could one not once again think of Marey ? Does Valéry not see in the dancer a pure “wave” phenomenon ? Does he not summon the “power of the insect [ in its ] wings’ myriad vibrations” ? Does he not describe these “images [ that ] dissolve and vanish” into a spectral and “inexhaustible lightness” ?325 Would he not later admit to writing “Dance and the Soul” after having read Maurice Emmanuel and, especially, after having “left open on [ his ] table Marey’s book [ which he had ] owned for thirty years” ? 326 We are hardly surprised, then, that in Degas, Dance, Drawing, Paul Valéry tightened the ties between the graphic method— Degas thought together with Leonardo da Vinci, Muybridge, and Marey, his gaze identifying with a true “tracer’s stylus” 327— and the dance of all things, in particular the dance of the wonderful medusas he witnessed in a scientific film, which became, in his eyes and those of Marey, the very picture of dancers : The freest, the most supple and voluptuous of all possible dances, was one which I saw in a film of giant medusas ; they were not women, nor were they dancing. Not women at all, but beings of an incomparable translucent and sentient substance, flesh of furiously sensitive glass, domes of floating silk, hyaline wreaths, long thongs traversed by rapid waves ; while they whirl, unshape themselves and shoot away, as fluidly as the tremendous fluid which harries, embraces and sustains them on all sides, yielding to their slightest inflections and restoring them their forms. [ ... ] No base, nothing solid to support these supremest of dancers ; no boards, only an element in which they press on all the yielding area allowing them passage where they will. [ ... ] The great medusa, transforming herself into an erotic phantasm, with an undulating shudder passing through the

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scalloped flounces of all her skirts, which she lifts and lowers with a strange and shameless insistence ; and then, suddenly flinging back all her shivering finery, her robes of severed lips, inverts and exposes herself, laid furiously open. But suddenly she recovers, thrills and spreads up through her space, rising like a montgolfier balloon to the forbidden, luminous region, the domain of the sun and the mortal air.328 How could we not think here of that great dancer, that contemporary of Marey who, only a short distance from the Collège de France, alternately became medusa and nymph, bird’s wing and skate’s fin, pure geometry and pure drapery, wave and light beam, flame and smoke [ fig.  140–141 ] ? How, indeed, could we fail to think of Loïe Fuller ? By inventing her famous Serpentine Dance329 in the early 1890s, Loïe Fuller did much more than lend movement to a graphic motif—the sinuous line— long talked about in aesthetics and Kunst Literatur. Her dance did much more than trace curves : more so, it formed surfaces in movement—the trail of her exaggerated dress, her drapery, the flexions of her veil, one might say her sails— creating, through their swirls, a complex volume in perpetual expansion or transformation : in other words, a sort of cinematic and fluid sculpture, always unpredictable, always renewed. Through the “soaring of her robes,” Mallarmé wrote in 1893, the woman herself “radiates, in all directions, the fabric” set in motion by her dance : “a weft spread far, giant petals and butterflies, unfurling [ ... ] infinitely, as if expanding [ into the ] atmosphere or nothing,

Fig. 144 Anton Giulio or Arturo Bragaglia, The Fan, 1928. Photograph.

[ she ] enlarges a milieu [ in ] a fleeting propulsion of whirlwinds.”330 Later, Mallarmé would call Loïe Fuller “an inexhaustible fountain of her own being [ ... ] through waves of cloth, floating, palpitating, dispersed.”331 Surrounded by her sumptuous drapery in movement, Loïe Fuller also gave rise to an anachronistic gathering of motifs rediscovered in Greco-Roman archeology,332 commented on—by Warburg—in a revitalized history of art,333 and reinterpreted in the light of present-day modernity. It was a dance that seemed to orchestrate a meeting between Lucretius, Leonardo, and Marey. The consequence was indeed similar to that of chronophotographic “diagrams” : the body tended to vanish—vaporizing, evaporating, rising like smoke—in favor of the visual expansion produced by its very movement. It became something like a metaphor for the “universal dance of all things,”334 the generalized dance of particles, materialities, environments. Hence, the crucial importance, as for Marey, of the dark background allowing for luminous emergence of these “trails” of movement : By abolishing the scenery and plunging the scene into darkness, she transformed the theatrical space through the invention of the luminous body. [ ... ] Eliminating any narrative or thematic dimension from the theatrical act, she introduced a spectacle of pure forms, in constant transformation, wherein the undulations of the veils or the passing of colors signified an “art of movement” giving rise to a new aesthetic. The singular features of this art were made of wandering lines, supple and mobile forms, fluid and abstract motifs—the galloping and dynamic repetition of which finally revealed a new form. The disappearance of the dancer’s body was necessary for the veil to become its own being [ ... ] pure life of possible forms, like a duplicate of spiritual energy.335 It is hardly surprising, given the context, that Loïe Fuller was so attentive to the philosophical enthusiasm surrounding the modern development of physics, chemistry, and even geometry, not to mention the means that these new techniques could put at her disposal. She conversed with Camille Flammarion, with Pierre and Marie Curie, with Edison.336 She installed, at the back of her garden, a small laboratory overseen by a chemical engineer. There she experimented— no longer, certainly, in the sense given by Claude Bernard—with all sorts of luminous magic, phosphorescence, magnesium explosions, effects directed at transforming her shows into photo-choreographic phenomena, so to speak.337

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Nor should we be surprised, therefore, that the Serpentine Dance’s kinetograms, made at the same time Movement was published, follow an operating protocol aimed at visualizing the geometric transformations of a luminous moving object, as can be seen in experimental chronophotographs of that era [ fig. 141–142 ]. Loïe Fuller picked up the camera herself to direct “experimental films”—using negative images, color shifts, and slow motion—that were rightfully said to be, through their “luminous kineticism, similar to some of Marey’s scientific experiments.”338 Loïe Fuller already demonstrated an affinity with Mareysian experiments through her initial choreographic choices : did not the veil of her Serpentine Dance endow the trail with a concrete, unde-

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niable existence, capable of endless growth and transformation ? The movements of her veil reverberated and expanded—excessively so, up to six meters—her body’s movements : “The veil not only made visible but rendered perceptible the gesture’s trajectory through space by a record of its transit, as in Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographs. Furthermore, it revealed a trace of expended energy, [ ... ] the veil’s fluid wake translating the gesture as a memory of its own progression, [ ... ] the status of the appearing form itself being in essence photographic.”339 This dynamic is closest to the Mareysian trail when delay and a marvelous deceleration are produced by the drapery : not only does it reveal the physical gesture’s wake, but it slows down its enactment

by its sheer size, its expanding force, and because the fabric remains suspended in the air for a moment, languorous, as light as smoke, never still under our eyes. Its line, born of the gesture’s speed, prolongs its memory as it slowly gives way to the line that follows. Such is its “chronophotographic” magic ; which is less about giving visibility to moving bodies than making the visual environment itself into something like a generalized mobility.

Fig. 145, 146 145: É.-J. Marey, Tumbling Starfish, 1891. Film. 146: Man Ray, photogram taken from the film L’Etoile de mer (The Starfish), 1928.

The result is the image thought entirely according to the temporal relationship—needless to say problematic—between the speed of a vital movement and the sumptuous delay, the “trail” of its inscription. Unlike the “continuous” curves of the graphic method stricto sensu, the Mareysian delay-image ends up producing a visual mobility. Because it is composed of both continuity and heterogeneity, this mobility—this process, this “progress” as Bergson liked to say—throws into crisis the appearance of things and, along with it, our whole understanding of representation. Its critical effect was to become the focus, in the two to three decades following Marey’s death, of the European artistic avant-garde. The formal analogy between Marcel Duchamp’s 3 Standard Stoppages and Marey’s luminous trajectories, separated by thirty or so years [ fig. 142–143 ], is not at all incidental. Duchamp too saw the inscription as delay : his three curves offer, not just a visual outcome, but also a différance, an afterthought, a change in the temporal status of the three threads as they rapidly fall to the ground. Like the author of La Méthode graphique, Duchamp enjoyed working on the movement and speed of all things, and later on the necessity, in order to build his image—a “delay in glass,” his allusion to the glass negatives of Marey’s era—of resorting to “ultra-rapid exposures.” We know Duchamp read Marey, and likely with an eye to Bergson. Are not the feet of his most famous “nymph”—the Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2, from 1912—reduced to the geometrized trail of a movement decomposed and interlocking all at once ?340 Might not the optical tricks of Anemic Cinema, of the Rotary Demisphere, or of Duchamp’s various experiments with stereoscopy, replay Mareysian studies on chronophotographic geometry (a sphere engendered by the revolution of a string and made stereoscopic) ? Conversely, could not some of Marey’s studies on human locomotion fall under the Duchampian concept of “swift nudes” ? It is, at the very least, the same “beauty of indifference,”341 impersonal down to

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its occult eroticism, which animates Duchamp’s objects and periodically transpires in Marey’s images. Italy’s Futurists also paid great attention to Marey : both using him for his critical effect on the representation of movement, and disproving him—in an explicitly Bergsonian way, since the philosopher’s translator, Giovanni Papini, was himself a Futurist—on the supposed “fixity” of the image’s deconstruction of movement.342 Anton Giulio Bragaglia, in particular, criticized the analytical aspects of Marey’s images, while congratulating himself on a “synthesis of movement” wherein the visual trail was no longer—in spite of its fecundity—an accident, but rather the very vocation of the image343 : hands and flowers rising and falling in fluid streams, even a woman’s face, rotating and fanning out, her bare throat becoming a mane of hair [ fig. 144 ]. The film screenings of the era were, as Thierry Lefebvre has shown, most often divided not in two but in three parts ; and short scientific films—with their telltale optical and temporal oddities, never-before-seen organisms and aberrant organs, macro- or microscopy, fascinating slow motions or vertiginous time-lapses—held a prominent place. Indeed, the genre reached its true “apogee” between 1910 and the start of World War I.344 This cinematographic genre undoubtedly had its source in Marey’s “experimental films,”345 and almost directly precipitated—surprising though it may be—the “experimental films” of Man Ray. The entire transformation of the concept of experimentation lies between these two moments. In 1893, Marey had filmed the “marvels,” as he himself called them, of the modest starfish’s walk346 [ fig. 145 ] ; thirty-five years later, Man Ray made the same animal the impersonal heroine of his own surrealist “marvel”347 [ fig. 146 ].

Fig. 147 Man Ray, Feu d’artifice (Fireworks), 1934. Photograph.

In the meantime, and as if to better align the two meanings put into play by the word “experimental,” a remarkable connivance occurs, in the twenties and thirties, between surrealism and scientific imagery.348 In 1928, Jean Painlevé, having previously directed some extraordinary silent films, including Vibratory Cilia and Elodea Canadensis, turned his camera on a starfish.349 He claimed to have invented nothing, to have solely observed, and yet he sought to define as “surrealist” the way the “film [ though it be scientific ] transcribes real-world events,” but which, thanks to the experimental possibilities of the camera, are “elevated to a more direct, more intense, more absolute state.”350 Painlevé never failed to give Marey his rightful title, not as distant pioneer but as direct inventor ; in his preface to Thévenard and Tassel’s work, Le Cinéma scientifique français, Painlevé described all works belonging to this cinematographic genre as “echos” of Marey’s work.351 He himself had directed, in 1937, Similarities in Distance and Speed, and Notation system for Movement in 1949 ; he produced the 1976 film, Marey, the Unappreciated Scientist. His last film, in 1983, with its slow-motion flight of birds, was yet another homage to the inventor of chronophotography.352 Meanwhile, he had forgotten neither the dancing medusas studied by Marey and poeticized by Valéry, nor the dance of Loïe Fuller, which he inserted—in a somewhat “surrealist” splice—between two “scientific” shots in his film on the acera, another animal that could be mistaken for its own flowing drapery.353 Faced with Painlevé’s works, Jean Cassou, citing Novalis, spoke of “the interior voluptuousness of water.” 354 Later, André Bazin would trace the definitive aesthetic link between this cinematographic genre and Muybridge and Marey’s inaugurating experiments : When Marey and Muybridge made the first films of scientific investigation, they were not solely inventing the techniques of cinema, but were also creating the purest form of its aesthetics. For therein lies the miracle of the scientific film, its inexhaustible paradox. At the farthest reaches of opportunistic, utilitarian research, and from within a total prohibition of aesthetic intentionality as such, cinematographic beauty develops like a supernatural grace. [ ... ] What optical tricks would have been capable of giving rise to the magical ballet of these freshwater animalcules, miraculously self-assembling as if in a kaleidoscope ? Which brilliant choreographer, which delirious painter, which poet could have imagined these assemblies, forms,

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and images ? The camera alone held the key to this universe wherein supreme beauty identifies with both nature and chance : that is to say to all the things that a certain aesthetic tradition considers to be the opposite of art. [ ... ] He who has not witnessed this does not know how far cinema can go.355 “How far cinema can go”—but also photography and in fact all graphy thought as a technique of time ; such was the issue addressed, in the same twenties and thirties, by the Surrealists. In the first pages of its first issue, La Révolution surréaliste printed a photograph by Man Ray entitled Retour à la raison, which illustrated certain “dreams” penned by André Breton : it is a remarkable and I daresay undulating feminine nude that displays on the skin something like a chronophotography of the fumes of desire… Other draperies were contained within, other decompositions of movement and visual trails signed by Man Ray, and even Georges Demenÿ’s phonoscope, divert-

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ed, of course, from its original analytical purpose.356 In the pages of the same journal, Aragon paid homage to the figure of the inventor or “mad scientist” who—without knowing it—creates machines for dreaming, of which Marey provided so many powerful examples : At the moment of their construction, these machines of practical life [ from the laboratory to the Lepine competition ] still have the tousled air of dreams, that crazed look, unsuited to the world, making them akin to a simple poetic image, to the slippery mirage from which they just emerged, still tipsy.357 Like La Révolution surréaliste, the magazine Minotaure opened its first pages, in 1933, with a famous visual trail : Marey’s fencer, accompanying a short text by Marcel Jean entitled “Chronogrammes.” Its aim, to some extent, was to reclaim chronophotography from the Italian Futurists, by returning to Marey’s images their full, distinct poetry :

Fig. 148 Man Ray, Homme d’affaires (Man of Affairs), 1926. Photographs.

[ ... ] here we have images produced through chronophotography (a series of snapshots, on a single plate, of a moving subject), a process Marey imagined, more than thirty years ago, for the purpose of studying locomotion. Suddenly, [ ... ] the faces of Time [ appear ] : images as unpremeditated as is possible, and yet perfectly precise, concrete, truthful, carefully reproducing the slightest inflexions of a moving body, both analysis and synthesis. The puerile idealism of the Futurists never understood this radiant poetry [ wherein ] all these common acts, walking, running, jumping, [ find ] their lasting portrait, their projection through time, as vaporous carvings or glistening flowers.358 It comes then as no surprise that Max Ernst, as early as 1929, borrowed from chronophotography—via the treasure trove of illustrations in the popular scientific journal La Nature—many of its visual features : from the obsession with bird flight to hydrodynamics and the movements of smoke.359 For his part, Salvador Dalí transformed, in 1934, his left hand into the “tracing stylus” of the activity—movement, vibration, even dance—of masturbation : “Espasmo-grafitisme obtained with the left hand, whilst with the right I masturbate to the point of bleeding”360… The next year, Dalí elaborated his “paranoiac-critical” method of “physical and moral aerodynamics,” unearthing in photography what he named a “non-Euclidian psychology.”361 Surrealist automatism was clearly not unrelated to the notion of inscription that Marey implemented with his “chronographic” and “chronophotographic” methods. Characterized by dynamism—what Warburg named dynamography—this mode of inscription allowed beauty itself to become “exploding-fixed,” which we also find in the graphs of desire obtained by Dalí’s left hand and the strange “claws of dark light” that Man Ray captured the same year by photographing fireworks [ fig. 147 ].362 Ultimately, automatic inscription and the inscription of movement both precipitated the “crisis of the object,” to which André Breton claimed to have delivered the final blow. And so for us it is striking that the poet situated this “crisis” both at the forefront of art—surrealism upturning our understanding of representation—and that of science : surrationalism, a term borrowed from Gaston Bachelard’s epistemology, upturning our entire understanding of reality itself. Marey had thus always been front and center of this debate held between science, art, and even poetry :

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Regrettably, we do not yet have at our disposal a volume of comparative history which would allow us to understand the parallel development, during the last [ that is to say the nineteenth ] century of scientific ideas on one hand, artistic and poetic ideas on the other. [ ... ] It is in this regard that we come to realize that surrealism is inevitably accompanied by a surrationalism which duplicates and measures it. [ ... ] Once again, each term verifies the other : this fact is enough to demonstrate that a fundamental, common spirit animates man’s research nowadays, be he poet, painter or scholar.363 Following this reasoning, the photographer—even more so the photographer of time-matter, crucial for chronophotography and cinematography—is situated midway between the painter and the scientist. So it is not surprising that Breton’s text both discusses and is illustrated by Man Ray’s images : “Since by photographing them, Man Ray, with his clairvoyant hands, delivered these practically unknown objects to us, we only have to interpret them as we please in order to make them our own.”364 So what are these objects ? Crystals, unnoticed wonders, challenges issued to all ordinary notions of space and composition. Man Ray’s images belong to the time of both surrealism and surrationalism : their poetry would not have existed without Lautréamont, they would not have existed at all without the invention of non-Euclidean geometry.365 Man Ray can be read as a pseudonym : “man-ray” or “ray of man” ; or, he who Breton called the man “with clairvoyant hands.” But the name Man Ray also sounds like a phonetic anagram of Riemann, the father of non-Euclidean geometry. It is, lastly, an imperfect homonym of Marey. Man Ray was fascinated by science and by “mathematical” and geometrical objects in particular, providing that they offered him strange, vibrating images.366 He first modestly defined himself

Fig. 149 Man Ray, photogram taken from the film Emak Bakia, 1926.

as a “letterer and layout man” or an aerograph painter, before inventing his famous “rayographs.”367 We know that in this respect, and many more, he was an incredible photographer, as well as an “experimental” filmmaker par excellence. He likely needed to set himself apart from these references—which he did at a later stage of his life—to argue that “photography is not an art.” It is for this reason that Man Ray the photographer detested those horses that Muybridge and Marey had elected as their first test subjects : “I was incapable of photographing a horse,” 368 he claimed—which in no way prevented him from photographing the dance of all things : fireworks [ fig. 147 ], flamenco dancers,369 or the luminous trails made by the headlights of passing cars.370 Man Ray later declared himself—ironically as always—a “photometrographer,” a “photo-measurer,” a description which, strictly speaking, fits Marey perfectly.371 At any rate, Man Ray was in his own way an inventor of images that often depicted the decomposition of a movement in discontinuous phases [ fig. 148 ], or otherwise in “trails”—by which the face of a friend, Marcel Duchamp in this instance, could become a great distortion sweeping the entire surface of the image.372 “While investigating the various phases of photography in my early days in Paris, inevitably I turned my attention to moving pictures. [ ... ] I made a few sporadic shots, [ ... ] without any aesthetic implications [ ... ] by animating black and white stills.”373 Like Marey, Man Ray expresses himself with modesty : inventing or reinventing cinema was, to both, “inevitable,” simply a matter of setting photographic images of movement in motion ; and this practice was more “experimental” than “aesthetic,” although neither could have failed to notice the visual splendors of the resulting images. To posit that Man Ray had, on his own account and by his own means, filmed the “dance of all things” is no exaggeration : in 1919, he devised the Revolving Doors system on the model of certain nineteenth century optical devices such as the praxinoscope ; in 1920, he experimented with Marcel Duchamp on stereography and “anaglyphic films” of moving rotoreliefs374 ; he dabbled with the pornographic genre, a choreographic genre if ever there was one ; he filmed dancers ; at the same time, he was cobbling together an animated version of his rayographs by producing continuous Cine-rayograms [ fig. 151 ], which by his own account created moving forms “criss-crossing and revolving in an epileptic dance.”375 In his 1926

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Fig. 150, 151, 152 150: Man Ray, Space writing, Marcel Duchamp, 1937. Photograph. 151: Man Ray, photogram taken from the film Le Retour á la raison (Return to Reason), 1923. 152: Bruce Nauman, Light Trap for Henry Moore No. 1, 1967. Photograph.

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film, Emak Bakia, the Mareysian dance is still there, not only in those sequences that animate and multiply women’s legs, giving them ghostly forms [ fig. 149 ], but also in the very editing of those sequences wherein the course of things becomes a collision, wherein the collision becomes a dance and the dance, in turn, becomes a play of fluids turned upside down—as fluids so easily are—, the water above and the air below : One of the most interesting shots I made was while being driven by Rose Wheeler in her Mercedes racing car ; I was using my hand camera while she was driving eighty or ninety miles an hour, being pretty badly shaken up, when we came upon a herd of sheep on the road. She braked to within a few feet of the animals. This gave me an idea—why not show a collision ? I stepped out of the car, followed the herd while winding up the camera and set it in movement, then threw it thirty feet up into the air, catching it again. [ ... ] There were other more carefully planned sequences : a pair of lovely legs doing the popular Charleston dance of the day, the sea revolving so that it became sky and the sky sea, etc.376 It is clear that what is at play here is not simply the use of Marey’s (“scientific”) techniques to produce solely dreamlike (“artistic”) results. It is more profound : a shared apprehension of the world upheld by the fundamental Bergsonian hypothesis according to which movement is more real than immobility, transformations more real than forms. What is the world like ?—a metaphysical question that both Marey and Man Ray deliberately ignored ; they wanted instead to know how the world might dance. To answer such a question one needs to invent new modes of inscribing both movement and time, in short, of “incorporating into the image what is fluid and ever-changing.”377 This is what Man Ray achieved in his Cine-rayograms, overturning the notion of drawing on the basis of the photographic possibilities opened up by Marey [ fig. 150 ], and then overturning the notion of film by extending this drawing—which is an imprint—beyond any standard temporal economy, since he had eliminated the separation into photograms, twenty-four per second, from his film strip [ fig. 151 ]. It is in a sense what Hollis Frampton would reformulate—once again in the footsteps of Muybridge and Marey—through his filmic combination of poesis and mathesis.378 Even the notion of sculpture was to be shaken up by this chronophotographic outlook on movement, on flow, when Bruce Nauman used a trail—the

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graphic dance of a point of light—to reflect on the possibilities of its spatial construction [ fig. 152 ].379 “To incorporate into the image what is fluid and ever-changing” : a theoretical and poetic decision, a quintessentially experimental decision, an extreme commitment towards the whole notion of inscription. Let us give the last word to Henri Michaux, who so often—and so admirably—formulated it by tying together all the dialectical aspects we have seen play out in the Mareysian image : the thread of the line, the flow of time, and the film where all things allow us to witness their dance. Instead of one vision excluding all others, I would like to have drawn the moments which, laid end to end, make up life, to have made visible the phrase within, the wordless phrase, a rope endlessly unfurling, sinuous, accompanying in its intimacy all that presents itself from without as from within. I wanted to draw the consciousness of existing and the flow of time. As one takes the pulse. Or again, on a more limited scale, what appears when, as evening falls, the film, imprinted by the events of the day, replays (albeit briefer, more hushed). [...] My own film was hardly more than a single line, or two or three, encountering others here and there, forming a bush here, an embrace there, further on doing battle, [or] rolling itself into a ball [ ... ]. Images, streaming, sparkling, seething, wherein all things remain ambiguous and, although striking, slip away from the grasp of definitive determination [ ... ]. Ripped from one’s rhythm, in a storm of frenzied infinitesimal waves, or in the hell of equally sudden, spasmodic and mad impulsions, it is hard to imagine that this inhuman speed will ever end…380

Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6

7 8 9 10

On the Equivalents, see S. Greenough and J. Hamilton, Alfred Stieglitz : Photographs and Writings (Washington, Boston : National Gallery of Art/Bulfinch Press, 1999 [ 1983 ]), p. 59–67 and A. Stieglitz, “How I came to Photograph Clouds” (1923), ibid., p. 206–208. On the Bragaglia brothers, see below, notes 342–343. On Adam Fuss, see T. Kellein, “Photograms of Life and Death,” in Adam Fuss (Cologne : Walther König, 2002), p. 5–25. Walter Benjamin, “Chinese Paintings at the Bibliothèque Nationale,” in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media, trans. Timothy J. Attanucci, ed. Michael W. Jennings et al. (Cambridge MA : Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2008), p. 259. See S. Mallarmé, “Le seul, il le fallait fluide…” (undated), in Œuvres complètes, ed. H. Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry (Paris : Gallimard, 1945), p. 311. See H. Baraduc, L’Âme humaine, ses mouvements, ses lumières et l’iconographie de l’invisible fluidique (Paris : Carré, 1896) among many other examples. É. Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, vol. II (Paris : Hachette, 1873–1874), p. 1705. Félix Nadar, “The New President of the French Society of Photography,” in When I Was a Photographer, trans. Eduardo Cadava and Liana Theodoratou (Cambridge MA : The MIT Press, 2015), p. 183. Ibid., p. 184. Ibid., p. 122. Ibid., p. 2. G. W. Leibniz, “Drôle de pensée touchant une nouvelle sorte de representation” (1675), in Sämtliche Schriften und Briefe, IV–1. Politische Schriften (Berlin, Hildesheim, New York : Akademie Verlag/ Georg Olms, 1971), p. 562–568. For a remarkable commentary, see H. Bredekamp. Die Fenster der Monade. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz’ Theater der Natur und Kunst (Berlin : Akademie Verlag, 2004) p. 45–63.

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On the theatralization of science in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see H. Schramm, Karneval des Denkens. Theatralität im Spiegel philosophischer Texte des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts (Berlin : Akademie Verlag, 1996) ; H. Schramm, L. Schwarte and J. Lazadzig (eds.), Kunstkammer – Laboratorium – Bühne. Schauplätze des Wissens im 17. Jahrhundert (Berlin, New York : Walter de Gruyter, 2003). On the Wunderkammern, see in particular H. Bredekamp. Machines et cabinets de curiosité, trans. N. Casanova (Paris : Diderot, 1996). 11 See A. Rasmussen, L’Internationale scientifique (1890–1914), (Paris, EHESS doctorate thesis, 1995) ; B. Bensaude-Vincent, “La science au tournant du siècle,” in 1900, ed. P. Thiébaut (Paris : Galeries nationales du Grand Palais/RMN, 2000), p. 10–14. 12 On the popularization of science, see B. Bréguet (ed.), La Science pour tous. Sur la vulgarisation scientifique en France de 1850 à 1914 (Paris : Bibliothèque du conservatoire national des arts et métiers, 1990) ; B. Bensaude-Vincent and A. Rasmussen (eds.), La Science populaire dans la presse et l’édition : XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris : CNRS Editions, 1997). On science’s museumization, see B. Schroeder-Gudehus (ed.), La société industrielle et ses musées. Demande sociale et choix politiques, 1890–1990 (Montreux, Paris : Gordon & Breach Science Publishers/Éditions des archives contemporaines, 1992). On science’s relation to the occult, see B. Bensaude-Vincent and C. Bondel (eds.), Des savants face à l’occulte, 1870–1940 (Paris : La Découverte, 2002). 13 É.- J. Marey, Du mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie (Paris : Baillière, 1868), p. VI. 14 É.- J. Marey, Recherches sur la circulation du sang à l’état physiologique et dans les maladies (Paris : Rignoux, 1859) ; É.- J. Marey, Physiologie médicale de la circulation du sang basée sur l’étude graphique des mouvements du cœur et du pouls artériel avec

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application aux maladies de l’appareil circulatoire (Paris : Delahaye, 1863). 15 É.- J. Marey, Du mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie, op. cit., p. 205 (quoting Claude Bernard, Leçons sur les propriétés des tissus vivants [ Paris : Baillière, 1866 ], p. 157). 16 Ibid., p. 205. 17 Ibid., p. 267–305. 18 Ibid., p. 67. See C. Bernard, An introduction to the study of experimental medicine, trans. Henry Copley Greene (New York : Henry Schuman, Inc., 1949), p. 69. 19 É.- J. Marey, Animal Mechanism : A Treatise On Terrestrial And Aerial Locomotion, trans. anonymous (New York : D. Appleton And Company, 1874), p. 27, 8. 20 Ibid., p. 2. 21 Ibid., p. 5–6. 22 Ibid., p. 5. [ Translation modified ] 23 Ibid., p. 35. 24 É.- J. Marey, “Des lois de la morphogénie chez les animaux,” Archives de physiologie normale et pathologique XXIV, 1889, p. 88–100. 25 É.- J. Marey, “La locomotion animale,” in Traité de physique biologique, I. Mécanique, ed. A. d’Arsonval, J.-B. A. Chauveau, C.-M. Gariel and É.- J. Marey (Paris : Masson, 1901), p. 229–287. 26 É.- J. Marey, Animal Mechanism, op. cit., p. 1. [ Translation modified ] 27 R. Descartes, L’Homme, ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery (Paris : Vrin, 1986), p. 120. 28 P. Poisson, quoted in R. Descartes, Cogitationes privatae (1619), ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery, Œuvres, X (Paris : Vrin, 1986), p. 232. On the question of movement in Cartesian physics, see D. Garber, Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics (Chicago, London : The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 156–305. On Cartesian biomechanics, see F. Duchesneau, Les Modèles du vivant de Descartes à Leibniz (Paris : Vrin, 1998), p. 45–84. 29 G. A. Borelli, De motu animalium (Rome : Bernabò, 1680–1681) ; G. Baglivi, Praxis medica ad priscam observandi rationem revocanda, libri duo (Rome : Herculis, 1696). See G. Canguilhem, “Machine et organisme” (1946–1947), La Connaissance de la vie (Paris : Vrin, 1965), p. 101–127. On Marey as biomechanic, see

A. Turowski, “Etienne-Jules Marey et l’utopie de la biomécanique ou machine du corps enveloppée,” in Marey, pionnier de la synthèse du mouvement, ed. M. Leuba (Beaune, Paris : Musée Marey/RMN, 1995), p. 49–59 ; M. Frizot, “Comment on marche. De l’exactitude dans l’instant,” 48/14, La revue du musée d’Orsay, no. 4, 1997, p. 74–83 ; P. Falguières, “Mécaniques de la marche. Pour une pathétique des images animées,” in Un siècle d’arpenteurs : les figures de la marche, ed. M. Fréchuret and T. Davila (Antibes, Paris : Musée Picasso/RMN, 2000), p. 63–102. 30 J.-V. Poncelet, Cours de mécanique appliquée aux machines (1826–1836), ed. X. Kretz (Paris : Gauthier-Villars, 1874–1876) ; A. Morin, Leçons de mécanique pratique : notions géométriques sur les mouvements et leurs transformations, ou éléments de cinématique (Paris : Hachette, 1861) ; F. Reuleaux, Cinématique. Principes fondamentaux d’une théorie générale des machines (Paris : Savy, 1877). 31 E. and W. Weber, Mechanics of the Human Walking Apparatus, trans. P. Maquet and R. Furlong (Berlin : Springer-Verlag, 1992). See the commentary of F. Kittler, “Der Mensch ein betrunkener Dorfmusikant,” in Bühnen des Wissens. Interferenzen zwischen Wissenschaft und Kunst, ed. H. Schramm and H.- C. von Herrmann (Berlin : Dahlem University Press, 2003), p. 300–318. 32 C. Bernard, Leçons sur les propriétés physiologiques et les altérations pathologiques des liquides de l’organisme (Paris : Baillière, 1859). On nineteenth century biomechanics, see G. Canguilhem, “Modèles et analogies dans la découverte en biologie” (1961–1963), Etudes d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences (Paris : Vrin, 1968), p. 305–318 ; G. Canguilhem, “La constitution de la physiologie comme science” (1963), ibid., p. 226– 273. On contemporary challenges of biomechanics, see A. Doyon and L. Liaigre, “Méthodologie comparée du biomécanisme et de la mécanique comparée,” Dialectica X, 1956, p. 292– 335, and in particular S. Bouisset, Biomécanique et physiologie du mouvement (Paris : Masson, 2002).

On the common terrain of physics, geometry and biology, see in particular G. Chauvet, La vie dans la matière. Le rôle de l’espace en biologie (Paris : Flammarion, 1995). 33 C. Bernard, An introduction to the study of experimental medicine, op. cit., p. 19, 5. 34 Ibid., p. 71. 35 Ibid., p. 129. 36 Aristotle, Physics, III, 1, 200b, trans. E. Hussey (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 1. 37 Ibid., IV, 11, 219b and IV, 12, 220b. 38 Ibid., IV, 11, 218b–219a. 39 Ibid., IV, 11, 220a. 40 On Aristotelian time and its geometrization, see V. Goldsmith, Temps physique et temps tragique chez Aristote (Paris : Vrin, 1982), p. 9–189 ; M. Paty, “Sur l’histoire du problème du temps : le temps physique et les phénomènes,” in Le Temps et sa flèche, ed. E. Klein and M. Spiro (Gif-sur-Yvette : Editions Frontières, 1994), p. 21–58. On the invention of curves describing motion in the sixteenth century, see N. Oresme, “Traité des configurations des qualités et des mouvements,” trans. P. Souffrin and J.-P. Weiss, in Nicolas Oresme. Tradition et innovation chez un intellectuel du XIVe siècle, ed. P. Souffrin and A. P. Segonds (Padua, Paris : Programma/Les Belles Lettres, 1988), p. 135–144. This fundamental text is commented by, in particular, H. Wieleitner, “Über den Funktionsbegriff und die graphische Darstellung bei Oresme,” Bibliotheca mathematica : Zeitschrift für Geschichte der Mathematik Wissenschaften XIV, 1913–1914, p. 193– 243. See also P. Duhem, Le Système du monde. Histoire des doctrines cosmologiques de Platon à Copernic, VII. La physique parisienne au XIVe siècle (Paris : Hermann, 1989 [ 1956 ]), p. 303–599 ; M. Clagett, Nicole Oresme and the medieval geometry of qualities and motions (Madison : University of Wisconsin Press, 1968) ; P. Souffrin, “La quantification du mouvement chez les scolastiques : la vitesse instantanée chez Nicole Oresme,” in Autour de Nicole Oresme, ed. J. Quillet (Paris : Vrin, 1990), p. 63–83.

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41 M. D.- J. Engramelle, La tonotechnie : ou L’art de noter les cylindres, et tout ce qui est susceptible de notage dans les instruments de concert méchaniques (Paris : Delaguette, 1775 ; Paris : Hermann, 1993) ; G. C. Goiffon and A.-F. Vincent, Mémoire artificielle des principes relatifs à la fidèle représentation des animaux, tant en peinture qu’en sculpture (Alfort, Paris : École royale vétérinaire, 1779) ; L. Mannoni, Étienne-Jules Marey : la mémoire de l’oeil (Paris, Milan : Cinémathèque Française/Mazzotta, 1999), p. 18–23 (as well as p. 37–55 and p. 121–136 on the instruments, controversies and triumphs of the graphic method). For an extensive history of the graphic method, see L. Mannoni’s—still unfinished—thesis, L’enregistrement du mouvement au XIXe siècle : les méthodes graphique et chronophotographique (Paris : Université de Paris III, 2003). 42 C. Wheatstone, “Description of the Kaleidophone, or Phonic Kaleidoscope, a New Philosophical Toy, for the Illustration of Several Interesting and Amusing Acoustical and Optical Phenomena,” (1827), Scientific Papers (London : Taylor & Francis, 1879), p. 21–29 ; C. Wheatstone, “Note sur le chronoscope électromagnétique,” ibid., p. 143–151. 43 A. Morin, Description des appareils chronométriques à style, propres à la représentation graphique et à la détermination des lois du mouvement, et des appareils dynamométriques, propres à mesurer l’effort ou le travail développé par les moteurs animés ou inanimés et par les organes de transmission du mouvement dans les machines (Metz : Lamort, 1838) ; J.- A. Lissajous, “Leçon sur l’étude optique des sons,” Leçons de physique et de chimie professées en 1861 (Paris : Hachette, 1862), p. 85–110. 44 F.-E. Pâris and son, “Description et usage du trace-vague et du trace-roulis,” Revue maritime et coloniale XX, 1867, p. 273–295. 45 H. Coupin, “L’inscription de l’état d’âme,” La Nature, no. 1347, March 18, 1899, p. 241–243. 46 C. Ginzburg, “Clues : Roots of an Evidential Paradigm” (1979), Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method (Baltimore : Johns Hopkins University

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Press, 1989). Marey himself did not hesitate to situate his method in a historical field encompassing “animal fossils” and photography : see É.- J. Marey, La méthode graphique dans les sciences expérimentales et particulièrement en physiologie et en médecine (Paris : Masson, 1878), p. III–IV and 121–123. 47 M. Frizot, “Les courbes du temps. L’image graphique et la sensation temporelle,” in Aux origines de l’abstraction, 1800–1914, ed. S. Lemoine and P. Rousseau (Paris : Musée d’Orsay/RMN, 2003), p. 70. 48 Ibid., p. 72 ; M. Frizot, Étienne-Jules Marey, chronophotographe (Paris : Nathan/Delpire, 2001), p. 10. 49 É.- J. Marey, Du mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie, op. cit., p. V–VI. 50 É.- J. Marey, La méthode graphique, op. cit., p. 107–240 (movements), p. 241–334 (forces and variations) and p. 335–426 (multiple inscriptions). 51 Ibid., p. 33, 36, 45, 50, 56–57, 175, 206, 434–435, 437–446. 52 Ibid., p. 445–455. 53 Ibid., p. 2. 54 Ibid., p. VI and VIII–IX. 55 Ibid., p. I. 56 F. Dagognet, Étienne-Jules Marey. La passion de la trace (Paris : Harman, 1987), p. 82. 57 É.- J. Marey, La Méthode graphique, op. cit., p. 502. 58 Ibid., p. 134. 59 Ibid., p. 341. 60 Ibid., p. 341–342. 61 Ibid., p. 423. 62 É.- J. Marey, Développement de la méthode graphique par l’emploi de la photographie (Paris : Masson, 1885). 63 Ibid., p. 4–22. 64 Ibid., p. 2. 65 Ibid., p. 3. 66 Ibid., p. 4. 67 É.- J. Marey, “La Station physiologique de Paris,” Revue scientifique (revue rose) II, no. 26, 1894, p. 804. 68 É.- J. Marey, “La chronophotographie, nouvelle méthode pour analyser le mouvement dans les sciences physiques et naturelles,” Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées II, no. 21, 1891, p. 690. 69 See, in chronological order, M. Frizot (ed.), É.- J. Marey (1830–1904) : la photographie du mouvement (Paris : Centre national d’art et de culture

Georges Pompidou/Musée national d’Art moderne, 1977) ; M. Frizot, Avant le cinématographe, la chronophotographie : temps, photographie et mouvement autour de É.- J. Marey (Beaune : Association des amis de Marey, 1984) ; F. Dagognet, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 51–99 ; M. Braun, Picturing Time. The Work of Étienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) (Chicago, London : The University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 42–199 ; L. Mannoni, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 159–191 ; M. Frizot, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 41–66 and 233–266 ; M. A. Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time. Modernity, Contingency, the Archive (Cambridge MA, London : Harvard University Press, 2002), p. 33–68. On the attempts by Muybridge, Ottomar Anschütz or Albert Londe, see J. M. Eder, Die Moment-Photographie in ihrer Anwendung auf Kunst und Wissenschaft (Halle : Knapp. 1886) ; D. Bernard and A. Gunthert, L’instant rêvé : Albert Londe (Nîmes, Laval : Jacqueline Chambon-Trois, 1993) ; Actes du colloque Marey/Muybridge, pionniers du cinéma (Beaune : Conseil général de Bourgogne, 1996) ; M. Braun, “The Expanded Present : Photographing Movement,” in Beauty of Another Order : Photography in Science, ed. A. Thomas (Ottawa, New Haven, London : National Gallery of Canada/Yale University Press, 1997), p. 150–184 ; D. Rossell, Faszination der Bewegung. Ottomar Anschütz zwischen Photographie und Kino (Basel, Frankfurt : Stroemfeld, 2001) ; D. Rossell, “Breaking the Black Box : A Reassessment of Chronophotography as a Medium for Moving Pictures,” in Arrêt sur image, fragmentation du temps. Aux sources de la culture visuelle moderne, ed. F. Albera, M. Braun and A. Gaudreault (Lausanne : Payot, 2002), p. 121–150. 70 M. Frizot, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 15. 71 See P. Geimer, “Was ist kein Bild ? Zur ‘Störung der Verweisung’,” in Ordnungen der Sichtbarkeit : Fotografie in Wissenschaft, Kunst und Technologie, ed. P. Geimer (Frankfurt : Suhrkamp. 2002), p. 313–341 ; C. Chéroux, Fautographie. Petite

histoire de l’erreur photographique (Crisnée : Yellow Now, 2003). 72 See G. Didi-Huberman, Devant le temps. Histoire de l’art et anachronisme des images (Paris : Éditions de Minuit, 2000). 73 M. Frizot, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 99–123. 74 É.- J. Marey, La Méthode graphique, op. cit., p. 167. 75 Ibid., p. 245. 76 É.- J. Marey, Movement, trans. E. Pritchard (London : William Heinemann, 1895), p. 34. 77 Ibid., p. 54. 78 É.- J. Marey, “Photographie expérimentale,” Paris-Photographe, no. 3, 1893, p. 95–104. 79 É.- J. Marey, Movement, op. cit., p. 55. 80 Ibid., p. 54–55. [ Translation modified ] 81 É.- J. Marey, “Photographie expérimentale,” op. cit., p. 95. 82 Ibid., p. 97. 83 É.- J. Marey, Movement, op. cit., p. 27. 84 É.- J. Marey, “Photographie expérimentale,” op. cit., p. 98–99. Emphasis added. 85 É.- J. Marey, Movement, op. cit., p. 60–61. 86 Ibid., p. 144–145. 87 É.- J. Marey, Développement de la méthode graphique par l’emploi de la photographie, op. cit., p. 4. 88 É.- J. Marey, Movement, op. cit., p. 13–14. 89 É.- J. Marey, La méthode graphique, op. cit., p. 644–647. 90 F. Nadar, When I Was a Photographer, op. cit., p. 186–187. 91 É.- J. Marey, Du mouvement dans les fonctions de la vie, op. cit., p. 205. 92 E. Mach, The Science of Mechanics : A Critical and Historical Exposition of Its Principles, trans. T. J. McCormack (New York : Cambridge University Press, 2013 [ 1893 ]), p. 506–507. 93 M. Frizot, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 67–123. 94 M. Berthelot, “La science et la morale,” Revue de Paris, February 1, 1895, p. 449–469 ; C. Richet, “La science a-t-elle fait banqueroute ?,” Revue Scientifique (revue rose), no. 3, 1895, p. 33–39 ; F. Brunetière, La Science et la religion. Réponses à quelques objections (Paris : FirminDidot, 1895). Debate with commentary by H. W. Paul, “The Debate over the Bankruptcy of Science in 1895,”

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French Historical Studies V, no. 3, 1968, p. 299–327. 95 See G. Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria. Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. A. Hartz (Cambridge MA, London: The MIT Press, 2004). 96 E. Straus, Vom Sinn der Sinne. Ein Beitrag zur Grundlegung der Psychologie (Berlin, New York : Springer-Verlag, 1956). 97 É.- J. Marey, “Des mouvements que certains animaux exécutent pour retomber sur leurs pieds, lorsqu’ils sont précipités d’un lieu élevé,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CXVIII, 1894, p.714–717. See L. Mannoni, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 335–339. 98 A. Allais, “Un peu de mécanique,” Deux et deux font cinq (1895), Œuvres anthumes, I (Paris : Robert Laffont, 1989), p. 513–514. 99 A. Rodin, L’Art. Entretiens réunis par Paul Gsell (Paris : Grasset, 1911), p. 61–63. 100 Ibid., p. 57–58. 101 F. Dagognet, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 13, 44. 102 M. Braun, Picturing Time, op. cit., p. 278–281. 103 M. Frizot, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 93–94, 285. 104 M. Merleau-Ponty, L’Oeil et l’esprit (Paris : Gallimard, 1964), p. 78, 80–81. 105 H. Bergson, É.- J. Marey et al., “Groupe d’études de phénomènes psychiques” (1901), in Mélanges, ed. A. Robinet (Paris : PUF, 1972), p. 509–510. 106 See A. Marietti, Les Formes du mouvement chez Bergson (Paris : Vrin, 1953). 107 H. Bergson, L’Idée de lieu chez Aristote (1889), trans. from Latin by R. Mossé-Bastide and G. Soury, in Mélanges, op. cit., p. 1–56. 108 H. Bergson, Extraits de Lucrèce avec commentaires, études et notes (1883), in Mélanges, op. cit., p. 265–310. 109 H. Bergson, Matter and Memory (1896), trans. N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer (London : George Allen & Unwin LTD., 1911), p. 248. 110 Ibid., p. 290–291. 111 Ibid., p. 273. 112 Ibid., p. 259. 113 Ibid., p. 255. 114 Ibid., p. 276–277.

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115 H. Bergson, Creative Evolution (1907), trans. A. Mitchell (New York : The Modern Library, 1944), p. 353, 171, 55–56, 230. 116 Ibid., p. 239. 117 H. Bergson, “The philosophy of Claude Bernard” (1913), The Creative Mind (1934), trans. M. L. Andison (New York : Philosophical Library, 1946). 118 Let us note that this analysis, while valid for Marey’s experiments, appears to ignore the qualitative geometries that were emerging at this time : “Bergson [ ... ] denounces mathematics’ incapacity to express quality, alteration, and becoming, at a time when geometry has finished untying its fate from that of metrics, when the science of situations and forms has fulfilled the revolution begun by Monge’s descriptive geometry and Poncelet’s projective geometry, at a time when space purifies itself of its thousand-year-old, strictly historical and thus contingent, relationship with the measuring technique….” G. Canguilhem, “Le concept et la vie” (1966), Etudes d’histoire et de philosophie des sciences, op. cit., p. 339. See also M. Capek, Bergson and Modern Physics. A Reinterpretation and Re-Evaluation (Dordrecht : Reidel, 1971). A work-in-progress by Elie During may well call into question some preconceived notions about Bergson’s relationship to the science of his time. 119 H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, op. cit., p. XX. 120 Ibid., p. 6. 121 Ibid., p. 27. 122 Ibid., p. 211. 123 H. Bergson, Time and Free Will (1889), trans. F. L. Pogson (London : George Allen & Unwin LTD., 1910), p. 103. 124 Ibid., p. 105. 125 Ibid., p. 104. 126 Ibid., p. 110. 127 Ibid., p. 232. 128 Ibid., p. 116. 129 H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, op. cit., p. 31, 71–72, 77, 73–74. 130 Ibid., p. 36. 131 Ibid., p. 37. 132 Ibid., p. 372. 133 Ibid., p. 396. 134 Ibid., p. 361. 135 Ibid., p. 141–142.

136 H. Bergson, Laughter, an essay on the meaning of the comic (1900), trans. C. Brereton and F. Rothwell, (New York : Macmillan, 1911), p. 14a. 137 Ibid., p. 17a. 138 H. Bergson, “Histoire de l’idée de temps” (1902), in Annales bergsoniennes, I. Bergson dans le siècle, ed. F. Worms (Paris : PUF, 2002), p. 25–68. 139 H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, op. cit., p. 296–395. 140 Ibid., p. 297. 141 See G. Didi-Huberman, “L’image-sillage,” L’Inactuel, no. 10, 2003, p. 111–126, and G. Didi-Huberman, “L’image est le mouvant,” Intermédialités, no. 3, 2004, p. 11–30. These texts discuss G. Deleuze, Cinéma 1. L’image-mouvement (Paris : Minuit, 1983), p. 9–22. On Bergson and cinema, see in particular G. Fihman, “Deleuze, Bergson, Zénon d’Elée et le cinema,” in Der Film bei Deleuze – Le cinéma selon Deleuze, ed. O. Fahle and L. Engell (Weimar, Paris : Verlag der Bauhaus-Universität Weimar/Presses de la Sorbonne nouvelle, 1997), p. 62–73 ; E. SeknadjeAskénazi, “A propos de Bergson et du cinema,” in Analyses et réflexions sur Henri Bergson : La Pensée et le Mouvant, ed. F. Worms (Paris : Ellipses, 1998), p. 113–122 ; D. Château, Cinéma et philosophie (Paris : Nathan, 2003), p. 52–58. 142 H. Bergson, Letter to Floris Delattre, August 24, 1923, in Mélanges, op. cit., p. 1417–1418. 143 H. Bergson, “Introduction : Retrograde Movement of the True Growth of Truth,” The Creative Mind, op. cit., p. 17. [ Translation modified ] 144 H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, op. cit., p. 334–335. 145 Ibid., p. 271–272. 146 Ibid., p. 328. 147 H. Bergson, “Introduction : Retrograde Movement of the True Growth of Truth,” The Creative Mind, op. cit. p. 14–18. 148 H. Bergson, “Notes sur les origines psychologiques de notre croyance à la loi de causalité” (1900), in Mélanges, op. cit., p. 419–428. 149 H. Bergson, “The Possible and the Real,” The Creative Mind, op. cit., p. 109. [ Translation modified ] 150 Ibid., p. 108. [ Translation modified ]

151 See F. Hulak (ed.), Pensée psychotique et création de systèmes : la machine mise à nu (Ramonville Saint-Agne : Erès, 2003). 152 G. Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958), trans. C. Malaspina and J. Rogove (Minneapolis : Univocal Publishing, 2017), p. 17. 153 Ibid., p. 61. 154 On the fundamental relation between technics and time—through a perspective derived from Gilbert Simondon’s work—, see B. Paradis, “Technique et temporalité,” in Gilbert Simondon, une pensée de l’individuation et de la technique, ed. G. Châtelet (Paris : Albin Michel, 1994), p. 220– 238, and especially B. Stiegler, Technics and Time (Stanford : Stanford University Press, 1998) (three volumes, the last of which is devoted to cinema). 155 M. Frizot, “Un instant, s’il vous plaît…,” in Le Temps d’un mouvement. Aventures et mésaventures de l’instant photographique, ed. R. Delpire, M. Frizot and F. Ducros (Paris : Centre national de la photographie, 1987), p. 9. 156 M. Frizot, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 101–107. For a critique of the photographic snapshot through the work of Albert Londe, see D. Bernard and A. Gunthert, L’Instant rêvé, op. cit. 157 M. Frizot, “Un instant, s’il vous plaît…,” op. cit., p. 7. 158 É.- J. Marey, “La chronophotographie, nouvelle méthode pour analyser le mouvement,” op. cit., p. 690. 159 See F. Albera, “Pour une épistémologie du montage : le moment Marey,” Arrêt sur image, fragmentation du temps, op. cit., p. 31–46. 160 É.- J. Marey, Movement, op. cit., p. 62. [ Translation modified ] 161 Ibid., p. 62–66. 162 Ibid., p. 61. 163 See M. Milner, La Fantasmagorie. Essai sur l’optique fantastique (Paris : PUF, 1982), p. 139–201. 164 V. Hugo, letter from August 22, 1837, quoted by M.-E. Mélon, “Le voyage en train et en images: une expérience photographique de la discontinuité et de la fragmentation,” in Arrêt sur image, fragmentation du temps, op. cit., p. 49. See also C. Chéroux,

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“Vues du train. Vision et mobilité au XIXe siècle,” Etudes photographiques, no. 1, 1996, p. 73–88; T. Hensel, “Mobile Augen. Pfade zu einer Geschichte des sich bewegenden Betracheters,” in Sehmaschinen und Bilderwelten. Ich sehe was, was du nicht sich! Die Sammlung Werner Nekes, ed. B. von Dewitz and W. Nekes (Cologne, Gottingen : Museum Ludwig/Steidl Verlag, 2002), p. 54–64. 165 É.- J. Marey, “La chronophotographie, nouvelle méthode pour analyser le mouvement,” op. cit., p. 58. 166 É.- J. Marey, Movement, op. cit., p. 57–58. [ Translation modified ] 167 Ibid., p. 59. See L. Mannoni, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 142, which quotes E. Onimus : “We had the idea of applying photography to this typ. of research (on the movements of the heart). We based ourselves on the fact that a photographic print often gives two distinct images of an object if, during the time of exposure, the object did not remain entirely still. This is what photographers refer to as out-of-focus [ flou ]. The heart, during its contraction and dilation, assumes various positions, and thus, photography can be able to represent these positions. Indeed, we were able to obtain, for tortoises and frogs, images of the heart in systole and diastole.” 168 See L. Mannoni, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 226, 264. 169 M. Frizot, “Les courbes du temps,” op. cit., p. 78. See also P.- A. Michaud, “Étienne-Jules Marey et la question des mobiles,” Cinémathèque, no. 10, 1996, p. 104, which speaks of a crisis of the “observed stations” (stations observées) in favor of “evanescent transitions.” 170 É.- J. Marey, Movement, op. cit., p. 234. [ Translation modified ] 171 A. Rodin, L’Art, op. cit., p. 58. 172 G. Guéroult, letter to É.- J. Marey from December 19, 1890, quoted by L. Mannoni, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 166–168. 173 H. Bergson, Matter and Memory, op. cit., p. 31–32. 174 Ibid., p. 194, 291, 171. 175 H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, op. cit., p. 325. 176 Ibid., p. 52–53.

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177 M. Merleau-Ponty, “Bergson se faisant” (1959), Eloge de la philosophie et autres essais (Paris : Gallimard, 1989), p. 239–241. On Bergson and phenomenology, see E. During, “Présence et répétition : Bergson chez les phénoménologues,” Critique LIX, no. 678, 2003, p. 848–864. 178 G. Deleuze, “Bergson, 1859–1941” (1959), Desert Islands and Other Texts, trans. M. Taormina (Cambridge MA, London : The MIT Press, 2004), p. 25. G. Deleuze, “Bergson’s Conception of Difference” (1956), op. cit., p. 36. 179 G. Deleuze, “Bergson’s Conception of Difference” (1956), op. cit., p. 32. 180 Ibid., p. 37. 181 G. Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. H. Tomlinson and B. Habberjam (New York : Zone Books, 1991), p. 37–49. 182 G.Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (New York : Columbia University Press, 1995). 183 É.- J. Marey, Recherches sur la circulation du sang, op. cit. ; É.- J. Marey, Physiologie médicale de la circulation du sang, op. cit. ; É.- J. Marey, La circulation du sang à l’état physiologique et dans les maladies (Paris : Masson, 1881). 184 É.- J. Marey, “Des mouvements que certains animaux exécutent pour retomber sur leurs pieds, lorsqu’ils sont précipités d’un lieu élevé,” op. cit., p. 714–717. See L. Mannoni, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 335– 338 ; M. Frizot, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 97–98. 185 É.- J. Marey, Physiologie du mouvement. Le vol des oiseaux (Paris : Masson, 1890). 186 É.- J. Marey, Movement, op. cit., p. 223–254. 187 Ibid., p. 246–247. 188 Ibid., p. 211. 189 Ibid., p. 212. 190 Ibid., p 220–221. See also É.- J. Marey, “Des mouvements de natation de la raie,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CXVI, 1893, p. 77–81. L. Mannoni, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 245–250, lists the films made by Marey, at the start of the 1890s, on the movements of the skate, the seahorse, the octopus, etc. 191 É.- J. Marey, La Méthode graphique, op. cit., p. 336.

192 É.- J. Marey, Movement, op. cit., p. 84–88. [ Translation modified ] 193 É.- J. Marey, Le Mouvement (Paris : Masson, 1894), p. 87–101. 194 G. W. Leibniz, Leibniz and dynamics : the texts of 1692, trans. Pierre Costabel, from the French by Robert Edwin Witton Maddison (Paris : Hermann, 1973). See M. Fichant, “Pour la beauté et pour l’harmonie : le meilleur de la dynamique” (1992), Science et métaphysique dans Descartes et Leibniz (Paris : PUF, 1998), p. 267–286. On the notion of “vis viva” and the rule for the composition of movements, see also P. Costabel, Leibniz et la dynamique en 1692. Textes et commentaires (Paris : Vrin, 1981), and L. Bouquiaux, L’Harmonie et le chaos. Le rationalisme leibnizien et la “nouvelle science” (Louvain, Paris : Peeters, 1994), p. 130–162. 195 H. Poincaré, Théorie des tourbillons (Paris : Georges Carré, 1893). 196 P. Duhem, Recherches sur l’hydrodynamique (Paris : Gauthier-Villars, 1903–1904). See in particular I, p. 65– 208 (“Propagation des discontinuités, des ondes et des quasi-ondes”). 197 E.-J. Marey, La Méthode graphique, op. cit., p. 65. 198 Ibid., p. 214–229 and 343–367. 199 Ibid., p. 641–652. 200 É.- J. Marey, “La locomotion aquatique étudiée par la chronophotographie,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CXI, 1890, p. 213–216 ; É.- J. Marey, “Le mouvement des êtres microscopiques analysés par la chronophotographie,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CXIV, 1892, p. 989–990. 201 É.- J. Marey, “Le mouvement des liquides étudié par la chronophotographie,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CXVI, 1893, p. 913 (article reprinted under the title “Hydrodynamique expérimentale : le mouvement des liquides étudié par la chronophotographie,” La Nature, no. 1040, 1893, p. 359–363). 202 É.- J. Marey, Movement, op. cit., p. 91. 203 É.- J. Marey, “Le mouvement des liquides étudié par la chronophotographie”, op. cit., p. 923–924. On Marey’s hydrodynamic experiments, see P. Noguès, Recherches expérimentales de Marey sur le mouvement

dans l’air et dans l’eau (Paris : Gauthier-Villars, 1933), p. 81–90 ; L. Mannoni, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 304–307. 204 É.- J. Marey, “Pneumographie. Étude graphique des mouvements respiratoires et des influences qui les modifient,” Journal de l’anatomie et de la physiologie normales et pathologiques II, 1895, p. 425–453. 205 É.- J. Marey, Physiologie du mouvement. Le vol des oiseaux, op. cit., p. 248–264. 206 É.- J. Marey, “Physiologie du vol des oiseaux : du point d’appui de l’aile sur l’air,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences LXXVIII, 1874, p. 117–121 ; É.- J. Marey, “Expériences sur la résistance de l’air, pour servir à la physiologie du vol des oiseaux,” École pratique des hautes études. Physiologie expérimentale : travaux du laboratoire de M. Marey, année 1875 (Paris : Masson, 1876), p. 215–253 ; É.- J. Marey, “Mécanique animale : des effets d’un vent intermittent dans le vol à voile,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CIX, 1889, p. 551–554. 207 É.- J. Marey, “Changements de direction et de vitesse d’un courant d’air qui rencontre des corps de formes diverses,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CXXXII, 1901, p. 1291–1296. See L. Mach, “Sur la manière de rendre apparentes les lignes d’un courant aérien,” Revue de l’aéronautique et de la physique de l’atmosphère, no. 9, 1896, p. 129– 139 ; H. S. Hele-Shaw, “The Motion of a Perfect Liquid,” Smithsonian Report for 1899, p. 107–118 ; L. Bull, “La photographie des mouvements invisibles. Expériences de M. HeleShaw,” La Nature, no. 1476, 1901, p. 247–250. 208 É.- J. Marey, “Des mouvements de l’air lorsqu’il rencontre des surfaces de différentes formes,” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des sciences CXXXI, 1900, p. 160 (reprinted in Bulletin de la Société française de photographie, no. 17, 1900, p. 419–422). 209 Ibid., p. 162. 210 See Laurent Mannoni’s essay in this volume, p. 119–133. 211 É.- J. Marey, “Le mouvement de l’air étudié par la chronophotographie,” Journal de physique théorique et

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appliquée, 4th series, I, 1902, p. 130–132. 212 É.- J. Marey, “Les mouvements de l’air étudiés par la chronophotographie,” La Nature, no. 1476, 1901, p. 233. 213 É.- J. Marey, “Le mouvement de l’air étudiés par la chronophotographie,” op. cit., p. 132. 214 É.- J. Marey, “Des mouvements de l’air lorsqu’il rencontre des surfaces de différentes formes,” op. cit., p. 162. 215 See L. Bull, “La photographie des mouvements invisibles,” op. cit., p. 247–250 ; P. Noguès, Recherches expérimentales de Marey sur le mouvement dans l’air et dans l’eau, op. cit., p. 81–107. 216 L. Mannoni, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 368 ; C. Chéroux, “La mécanique des fluides selon Marey,” Vision machine (Nantes, Paris : Musée des Beaux-Arts/Somogy, 2000), p. 71. 217 F. Albera, “Pour une épistémographie du montage,” op. cit., p. 35. 218 Ibid., p. 42 (quoting G. Bachelard, Le Nouvel esprit scientifique [Paris : PUF, 1934], p. 52). 219 See P. Rousseau, “Un langage universel. L’esthétique scientifique aux origines de l’abstraction,” in Aux origines de l’abstraction, 1800–1914, ed. S. Lemoine and P. Rousseau (Paris : Musée d’Orsay/RMN, 2003), p. 19–33. 220 See G. Roque, “Ce grand monde des vibrations qui est à la base de l’univers,” in Aux origines de l’abstraction, 1800–1914, op. cit., p. 51–67. On Marey and Demenÿ’s experiments in the field of sounds and phonetics, see É.- J. Marey, “L’inscription des phénomènes phonétiques,” Revue générale des sciences pures et appliquées IX, 1898, p. 445–456 and 482–490. 221 G. Tissandier, Les Poussières de l’air (Paris : Gauthier-Villars, 1877). 222 Thank you to Laurent Mannoni for providing me with this example. Sadly, the film in question has been lost. See, for photography, L. Lebart, “Les archives du ciel. La photographie scientifique des nuages (1879–1923),” Etudes photographiques, no. 1, 1996, p. 56–72. 223 A. Lafay, “La photographie du vent,” La Technique aéronautique III, 1911, p. 169–177.

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224 See in particular M. Lesieur, La Turbulence (Grenoble : Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, 1994) ; M. Lesieur, “Fluides et tourbillons,” in Université de tous les savoirs, XVII. Les états de la matière, ed. Y. Michaud (Paris : Odile Jacob, 2002), p. 21–44 ; G. Cohen-Tannoudji and M. Spiro, La Matière espace-temps. La logique des particules élémentaires (Paris : Fayard, 1990 [ 1986 ]) ; E. Guyon and J.-P. Hulin, Granites et fumées. Un peu d’ordre dans le mélange (Paris : Odile Jacob, 1997). 225 H. Bergson, É.- J. Marey et al., “Groupe d’études de phénomènes psychiques,” op. cit., p. 509–510. Amongst Bergson’s works on these “psychic phenomena,” see H. Bergson, “De la simulation inconsciente dans l’état d’hypnotisme” (1896), Mélanges, op. cit., p. 333–341 ; H. Bergson et al., “Groupe d’études de phénomènes psychiques : les courbes respiratoires pendant l’hypnose” (1904), ibid., p. 639–642 ; H. Bergson, “‘Fantômes de vivants’ et ‘recherche psychique’” (1913), in L’Energie spirituelle (1919), ed. A. Robinet, in Œuvres, op. cit., p. 860–878. These experiments were conducted with Eusapia Palladino who, moreover, broke, during one of these experiments, the Mareysian device destined to record her psychic reactions. See C. Blondel, “Eusapia Palladino : la méthode expérimentale et la ‘diva des savants’,” Des savants face à l’occulte, op. cit., p. 143–171. 226 See H. Coupin, “L’inscription de l’état d’âme,” op. cit., p. 241–243. L. Mannoni, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 364–368, showed the role played by Charles Comte, Marey’s laboratory assistant, in the exploration of this new field of psychophysiological studies. 227 H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, op. cit., p. 243. 228 Ibid., p. 244–245. 229 Ibid., p. 371. 230 H. Bergson, “Introduction (Part II),” The Creative Mind, op. cit., p. 244–245. 231 C. Bernard, Introduction to the study of experimental medicine, op. cit., p. 21. “Such experiments of adjustment [ expériences de tâtonnement ], which are very common [ ... ], may be called ‘experiments in order to

see’ since they are intended to make a first observation emerge, unforeseen and undetermined in advance, but whose appearance may suggest an experimental idea and open a path for research.” [ Translation modified ] 232 H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, op. cit., p. 267. [ Translation modified ] 233 Ibid., p. 260. 234 H. Bergson, “Introduction (Part II)”, op. cit., p. 38. 235 Ibid., p. 38. 236 H. Bergson, “Introduction (Part I)”, op. cit., p. 7. 237 H. Bergson, Creative Evolution, op. cit., p. 273. 238 Ibid., p. 211. 239 Ibid., p. 291–292. 240 H. Bergson, “Life and Consciousness,” Mind-Energy, trans. H. Wildon Carr (Westport, London : Greenwood Press, 1975 [ 1920 ]), p. 20. 241 See M. Serres, Hermès IV. La distribution (Paris : Minuit, 1977), p. 127– 142, and Hermès V. Le passage du Nord-Ouest (Paris : Minuit, 1980), p. 142–154, which views Bergson’s philosophy—its “novel energy,” its “difference”—as an “isomorphism,” be it conflictual, of thermodynamics and of Ludwig Boltzmann. I would like to thank Elie During for pointing this out to me. 242 H. Bergson, “On The Pragmatism Of William James : Truth And Reality,” The Creative Mind, op. cit., p. 256. 243 Ibid., p. 249–250. 244 H. Bergson, “The Philosophy Of Claude Bernard,” The Creative Mind, op. cit., p. 246. 245 Ibid., p. 245. 246 H. Bergson, “Introduction to Metaphysics,” The Creative Mind, op. cit., p. 198. 247 Ibid., p. 237. 248 M. Frizot, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 15, 17. 249 E. Littré, Dictionnaire de la langue française, op. cit., II, p. 1568. 250 See Trésor de la langue française. Dictionnaire de la langue du XIXe et du XXe siècle (1789–1960), VIII (Paris : Éditions du CNRS, 1980), p. 470 : “Experimental. 1. Based on scientific experiment, systematically uses experimentation. Spec. Experimental method. Method admitting only principles based on a fact. 2. Which essentially uses experimentation :

psychology, experimental medicine.” The second meaning of the word— “undertaken on a trial basis”—leads to an artistic example, albeit more recent (P. Schaeffer, A la recherche d’une musique concrète [ Paris : Le Seuil, 1952 ], p. 228). It would seem that the nineteenth century ignores the aesthetic acceptance of the word “experimental.” 251 M. Frizot, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 69, 71. 252 See M. Braun, Picturing Time, op. cit., p. 150–198. 253 L. Bull, La cinématographie (Paris : Armand Colin, 1928), p. V–VI ; L. Bull, Cinématographie des mouvements ultra-rapides (Paris : Palais de la découverte, 1941). See G. Brunel, La photographie et la projection du mouvement. Historique, dispositifs, appareils cinématographiques (Paris : Gauthier-Villars, 1899), with a foreword by É.- J. Marey ; J. Ducom, Le cinématographie scientifique et industriel. Traité pratique de cinématographie (Paris : Geisler, 1911) ; B. Coe, The History of Movie Photography (Westfield : Eastview Editions, 1981) ; D. Pesenti Compagnoni, Verso il cinema. Macchine, spettacoli e mirabili visioni (Turin : UTET, 1995), p. 182–203 ; F. Kittler, Optische Medien : Berliner Vorlesung 1999 (Berlin : Merve Verlag, 2002), p. 210– 218. L. Mannoni, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 13, reminds us that the some 400 films made by Marey “starting in 1889, on transparent celluloid strips, represent the first films in the history of French cinema, long before the arrival of the Lumière brothers and their ‘cinématographe’.” See also ibid., p. 236–251, 277–304, 335–351 ; L. Mannoni, Le Grand Art de la lumière et de l’ombre. Archéologie du cinéma (Paris : Nathan, 1994), p. 299–337. On Georges Demenÿ, see L. Mannoni (ed.), Georges Demenÿ, pionnier du cinéma (Paris, Lille, Douais : Cinémathèque française/Université de Lille III/ Editions Pagine, 1997). 254 M. Braun, Picturing Time, op. cit., p. 264–317 ; M. Frizot, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 17–20, 279–291. 255 F. Dagognet, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 99, 101–131.

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256 R. Pierantoni, Forma fluens : Il movimento e la sua rappresentazione nella scienza, nell’arte e nella tecnica (Turin : Boringhieri, 1986), p. 551–565. 257 É.- J. Marey, “Photographie expérimentale,” op. cit., p. 95–104. 258 H. Bergson, “The Perception of Change,” The Creative Mind, op. cit., p. 156–158. 259 Ibid., p. 158. 260 Ibid.. 159. 261 Ibid., p. 159–160. [ Translation modified ] 262 Ibid., p. 162–163. 263 Ibid., p. 159–160. [ Translation modified ] 264 É.- J. Marey, Movement, op. cit., p. 135. 265 Ibid., p. 80. 266 Ibid., p. 169–185 ; É.- J. Marey and G. Demenÿ, Études de physiologie artistique faites au moyen de la chronophotographie (Paris : Société d’éditions scientifiques, 1893). The subtitle (“Première série. No 1. Des mouvements de l’homme”) suggests that several volumes were planned. On this, see L. Mannoni, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 309–319 ; C. Pociello, La Science en mouvements. Étienne-Jules Marey et Georges Demenÿ, 1870–1920 (Paris : PUF, 1999), p. 200–225. On the “artistic clinic,” see J. M. Charcot and P. Richer, Les Démoniaques dans l’art (1887), ed. and commentary by G. Didi-Huberman and P. Fédida (Paris : Macula, 1984). 267 É.- J. Marey, Movement, op. cit., p. 177. [ Translation modified ] 268 Ibid., p. 169. [ Translation modified ] 269 Ibid., p. 170 (Emphasis added). [ Translation modified ] 270 Ibid., p. 205–206 (Emphasis added). 271 Ibid., p. 171–173, 177. [ Translation modified ] 272 Ibid., p. 182–183 . [ Translation modified ] 273 E. Véron, L’Esthétique (Paris : Reinwald, 1878), p. 39–43, 48, 289–298, 448–449. 274 G. Guéroult, “Formes, couleurs et mouvements,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, XXV, February 1882, p. 176–179. 275 J. M. Gurau, Les Problèmes de l’esthétique contemporaine (Paris : Alcan, 1884), p. 38. See H. Spencer, “Gracefulness” (1852), The Works of Herbert Spencer, XIV. Essays : Scientific, Political and Speculative, II (London :

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Williams & Norgate, 1868–1875), p. 381–386. 276 P. Souriau, L’Esthétique du mouvement (Paris : Alcan, 1889), p. 5, 9, 37–49, 114–161, 244–246. 277 R. de La Sizeranne, Les Questions esthétiques contemporaines (Paris : Hachette, 1904), p. 197–203. 278 H. Bergson, “Philosophical Intuition,” The Creative Mind, op. cit., p. 133. 279 Ibid., p. 127. On the image and the access to intuition in Bergson, see in particular L. Adolphe, La Dialectique des images chez Bergson (Paris : PUF, 1951) ; L. Adolphe, L’Univers bergsonien (Paris : Éditions du Vieux Colombier, 1955), p. 159–230 ; P. Naulin, “Le problème de la conscience et la notion d’image,” Bergson : naissance d’une philosophie. Actes du colloque de Clermont-Ferrand (Paris : PUF, 1990), p. 97–109 ; J.-F. Bordron, “Bergson et les images. L’iconicité de la pensée dans ‘Le possible et le réel’,” in Lire Bergson : “Le possible et le réel”, ed. F. Cossutta (Paris : PUF, 1998), p. 159–181. 280 H. Bergson, “Philosophical Intuition,” The Creative Mind, op. cit., p. 140. 281 Ibid., p. 143. 282 S. Mallarmé, “D’une méthode” (1865– 1870) and “Notes” (1869–1895), Œuvres complètes, op. cit., p. 849–856. 283 S. Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command. A contribution to anonymous history (New York : Oxford University Press, 1948), p. 24. More recently, Joel Snyder has spoken of Marey in terms of a “mechanical imagination.” See J. Snyder, “Visualization and Visibility,” in Picturing Science, Producing Art, ed. C. A. Jones and P. Galison (New York, London : Routledge, 1998), p. 396. 284 See L. Mannoni, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 55–59. Let us not forget the central role occupied by Leonardo da Vinci in Pierre Duhem’s studies— which Marey was naturally well aware of—on mechanics and hydrodynamics : P. Duhem, L’Évolution de la mécanique (Paris : Joanin, 1903) ; P. Duhem, Recherches sur l’hydrodynamique, op. cit. Let us also recall that Manuscript E of the Institut de France, dedicated to the flight of birds, had been published in 1888 by C. Ravaisson Mollien, Les Manus-

crits C, E et K de la bibliothèque de l’Institut (Paris : Quantin, 1888). 285 E. Panofsky, The Codex Huygens and Leonardo da Vinci’s Art Theory (London : The Warburg Institute, 1940) ; M. Kemp. Leonardo da Vinci. The Marvelous Works of Nature and Man (Cambridge MA, London : Harvard University Press, 1981), p. 285–329 ; B. Croce and E. Malara (eds.), Leonardo e le vie d’acqua (Florence : Giunti Barberà, 1983). 286 P. Valéry, Leonardo, Poe, Da Vinci, Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Volume 8, trans. M. Cowley and J. R. Lawler (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1972), p. 9. [ Translation modified ] 287 Ibid., p. 144. 288 Ibid., p. 153. 289 Ibid., p. 16. 290 Ibid., p. 13, 28. 291 Ibid., p. 11. 292 Ibid., p. 24. 293 Ibid., p. 21, 26. 294 Ibid., p. 34–35. 295 H. Bergson, “The Life And Work Of Ravaisson,” The Creative Mind, op. cit., p. 268. 296 Ibid., p. 263–264. 297 Ibid., p. 272–274. 298 É.- J. Marey, Physiologie du mouvement, op. cit., p. 28–29, 77, 84. 299 H. Bergson, “The Life And Work Of Ravaisson,” The Creative Mind, op. cit., p. 288–289. 300 H. Bergson, Time and Free Will : An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness, op. cit., p. 11–12. 301 É.- J. Marey, Movement, op. cit., p. 100. [ Translation modified ] 302 M. Frizot, Étienne-Jules Marey, op. cit., p. 79. 303 É.- J. Marey, Movement, op. cit., p. 77. 304 Ibid., p. 184. See M. Emmanuel, La Danse grecque antique d’après les monuments figurés (Paris : Hachette, 1896), p. V : “M. Hansen, ballet master of the opera [ ... ] led the chronophotographic experiments which sought to analyze and synthesize the dance’s movements. M. Marey had indeed put at my disposal his marvelous devices, and it is to his benevolence that I owe the series of images upon which most of my interpretations are based.” Marey also refers to the works of L. Heuzey, Recherches sur les figures de femmes voilées dans

305

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307

308 309

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l’art grec (Paris : Chamerot, 1873) ; L. Heuzey, “Du principe de la draperie antique,” Dictionnaire de l‘Académie des Beaux-Arts, V (Paris : Firmin-Didot, 1896), p. 186–206. See G. Didi-Huberman, Invention of Hysteria, op. cit., p. 222–258 and G. Didi-Huberman, The Surviving Image : Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms : Aby Warburg’s History of Art, trans. Harvey Mendelsohn (University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), p. 157–173, 215–235 ; G. Brandstetter, Tanz-Lektüren : Körperbilder und Raumfiguren der Avantgarde (Frankfurt : Fischer, 1995), p. 118–289 ; T. Gunning, “Bodies in Motion : The Pas de Deux of the Ideal and the Material at the Fin-deSiècle,” Arrêt sur images, fragmentation du temps, op. cit., p. 17–30. See C. Féré, Sensation et mouvement. Etudes expérimentales de psycho-mécanique (Paris : Alcan, 1887) ; K. Bücher, Arbeit und Rhythmus (Leipzig : Hirzel, 1897) ; O. L. Forel, Le Rythme. Étude psychologique (Leipzig : Barth, 1920) ; H. Mehrtens, “Bilder der Bewegung – Bewegung der Bilder. Frank B. Gilbreth und die Visualisierungstechniken des Bewegungsstudiums,” Bildwelten des Wissens. Kunsthistorisches Jahrbuch für Bildkritik I, no. 1, 2003, p. 44–53 ; A. Pierre, “La musique des gestes. Sens du mouvement et images motrices dans les débuts de l’abstraction,” Aux origines de l’abstraction, op. cit., p. 85–101. On this very old conceptual opposition, see E. Benveniste, “La notion de ‘rythme’ dans son expression linguistique” (1951), Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris : Gallimard, 1966), p. 327–335. É.- J. Marey, “Des mouvements de l’air,” op. cit., p. 161. As an expansion, perhaps, of what D. Semin remarkably identified in “La ligne du célibat. Le hasard, l’arabesque et la volute : pour servir à une histoire du zigloogloo,” Les Cahiers du musée national d’Art moderne, no. 83, 2003, p. 39–55. C. Quiguer, Femmes et machines de 1900. Lecture d’une obsession Modern Style (Paris : Klincksieck, 1979), p. 26–28 (on the “pan feminization”

of space), p. 111–131 (on hair and vibration-lines), p. 197–326 (on biomechanics). See also B. Dijkstra, Idols of Perversity : Fantasies of Feminine Evil in Fin-de-Siècle Culture (New York : Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 83–119 (on “weightless woman” and woman of water) ; D. Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-siècle France : Politics, Psychology, and Style (Berkeley : University of California Press, 1992 [ 1989 ]), p. 186–207 (on the organic and the feminized) ; P. Thiébaud (ed.), 1900 (Paris : Galeries nationales du Grand Palais/ RMN, 2000), p. 255–313 (on feminization and biomorphism). 311 See A. Saint-Léon, La Sténochorégraphie, ou l’art d’écrire promptement la danse (Paris : Brandus, 1852) ; F. A. Zorn, Grammatik der Tanzkunst : Theoretischer und praktischer Unterricht in der Tanzkunst und Tanzschreibkunst oder Choreographie (Leipzig : Weber, 1887) ; V. J. Stepanov, L’Alphabet des mouvements du corps humain. Essai d’enregistrement des mouvements du corps humain au moyen des signes musicaux (Paris : Zouckermann, 1892). See A. Hutchinson Guest, Choreo-Graphics. A Comparison of Dance Notation Systems from the Fifteenth Century to the Present (New York, London : Gordon & Breach, 1989), p. 28–101. For a more contemporary take on these questions, see L. Louppe (ed.), Danses tracées. Dessins et notations de chorégraphes (Marseille, Paris : Centre de la Vieille Charité/Editions Dis Voir, 1991) ; G. Brandstetter, “Choreography As a Cenotaph : The Memory of Movement,” in ReMembering the Body, ed. G. Brandstetter and H. Völckers (Ostfildern-Ruit : Hatje Cantz, 2000), p. 102–134. 312 See C. Baudelaire, “Le serpent qui danse” (1857), Œuvres complètes, I, ed. C. Pichois (Paris : Gallimard, 1975), p. 29–30 ; F. Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), trans. R. Speirs (Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 44–45 ; D. Priddin, The Art of Dance in French Literature, from Théophile Gautier to Paul Valéry (London : Black, 1952) ; M. Wienholz, Französische Tanzkritik im Jahrhundert als Spiegel ästhetischer Bewusstseinsbildung. Théophile

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Gautier, Jules Lemaître, Stéphane Mallarmé (Bern, Frankfurt : Peter Lang, 1974) ; G. Gumpert, Die Rede vom Tanz : Körperästhetik in der Literatur der Jahrhundertwende (Literatur und andere Künste) (Munich : Wilhelm Fink, 1994) ; G. Ducrey, Corps et graphies. Poétique de la danseuse à la fin du XIXe siècle (Paris : Honoré Champion, 1996) ; D. Kramer-Lauff, Tanz und Tänzerisches in Rilkes Lyrik (Munich : Wilhelm Fink, 1969). 313 I. Duncan, My Life (New York, London : Liveright Publishing Corporation, 1927), p. 22 ; M. Wigman, The Language of Dance (1963), trans. W. Sorell (Middleton : Wesleyan University Press, 1966), p. 73. 314 H. de Balzac, Théorie de la démarche (1833) (Paris : Albin Michel, 1990), p. 26–27. 315 Ibid., p. 51, 75. 316 Ibid., p. 52, 77. 317 Ibid., p. 37. 318 É.- J. Marey, Movement, op. cit., p. 312–313. [ Translation modified ] 319 S. Mallarmé, “Ballets” (1886), Œuvres complètes, op. cit., p. 295–296, 303. 320 Ibid., p. 304. 321 Ibid., p. 305–306. 322 S. Mallarmé, “Le seul, il le fallait fluide…,” Œuvres completes, op. cit., p. 311. On Mallarmé’s poetics of dance, see J.-P. Richard, L’Univers imaginaire de Mallarmé (Paris : Le Seuil, 1961), p. 317–320, 409–419 ; G. Ducrey, Corps et graphies, op. cit., p. 357–399 ; Z. Simonffy, “L’espace de la danse ou la fiction de l’espace. Quelques remarques programmatiques sur Mallarmé,” in Ecrire la danse, ed. A. Montadon (ClermontFerrand : Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 1999), p. 195–216. 323 P. Valéry, “Dance and the Soul” (1921), Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume 4 : Dialogues, trans. W. McCausland (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1989), p. 38. 324 Ibid., p. 57. 325 Ibid., p. 44–45. 326 P. Valéry, Letter to Louis Séchan (August 1930), Œuvres, II. ed. J. Hytier (Paris : Gallimard, 1960), p. 1408. 327 P. Valéry, Degas, Manet, Morisot, trans. D. Paul (New York : Pantheon Books, 1960), p. 27.

328 Ibid., p. 1173. On the “dance” of jellyfish, see É.- J. Marey, Movement, op. cit., p. 214–215. 329 See L. Fuller, Ma vie et la danse. Autobiographie (1908) (Paris : L’Oeil d’or, 2002), p. 22–32 ; G. Brandstetter and B. M. Ochaim, Loïe Fuller : Tanz, Licht-Spiel, Art Nouveau (Freiburg : Rombach, 1989), p. 92–100 ; G. Lista, Loïe Fuller, danseuse de la Belle Epoque (Paris : Stock/Somogy, 1994), p. 59–109. 330 S. Mallarmé, “Autre étude de danse : les fonds dans le ballet,” Œuvres complètes, op. cit., p. 307–309. 331 S. Mallarmé, “Le seul, il le fallait fluide…,” Œuvres complètes, op. cit., p. 311. 332 See in particular, V. Jeammet (ed.), Tanagra. Mythe et archéologie (Montréal, Paris : Musée des BeauxArts/Musée du Louvre/RMN, 2003). 333 A. Warburg, Sandro Botticellis “Geburt der Venus” und “Frühling” : eine Untersuchung über die Vorstellungen von der Antike in der italienischen Frührenaissance (Hamburg, Leipzig : Leopold Voss, 1893). 334 See G. Ducrey, Corps et graphies, op. cit., p. 421–429. 335 G. Lista, Loïe Fuller, op. cit., p. 594. 336 See L. Fuller, Ma vie et la danse, op. cit., p. 66–74 ; L. Fuller, “Écrits sur la danse” (1911–1914), Ma vie et la danse, op. cit., p. 173–174 ; G. Tissandier, “La science au théâtre : la danse serpentine,” La Nature, no. 1030, February 25, 1893, p. 205–206 ; G. Lista, Loïe Fuller, op. cit., p. 193– 194, 248–249, 324–325. 337 See L. Fuller, Ma vie et la danse, op. cit., p. 41–48 ; G. Lista, Loïe Fuller, op. cit., p. 238–240, 258–263, 305–307, 322–358, 476–477. 338 G. Lista, Loïe Fuller, op. cit., p. 594. 339 G. Lista, “Loïe Fuller et le cinéma”, in Loïe Fuller, danseuse de l’Art nouveau, ed. V. Thomas and J. Perrin (Nancy, Paris : Musée des BeauxArts/RMN, 2002), p. 76. 340 On the relationship between Duchamp and Marey, see J. Clair, Duchamp et la photographie. Essai sur un primat technique dans l’évolution d’une œuvre (Paris : Le Chêne, 1977), now included in Sur Marcel Duchamp et la fin de l’art (Paris : Gallimard, 2000), p. 200–

220. On the role of chance and the “art of letting go” (l’art de laisser tomber), see D. Semin, “La ligne du célibat,” op. cit., p. 39–41. 341 M. Duchamp, Duchamp du signe. Ecrits, ed. M. Sanouillet and E. Peterson (Paris : Flammarion, 1975), p. 46. 342 See J. Brun, “Le voyage dans le temps. De la chronophotographie au futurisme” in Temporalità e alienazione, ed. E. Castelli (Padua : Antonio Milani, 1975), p. 355–364 ; P. Berletto and G. Celant (eds.), VeliCittà. Cinema e futurismo (Milan : Bompiani, 1986) ; P. Hulten, “Étienne-Jules Marey,” in Futurisme et futurismes, ed. P. Hulten (Milan : Bompiani, 1986), p. 104–105 ; G. Lista, “La photographie futuriste, de Marey aux frères Bragaglia,” in Vitalité et contradictions de l’avant-garde : Italie-France, 1909–1924, ed. S. Briosi and H. Hillenaar (Paris : José Corti, 1988), p. 231–239 ; G. Lista, Cinema e fotografia futurista (Milan : Skira, 2001) ; M. Braun, Picturing Time, op. cit., p. 291–311 ; M. Braun, “Mouvement et modernisme : le travail d’Étienne-Jules Marey,” in Marey, pionnier de la synthèse du mouvement, op. cit., p. 21–36 ; M. Braun, “Fantasmes des vivants et des morts : Anton Giulio Bragaglia et la figuration de l’invisible,” trans. V. Lavoie, Études photographiques, no. 1, 1996, p. 41–55. For a more general overview, see S. Kern, The Culture of Time and Space, 1880–1918 (Cambridge MA : Harvard University Press, 1983). 343 See A. G. Bragaglia, Fotodinamismo futurista (1911), ed. A. Vigliani Bragaglia (Turin : Einaudi, 1970). 344 T. Lefebvre, “De la science à l’avant-garde. Petit panorama,” Images, science, mouvement. Autour de Marey (Paris : L’Harmattan-Sémia, 2003), p. 103–106. 345 See P. Thévenard and G. Tassel, Le Cinéma scientifique français (Paris : La Jeune Parque, 1948), p. 1–39. 346 É.- J. Marey, Movement, op. cit., p. 224. 347 See A. Kyrou, Le Surréalisme au cinéma (Paris : Le Terrain Vague, 1963), p. 175–178 ; I. Hedges, “Constellated Visions : Robert Desnos’s and Man Ray’s L’Etoile de Mer,” Dada/Surrealism, no. 15, 1986, p. 99–109 ;

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J.- M. Bouhours and P. de Haas (eds.), Man Ray, directeur de mauvais movies (Paris : Centre Georges Pompidou, 1997), p. 58–83. 348 See N. Ghali, L’Avant-garde cinématographique en France dans les années vingt : Idées, conceptions, théories (Paris : Éditions Paris Expérimental, 1995), p. 228–236 ; T. Lefebvre, “De la science à l’avantgarde,” op. cit., p. 106–109. 349 A. M. Bellows and M. McDougall (eds.), Science Is Fiction : the Films of Jean Painlevé (San Francisco : Brico Press, 2000), p. 107. 350 J. Painlevé, “Exemple de surréalisme : le cinéma,” Surréalisme, no. 1, 1924, p. 4. And a few pages further on, J. Painlevé, “Drame néo-zoologique,” ibid., p. 13, where one can read : “Soft is the plasmodium of the ascomycetes ; the eyeless prorhyncus has the dull color of the blind-born [ ... ].” 351 J. Painlevé, “Foreword” to P. Thévenard and G. Tassel, Le Cinéma scientifique français, op. cit., p. VII. 352 See H. Hazéra, “Jean Painlevé : la science et l’image,” Positif, no. 348, 1990, p. 31–35. 353 J. Painlevé, How Some Jellyfish Are Born, 1960 (35 mm, black and white, 14 min) ; J. Painlevé, Acera or The Witches’ Dance, 1972 (35 mm, color, 13 min). 354 J. Cassou, “L’art sous-marin” (1930), in Jean Painlevé (1902–1989) : photographies (Paris : Galerie Françoise Paviot, 1997), p. 3–6. 355 A. Bazin, “A propos de Jean Painlevé” (1947), Qu’est ce que le cinéma ?, I. Ontologie et langage (Paris : Le Cerf, 1958), p. 37–39. See also, J.- J. Henry, “Jean Painlevé : voir d’abord,” Cahiers du cinéma, no. 423, 1989, p. VI–VII ; F. Grafe, Ein Wilderer : Jean Painlevé, 1902–1989 (Basel : Stroemfeld, 1997) ; R. Rugoff, “Fluid Mechanics,” Science Is Fiction : the films of Jean Painlevé, op. cit., p. 48–57. 356 La Révolution surréaliste, no. 1, 1924, p. 4 ; no. 6, 1926, p. 1 ; no. 7, 1927, p. 24 ; no. 11, 1928, p. 27 ; no. 12, 1929, p. 21. 357 L. Aragon, “L’ombre de l’inventeur,” La Révolution surréaliste, no. 1, 1924, p. 22. See also the tribute paid to George Demenÿ in F. Fels, “L’harmonie des mouvements,” Action, I, no. 1, 1920, p. 71–74.

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358 M. Jean, “Chronogrammes,” Minotaure, no. 1, 1933, p. 4. 359 See A. Scharf, “Max Ernst, Étienne-Jules Marey, and the Poetry of Scientific Illustration,” in One Hundred Years of Photographic History. Essays in Honor of Beaumont Newhall, ed. V. D. Coke (Albuquerque : University of New Mexico Press, 1975), p. 117–126 ; C. Stokes, “The Scientific Methods of Max Ernst : His Use of Scientific Subjects from La Nature,” The Art Bulletin LXII, 1980, p. 453–465. 360 G. Hugnet, Onan (Paris : Editions Surréalistes, 1934), frontispiece plate. See J. J. Lahuerta, El fenómeno del éxtasis : Dalí ca. 1933 (Madrid : Siruela, 2004), p. 41–46. 361 S. Dalí, “Apparitions aérodynamiques des ‘Êtres-Objets’,” Minotaure, no. 6, 1935, p. 33–34 ; S. Dalí, “Psychologie non-euclidienne d’une photographie,” ibid., p. 56–57. 362 A. Breton, “Le message automatique,” Minotaure, no. 3–4, 1933, p. 55– 65 ; A. Breton, “La beauté sera convulsive,”Minotaure, no. 5, 1934, p. 8–16. See M. Poivert, “Politique de l’éclair. André Breton et la photographie,” Études photographiques, no. 7, 2000, p. 71–89. 363 A. Breton, “Crise de l’objet,” Cahiers d’art, XI, no. 1–2, 1936, p. 21. 364 Ibid., p. 26. 365 Ibid., p. 21. 366 See I. Fortuné, “Man Ray et les objets mathématiques,” Études photographiques, no. 6, 1999, p. 101–117. 367 Man Ray, Self-Portrait (Boston, Toronto : Little, Brown and Company, 1963), p. 16. 368 Man Ray, “La photographie n’est pas de l’art” (1943), Ce que je suis et autres textes (Paris : Hoëbeke, 1998), p. 60–63. 369 Man Ray, “Danses-horizons,” Minotaure, no. 5, 1934, p. 27–29. 370 P. Mabille, “La conscience lumineuse,” Minotaure, no. 10, 1937, p. 22–23. 371 Man Ray, “Ce que je suis” (1959), Ce que je suis et autres textes, op. cit., p. 20–21. On Man Ray, the photographer, see J. Livingston, “Man Ray et la photographie surréaliste,” trans. D. Saran, in Explosante-fixe, Photographie et surréalisme, ed. R. Krauss, J. Livingstone and D. Ades (Paris : Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985),

372 373 374

375 376

377

378

379

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p. 113–151 ; E. de L’Ecotais and A. Sayag (eds.), Man Ray : la photographie à l’envers (Paris : Centre Georges Pompidou/Le Seuil, 1998) ; A. Lampe, “Irreale Welten. Die Fotografie Man Rays,” in Abstrakte Fotografie, ed. T. Kellein and A. Lampe (Bielefeld, Ostfildern-Ruit : Kunsthalle/Hatje Cantz, 2000), p. 57–73. Man Ray, Distorsion, 1925. Photograph. Paris, Musée national d’Art moderne. Man Ray, Self-Portrait, op. cit., p. 259, 266. See P. de Haas, “J’ai résolu de ne jamais m’occuper de cinéma…,” in Man Ray, directeur de mauvais movies, op. cit., p. 10–15. Man Ray, Self-Portrait, op. cit., p. 262. Ibid., p. 270. See J.- M. Bouhours and P. de Haas (eds.), Man Ray, directeur de mauvais movies, op. cit., p. 40–57 ; S. Kovács, From Enchantment to Rage : The Story of Surrealist Cinema (London, Toronto : Associated University Presses, 1980), p. 114–154. Following Walter Benjamin’s words, quoted above, from “Chinese Paintings at the Bibliothèque Nationale,” op. cit., p. 262. H. Frampton, “For a Metahistory of Film : Commonplace Notes and Hypotheses,” On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters : The Writings of Hollis Frampton (Cambridge MA : The MIT Press, 2009), p. 131–138 ; H. Frampton, Eadweard Muybridge : Fragments of a Tesseract, ibid., p. 22–31 ; H. Frampton, Incisions in History / Segments of Eternity, ibid., p. 33–45. See A. Michelson, “Poesis/Mathesis,” October 32, Hollis Frampton (Spring, 1985), p. 4–6. See N. Benazera and K. Halbreich (eds.), Bruce Nauman (Minneapolis, Basel : Walker Art Center/Wiese Verlag, 1994), p. 118–129. H. Michaux, “Dessiner l’écoulement du temps” (1957), Œuvres complètes, II, ed. R. Bellour and Y. Tran (Paris : Gallimard, 2001), p. 371, 374.

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Table of Figures

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Table of Figures / Image credits

The credits follow the French original, Mouvements de l‘air. Étienne-Jules Marey, photographe de fluides (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), as given on pages 89, 93, 98, 105– 109, 339–343, and have been only modified when we found new data. We changed the order of some images from Marey’s machine with fifty-seven tubes according to Marey’s order in fig. 21. Furthermore fig. 27, 29, 32, 34, 39, 53, and 54, missing in the French original, have here been added. Most of the images and documents reproduced in this book were provided by the Cinémathèque française, collection des appareils, Paris. We indicate this with “CFCA” Fig. 1 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 13 canaux (Machine with thirteen tubes), 1899. Angled obstacle, print from glass plate negative, 12 × 9 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 335. Fig. 2 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 13 canaux (Machine with thirteen tubes), 1899. Angled obstacle, print from glass plate negative, 12 × 9 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 340. Fig. 3 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 13 canaux (Machine with thirteen tubes), 1899. Angled obstacle, print from glass plate negative, 12 × 9 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 341. Fig. 4 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 11 ou 12 canaux (Machine with eleven or twelve tubes),

Fig. 16 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 21 canaux (Machine with twenty-one tubes), 1899– 1900. Curved shape, print from glass plate negative, 12 × 9 cm, numbered 10. CFCA, Inv. MPN 332.

Fig. 25 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined plane, 30 degree angle, with chronograph, original print, 8.9 × 5 cm. Fonds Noguès n° 56/23.

Fig. 17 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 21 canaux (Machine with twenty-one tubes), 1899– 1900. Curved shape, print from glass plate negative, 12 × 9 cm, numbered 9. CFCA, Inv. MPN 331.

Fig. 26 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined plane, 65 degree angle, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 311. Inscription at the bottom right on the emulsion side : “5”. View showing the average direction of the air.

Fig. 18 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 21 canaux (Machine with twenty-one tubes), 1899– 1900. Inclined curved shape, print from glass plate negative, 12 × 9 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 333. Fig. 19 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Photograph of the smoke machine, print from glass plate negative, 12 × 9 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 102.

Fig. 27 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. plane, 65 degree angle, original print , 7.9 × 5 cm, mounted on a board alongside other prints (detail from fig. 21). CFCA, Inv. ML 10 (n° 6).

Fig. 20 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. The machine in operation but without obstacles, original print, 12 × 7.7 cm. Fonds Noguès n° 12.

Fig. 28 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined plane, 65 degree angle, with chronograph, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 310. Inscription at the bottom right on the emulsion side: “B”; “2” and on the left: “O”.

Fig. 21 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Wisps of smoke, thirty-six original photo-

Fig. 29 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Three planes, 30 degree angle, original

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1899. Inclined plane, eight original prints, each measuring 10.5 × 4.4 cm, mounted on cardboard (13.4 × 38 cm). CFCA, Inv. ML 6. Fig. 5–12 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 11 ou 12 canaux (Machine with eleven or twelve tubes), 1899. Inclined plane, eight original prints, each measuring 10.5 × 4.4 cm, mounted on cardboard (13.4 × 38 cm) (details from fig. 4). CFCA, Inv. ML 6. Fig. 13 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 21 canaux (Machine with twenty-one tubes), 1899– 1900. Inclined plane, original print, 12 × 9 cm. Fonds Noguès n° 5. Fig. 14 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 21 canaux (Machine with twenty-one tubes), 1899– 1900. Inclined plane, print from glass plate negative, 12 × 9 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 336. Fig. 15 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 21 canaux (Machine with twenty-one tubes), 1899– 1900. Inclined plane, print from glass plate negative, 12 × 9 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 342. Writing on the lower right in blue ink, on the emulsion side: “7”; on the upper left “P” and along the left side: “smooth front” (etched into the emulsion). The fluid remains disturbed far behind the plane after its passage: “this is a powerful argument against the use of successive bearing planes in aviation.” (Victor Tatin, Théorie et pratique de l’aviation, Paris, Dunod et Pinot, 1910, p. 36).

graphs printed on paper and mounted on a board, 63.5 × 48.8 cm. CFCA, Inv. ML 10 Fig. 22 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined plane, 20 degree angle, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 315. The layer that hits the plane from below becomes narrower, and the wisps which have fallen off the plane’s leading edge remain almost parallel to each other. The layer rolling off the leading edge narrows slightly before significantly expanding. Its wisps are wider the closer they are to the center. Fig. 23 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined plane, 20 degree angle, with chronograph, original print, 7.9 × 5 cm mounted on a board alongside other prints (detail from fig. 21). Inv. ML 10 (n° 2). An “electric vibrator” shook the emission tubes ten times per second, causing the wisps of smoke to form sinusoidal curves instead of straight parallel lines. This chronographic system was used to indicate air velocity. Fig. 24 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined plane, 30 degree angle, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 314. Same comment as for fig. 22.

print 7.9 × 5 cm mounted on a board alongside other prints (detail from fig. 21). CFCA, Inv. ML 10 (n° 8). The three lower layers cascade off the leading edge. Fig. 30 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Three planes, 30 degree angle, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 317. Inscription at the bottom right on the emulsion side: “18”. Fig. 31 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined curved surface, original print, 8.8 × 5.2 cm. Fonds Noguès n° 51/31. Fig. 32 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined curved surface, with chronograph, original print, 7.9 × 5 cm mounted on a board alongside other prints (detail from fig. 21). CFCA, Inv. ML 10 (n° 11). Fig. 33 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined curved surface, original print, 8.8 × 5.2 cm. Fonds Noguès n° 59/30.

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Fig. 34 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined curved surface, 36 degree angle, original print, 7.9 × 5 cm mounted on a board alongside other prints (detail from fig. 21). CFCA, Inv. ML 10 (n° 13).

Fig. 43 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Prism presenting one of its bases to the current, with chronograph, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 325.

Fig. 35 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined curved surface, 36 degree angle, with chronograph, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 320. The wisps from the superior layer seem to maintain a relatively regular velocity, whilst those from the inferior layer, on the convex side, decelerate significantly after having passed the low pressure area.

Fig. 44 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Triangular prism with rounded edges presenting its edges to the current, original print, 7.9 × 5 cm mounted on a board alongside other prints (detail from fig. 21). CFCA, Inv. ML 10 (n° 23).

Fig. 36 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined curved surface, 36 degree angle, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 319. The lower zone has very little deflection and the upper layer has a strong downward deflection. Fig. 37 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined curved surface, original print, 8.8 × 5.4 cm. Fonds Noguès n° 48/36. Fig. 38 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901.

Fig. 45 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Triangular prism with rounded edges presenting its base to the current, original print, 8.7 × 5 cm. Fonds Noguès n° 52/45. Fig. 46 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. 5 cm cylinder, original print, 7.9 × 5 cm mounted on a board alongside other prints (detail from fig. 21). CFCA, Inv. ML 10 (n° 25). Fig. 47 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. 5 cm cylinder, with chronograph, original print, 7.9 × 5 cm mounted on a board alongside other prints (detail from fig. 21). CFCA, Inv. ML 10 (n° 26).

Fig. 51 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Tapered body, original print, 12.3 × 9.5 cm. Fonds Noguès n° 5/57. Fig. 52 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Tapered body, with chronograph, original print, 8.6 × 5 cm. Fonds Noguès n° 5/58. Fig. 53 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Tapered body, original print, 7.9 × 5 cm mounted on a board alongside other prints (detail from fig. 21). CFCA, Inv. ML 10 (n° 32). Fig. 54 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Tapered body, with chronograph, original paper print, 7.9 × 5 cm mounted on a board alongside other prints (detail from fig. 21). CFCA, Inv. ML 10 (n° 33). Fig. 55 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Tapered body with tapered tail, original print, 7.9 × 5 cm mounted on a board alongside other prints (detail from fig. 21). CFCA, Inv. ML 10 (n° 34). Fig. 56 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux

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Inclined curved surface, with chronograph, original print, 8.8 × 5.1 cm. Fonds Noguès n° 26/37. Fig. 39 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Elongated tapered body, same shape at front and back, original paper, 7.9 × 5 cm mounted on a board alongside other prints (detail from fig. 21). CFCA, Inv. ML 10 (n° 18). Fig. 40 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Two prisms with a rectangle in the center, original print, 7.9 × 5 cm mounted on a board alongside other prints (detail from fig. 21). CFCA, Inv. ML 10 (n° 19). Fig. 41 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Two prisms with a rectangle in the center, with chronograph, original print, 7.9 × 5 cm mounted on a board alongside other prints (detail from fig. 21). CFCA, Inv. ML 10 (n° 20). Fig. 42 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Prism presenting one of its bases to the current, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 326. The prism behaves like a normal plane of equal width.

Fig. 48 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. 5 cm cylinder, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 329.

(Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Tapered body with tapered tail in the front, original print, 7.9 × 5 cm mounted on a board alongside other prints (detail from fig. 21). CFCA, Inv. ML 10 (n° 35).

Fig. 49 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Body of ovoid section ending in a point, and presenting its round end to the current, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 328. Inscription at the bottom left, on the emulsion side: “66”. “In another case, it would be a question of knowing if the conformation of aquatic animals, whose head is obtuse and whose tail is tapered, constitutes a favorable disposition. By submerging in water solids of which one end is obtuse and the other tapered, one can see that there is a great advantage in having the large end present itself first: in this way there are far fewer eddies at the rear. The same applies when operating in the air: the figures [...] show that when the large end is forward facing, the bodies leave a smaller wake of eddies behind them.” (É-J. Marey, “Le mouvement de l’air étudié par la chronophotographie”, Journal de physique théorique et appliquée, March 1902, p. 134–135).

Fig. 57 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Tapered body slightly wider in the center, original print, 8.4 × 5 cm. Fonds Noguès n° 5/59.

Fig. 50 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Body of ovoid section, turned around, presenting its tip to the current, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 327. Inscription at the bottom left, on the emulsion side: “65”.

Fig. 58 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Normal plane measuring 30 cm wide, print from glass plate negative, 12 × 9 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 337. Picture taken in 1904 by Pierre Noguès with Marey’s machine. In the background, we observe clouds overlaid with smoke which seem to originate from small tip vortices and tend to fill up the low pressure area. Speed 1 meter per second. Fig. 59 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Normal plane measuring 30 cm wide, with chronograph, print from glass plate negative, 12 × 9 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 339. Picture taken in 1904 by Pierre Noguès with Marey’s machine. The wisps come crashing against the plane. They elongate significantly having surpassed the edge. The speed increases gradually and then slows.

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Fig. 60 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Normal plane measuring 20 cm, print from glass plate negative, 12 × 9 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 338. Picture taken in 1903 by Pierre Noguès with Marey’s machine. The current velocity is 1 meter per second. One can see uneven eddies and curls of smoke that return towards the rear of The plane due to the influence of the low pressure area. Fig. 61 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Normal plane measuring 5 cm wide, with chronograph, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 323. Fig. 62 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Normal plane measuring 10 cm wide, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 309. The wisps of smoke become wider after passing the obstacle, highlighting the rear depression. Fig. 63 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined plane, 60 degree angle, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 312. Major eddies appear, especially towards the rear of the plane.

Fig. 69 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined curved surface, 36 degree angle, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 321. The two layers comprise many eddies but the low pressure area at the rear is very pronounced. Fig. 70 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined curved surface, 36 degree angle, with chronograph, original print, 12 × 9.5 cm. Fonds Noguès n° 32/35. Fig. 71 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Parabolic arc hit on its concave side, 7 degree angle, print from glass plate negative, 12 × 9 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 343. One can see a low pressure area at the rear, which propagates very far. Fig. 72 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Parabolic arc, 2 degree angle, print from glass plate negative, 12 × 9 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 345. Fig. 73 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Parabolic arc, 10 degree angle, print from glass plate negative, 12 × 9 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 344.

Fig. 77 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Triangular prism presenting its edges to the current, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 324. Fig. 78 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Two surfaces joined in a V shape, the tip of the V faces the current, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 318. Fig. 79 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. A square, with chronograph, original print, 8.7 × 5 cm. Fonds Noguès n° 64. Fig. 80 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Two rectangles, with chronograph, original print, 12.5 × 9 cm. Fonds Noguès n° 3/63. Fig. 81 Unpublished portrait of Étienne-Jules Marey in 1874. Paris, private collection, provided by CFCA. Fig. 82 The anemometer of Louis-Léon Pajot (1734). CFCA. Fig. 83 Recording device of Arthur Morin, ca. 1850. CFCA.

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Fig. 64 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined plane, 60 degree angle, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 313. As the angle increases, the two layers tend to become symmetrical especially towards the rear of the plane. Fig. 65 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined plane, 65 degree angle with chronograph, original print, 8.7 × 5.2 cm. Fonds Noguès n° 60/28. Fig. 66 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined plane, 30 degree angle, print from glass plate negative, 12 × 9 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 334. One can see the top of the machine as well as part of the smoke exhaust pipe. Fig. 67 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined plane, 65 degree angle with very discreet chronograph, original print, 8.8 × 5.2 cm. Fonds Noguès n° 57-49/27. Fig. 68 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Inclined plane, 10 degree angle, original print, 10.2 × 5.2 cm. Fonds Noguès n° 18.

The layer of smoke deviates slightly at the side facing the convexity. Fig. 74 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Highly elongated tapered body, same shape at front and back, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 322–62. Inscription at the bottom right on the emulsion side: “50”. Fig. 75 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Three planes, 30 degree angle, print from glass plate negative, 10 × 5 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 316. Inscription at the bottom right on the emulsion side: “15”. One can see that when the superior layer hits the third superior plane, it is influenced less than when the obstacle is a single plane. “An important problem for aviation is to know how currents of air behave against three neighboring and parallel planes inclined at a given angle. The figure answers this question in a very clear manner.” (É.- J. Marey, “Le mouvement de l’air étudié par la chronophotographie”, Journal de physique théorique et appliquée, March 1902, p. 134). Fig. 76 É.- J. Marey, Machine à 57 canaux (Machine with fifty-seven tubes), 1901. Three parallel concave planes, 30 degree angle, print from glass plate negative, 12 × 9 cm. CFCA, Inv. MPN 330. The low pressure area at the rear is greater than when using a plane surface.

Fig. 84 É.- J. Marey, Trajectoire chronographique d’un corps qui tombe après avoir reçu une vitesse de translation horizontale (Chronographic trajectory of a falling body after having received a horizontal impulse), original drawing. CFCA, fonds Marey MF 8. Fig. 85 É.- J. Marey, trajectory of a ball. Experimental photograph, ca. 1892. CFCA, fonds Marey ML 9. Fig. 86–91 É.- J. Marey, series of six photographs, ca. 1892. CFCA, fonds Marey ML 9. Fig. 92 Bird attached to the framework, determination of the horizontal and vertical movements of the humerus, original watercolor by E. Valton, ca. 1869, and original graph by Étienne-Jules Marey. CFCA, fonds Marey MG 15. Fig. 93 Schema of insect flight. Original watercolor by E. Valton, 1869. CFCA, fonds Marey MG 17. Fig. 94 Victor Tatin’s airplane, 1877. Engraving published in La Nature, October 25, 1884. CFCA.

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Fig. 95 Charles Richet and Victor Tatin’s steam-powered aeroplane, 1890–1897. Engraving published in Victor Tatin, Théorie et Pratique de l’aviation, Paris, 1910. CFCA.

Fig. 108 Gustave Eiffel’s wind tunnel at the Champ-de-Mars, ca. 1910. Photograph by Giraudon, Paris. Paris, private collection, provided by CFCA.

Fig. 96 É.- J. Marey and Georges Demenÿ, Vol du goéland, 25 images par seconde (Flying gull, 25 images per second). Ink drawing, 1887. CFCA, fonds Marey ME 164 b.

Fig. 109 Leonardo da Vinci, Studies of water, and a seated old man (detail, recto). Pen and ink, ca. 1509. 15.2 × 21.3 cm. Royal Collection Trust, RCIN 912579. Photograph by Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2022.

Fig. 97 É.- J. Marey and Georges Demenÿ, Goéland volant obliquement dans la direction de l’appareil, vingt images par seconde (Gull flying in an oblique direction towards the camera, twenty images per second). Ink drawing, 1887. CFCA, fonds Marey ME 164 a. Fig. 98 É.- J. Marey, Décomposition du vol d’un goéland (Decomposition of a gull’s flight), 1887. Bronze. Collège de France, Paris. Archives. Fonds Marey. Photo: Musées de Beaune / J.-C. Couval. Fig. 99 Plaster sculpture of the flight of a pigeon by Marey, 1887. CFCA. Fig. 100 Marey’s zoetrope, 1887. Engraving published in La Nature, December 3, 1887. CFCA. Fig. 101 É.- J. Marey, manometric device allowing

Fig. 110 Alfred Stieglitz. Equivalent W3, 1929. Gelatin silver print, 1949. 3.1052 Washington, National Gallery of Art, Alfred Stieglitz Collection. Fig. 111 Adam Fuss, Untitled, 1988. Photograph. New York, collection Emily Fischer Landau (Whitney Museum). Courtesy of the artist. Fig. 112 ENSTA, unsteady flow around an oscillating profile. Photograph, 1974. Paris, École nationale supérieure des techniques avancées, provided by CFCA. Fig. 113 É.- J. Marey, Changements de direction et de vitesse d’un courant d’air qui rencontre des corps de formes diverses (Changes in direction and speed of an air current colliding with different shapes), 1899. Photograph. CFCA.

Fig. 119 É.- J. Marey, Trajectoire de deux boules liées ensemble (Trajectory of two balls tied together), 1888. Chronophotograph. Collège de France, Paris. Archives. Fonds Marey. Photo: Collège de France, Paris. Archives. Fonds Marey. Fig. 120 É.- J. Marey, Double ellipse créée par un point lumineux agité dans l’obscurité (Double ellipse created by a luminous point waved in the dark), undated. Photograph. CFCA. Fig. 121 É.- J. Marey, Étude de la marche d’un homme avec une baguette blanche fixée le long de la colonne vertébrale (Study of a man walking with a white rod fixed along his spine), 1886. Chronophotograph. CFCA. Fig. 122 The trajectory of the pubis of a man at a walking pace. Figure taken from Le Mouvement, Paris 1894, p. 134. CFCA. Fig. 123 Record of two airs played on the keyboard of a harmonium. Figure taken from Le Mouvement, Paris 1894, p. 13. CFCA. Fig. 124 Charles Ozanam and Édouard Baldus, Pouls d’une demoiselle de dix-huit ans, 74 pulsations par minutes (Pulse of a young woman of eighteen, 74 pulsations per minute), 1869. Albumen paper,

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for the indication of pressures upon the different surfaces of a turning disk, 1870. Engraving published in, Le Vol des oiseaux, 1890, p. 214. CFCA. Fig. 102 Portrait of Marey, ca. 1890. Paris, private collection, provided by CFCA. Fig. 103 Reconstruction of Marey’s wind tunnel by the Cinémathèque française, 1999. Photo: Stéphane Dabrowski, provided by CFCA. Fig. 104 Lucien Bull, phases of a sphere falling in water, at a rate of 1250 frames per second on glass plate, dated June 23, 1934. CFCA, Inv. MPN 375. Fig. 105 Laboratory of Cailletet and Colardeau. Engraving published in La Nature, July 9, 1892. CFCA. Fig. 106 Gustave Eiffel’s apparatus for measuring air resistance. Photograph published in G. Eiffel, Recherches expérimentales sur la résistance de l’air exécutées à la tour Eiffel, Paris, 1907. Paris, private collection, provided by CFCA. Fig. 107 Gustave Eiffel’s apparatus for measuring air resistance, equipping the apparatus before its reascent. Photograph published in G. Eiffel, Recherches expérimentales sur la résistance de l’air exécutées à la tour Eiffel, Paris, 1907. Paris, private collection, provided by CFCA.

Fig. 114 É.- J. Marey, Mesure de la durée du flux électrique d’une torpille au moyen d’explorations successives avec un muscle de grenouille comme signal (Measurement of the duration of a current flowing from an electric ray by successive explorations with a frog muscle as feedback indicator). Figure taken from La Méthode graphique, Paris 1878, p. 410. CFCA.

pulsograph, mount 13.5 × 22 cm. Paris, Collection Société française de photographie (coll. SFP), frSFP_0320im_ EP_0003. Fig. 125 É.- J. Marey, Étude de la course humaine (Study of a man running), 1886. Chronophotograph (detail). CFCA.

Fig. 115 Courbes de mouvements oscillatoires (Curves of oscillatory movements), based on Tisley and Spiller. Figure taken from La Méthode graphique, Paris 1878, p. 129. CFCA.

Fig. 126 The Parthenon Sculptures, temple-relief, Classical Greek, Athens, Parthenon, ca. 438 BC-432 BC. London, British Museum. Photo © The British Museum, London, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / The Trustees of the British Museum.

Fig. 116 É.- J. Marey, Plaque originale pour le fusil photographique (Original plate for the photographic rifle), 1882. CFCA.

Fig. 127 É.- J. Marey, Étude de la course du cheval (Study of a horse’s gallop), 1886. Chronophotograph. CFCA.

Fig. 117 É.- J. Marey, Études des mouvements de nageoires de la raie (Studies of the skate’s fin movements), 1891. 60 mm film. CFCA.

Fig. 128 É.- J. Marey, Étude de la marche du cheval (Study of a horse’s gait), 1886. Photograph. Collège de France, Paris. Archives, Fonds Marey. Photo: Collège de France, Paris. Archives, Fonds Marey.

Fig. 118 É.- J. Marey, Trajectoire simple et trajectoire chronophotographique d’une boule brillante qui se déplace devant un champ obscur (Simple trajectory and chronophotographic trajectory of a bright ball moving in front of a dark background). Figure taken from Le Mouvement, Paris 1894, p. 55. CFCA.

Fig. 129 É.- J. Marey, Étude du trot du cheval (cheval noir portant des signes blancs aux articulations) (Study of a horse’s trot [black horse with white markings on the joints]), 1886. Collège de France, Paris. Archives, Fonds Marey. Photo: Collège de France, Paris. Archives, Fonds Marey.

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Table of Figures / Image credits

Fig. 130 É.- J. Marey, Étude du vol du goéland (vue latérale) (Study of a gull’s flight [side view]), 1886. Chronophotograph. Collège de France, Paris. Archives, Fonds Marey. Photo: Collège de France, Paris. Archives, Fonds Marey. Fig. 131 É.- J. Marey, Tracés partiels de trajectoire d’une aile d’insecte pendant le vol (Partial tracings of the trajectory of an insect’s wing in flight). Figure taken from La Méthode graphique, Paris 1878, p. 209. CFCA. Fig. 132 É.- J. Marey, Étude des mouvements de l’anguille (Study of the movements of the eel), undated. Chronophotograph. CFCA. Fig. 133 É.- J. Marey, Étude du mouvement des liquides (Study of the movement of fluids), undated. Chronophotograph. CFCA. Fig. 134 É.- J. Marey, Pendule articulé : une oscillation de droite à gauche suivie d’une demi-oscillation de gauche à droite (Jointed pendulum: an oscillation from right to left following on a half oscillation from left to right). Figure taken from Le Mouvement, Paris 1894, p. 99. CFCA. Fig. 135 É.- J. Marey, Épure des mouvements du cheval (galop) (Diagram of a horse’s movements [gallop]), undated. Ink drawing. CFCA.

Fig. 142 É.- J. Marey, Points lumineux agités dans l’obscurité (Luminous spots moving in the dark), undated. Photograph. CFCA. Fig. 143 Marcel Duchamp, The Box of 1914, Standard Stoppages, 1913–1914. Philadelphia Museum of Art: Gift of Mme Marcel Duchamp, 1991, 1991-133-1. Photo : Philadelphia Museum of Art © Association Marcel Duchamp / 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich. Fig. 144 Anton Giulio or Arturo Bragaglia, L’Éventail (The Fan), 1928. Photograph. Private collection, provided by CFCA. Fig. 145 É.- J. Marey, Astérie culbutante (Tumbling Starfish), film, April 1891, aquarium in Naples. Collège de France, Paris. Archives, Fonds Marey. Photo: Musée de Beaune. Fig. 146 Man Ray, photogram taken from the film L’Etoile de mer (The Starfish), 1928. CFCA. © Man Ray Trust / 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich; Photo Telimage / Adagp Images. Fig. 147 Man Ray, Feu d’artifice (Fireworks), 1934. Photograph. Paris, Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’art moderne. Photo : © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Jacques Faujour.

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Fig. 136 É.- J. Marey, Étude des mouvements de draperie (Study of the movements of drapery), 1885. Chronophotograph. CFCA. Fig. 137 É.- J. Marey, Étude des mouvements de danse et de draperie (détail) (Study of the movements of dance and drapery (detail)), before 1894. Chronophotographs. Figure taken from M. Emmanuel, La Danse grecque antique d’après les monuments figurés, Paris, 1896. CFCA. Fig. 138 Louis-Ernest Barrias, La Nature se dévoilant à la Science (Nature Unveiling Herself Before Science), 1895. Polychrome marbles and onyx. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. Photo : © RMN-Grand Palais / René Gabriel Ojéda. Fig. 139 Pierre Roche (Fernand Massignon), Loïe Fuller, 1904. Gypsotype. Paris, private collection, provided by CFCA. Fig. 140 Isaiah West Taber, Loïe Fuller dans la Danse du Lys (Loïe Fuller in the Dance of the Lily), 1902. Photograph (aristotype), 55.1 × 34.4 cm, Paris, Musée Rodin. Photo Ph 1776, © Musée Rodin.  Fig. 141 Anonymous, La Danse serpentine de Loïe Fuller (Loïe Fuller’s Serpentine Dance), ca. 1894. Kinetograph comprising 90 photographs dyed with a stencil. Paris, private collection, provided by CFCA.

Fig. 148 Man Ray, Homme d’affaires (Man of Affairs), 1926. Photographs. Paris, Centre Pompidou – Musée national d’art moderne. Photo : © Centre Pompidou, MNAM-CCI, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Guy Carrard. Fig. 149 Man Ray, photogram taken from the film Emak Bakia, 1926. Paris, Musée national d’art moderne. © Man Ray Trust / 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich; Photo : Telimage /  Adagp Images. Fig. 150 Man Ray, Space writing, Marcel Duchamp, 1937. Photograph. Paris, Musée national d’art moderne. © Man Ray Trust / 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich; Photo : Telimage /  Adagp Images Fig. 151 Man Ray, photogram taken from the film Le Retour á la raison (Return to Reason), 1923. Paris, Musée national d’art moderne. © Man Ray Trust / 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich; Photo : Telimage / Adagp Images. Fig. 152 Bruce Nauman, Light Trap for Henry Moore No. 1, 1867. Photograph, 157 × 106 × 5 cm. Potomac, Maryland, Glenstone Museum. © Bruce Nauman / 2022, ProLitteris, Zurich. Photo: Alex Jamison.

Epilogue

Florian Dombois and Christoph Oeschger

There was an exhibition Mouvements de l’air: Étienne-Jules Marey, photographe de fluides that ran at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris, from 19 October 2004 to 16 January 2005. The show was curated by Laurent Mannoni of the Cinémathèque française and the Musée d’Orsay’s Dominique de Font-Réaulx. A book of the same name—now out of print for several years—was published by Gallimard in conjunction with the exhibition. The material it contains is exceptional because it brings together for the first time the surviving negatives and prints of the seminal photographs that Étienne-Jules Marey shot between 1899 and 1901 in the wind tunnels he had developed. It is also exceptional because the two texts accompanying the pictures, written by Laurent Mannoni and Georges Didi-Huberman, are of a similarly high quality. Mannoni delves into the background of Marey’s (chrono) photographs, probing with great precision the technology and science behind them and their position in the history of photography. DidiHuberman’s essay, meanwhile, is an art-historical and philosophical tour de force centred on these pictures: it begins with a brilliant reading of the wind tunnel photos and concludes with a rumination on the major questions relating to the nature of time that the pictures expose. It is our belief that these texts deserve to be received in the English-speaking world. In Aubrey Birch and Lucie Wright we have found two translators whose splendid linguistic work facilitates this process. However, what prompted this book project for us was not the exhibition in Paris but rather our research project “Images of Air and Light: The Moving Image and the Camera as a Scaling and Analytical Instrument” (2017–2022). The project, which was funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation, was headed by Florian Dombois with Christoph Oeschger, Mario Schulze, and Sarine Waltenspül as team members. Photo and film cameras are still used to this day for taking measurements in wind tunnels because they can remain outside the highly sensitive laminar flow of air. It is interesting to note that Marey, who was one of the pioneers of the (chrono)photographic camera, quite literally constructed his wind tunnel in front of the camera, as can be seen in the dimensioning of his experimental installations, whose design is based on the ratios of 2 : 3, 3 : 4, and 1 : 2, thus corresponding to the proportions of his negatives. Unlike Marey, specialists in aerodynamics such as Ludwig Prandtl built their wind tunnels first and only then went looking for cameras. The

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history of wind tunnels and of the images they have generated is part and parcel of the history of the camera. In the “Images of Air and Light” project the main focus for us, as artists, was on using cameras from the last hundred years to take pictures and shoot film in our own wind tunnel. It is probably this experience with wind, lines of smoke, and test objects that has allowed us to see the impact of Marey’s photographs as objects that stir the billow of ideas and images. This inspired us to establish a reciprocal relationship in this book between image and text such that the two operate on one another. Our graphic designer Viola Zimmermann came up with a layout that articulates the interaction between image and text to reflect what we are striving for. This is particularly evident in the two essays, where the images inserted in the texts cause the lines opposite them to “flutter”, an effect that is inherently suggested by the German term for this setting, Flattersatz. The collaboration with Viola was extremely enriching for us and we would like to express our sincerest gratitude for the possibility of working together. This epilogue presents a further challenge. As artists, we would like to honour Étienne-Jules Marey in our own way, while also paying tribute to Mannoni and Didi-Huberman. To this end, we have developed a frieze of images spanning sixteen pages, a blending of our own and others’ material that seeks to reveal different facets of Marey’s images and the impact they have had. In what follows, we have combined works of art and aerodynamics from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries (almost exclusively), weaving them around questions of how to approach image-making and explore motifs, issues that we were concerned with during our work in the wind tunnel. The frieze is a work of artistic research that attempts a further process of contextualisation in conjunction with the texts of Mannoni and Didi-Huberman, reflecting on questions of how to conceive and generate images. We have drawn on a selection of images provided by our colleagues from the arts and sciences, whom we would like to thank for their work. In order of appearance, they are: Maya Deren, Eadweard Muybridge, Tom Wasmuth, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Ètienne-Jules Marey, the students of VChUTEMAS, Thomas Schütte (p. 297); Pierre Huyghe, Robert Fludd, Haus-Rucker-Co, Yutaka Sone, Max Ernst, Mary Wigman, Dziga Vertov, U5,

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Robert Morris, Marcel Duchamp & Man Ray (p. 298–299) ; Bridget Riley, Charlotte Posenenske, Mika Yoshizawa, Antonio Giuglio Bragaglia, Gabriel Orozco, Kwan-ichi Terazawa & Kichisuke Yamazaki & Yûzô Akishino, Claude Ledoux, Masakazu Tasuno (p. 300–301) ; H. Werlé, the unknown Balinese artist, Marianne Brandt, Alejandra Quiroga & Lizeth Códoba (Yamay Inga), Lucien Bull (p. 302–303) ; Jan Bayen, Cédric Ragot, Berenice Abbott, Koki Tanaka (p. 304–305) ; Guillaume Grossir, Ludwig Prandtl, Doug Aitken, Christo & JeanClaude, Andreas Bunte, Oskar Fischinger, Cabinet Magazine, Luigi Russolo (p. 306–307); Ernst Mach, Jean-Luc Godard, Luise Schröder, Howell Peregrine, Harun Farocki, Thomas Corke & Hassan Naghib (p. 308–309); Olivier Chazot, Helmut Voelter, Gelitin, Masanao Abe, Buckminster Fuller, Tacita Dean, David Hockney, Justinus Kerner (p. 310–311) ; Hito Steyerl, Elodie Pong, TIROS, Leslie Thornton (p. 312).

Authors : Georges Didi-Huberman is a leading French art historian and philosopher and has taught at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (Paris) since 1990. He has published extensively on the history and theory of images, from the Renaissance to contemporary art. In 2020, he was awarded the Aby Warburg Prize of the City of Hamburg. Laurent Mannoni is head of heritage at the Cinémathèque française and the Centre national de la cinématographie. As an author and curator, he focuses on the history of film technology from its earliest origins to the present day. His published work include the monograph on Étienne-Jules Marey (Cinémathèque française / Mazzotta, 1999), and the exhibition Le Mouvement en lumière: Étienne-Jules Marey (Paris, 2000).

Editors : Florian Dombois is an artist and professor at Zurich University of the Arts. In his work he explores wind, time, labilities, and tectonic activity. 2010 he received the German Sound Art Prize. Christoph Oeschger lives in Zurich as an artist, filmmaker, photographer and publisher. He works with various forms of the documental. His work has been shown in various museums including Fotomuseum Winterthur (CH), ZKM Karlsruhe (DE), Centre de la Photographie Genève (CH). Translators : Aubrey Birch is an artist and writer living and working in Australia and Europe. Lucie Wright is a translator and academic based in Paris, France. Designer : Viola Zimmermann is an independent graphic designer and art director based in Zurich.

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