The main attraction at the opening night gala of the Anchorage International Film Festival will be a historical drama based on the life of the photographer whose groundbreaking technical work laid the foundation of motion pictures. "Eadweard" will be screened at least twice during the festival and director Kyle Rideout will be present for the first showing on Friday night.
Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) was born in England, came to America and worked his way west where he took sensational photos of the wild landscape. The U.S. government sent him to Alaska shortly after acquiring the Russian claims to the territory, and he is said to have taken the first known photographs of Alaska. To settle a bet for railroad magnate Leland Stanford, he set up a series of cameras that caught a race horse as it galloped around a track in Palo Alto, California, and discovered that, when viewed in quick succession, they showed the action of the horse in motion over time, adding the fourth dimension to photography and essentially creating a movie.
He also shot his wife's lover.
"He was the last defendant in America to be acquitted of murder on the grounds of justifiable homicide," said Rideout. The trial also presented evidence that he had suffered a brain injury in a stagecoach accident, which led to emotional extremes and affected him physically. "We looked at photographs of him and found that his physical posture was hunched," Rideout said.
Muybridge, who pronounced his name as a normal "Edward," spent his later years in Pennsylvania, making more than 100,000 images, many nude, of people and animals in motion. Much of the film is built around that part of his career, Rideout said. But the main focus is his relationship with his wife.
"We had to cut out a lot of his life," Rideout said. Even the famous Palo Alto race track shoot is given brief treatment. "It would have been a whole story all by itself."
The movie is based on a play, "Studies in Motion," in which Rideout and co-writer Josh Epstein performed as actors. "During the run we kept thinking: Why isn't this a movie? He's the godfather of cinema!" They got the film rights and went to work.
The finished film premiered in March in San Jose, California, not far from where Muybridge took the epoch-creating race horse pictures. It has since been shown at major film festivals in Edinburgh, Munich, Belgium, Mexico, Hawaii, Newport Beach and Cape Cod, picking up several awards along the way.
Rideout said he was honored to have the film open the Anchorage festival. It will be his first trip to Alaska and he said he was excited to be able to make the trip and talk with viewers.
"People often ask what was our inspiration, how (Michael) Eklund (in the title role) came up with the character, where it was shot, what the budget was, what was historical and what we added," he said.
In the case of Muybridge, there's not a lot they needed to make up.
Rideout does a lot of voice work. Parents with smaller children may recognize his voice from cartoon series like "Lego Elves" and "Littlest Pet Shop." His current creative efforts, "a whole pot of brewing film and television projects," include a teen comedy and "a teen romance with magic and fantasy."
He knew that Muybridge had been to Alaska, but was unaware of the place his photographs may hold in the state's history. That bit of information also excited him.
"This is a perfect film for Anchorage," he said.
EADWEARD will be shown at 7 p.m. Friday, Dec. 4, at Bear Tooth Theatrepub and 8 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 9, at the Anchorage Museum.