Muybridge's Strings

Can time be made to stand still? Can it be reversed? Koji Yamamura’s Muybridge’s Strings is a meditation on this theme, contrasting the worlds of the photographer Eadweard Muybridge—who in 1878 successfully photographed consecutive phases in the movement of a galloping horse—and a mother who, watching her daughter grow up, realizes she is slipping away from her. Moving between California and Tokyo, between the nineteenth century and the twenty-first, the film focuses on some of the highpoints in Muybridge’s troubled life and intercuts them with the mother’s surrealistic daydreams—a poetic clash that explores the irrepressible human desire to seize life’s fleeting moments, to freeze the instants of happiness. Enriched by Koji Yamamura’s refined artistry and Normand Roger’s soundtrack, Muybridge’s Strings observes the ties that cease to bind, fixes its gaze on the course of life, and presents a moment in time suspended on the crystalline notes of a canon by J.S. Bach.