The birth of motion capture: Transcribing the phenomena of bodily movement through the “graphic method”

How is the movement of bodies recorded, traced, captured? How is the perception of movement decomposed, analyzed, and then reconstructed through signs, lines, and diagrams? This article traces how, with the help of engineers and collaborators, Etienne-Jules Marey’s self-styled “graphic method” innovated upon existing instruments and photographic apparatuses in order to capture not just the movement of horses’ legs but something of the biomechanical essence of animal movement through the technique of “chronophotographie.” Although inspired by Edward Muybridge’s photographs of horses in motion, for Marey the photographs were not the end result. What he achieved were new ways of transcribing the phenomena of bodily motion. Unlike previous physiologists who thrived on vivisection in the laboratory, Marey took ever greater pains to examine the principles of animal movement in the wild, and built an open-air “station physiologique” in a Parisian park for this purpose. One legacy of Marey’s chronophotographic technique was in the documentation and dissection of human movement, and became acknowledged precursors of the wave of Taylorism which would sweep industrial research in the early 20th century. But another legacy is the capacity to transcribe the phenomena of movement into other forms, externalizing perception across other media.