Notes on Eadweard Muybridges Chickens; scared by torpedo, Plate 781 of Animal Locomotion (1887).

Barnaby Dicker, Royal College of Art, London

Keywords: Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, Chickens, Explosives, Chronophotography

Chickens; scared by torpedo is the final plate or sheet of Eadweard Muybridges 1887 multi-volume
chronophotographic portfolio, Animal Locomotion.1 This plate the 781st in the series is visually, at once,
compelling and perplexing, orderly and disorderly (fig. 1-5). We can perceive comical, absurd, excessive
and destructive qualities mirrored in its form and content, its materiality and its concept. This plates
photographs and title appear, at face value, inexplicable, even redundant. To understand me, the plate seems
to insist, you must look to the (depictive and verbal) rationale underpinning Animal Locomotion as a whole.
This essay presents a preliminary indication of the discursive complexities surrounding Chickens; scared by
torpedo and argues that the plate is a key to approaching Animal Locomotion as a work caught, not so much
between art and science, as between knowledge and value. A key piece of historical evidence is identified
that indicates that the plate is neither inexplicable nor redundant, but nevertheless continues to exceed
Animal Locomotion.

To begin, a few remarks on the critical perspective and methodology taken here. Firstly, Muybridges
chronophotographic work is taken to exert a pressure on film/cinema history precisely at their borders on
the basis that the work stands as a widely-publicised proto-cinematographic contribution to the founding
explication of what has come to be recognised as the cinematographic dispositif, that is, the discursive-
structural-technical logic of cinematography.2 Muybridges animated loops, published for use in such
devices as Reynauds Praxinoscope or projected as part of his lectures, demonstrated the cinematographic
principle directly. Muybridges chronophotographic plates provided a different function. Owing to their
cabinet card-/page-based layout, and, ultimately, the sheer scale of Animal Locomotion, they helped sensitise
audiences to cinematographys frame- or photogramme-based system, predicated on the proliferation of
unprecedented numbers of individual pictures grouped in equally unprecedented spatial and temporal
intensity.
In line with the conference aims, Plate 781, Chickens; scared by torpedo is taken as a microhistorical3
means to open up, rather than lock down conceptions of the border of film/cinema history; to dwell on
details to reflect on wider concerns; to impede historiographic narrativity; to look, instead, towards
discursive formations; and to draw on historical material that raises questions and invites speculation, rather
than only supporting hypotheses. An archaeology of specific discursive formations found in work predicated
on the production of (photographic) data, this essay opts to follow the lead of Michel Foucault. There will be
no writing a history of the referent4 (or proto-pro-filmic events). In other words, we seek, through the
analysis of [discursive and systemic] formations [...] not the bubbling source of life itself, life in an as yet
uncaptured state [...] [but, rather,] an immense density of systematicities, a tight group of multiple
relations.5 One point of divergence with Foucault concerns the scale and approach towards the comparative
study of widely dispersed discourses. As noted, this essay presents a microhistory. This is not to reject the
comparative dimension, but to show how a tight group of multiple relations intersect in and around a
specific case study. This is in line with Foucaults approach to Velzquezs 1656 painting Las Meninas as a
representation [...] of Classical representation6 in which this dispersed discourse is simultaneously
grouping together and spreading out before us.7 Chickens; scared by torpedo embodies this in multiple
ways, from its photographic content, to its layout, to its place in the ensemble, Animal Locomotion, and

1
Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal
Movements, 1872-1885, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 1887.
2
For recent work on this see Franois Albera and Maria Tortajada (eds.), Cinema Beyond Film: Media Epistemologies in
the Modern Era, Amsterdam University Press 2010.
3
See, for example, Carlo Ginzburg, Microhistory: Two or Three Things That I Know about It, in Critical Inquiry, vol.
20, no. 1, Autumn 1993, pp. 10-35.
4
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Tavistock, London 1974, p. 47.
5
Idem, p. 76.
6
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, Routledge, London 2002, p. 17.
7
Idem, p. 18.
beyond. If, as Foucault states, archaeology [...] takes as the object of its description what is usually
regarded as an obstacle,8 Plate 781 is a fitting candidate.
Marta Braun considers Animal Locomotion [...] the point where the discourses of art and science unite to
produce what we might call cinema.9 The present essay suggests an alternative, complimentary model that
utilises knowledge and value in place of art and science so as to approach the richness of Animal
Locomotion from a different angle and engage with the challenges of comprehending plates such as
Chickens; scared by torpedo. Understanding Animal Locomotion as a juxtaposition and intersection of the
discourses of art and science is important and may be traced directly back to the projects origins.10
However, it does carry limitations (and, perhaps, contradictions) principally in assuming a clear division
between the fields of art and science, which the work in question collapses. Approaching Chickens; scared
by torpedo and Animal Locomotion in terms of knowledge and value follows Roland Barthess analysis of
Georges Batailles scientific writing, exemplified by his 1929 Documents essay The Big Toe, in which
Barthes identifies an alternation of knowledge and value, rest from one in the other, according to a kind of
amorous rhythm.11 This is not a polemical opposition, but a structural one.12 Barthes sees Bataille
fragmenting but not destroying knowledge, or rather its codes, to make space for outburst[s] of
value.13 In fact, Barthes presents knowledge and value as two kinds of knowledge: one official (endoxal),
citational, referential, reverential, the other remoter, almost poetic, focussed on the strange and on the
detail.14 Through this eccentric,15 capricious, cunning [...] (discursive) play of knowledge,16 a whole
fabric of value, [] [a] verbal display17 that rules the entire discourse18 becomes visible. In this way,
we have a text that exceeds knowledge by value.19 Oscillations between knowledge and value can be
found at all levels and the interrelations we find between and across them can be complex. With its emphasis
on the detail, the miniaturisation of knowledge20 (at the value end), Barthes/Batailles model aids
microhistorical attention to discursive formations by providing a means to scale the critics framework to
their chosen case study.

Muybridges work has received significant attention since its inception. Muybridge is credited and critiqued
in equal measure for his technological, artistic, scientific and commercial achievements. His importance
to the histories of photography and cinematography is agreed, however, the terms of this status are
contested. Animal Locomotion is often considered Muybridges magnum opus; an epic work. Stephen
Barber describes it as profligately vast and expansive, wilfully so. 21 Endless reference is made to the
20,000 odd photographs used. Noted with equal frequency, often in the same sentence or paragraph, is the
total number of plates 781. In discursive terms, Animal Locomotions significance is founded, in part, on
numeric value (its scale and the implied expense of labour) irrespective of content or method. To speak
about Animal Locomotion, then, is to accept these terms. As noted, this appeal to scale has contributed to
public understanding of cinematographys frame structure. The repeated references to Animal Locomotions
781 plates are important here: they may be taken as (admittedly indirect) signposts to Plate 781, Chickens;
scared by torpedo. In this sense, Chickens; scared by torpedo can be approached as a metonymic index of
Animal Locomotions 781 plates, as well as its closing statement. Doing so provides us with a valuable
opportunity to access deeper discursive structures. While we do not seek to reveal any secret truth to Animal
Locomotion, or rather, it is irrelevant whether Muybridge and his team considered Chickens; scared by

8
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, cit. p. 171.
9
Marta Braun, Fragmentation as Narration: The Case of Animal Locomotion, in Franois Albera, Marta Braun, Andr
Gaudreault (eds.), Arrt sur image, fragmentation du temps/Stop Motion, Fragmentation of Time, Payot, Lausanne, 2002, p. 168.
10
See Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal
Movements, Prospectus and Catalogue of Plates, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia 1887, p. 3.
11
Roland Barthes, Outcomes of the Text, in Id., The Rustle of Language, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1986, p. 243.
12
Ibidem.
13
Idem, p. 242.
14
Idem, p. 240.
15
Idem, p. 246.
16
Idem, p. 242.
17
Idem, p. 248.
18
Idem, p. 245.
19
Idem, p. 239.
20
Idem, p. 240.
21
Stephen Barber, Muybridge: The Eye in Motion, Elektron Ebooks, n.p. 2013, p. 5.
torpedo as a metonymic index of the whole work, we equally cannot doubt that this plate was consciously
chosen to be last.
It is important to remember here that Animal Locomotion was not originally a book; but a set of eight
portfolios containing loose plates divided into eleven volumes.22 This portfolio structure offers an
intersection of a linear order (the numbering of plates) with a non-linear system (the potentially variable
sequences of plates). Chickens; scared by torpedo could thus potentially appear at any point in the study
of Animal Locomotion. Plate 781 is Animal Locomotions closing statement solely in terms of numeric
sequence. Within Animal Locomotions non-linear system the terminal force of this metonymic index of all
plates could intervene at any given point.
Chickens; scared by torpedo has attracted some attention from scholars (often being slightly mistitled). In
1968, Aaron Scharf described the plate as an experiment using explosive force to set off a clockwork motor
and simultaneously [...] provoke the nervous reaction of the subject.23 To give Muybridges project its due,
instead of a clockwork motor, we are dealing with early electrical circuitry. The relationship between the
explosion and the motor seems also to have been different. Performing a sleight of hand with Scharfs
assessment, Virgilio Tosi emphasises detonation as the initiating factor, marking Chickens; scared by
torpedo the result of a very modern experiment, both in terms of its starting point and its methodology.24
These assessments argue for the plates purpose, innovation and value by stressing only its technical
dimensions. Sidelining these dimensions, other critics have emphasised the plates conceptual
(in)significance. After reaching Plate 781, Braun notes,

The scientific logic [of Animal Locomotion] [...] follows a covert sociological hierarchy, from the
movements of the highest subject the nude male [through women, children and the crippled] to the lowest,
animals. It also moves from the more visually intelligible to the more obscure: the most difficult pictures, in
which the movement is hardest to determine, are placed towards the end of each volume, where they are less
noticeable.25

In Brauns two intersecting grading scales, Chickens; scared by torpedo would not just be last, but lowest of
the low. Astute and attractive as this observation is in its broad strokes, it does overlook the original
portfolio structure of Animal Locomotion which effectively neutralises any possibility of making certain
plates less noticeable. Equally debatable is the degree to which the sociological hierarchy presented is
covert. After all, Muybridges Prospectus and Catalogue of Plates for Animal Locomotion plainly lists the
titles of all plates. Applying the opposition of visually intelligible and visually obscure, Braun explicitly
places Chickens; scared by torpedo in the latter category. Looking at the plate we can certainly recognise
obscurity, but we must also concede that this obscurity is presented with clarity; that the disorder of the
scene is housed in an orderly layout. I will return to this later.
For Phillip Prodger, Chickens; scared by torpedo, alongside certain other plates, indicates that the
occasional craziness of life [was] allowed to assert itself within Animal Locomotion.26 For Prodger,
Chickens; scared by torpedo specifically suggests that having turned his attention to the reactions of
poultry to projectiles, Muybridge had at last exhausted his prodigious list of motion study experiments. 27 In
casting the reactions of poultry to projectiles as a low topic of inherently minimal interest, Prodger
uncritically buys into the sociological hierarchy identified by Braun, rendering the plate, as it were, the
straw that broke the camels back. Prodger also provides no evidence that Chickens; scared by torpedo was

22
Animal Locomotion customers, or subscribers, as they were called, were initially invited to select 100 plates from the
total collection for the price of $100. Muybridge idiosyncratically referred to these potentially idiosyncratic sets as copies of
Animal Locomotion. Buyers of six such copies (i.e. 600 plates) would automatically receive all 781 plates. See Eadweard
Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements, Prospectus
and Catalogue of Plates, cit.
23
Aaron Scharf, Art and Photography, Allen Lane, London, 1968, p. 169.
24
Virgilio Tosi, Cinema Before Cinema: The Origins of Scientific Cinematography, British Universities Film and Video
Council, London, 2005, p. 71.
25
Marta Braun, Eadweard Muybridge, Reaktion Books, London 2012, p. 187. The reference in parenthesis to women,
children and the crippled is taken from a largely identical passage in Brauns Fragmentation as Narration: The Case of Animal
Locomotion, cit. p. 167.
26
Phillip Prodger, Time Stands Still: Muybridge and the Instantaneous Photography Movement, Oxford University Press,
Oxford-New York, 2003, p. 220.
27
Ibidem.
the last plate to be photographed, despite this being essential to his argument. While this is not out of the
question, it is worth noting in the absence of more precise information that, based on her consultation of
Muybridges notebooks and proof prints, Braun finds that the published plates are numbered and ordered in
a sequence that is not related to the chronological order in which they were made. 28 All this raises the
question of what discursive significance the recorded shooting sequence of Animal Locomotion is perceived
to carry in relation to the published outcome. Prodger seems to be arguing either that the work is a document
of a linear developmental process in which Muybridge and his team reflected on their work step by step
(through their turning of attention and exhausting of possibilities) or that the whole project was defined
in advance (Muybridges prodigious list). The underlying view is that the publication mirrors the shooting
schedule which in turn mirrors an initial plan; not, we must note, with the aim of improvement (as implied
by Scharf and Tosi), but rather to exhaust the projects potential, to chart its decline (ending in Plate 781).
Braun, meanwhile, underlines the evidence that the published work has been hugely edited, to posit, in
keeping with her wider arguments, that Animal Locomotion harbours a disjuncture between (broadly
speaking) stated intent and outcome. As we have seen, Braun also sees the project presenting decline; a
double decline in sociological hierarchy and visual intelligibility.
Considered side by side, the above accounts are all uneven. Scharf and Tosi strip Chickens; scared by
torpedo of its unusual visual and conceptual appeal. Braun and Prodger overlook the importance of
technology in understanding the plate. All suffer from hurriedly utilising Chickens; scared by torpedo to
support a larger argument. If Chickens; scared by torpedo is worthy of mention at all, surely it deserves an
assessment that embraces and exceeds the full scope of these critical responses?
To this end, I believe we can be more assertive about the conditions underpinning the use of explosives in
Chickens; scared by torpedo. If we look at Muybridges patent for a Method of and Apparatus for
Photographing Changing or Moving Objects, dated 19 June 1883, just prior to the University of
Pennsylvanias decision to sponsor what would become Animal Locomotion, we find explicit reference to
photographing a changing object, such as an exploding torpedo, or blasting rock in its different phases.29
A few lines on, Muybridge goes into more detail:

To photograph a changing body such as an exploding torpedo or blasting rock the electric current which
fires the charge may effect [sic] the release of the stop of the motor to cause the latter to operate; but in such
case the circuit-closing cylinder will preferably be so constructed as to make one or two rotations before
operating on any of the terminals, so as to give time for the fuses which are ignited by the electric current to
transmit fire to the explosive charge before the shutter of any camera is operated.30

The clear intention here is that both explosive and cameras are triggered simultaneously. Given the
mechanical operating systems used for Animal Locomotion (in particular the electrically operated cameras),
it is reasonable to assume that Chickens; scared by torpedo tests this dual-triggering; albeit missing the
beginning and resolution of both the explosion and the dispersal of the chickens. Above all, the patent
clearly shows that photographing torpedoes exploding had entered Muybridges thoughts prior to starting
work on Animal Locomotion. The circumstance we glimpse thus supports Scharfs and Tosis assessments,
and runs at odds with Prodgers and Brauns: Chickens; scared by torpedo demonstrates a patented,
rationalised technique that makes (small) overtures to industrialist and military activity. It does not signal a
project exhausted, but rather, suggests a different avenue of enquiry altogether, a future project (ultimately
unrealised). Thus, Chickens; scared by torpedo contains a socially significant element the torpedo that
will always exceed the remit of Animal Locomotion. Excessive as this element might be, it does feed back
into Animal Locomotion by raising the question of the other non-physiological components found in other
plates; which in turn raises the question as to whether animal locomotion can ever be abstracted from non-
physiological components, i.e. the world, its materiality, its surfaces (including its photo-sensitive surfaces),
its adornments. Indeed, approached in this way, Animal Locomotion teems with non-physiological factors.

28
Marta Braun, Eadweard Muybridge, cit. p. 207. It is likely that we will never know more information about the
production of Plate 781: archivists at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington, and George Eastman House, Rochester, where the
Animal Locomotion proof prints and Muybridges working notebooks are held, respectively, have informed me that no proof print
or written record relating to Chickens; scared by torpedo is included among these items. Consequently, these two important
sources of information must be treated as incomplete.
29
E. J. Muybridge, Patent No. 279,878: Method of and Apparatus for Photographing Changing or Moving Objects, United
States Patent Office, June 19, 1883, p. 2.
30
Ibidem.
Here, it seems apt to introduce Plate 714, Dog; aroused by a torpedo, the only other plate in Animal
Locomotion to reference torpedoes. Here, the torpedo is largely absent a number of the photographs
contain specks that would seem to be falling shrapnel, but no explosion is visible.
Placing the 1883 patents verbalised intent beside Plate 781s depicted demonstration underlines an
important discursive ambiguity over the definition of torpedo. Muybridges patent suggests some kind of
large or powerful, certainly functional charge. The explosion we see in the photographs is rather smaller and
less significant, less valuable, by comparison, and correlates better with two American usages of torpedo
recorded in the Collins English Dictionary as follows: a firework containing gravel and a percussion cap
that explodes when dashed against a hard surface and a detonator placed on a railway line as a danger
signal. A novelty of Muybridges torpedo is the use of remote detonation, discussed above. Perhaps here
we glimpse a named form of torpedo that has fallen into almost total obscurity? What seems clear is that
Muybridge is making a direct reference to his patent. Beyond the ambiguity of what constitutes a torpedo,
what emerges between the patented intent and Chickens; scared by torpedo is a disjuncture of scale and
value: we read about industrial or military explosions and are shown almost harmless fireworks. Moving
from patent to chronophotographic plate, value is, as Barthes puts it, miniaturised. Moving from
chronophotographic plate to patent, value is amplified. Either way, knowledge is underlined.
In Muybridges favour, the torpedo serves its purpose admirably. Indeed the only discernable fault in the
demonstration of this networked electro-photo-pyrotechnic apparatus is that, as the patent specifies, the
cameras could have been better synchronised with the explosive. Nevertheless, Chickens; scared by torpedo
presents two fluent series of photographs in a neat, orderly layout. Unlike the 40% of Animal Locomotion
plates that Braun has calculated do not present consecutive phases of movement, but, rather, collaged
sequences containing gaps, repeated photographs, and photographs from other shoots,31 Chickens; scared by
torpedo contains no noticeable errors, gaps or substitutions32; each camera shutter and photographic plate
seems to have functioned as intended. In this way, the plate provides evidence of the effectiveness and
precision of Muybridges system as outlined in his patent. And yet this plate is one of less than a hundred for
which No record of intervals of time between phases33 exists. Considered in connection with the 1883
patent, this seemingly casual approach has the effect of playing down the knowledge embedded in Plate
781.
What of the chickens? Visually (photographically), their shapes in some of the frames approach
formlessness (fig. 4). The torpedo smoke further obscures their animal appearance (fig. 5). Above all,
they are not paid the same attention as the other animals in the collection; they are not given precedence and
held tightly in view, instead they are dwarfed by the smoke and somewhat lost in the mise-en-scne. In his
near contemporaneous record of the animals used in Animal Locomotion, Edwin A. Kelley lists the chickens
as Gallus bankiva, Temm., var. Domesticus.34 Choosing a domestic that is, unexceptional breed to be
scared by torpedo is hardly surprising to us (the dog in Plate 714 seems to be at a safer distance from its
torpedo). And yet, the widely known practice of cockfighting suggests a sort of bloody nobility for the
chicken. Indeed, there is evidence that this brutal heritage defined the chicken's initial domestication in
archaic Asian societies and beyond, including Celtic Britain.35 These animals were not food, they were
prized, if expendable possessions, intimately caught up in complex social and economic structures. They
were, then, excessive animals for humanity, linked to recreation (gambling), not survival. By the late
nineteenth century in America and Europe, while cockfighting endured, the chickens social status had
declined. In his 1910 Encyclopaedia Britannica entry for Fowl, Alfred Newton, despite specifying the
genus Gallus, nevertheless speaks of the otherwise nameless species which struts on our dunghills, gathers
round our barndoors or stocks our poultry yards.36 Nameless and formless, the chickens of Plate 781 reveal
31
See Marta Braun, Picturing Time: The Work of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830-1904), University of Chicago Press, Chicago
and London, 1992, pp. 237-254. Whether one chooses to see such plates as exceeding or falling short of Animal Locomotions
remit is down to personal opinion.
32
Signs of cropping are visible in 7a, 1b, 2b (especially) and 3b in the form of markings on the negatives (fig. 3).
33
Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal
Movements, Prospectus and Catalogue of Plates, cit. p. 16.
34
Edwin A. Kelley, Appendix: A List of the Quadrupeds and Birds Represented in the Photographs, in Dennis Marks, et
al. Animal Locomotion: The Muybridge work at the University of Pennsylvania: The Method and the Result, University of
Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, 1888, p. 101.
35
See, for example, John Crawfurd, On the Relation of the Domesticated Animals to Civilization, in Transactions of the
Ethnological Society of London, vol. 2, 1863, p. 449 and Esther Verhoff and Aad Rijs, The Complete Encyclopedia of Chickens,
Rebo Publishers, Lisse, p. 11-12.
36
Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. X, The Encyclopaedia Britannica Company, New York 1910, p. 760.
the mutability of values; we can imagine an alternative scenario where chronophotographic scrutiny of the
kick of a prize cockerel would be more valuable than the gait of a horse. From the perspective of value that
is, in a rest from knowledge, as well as art and science there is power here. The chickens are not described
as flying or running, they are scared. This is an emotional adjective, a blatant example of what
Barthes calls a value word. Animal Locomotion contains only a select number of named value movements
judgement on the human movements suspended (the aroused dog in Plate 714 probably does not
count). More than simply pointing away from (scientific) knowledge in themselves, these plates, above all
Chickens; scared by torpedo, perhaps reflect and certainly introduce value at the level of the locomotion.
This suggests an implicit, unverbalised emotional value to the human actions. The emotional adjective
scared is also what connects the chickens with the torpedo both causally and compositionally. With their
low social status, the chickens become the principle elected custodians of contact with the torpedo,37 and
with it the move away from Animal Locomotion suggested by the 1883 patent.
Approaching Animal Locomotion in terms of value and knowledge is, I argue, at once an opportunity
afforded by historical and critical distance and a dimension embedded in its conceptual foundations and
initial reception. In 1893, Robert de la Sizeranne observed,

Leafing through the pages of M. Muybridge's albums we gradually penetrate the mystery of scenes that, in
nature, unroll too quickly for our eyes to comprehend. Consequently, these pages present diverse and
contradictory impressions: some movements trace exquisite curves, while other postures reach
grotesqueness.38

Sizerannes remarks which chime with twentieth century assessments of photographys capabilities, most
notably, notions of an optical unconscious39 clearly gesture towards an understanding of Animal
Locomotion in which value and knowledge are fundamental. In 1888, in a similar vein, an anonymous
reviewer for The Art Amateur noted,

While the work was yet in progress interest was excited in various quarters by the unexpected grotesqueness
of some of the forms thus caught after the beginning and before the accomplishment of an action. [] The
motions of the wings of birds in flight looked queer to artists who had made a special study of this branch
of animal painting. [...] By far the greater number of these photographs are beautiful objects in themselves.
The grotesque attitudes spoken of above are not many.40

Here, as in Sizeranne, the beautiful and the grotesque (indicators of value) are recognised as deeply
embedded in the work. We might speculate, then, that art and science constituted the named fields between
which Animal Locomotion appeared, while knowledge and value functioned as key forces in its discursive
framework.

In accessing Animal Locomotions underlying discursive structure we move beyond an account that sees the
work positing a system from which it departs and where its visual and verbal components vie for dominance.
Instead, its irregularities, contradictions, idiosyncrasies and excesses become part of the whole.
Within Animal Locomotion, Chickens; scared by torpedo occupies a position both marginal and privileged.
In relation to the works dominant concerns and themes the humans, the horses and so on Plate 781 will
always be a minor case study. But this is very much part of its appeal and power. Another assessment of
Batailles methodology, from Philippe Sollers, encapsulates this situation well:

37
Too important to take on this role, the dog of Plate 714 literally eclipses its torpedo.
38
Robert de la Sizeranne, Le photographe et lartiste, in Revue des Deux Mondes, vol. 115, 1893, p. 849. My translation.
The original reads:
Lorsquon feuillette les pages des albums de M. Muybridge, lorsquon pntre ainsi peu peu dans le mystre
des tableaux que la nature droule trop vite sous nos yeux pour que ceux-ci les puissant contempler, on prouve des
impressions trs diverses et trs contradictoires. Il y a l des tournures dun galbe exquis et des postures d'un grotesque
achev.
39
See, for example, Lszl Moholy-Nagy, Painting Photography Film, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1967, Walter Benjamin,
The Work of Art in the Age of its Reproducibility (second version), in Selected Writings, vol. 3, The Belknap Press of Harvard
University Press, Cambridge and London, 2002, pp. 101-133 and Rosalind Krauss, The Optical Unconscious, MIT Press,
Cambridge and London, 1994.
40
An., Animal Locomotion, in The Art Amateur, vol. 18, no. 4, March 1888, p. 85.
 The most insignificant anecdote, in the system of the non-system, brings in the infinitesimal mark of the
instant, that is, the non-dissolution, total or abstract, of the non-system in the system. [...] [Within the system]
there is always [...] a concrete detail which seems useless, which seems to be there to prove that, at a certain
point, the system founders, collapses, has a lack hollowed out in it, a hole. A hole which imprints a non-
seriousness in the system.41

A question arises: does Animal Locomotion present a (non-)system? Brauns assessments regarding the
irregularities of many of the plates certainly give grounds to think of it as containing both system and non-
system. As one plate among so many, Chickens; scared by torpedo may always remain an insignificant
anecdote, a useless concrete detail, but as Plate 781 of 781 it carries enough charge to scare Animal
Locomotion a little.

I offer a quotation and illustration (fig. 6) from Strand Magazine, 1891 as a coda that reconnects the
foregoing discussion with wider currents around the spectacle of animal locomotion and points to the
underlying value that the conjunction of chickens and fireworks had in the period in question:

Perhaps the greatest curiosity of recent years in the way of firework displays, has been centred round the
living fireworks. The "fighting cocks" greatly amused the Shah when he [visited Britain]. [] Two men
clothed with an "asbestos" suit, and entirely protected from danger, who have fastened to one side of them a
framework of fireworks, depicting a [chicken] in fighting attitude. [] [They] do it in a very life-like
manner.42

Illustrations:

1. Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, Plate 781, Chickens; scared by torpedo (1887) (detail).
2. Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, Plate 781, Chickens; scared by torpedo (1887) (detail).
3. Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, Plate 781, Chickens; scared by torpedo (1887) (detail).
4. Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, Plate 781, Chickens; scared by torpedo (1887) (detail).
5. Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion, Plate 781, Chickens; scared by torpedo (1887) (detail).
6. Hare, Living Fireworks Cockfighters from Fireworks, Strand Magazine, vol. II, July-December 1891, p. 473.

41
Philippe Sollers, The Bataille Act, in Patrick ffrench and Roland-Franois Lack (eds.), The Tel Quel Reader, Routledge,
London and New York, 1998, p. 123.
42
Anonymous, Fireworks, in Strand Magazine, vol. II, July-December 1891, pp. 473-474.