Horses.

This is not about the history of horses, for the equestrian ancestor Eohippus (Greek for ‘Dawn Horse’) is sixty million years old. Nor is this about our human history of horse mythology, as there are too many contradictions. In the depths of our dreams, blissful unicorns battle pale horses carrying Death, with Hell following. What we have here is the tale of the birth of an art form, bred on the back of a horse. It was Pegasus, the winged horse, which carried Zeus’ thunderbolts to him. In our own time, it was the striking image of a flying horse that gave rise to the world of cinema. Lord of the sea, Poseidon, had a short stint on land in which he sought Demeter, goddess of grain and purity. Disguising herself as a mare to shake him off the trail, Poseidon checkmated by becoming a stallion. The result was their son Arion, an immortal talking horse. Still under his equestrian guise, Poseidon seduced an all-too-human Medusa, across the threshold of Pallas Athena’s temple. Unable to punish Poseidon for this injustice, the goddess of love and fertility turned Medusa into the snake-haired gorgon we know today. Later, mythical hero Perseus removed her hideous head, and the winged horse Pegasus spawned from her spilled blood.

On the morning of June 11th 1878, racing enthusiasts and press huddled around the track at what would later become Stanford University. Leland Stanford, former Governor of California and railroad magnate, had invited the world here to see a horse fly. Having contracted photography pioneer Eadward Muybridge to set up twelve cameras along the track, armed with state-of-the-art shutter speeds and tripwire triggers, Stanford had bet his reputation on proving that a horse’s gallop takes all four of its hooves off the ground. As the esteemed steed ran the length of the track, the successive clicking of each camera shutter, the thunder of the hooves, and cheer of the crowd and the popping of countless flashbulbs... it might have all sounded something like the amplified hum of a film projector. Only now can we see how fitting this sound was; only today can we feel how much that image meant. Now we know how much art was in that science. Just twenty minutes after the horse’s run, the exposed plates were laid out for admiration and inquiry. There were all the intricate motions of a horse’s stride, encompassed at once in a single glance. And there in the very centre was a horse completely unbound by the ground below. Flying. All you had to do was flip through the films in the same manner in which they’d been taken, and you could hold and behold that most bewitching of paradoxes, the motion picture. Horses have always been revered, across every culture and continent: the nobility of cavalry; the sport of kings. We may have been cultivating different breeds of equines for some 6000 years, but they don’t look all that different from the wild families that we first found. A foal can stand and walk only hours after birth. Arriving almost ready-made, we can be forgiven for assuming that horses were godsent gifts for us. And it is little wonder so many of our mythical gods are horses themselves. Pegasus was born from the gorgon Medusa’s severed head. Previously, anyone who looked on her would turn to stone. Perseus was able to defeat her only with the divine assistance of godly gifts. Athena’s bronze shield had such a polished surface that it allowed him to approach Medusa without having to look at her directly. From Hades, Perseus received a helmet of invisibility. With the great gorgon dead, and Pegasus in flight, what was once trapped by the dead still of stone could now come to life. With our modern flying horse, static photography moved to cinema, paradoxically in a single frame. For some time, Perseus used Medusa’s severed head as a weapon, before gifting it to Athena to place on her shield. As an image it became an even greater weapon, freezing time as it turned flesh to stone. The death of a monster meant the birth of a winged horse. And the flight of a horse meant the beginning of a medium, started in a photo finish.