Alexander Kerlin

‘Muybridge was a world-famous photographer in his day, a major pioneer of cinema in California – and a murderer out of jealousy who was acquitted in court. The jury's dubious reasoning: Insanity due to the madness caused by journalist Harry Larkyns' affair with his wife. Flora was twenty years younger than Muybridge and an early feminist – it is thought that she attended lectures by Victoria Woodhull, who at the time was campaigning for women's economic and sexual self-determination.

Today, Muybridge is probably better known for his series of photos of galloping horses than for his name and the deadly shot he fired. These series were taken in the late 1870s in Palo Alto – pretty much where Silicon Valley is today – as a commission for the infamous railroad tycoon, capitalist and university founder Leland Stanford. If you will, you can see this collaboration between Stanford and Muybridge as a kind of zero hour of Hollywood and Silicon Valley – the deeply Californian complicity of disruptive technology and capital.’ (Alexander Kerlin)

The fact that the beginnings of motion photography and the close observation of its protagonists not only led to the famous series of galloping horses, but also to a murder, says a lot about the obsession to which the mind and body are all too susceptible in their pursuit of the seemingly unthinkable.

In BULLET TIME, the detailed observation of a spectacular artistic breakthrough and the banality of a jealous act combine to create a fascinating and entertaining story about passion, vision, ambition, ruthlessness, genius and madness.

‘With this play about the photographer, ingenious inventor and murderer of his wife's lover, Eadweard Muybridge, Alexander Kerlin has written nothing less than a modern-day Faust myth.’ (taz)

‘Stage play and film. Both support, betray and undermine each other constantly until you realise: this story about the great image maker Muybridge is to be enthusiastically distrusted in every scene.’ (Die Zeit)