Continuing ...

"In France, the cinema emerged as a massive and collective training for death.—

{"To preserve, artificially, [the] bodily appearance is to snatch it from the flow of time, to stow it away neatly, so to speak, in the hold of life." (Bazin, "Ontology")}

—The scientific program of the Station Physiologique was to investigate highly practical matters: to find out the maximum weight a man could support, the maximum length a man could walk, and the "best," i.e., the most economical, way to put a foot on the ground to move forward. Here "man" precisely means "soldier," and indeed all of Marey's actors were on loan from the French army. This also explains why the first slow-motion films made by Lucien Bull are visual studies of the ballistics of bullets, shells, and human bones exploding. These visually sublime films, made mainly between 1903 and 1912, between a war lost and another largely conducted for revenge, are the first real action films.

"In France, the invention of cinema as a technique for de-composing movement is clearly inscribed in a "history of the social control of the body," as Marta Braun, following Michel Foucault, has written so well. This is an almost unknown phenomenon that has not yet been thought through in terms of original sin, but which constitutes, however, a kind of original unconscious repression that contemporary experimental cinema is now beginning to question." (Nicole Brenez, "The Secrets of Movement")