Shorts: Horsepower

For this short program, Plokta unravels film’s role in understanding movement, by returning to motion pictures’ origins in sports. By representing a racehorse’s gallop, Eadweard Muybridge’s 1878 The Horse in Motion spurred on the development of the movie camera. So in Horsepower, cameras in and around sports reveal the continuing social entanglements of watching, recording and moving. Here, what technologies let us see – or not see – have fundamental impacts on sports and beyond.

Sound and rhythms take centre stage in Mountain Plain Mountain. This poetic observational documentary centres on Ban’ei, a rare kind of draft horse race that takes place only in Obihiro, Japan. The twist is, we witness everything but the race itself. Subject to Review charts the rise of the instant replay system Hawk-Eye in professional tennis, probing how the technology exposes deeper questions of spectacle, justice, and imperfect human knowledge.