Having read Schwartz's Spectacular Realities before, I came to this reading with an eye for 1) how she set up her claims in relation to prior scholarship; 2) how early cinema factored into her argument; and 3) how she might suggest future avenues for research on fin-de-siecle visual culture in Paris.

1a) I was particularly interested in how she took to task the ahistorical interpretations of spectacle on the part of cultural studies and cinema studies. The idea that spectacle is a unitary, never-changing, physiological experience is subject to Schwartz's revision. I might extend her critique of ahistoricity to the kinds of semiological interpretations she lists just earlier in the introduction. This kind of interpretation reads urban space as a "text" ready to be decoded, often using - in my opinion -methods developed out of personal interactions with mid-to-late twentieth century visual culture. While this might be better termed anachronistic rather than ahistorical, the impulse to "read" visual culture as a "text" has often seemed to reify both "visual culture" and "text." Possibly this is coming from a delayed investment in the "death of the author" among scholars in the 1990s.

1b) I was also intrigued by how Schwartz determined her time period of study. For example, why did the Paris Commune act as the start date rather than mid-19th century Haussmannization or slightly earlier origins of the illustrated press? More so than in the exhibition, the dominant scholarly narratives about the revolutionary French crowd and its opposite - the isolated, overstimulated modern "man" - determine the book's critical thrust. Have these narratives become less dominant by 2022? Do scholars still "care" about defining "modernity" and its impact on the human subject writ large?

1c) Schwartz's claim that textual literacy and visual culture rose in tandem in the late 19th century in France seems indirectly to push against historians who might/have suggested that cultures typically use images to replace words as a more accessible form of literacy. Schwartz's claim made me wonder again at the role of pedagogy and public education in the period as it related to cinema. It also made me wonder about how the new technologies she lists from the late 18th and early 19th century (lithography, photography, mass illustrated press) factor into her narrative about the rise of mass literacy in the late 19th century.

1d) Tony Bennett was a surprising interlocutor, for his idea of the "exhibitionary complex." Bennett has recently (2015) revised his idea of "exhibitionary complex" to "governmental assemblage," in order to acknowledge the non-exhibition (aka "invisible" or non-public-facing) aspects that go into the power structures that govern museum spaces. This turn away from the outwardly visible to the "behind the scenes," we could say, can be found in many other humanities scholarship that distrust the superficial image in favor of the "reality" behind it. While I do agree with Bennett's 2015 revision in the context of his article, I do wonder to what degree art historians must still argue - with Schwartz from 1998 - that visual images do cultural work (rather than just reflect it).

2) Besides a brief address to cinema studies in the introduction, cinema really plays a role in the last chapter as a powerful way to conclude the book's argument. In this position, cinema seems to be the inevitable evolution of the ideas and visual forms introduced in earlier chapters. The d'Orsay/LACMA exhibition, however, seems to put the cinema chapter "first" -- literally by placing two film examples at the front of the LACMA exhibition venue. Unlike the book, this exhibition tells the story of fin-de-siecle visual culture in Paris as a pre-history to cinema. This is not to say it is teleological without nuance, but to reiterate the curators' claims that cinema in this historical period was practically "inevitable."

3) My impulse is to seek a nonintuitive avenue forward from Schwartz's scholarly tome. Perhaps this impulse is in the same spirit of the techno-materialists who, when faced with cinema's immateriality, crave the indexes of its materiality. If I were to push some of Schwartz's ideas further, I would imagine trying to locate the non-realistic elements of early cinematic practices. The thematic link of "realism" may with certain objects, such as Reynaud's moving pictures, begin to fray. This may fall beyond the scope of Schwartz's interrogation of the construction of "realism." In the case of Reynaud, the figures do move around the screen - their animation alone rendering them more lifelike - but what about the static background? Similarly, the backgrounds of the zoetropes were bare stage-sets that could only be activated through the superimposition of the moving figures. Those figures, in turn, were set against black backgrounds, which would themselves disappear in the mind's eye when perceived in motion. Is this a precursor to the cinematic "fade to black"? The historical particularity of projection, which Schwartz has noted in class already, would seem to be in an intriguing relationship with mental/optical processes of projection. The psychoanalytic ring to that term may yet be salvageable as a historically-specific phenomenon rooted in visual and material culture.