Jacobson shines new light on Melies as a creative practitioner invested in the realities of machine-based life that surrounded him in the late 19th century. This reading contextualizes Melies within his historical moment as an observant (rather than simply a prescient) figure. The kinds of machines that Jacobson draws our attention to are the industrial machines present in workshop settings such as the shoe factory, the artisan workshop, the scientific laboratory, and cinema studio. Jacobson claims to highlight Melies's "material reality" because Melies has thus far exclusively been characterized by his magical or science fiction work. I would like, however, to learn more about the precise dynamic between material and immaterial that Jacobson sees in Melies's practice (as evidenced by one of his subtitles). Similarly, I would like to better understand how Jacobson would describe how the material conditions of the cinema studio (either Melies's or the later Hollywood "dream factories") can "spur the imagination." What are the constraints and possibilities that make the cinematic studio a "productive space"? The idea of the lab, which earned its own "room" in the LACMA exhibition, became reenergized when in the late 19th century such spaces became industrialized. Jacobson notes how the machines painted on the canvas backdrops looked like some of the iron-and-glass architecture of such spaces. Can the formal or phenomenological properties of the cinematic "greenhouse" be found in early cinema apart from iconography, as well? For example, Jacobson assures the reader that Melies's machines were not "mere backdrop," but directly related to his cultural reality. But what would happen if we took seriously the "mere backdrop" as itself a cultural reality - one that may in fact have helped create an experimental atmosphere within the studio setting?