Dr. Jacobson’s chapter is absolutely fascinating, particularly in thinking about the connections between the historical context of the LACMA show and the foundations of Hollywood. It made me think about how/why scholarship and the public treat the content of movies as so much more sacred than where the places movies were made. Why is there a bust of James Dean at the Griffith Park Observatory—memorializing Rebel Without a Cause—while a major hub of early film studios (Edendale, close to where I live in Echo Park) has barely a sign?

I find Dr. Jacobson’s arguments about space, imagination, and technology quite convincing, but I’d like for us to discuss a certain distinction his chapter could have worked out more: the delineation between theatre and film studio design. He writes that, by “focusing on these interior similarities, historians have long seen the Méliès studio as a clear extension of his theater and, more generally, as an example of cinema’s debt to theatrical performance. This, however, misses an essential architectural difference between theater and studio, and between the basic needs of Méliès the magician and Méliès the director. Where the Robert-Houdin and theaters like it shuttered themselves in—literally, in rooms without windows—the early studio required access to the outside world for one simple need: natural light.” (158)

Although his point is taken about theaters specifically like the Robert-Houdin, what about the long history of open-air theater? Greek theatres were outdoors, and Shakespeare’s (purpose-built) Globe in London is roofless. Would it be wrong to think of the early studio as a space evoking an open-air theater, in which the actors play for the camera instead of for an audience? Like “the studio… (holding) the essence of cinema’s broader space- and time-defying ambitions” (163) and being “every world in one,” (166) a stage performance also builds new worlds that span space and time.

I’m wondering, then, if Dr. Jacobson or Vanessa know of any historical actors who wrote about film in relation to (or distancing from) older theatre traditions. Also, is it wrong to acknowledge “cinema’s debt to theatrical performance”? What trend in the historiography is Dr. Jacobson situating himself against, and why?