Our visit to the Musée Albert-Kahn helped me think through a topic I’ve been pondering since watching the Phantom of the Cinémathèque. Near the end of the movie, filmmaker Jean Douchet states that “the Cinémathèque’s ‘country’ was cinema itself, making the place a sort of embassy.” This reflects a concept discussed by Langlois at the start of the film. Describing his viewing of Méliès’s film Joan of Arc as a child, he states that the film made him believe that there were two Parises: Joan’s and his own.

These statements made me wonder about the role of place in the importance and categorization of moving pictures. Throughout this class (mirroring the exhibition), we have discussed movies as a form of transport across space and time, as well as Paris as the home to the birth of cinema. Do films transport us across space as much as they do across time? Is there a difference in viewing a photograph of a place one is familiar with, versus a place which is completely foreign?

These questions were put in focus at Musée Albert-Kahn through a questioning of medium specificity. When looking at the wall of photographs, I was more drawn to the ones of places that were recognizable to me—and even more so to places I have physically visited. When watching the films, contrastingly, I felt equally drawn to all of them. The duration of the films, taking place over time as do events in lived experiences, feels instantly recognizable in ways still photographs do not. It is through this time, then, and corresponding movement on the screen that transports us across space. In what ways, then, might we think about cinema as a collapse of space and time?