I have soooo many research questions about Spectacular Realities that I didn’t get to ask today in class, but I’ll try and keep them short:
You cite 11 different archives; how did you determine which collections to visit, and did this list develop over the course of the research process? Are there other relevant collections that have come to your attention since Spectacular Realities? Are there particular institutions in Paris that are particularly challenging to work with (in terms of scheduling, access, protectiveness etc.), and on the reverse what are the archives that you suggest we make appointments at in the limited amount of time we have?
Similarly, you cite two or three dozen newspapers. How are you “reading” periodicals for historical information/potential quotations? And did you find quotes by consulting actual newspapers or the secondary literature on the topic? How has this type of historical research changed now that many periodicals are digitized and fully searchable by OCR?
I also want to know how you went about developing an argument as you progressed further into your research. Did you go into this project with a set of leading questions? At what point did the content/structure of chapters become clear?
Less of a general research question, and more specific to my interests — but is there literature on photographs of wax museums? Your chapter on the Musée Grévin is more of an institutional history, but I am curious to know more about the project of documenting the wax tableaus via photography (presumably for sale or publicity purposes??). As images, they seem to be offering something really unique for the period in their ability to stage “photorealistic” action at a time when the technology of photography wasn’t great at capturing candid motion.
Now to Brian Jacobson’s essay for City of Cinema… Vanessa, I totally understand your frustration with the “laboratory” section of the show after reading Jacobson’s essay, which so clearly demonstrates the mutual influence of theater, photography, and industry on the development of the “film studio” as a distinct architectural space. Tracking the motif of the glass ceiling over the course of the entire chapter was an effective way of communicating this idea in concise visual terms. During his visit, I’d love to hear how he thinks this essay fits into the larger body of scholarship on Georges Méliès. Have scholars traditionally taken Méliès’s interest in technology for granted? Does the fictive/fantastical nature of Méliès’s work lend itself more easily to narrative/visual analysis versus historic explication?