Both Vanessa Schwartz and Michael Allan emphasize the role of temporality and motion in producing cinematic realism at the turn of the 19th century. Schwartz writes that “Early transport films conquered space by keeping time; the medium would archive how slow time had once seemed to be, and how geographic distances would be stitched together by taking on new rhythms.”  (Schwartz, 132) I was reminded of Johannes Fabian’s concept of anthropological time, which (in the most general sense) equates geographic with temporal distance. Fabian argues that the subjects of 19th/20th c. anthropological observation were not only perceived as spatially removed from the West, but were also constructed as living relics of the past, or inhabitants of a more “primitive” state of human development. How do the early travel films discussed by Schwartz contribute to the trope of anthropological time? I was struck by her observation that these films “regularly juxtaposed modern and archaic vehicles on screen, creating a simultaneity of new and old time” (132). These visual signifiers of transportation seem to occupy a middle ground between Allan’s distinction between 8“realism embedded in time and realism embedded in objects.” (168).

He is primarily concerned with the former, and argues quite successfully that Pommio’s early film of the Great Pyramids transforms the monument “from mythologized and abstracted objects into a temporal event” (159). Through its durational time, the film shows audiences the pyramids in their current state (versus the idealized historical imaginings of the complex in print and literary culture). Allan states that “Egypt came to be known through its objects,” and I was left wondering how the visual/material culture of Giza is represented on screen (beyond its temporal “animation” by the filmic medium). While Allan only briefly mentions the work of film theorist Vachel Lindsay, I was reminded of Lindsay’s observation from 1916 that “moving objects, not moving lips, make the words of the photoplay.” How is “Egyptian-ness” communicated through the movement of objects across the screen? And how does the reality of Pommio’s travel film contrast with pre-cinematic spectacles such as the ethnographic museum and human zoo, which afforded viewers a chance to physically move through simulated exotic environments? (for an interesting counterpoint to Pommio’s film, see the 1912 Egyptian exhibition at Carl Hagenbeck’s Tierpark Zoo in Hamburg, which included monumental renderings of the Great Pyramids, the Sphinx and the Temple at Abu Simbel populated by ethnographic performers). How can we best locate early travel films as products of a colonial economy which saw non-western objects and subjects as interchangeable?