The two readings for today highlight the role of travel in early cinema. Schwartz emphasized that cinema created two kinds of mobility: a representational mobility such that the viewer of the film could see the world, and a literal mobility produced by setting the cinematographe on a gondola, train, or hot air balloon. Schwartz's elucidation of mobility in "transport films" echoes her remark in the LACMA exhibition documentary that the train could be considered a new "medium" in the 19th century. Her suggestion is that new technologies for moving human bodies necessarily brought about new ways of seeing and recording the world. Schwartz ends her essay with Morrison's documentary Dawson City: Frozen Time, with which she makes the claim that film continues to operate within systems of global transportation even after its disuse -- as discarded things at the level of trash.

Frozen Time leads in an admittedly loose way to mummified or embalmed time, one subject of Allan's article. Whereas Schwartz emphasizes the mobility of cinematic duration, I would say that Allan emphasizes the temporality of cinematic mobility. The vision of the Sphinx in Alexandre Promio's 1897 film for the Lumiere Brothers condenses many of Allan's preoccupations into a single object. He argues that this image acts as a figure for considering one's relationship to time made "thinkable" with the advent of cinema. The Sphinx particularly dramatizes the depiction of deep time through the fast rate of cinematic stills. While I was convinced by how he argues against some scholarly claims that early films like this one display merely a transparent "realism," I was less convinced by his analysis of restoration/preservation. It seems to me that the kind of "restoration" that the artist David Roberts enacted by reorienting the Sphinx to face the setting sun was both purely imaginative (not a suggestion to actualize) and towards Romantic ends of setting mood (not in clear reference to a Biblical passage nor to a clear "prior time"). In other words, this was not an image of the Sphinx restored in the manner of late-19th century restoration debates about monuments from antiquity. The Sphinx, for example, still lacks a nose. This distinction seems rather important, especially since attitudes towards restoration changed so much between the early and late 19th century. The subject of restoration and preservation was not just a device constructed as a dialectic by late 20th/early 21st century theorists.

This brings me to a set of questions that originate from Schwartz's use of the term "virtual": What do we mean when we say that cinema produced a "virtual" experience? How do cinema's mobility and temporality, as described by Schwartz and Allan, constitute the "virtual"? How is this concept related or not related to the notion of the "mental image," the imagination as agent, or the role of early psychology? If the "virtual" is situated between the real and the ideal (the "as if"), then where does the genre of "actualities" fall? Finally, what are the material conditions for early cinematic "virtuality"?

Courtney