One theme that emerged in Thursday’s reading—and in class this week—that I’d like to think about further is the ways in which medium informs or shapes constructions of realism. I was considering this question at LACMA on Tuesday morning while contemplating Fernand Pelez’s Sans asile (1883). The painting depicts a beggar mother breastfeeding, a biting social criticism appearing at the Salon of that year, and a distinct kind of realism that critics and patrons (especially the state) met with horror. And yet, the painting does not actually depict a beggar, but rather a model posing for the artist. The woman is perhaps working-class or impoverished, but rather than beg, one can assume she works for her money in a transactional exchange between artist and model. The illusion of the painting as documentary nonetheless withstands—operating within a mid-nineteenth-century cultural understanding of style, medium, and truthfulness.

Both Allan and Schwartz address the construction of early cinematic realism as part of and distinct from the existing visual culture of the period. Drawing a distinction between cinematic vision and cinematic time, Allan builds on André Bazin’s discussion of cinematic realism in terms of staging duration within “an ideal world…with its own temporal destiny” (Allan quoting Bazin and Gray, 166). This conception of duration and time seems to both draw on the experience of “railway vision,” and also construct a “semblance of continuity” (Allan 167) that was displaced by railway travel. Contrasting Alexandre Promio’s Les Pyramides to David Roberts’ paintings of Egypt, Allan draws the distinction between the restorative representation of Roberts, who constructs a kind of scriptural reality in his paintings, to the representational work of Promio, who engages with cinematic time as a durational realism.

Schwartz also discusses the emergence of early cinema as having an evolving relationship with representation and knowledge. If early “transport films” were referred to in many ways—“actualités, views, panoramas” (Schwartz 130)—they were also considered in relation to pre-existing forms such as the Panorama Transsibérien. Schwartz points out that by 1896, viewers began to rank film above precinematic forms such as the wax museum because in transport films such as Promio's of the Grand Canal in Venice they “understood the camera operator was actually there, and thus believed that the scenes depicted were a degree more authentic” than those at wax museums (131). The nonfictional actualité that preceded newsreels thus aided in formulating a new relationship between film and the documentary—and thus new ideas about how knowledge is constructed and represented.

Finally—and somewhat unrelated—considering how Allan highlights Bazin’s assertion that one cannot deny the evident link between “Victorian visions of Egypt and early motion picture culture” (166), I’m wondering whether and how we might extend his argument about how time transforms the object, in this case, the Pyramids in terms of the “novel notion of duration,” to the simultaneous emergence of Egyptomania following the discovery of King Tut’s tomb in 1922 and the rise of the movie palaces in the United States (and the convergence of these two trends in the many Egyptian-Revival style movie palaces). Is this a longer history of entwined constructions of vision and cinematic time through the preservation, restoration, and glorification of Ancient Egypt? (My inclination is yes—as this might in part explain Grauman's prescience).