The Voyagers in particular, of the appropriation footage films we’ve watched, collapses and simultaneously heightens the difference between “then” and “now.”

That might be a controversial statement. Obviously, the newness of audiovisual material in our cultural history means that – for now — most of the found or archival footage is going to be from within a single generation, featuring scenes which also exist in living cultural memory; there are probably people still alive from some portions of No More Road Trips? albeit probably rarer from the very earliest clips, and similarly there are still those alive from the era portrayed in The Maelstrom (although less than there were twenty years ago during that film’s creation.) And in fact the latter is one of the examples Barron uses for discussing the ironic distance that archival footage produces: the footage is “‘too close to home’ in both a literal and figurative sense […] we share in the same context of modernity.” (40)

But what to do then when the footage is even closer to home? One of the things that catches me about The Voyagers, especially in light of “the experience of the archive effect – as it occurs through the perception of temporal and/or intentional disparity” (29) is its concern with the temporal, and with the temporary: with the almost absurd temporality the audience is required to wrap their heads around, both the brevity of time and, paradoxically, its vastness.

Immediately after telling Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s love story from the launch in 1977, filmmaker Penny Lane inserts herself into the narrative in 1996: “I remember when Carl Sagan died. I was in high school. I guess you were in college.” Most of the film later, she muses on the visionary idealism of the Golden Record: “I wish I had lived in that time. It’s hard to imagine the Golden Record being made now.” This is the bizarre crux of the temporal issues of this film: the tension – the distance – between the portion of the story Penny personally remembers and uses as a way to daydream about her partner, and the portion that seems to her impossibly distant, is only a matter of only decades.

And that vast difference is marked perhaps by Carl Sagan’s particular lifetime (“I wish Carl Sagan were here…”), or maybe instead by the Challenger explosion that seems to serve as a “major temporal break” (Baron 40) at least as presented by the film: the dead silence around the sixth minute, the pause to play the familiar footage, the clip which shows a NASA(?) staffer stare in shocked silence before demanding that the cameras be cut. (We don’t see – can’t see — whether they are; within the context of the documentary, the film keeps moving.) Regardless, the “history” of the film seems compactly close to its personal memory and the present moment.

The distance between 1977 and 1996 (or even 1977 and 1986) seems immense here: one is a distant past and the other is a remembered experience. This is almost a hyper-temporal experience – what are its effects? One is to emphasize the brevity of life, the rapidity of change; the human lifespan being so short especially in comparison to the vastness of the universe, to the “thousand billion years” of cosmic time, which is just as much a timeline at play in this documentary.

But The Voyagers is a love story, too, and Carl and Ann have an answer to that: the sense of luckiness they had in an atheistic universe, “that fate could be so kind; that we could find one another in the vastness of space, the immensity of time.” By paying such loving attention to the temporal details of the space movement over a few decades of the 20th century, and situating it within the vast cosmic scales of time (the Voyager probes which are still traveling and their Golden Records which could stay intact for millions of years), the vastness of time is emphasized in counterpoint with the absolute importance, nevertheless, of the particular human moment. This is the heart, we seem to think by the movie’s end, of any love story: that it is impossible to know what will happen, but “why not try? Why not reach for something amazing?”

And if this reads as too optimistic, well, I’ll leave with Lane’s thoughts on the Golden Record: “Some people have criticized this, but I’m glad they did it that way. That’s what it’s like to look at the thing you love most. That’s why it’s a valentine.”

Baron’s concept of the “appropriation film” allows for a relational friction that seems to be what makes a film like Penny Lane’s The Voyagers (2010) successful, or at the least unexpected. It’s not just the figure(s) of the Voyagers supplying the metaphorical framework as well as temporally locating the actual NASA/space/Sagan footage of the film, but the incorporation of more “home mode” images that seem to build layers of complexity. This complexity creates, of course, the space for the romantic narrative, but also recontextualizes the mission of the Voyagers—they are as lane suggests: “fearless,” and “seeking.” Their hopeful journey which hadn’t been expected to last more than two years has now an indefinite end, and those golden records and their techno-steel containers will far outlast the life of the Earth.

While the narrative aspect of the film makes relatively clear the temporal and intentional disparities at work, what Baron has to say about the viewer’s struggle to discern these two elements in response to an appropriation film is particularly useful:

When temporal and intentional disparity are uncertain, the viewer is faced with a constant struggle around how much authority to give the indexical recording. This struggle is crucial to our understanding of history, because it both depends upon and determines what we give the status of archival—and, thus, historical evidence. (30)

Lane is using “archival” footage from the mid-1980’s to make a film in 2010. (Though interestingly according to this interview in The Atlantic her project began by ordering a collection of VHS tapes on eBay.) And the appropriated footage of the space program, Carl Sagan, and the beautiful while potenitally banal boardwalk/coastal images used in the film are in fact about the miraculous risk of love—Lane’s personal voyage—rather than something more universally historic, or so it would seem.

This blend of the “archival” launch sequences (particularly the tragic Challenger explosion) and space walks, and “little-blue-marble” shots, with Sagan and school children and with the more “home mode” shot, for example of a phone booth, unexpectedly create a portrait of what it takes to love—a very universal experience.

The balance of footage from these various sources, according to Baron, “allow[s] us to experience a sense of continuity with or contiguity across different temporal and intentional—or historical and social—contexts, or to experience the sense that “our” context “here and now” and “their” context “there and then” may be extremely similar” (43).

Baron goes on to suggest that “when we feel that we share the same context across time and space, we are charged with a moral responsibility towards those “others” to whose traces we bear witness” (43). Here, the image of the Challenger as a bisecting plume of exhaust offers the other side of that risk game, simultaneously connecting and tearing apart unfathomable despair with unimaginable optimism. The distant, terrifying, and reverent silence that Lane employs acknowledges that moral responsibility. And since Voyagers was made almost like a wedding vow, could there be the possibility that the temporality of that sense of responsibility might reach into the future, not just the present viewing of the past archival image?

Baron’s The Archive Effect has kept me considering something about the home mode movies of both audiovisual archive and private collection senses. On page 82, Baron defines the effects of home mode movies as “…the presence of such documents in appropriation films may represent a democratizing of history and contribute to public knowledge about or experience of past events by including traces of otherwise unknown individuals into histories that previously accounted only for those who held the most social and political power”. This definition, I think, exactly describes the meaning and the function of home mode documents. It also reminds me of the concept of reformulating these home mode documents with the sense of temporal disparity. In this sense, instead of being narrated officially and authoritatively as traditional archives, it is true that the footage and audiovisual appropriations, recording individual’s daily lives in the simple ways, not only reveal the democratic spirits but also visualize the life and society in the past.

Many now use smartphones or cameras to record their lives for various purposes, but once those private movies made by themselves are debunked in public no matter with or without their will, I think there will be some certain ethical issues even though the movies are just used by the professionals for academic or archival purpose. Baron also raised a similar question: “What are the ethical implications of using home mode documents in public texts?” (82). I think it’s hard to answer. Obviously, these footage and appropriations are precious and valuable for us to look back in public texts, but it also involves privacy problems and seems like “a voyeuristic peek into other people’s private lives”. Thus, the status of home mode documents will definitely change when they appear in different texts.

Another thing I’m also considering is how to understand properly while watching appropriation films, like The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle. Someone may feel a little bit confused about what is going on, if he or she barely has a good knowledge of the history in 1930s. I have no idea whether someone else feels this way, but I do. It seems like when watching the more authoritative archival films, say, BBC documentaries, I  usually have a fairly clear purpose for what I am watching, why I watch these or what I am supposed to do after watching, but after watching The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle, I am a little lost. Baron discusses the“video confession”, a kind of appropriated confessional video footage, which may present more complex human emotions. I’m curious about the reaction by somebody who watch it. Will he or she feel lost as I do? I assume these reactions, such as getting lost, feeling nervous or awkward, are probably parts of archival voyeurism.

The term “unruliness” is reiterated in the outset of this book, I can’t help thinking that is there any boundaries between the private footage collection and the archival appropriations? Is it necessary that some rules be established to make a clear distinction between the private and the public? If so, what will happen to the footage and audiovisual experiences in terms of archival effect?

In her Vimeo bio, Penny Lane identifies her short film, The Voyagers, as one of her “short experimental films.” Her biography also remarks that she often creates “essay films” in addition to documentaries. In the description of the film itself, Lane defines the The Voyagers as a love letter to her (then future) husband. These carefully worded introductions seem to place The Voyagers in the “found footage” category on the “archival footage” / “found footage” binary that Jaimie Baron breaks down and complicates through the analysis of the ways in which these two black-and-white footage categories no longer suit appropriation films. In my personal experience of watching The Voyagers, the heart-felt narrative spared me of viewing this “love letter” with the same critical analysis with which I might typically approach a documentary. My objective eye seemed less important to tasks such as locating the time of each clip regarding the launches of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

Despite the “experimental film” label, I did experience various levels of “realness” while watching this short film. The clips of the space ship launches, the NASA staff at their computers and desks, the reactions during press conferences, and Carl Sagan’s speeches in the school classroom and on other films all appeared historical to me in a way that the clips of rides at Coney Island and somewhat context-less images such as planet Earth as viewed from space or a telephone dangling from its wire did not. One reason I perceived these spacecraft and Carl Sagan clips as appearing more historical than the Coney Island clips was a result of temporality. With pale color and grainy composition, the clips from the 1970s actually appeared older.

This materiality alone most likely would not have created the gradations of “realness” that I experienced as a viewer. In The Archive Effect, Jaimie Baron argues “what makes footage read as ‘archival’ is, first of all, the effect within a given film generated by the juxtaposition of shots perceived as produced at different moments in time” (17). Had these clips of the spaceship launches not appeared alongside clean, crisp, more saturated footage of Coney Island and our solar system, the appropriated 1970s clips would not appeared “archival” to me. The intention of the film to serve as a love letter, not a documentary, and the narration and sound effects that support Lane’s personal intention, could have effectively removed The Voyagers from the possibility of interpreting the “experimental short film” as “archival,” but these pieces of footage appear distinctly archival when the “‘temporal disparity,’ the perception by the viewer of an appropriation film of a ‘then’ and a ‘now’ generated within a single text” is taken into account (18).

While it’s hard to separate my perceived temporality of the 1970s footage from the materiality of that footage, my reception of the clips of the twin spacecraft launches illustrates Baron’s point that “certain documents from the past—whether found in an official archive, a family basement, or online—may be imbued by the viewer with various evidentiary values as they are appropriated and repurposed in new films” (7). While the assumed historical nature of the Voyager 1 and 2 launches doesn’t alter my perception that the use-value of The Voyagers is an emotional one, personal to Penny Lane and offered to the public as an “authentic” experience, the footage of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 appear archival if only in their material presence as a record from the past. This leads me to the questions: How does materiality influence a viewer’s definition of “archival footage” and play into what Baron calls the archive effect?

Prelinger’s choice of audience discussion over a traditional voiceover narrative or soundtrack draws attention to a complication of the “intentional disparity” discussed by Baron. It is not possible upon viewing No More Road trips? to absolutely define Prelinger’s intentions. Without narrative, the meaning of the film is ambiguous, it “suggests a form of irony that does not just ‘reverse’ meaning, but rather puts it in question indefinitely” (Baron, 36). This disparity—one of the necessities of the archive effect—is further complicated by the presence of Prelinger himself. In class we watched the movie with minimal information about the film. We may have read Prelinger’s blog post about the film, or we may not have. On his blog he has specific questions that he wants him film to explore, such as: “Are we approaching “peak travel?” Is localism, which is a pretty good thing in many ways, edging out the nomadic tradition in America? Will we be staying put more than we have in the past? And if so, how will we react to diminished horizons? Is it possible that the journey TO America, which so many new Americans have made in recent years, might become a more significant part of our shared consciousness than the journey WITHIN America?” (Prelinger blog). These questions show Prelinger’s intention of the production of this film that is distant from the original intention of collecting home movies to document road trips.

But how important is the author when there is no narrative? If this film were to stand alone without any framing by Prelinger, there may be very different perceptions of what this film’s intentions are. Does it document American travel?  The changes in fashion? In architecture? In automobile design? Even with Prelinger’s framing, the film seems to be distant from him. Without an explicit narrative there appears to be no author—there is, then, a third disparity: a disparity between the author’s intention and the intentions perceived by the audience. This sort of ambiguity effectively elides the author from the film. Yes, the home movies were clearly placed in order by someone—but if there is no explicit intent, then it is possible that the document was found in that order.

The danger of this ambiguity of authorial intention is that the film could be seen as a document rather than a documentary or an appropriation film. It would appear that nothing was altered. Baron notes that, to a degree, this depends on the audience: “if the viewer does not perceive this difference, as a difference within the text, the archive effect will not occur and the text will remain a document. Not a documentary and not an appropriation film”. Prelinger makes one other choice in order to avoid the confusion of his film with a document: he chooses the venues where his film is shown.

When discussing Jones’ choice to show his film, Tearoom, in only “unalienated” settings, Baron defines the term “unalientated” as “contexts in which it will be regarded through a critical lens” (Baron, 33). Similarly, Perlinger does not just post his film online—he makes sure to send his film to events where discussion will be possible. Intention is dictated by the environment where the film is shown. It privileges the collective interpretation of the audience over the author and avoids the classification of the film as document. The archive effect, then, is dependent on the audience and the environment rather than textual narrative or extra-textual knowledge of the individual.

What does this show us? This does exhibit a very clever way or removing the dictatorial control of the author and creating a democratic interpretation. Yet Prelinger still has the power to choose where and how he shows his film. I think this also points to the yearning for an open and public archive. Prelinger plays between document and appropriation film in order to realize a certain democratic influence that the institutional archive has been without. It is not totally democratic, but it does reach for that ideal.