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?