It seems rather a common experience for modern viewers to have so many accesses to the home mode appropriations in the age of mass media. Sometimes we just cannot resist the desire to go to the movie theatre and see a film telling a story of someone we have no knowledge of in our former times. Meditating on the archive effect of home mode documents, Baron argues that “the interest we may have in such documents as they appear in appropriation films is also fundamentally and unavoidably voyeuristic—offering us the pleasure of seeing something we were not “meant” to see—and may come with an ethical price.” (82) This kind of voyeuristic pleasure really causes me to think about the relationship between the viewers and the performers in a home mode appropriation film. I am also eager to find out the reasons that lead to this voyeuristic pleasure in watching somebody else’s history.

One thing that comes up to mind when I am thinking about voyeuristic pleasure is the position of both viewers and actors or performers. Actually we should not, in a strict sense, use “actors” to describe those who perform in the home mode appropriations, because they are not acting for us as viewers but acting for their family members in front of the camera. But they are, as the home documents have been appropriated into a film, being watched by us, those who are not supposed to watch it. The different position of “watching” and “being watched” certainly distributes different kinds of power between them as performers and us as viewers. As we are watching the Jews going to have a picnic in the fields, travelling to Paris, or making a ceremony of marriage, we as viewers are watching their stories and certainly not being watched by them. So there is obviously this inequality between the power of them and the power of us. We know for sure their final destiny as long as we have some former knowledge about modern history. Before we go to the ending of the film, we already know what is waiting around the corner. We have every superiority beyond them as innocent performers having no sense what is becoming of them. We, as viewers, feel that we are assuming the position of “God”, anticipating their tragic fate beforehand. Getting on the upper hand of this field, we are quietly waiting the last moment to unclose everything to these performers who are in the dark. It is kind of like a person of modern age, taking a time travel machine to the past, having all the wisdom of the trend of history, and watching the people beside him in a position of superiority. As those beside him are worrying about problems of their age, he, as a person of all the sagacity of time, watches them with all the disinterestedness and detachment. The moment one assumes the position of detachment, one has already taken the position of superiority. So are the viewers in watching an old home mode appropriation film.

One thing that also contributes to the drive of watching a home mode appropriation film lies in the feeling of comfort from the viewers. For most of the times, the tragic home mode appropriation films seem to arouse more feelings from the viewers than those happy ones. As a good saying goes in Anna Karenina, “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Happy moments in the family archives are sort of like the same while the most frustrating and the most tragic moments can touch us to the deep of ourselves. It also reminds me of something like bad news travel even faster than the good ones. We love to see and to hear the tragic moments of others though we really feel sorry for them and give our pities to them. But the moment we lament over their unhappiness, we are no longer seeing them as our equals. Instead, we feel our superiority over them. This is, in my opinion, one of the reasons that cause the voyeuristic pleasure of viewers. When we are seeing the Jews being persecuted by the policies of Nazi, we seek our private comforts from our own families in our own circumstances. We, at least, have the rights to live in this world, but they don’t. We can go camping or whatever in the outside, but they are confined to their house roof. It is kind of like the time one hears a bad news from others, one gives his pity as well as seeks his own comfort from his own situation of not being a victim of such an accident. Since we are necessarily members of our own families, the time we see those similar domestic settings in a home mode appropriation, we tend to recall the details of our own. When we see how the family in the film has gone through a great number of hardships, we feel relieved that we have narrowly escaped such tragedy by our own. The more the settings are familiar to us, the more we will enter into the context of the film and receive our reliefs that hopefully we are not the unlucky guys in that film.