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?
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