Using the footage from Here Comes the Circus found in the Prelinger Archives, I have created a 15-second clip that layers introductions to clowns—a composition I hope represents “one of the paradoxes of the archive: [that] it is constituted by both absence and excess” (109). The short video above shows the “absence” part of this paradox by being a trace of a trace of a historical event—fragments of the archived film of the real-life circus show that occurred in 1942. As Jaimie Baron argues, “Every document is always only a fragment of the vast trove of indexical recordings scattered throughout the world in physical or digital form”—so too is the source material for this short video (110). However, the composition of my video—the building layers of clown faces and the audio that accompanies them—draws attention to the massive accumulation of audiovisual material not only in the original 9-minute archived video that the appropriated clips belong, to but also, on a larger scope, the archives that the original video belongs to (never mind all the audiovisual material available in all archives). Considering this context, my video is based on a selection, leaving many parts of the full Here Comes the Circus video and other possible materials in the Prelinger Archives out. By presenting a selection of a selection, my short video shows the “absence” of other footage from within in original circus video, but also the vast possibility of material that could have been included within the Prelinger Archive. In this way, my tiny manipulative video acknowledges “the excess, ambiguity, and disruptive ‘real’” by causing the viewer to think about the material that’s there and not there—the limited (but also impossibly large) bank of possible material I could have spliced into the video clip.
The clip also confronts the temporality a viewer may experience while watching material from a given audiovisual archive by disrupting that experience’s typical linearity. If the archive effect is indeed an event for a given viewer, the event of watching my short film starts and then disruptively restarts again and again as each clips repeats and becomes buried beneath another clip. This restarting and layering draws attention to how “our historical experience is constructed”: a filmmaker gets to decide where each archival clip begins and ends when they fashion a (usually linear) narrative traditional to documentaries (Baron 174). However, the composition of my short film undermines the ‘touch of the real’ that documentaries often rely on by confronting through overlap and replay that this ‘real’ is a construction within the film as well as within the viewer’s perception of that film. In this way, my video too is a joke. The archival material is misused to create a clown nightmare, but also a historical narrative nightmare, in which the record of the circus becomes indiscernible and thus so does the “truth” that Here Comes the Circus could purport. The play inherent in my video to some degree undermines the false power of the archival document.
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