I have created a short clip from a footage Doctor in Industry in the Prelinger Archive.  Instead of overlapping the images, I select five scenarios from the video and integrate them into one short clip. Each of them lasts about 5-8 seconds and forms different angles of viewing the story. At first sight, viewers may find it difficult to understand this short clip, but as Baron argues in chapter 4: “the film acts as a succession of encounters and interruptions that are only tentatively held together by the delicate narrative thread of the narrator’s reflexive meditations” (118), it seems that, to some extent, the narrators’ reflections of a video clip come from not only the completeness of a storytelling but also the fragments of a story that shape viewer’s thoughts in a figurative sense.

This clip covers different parts of a certain history of industrial medicine in the first half of the 20th century, consisting of an introduction in the beginning which, I think, makes it like a traditional movie, a love story of a doctor at that time, the doctor’s behavior in the hospital, the scenery of a hospital and the communication between doctors. Though these are just fragments extracted from a footage film, they still, in my opinion, picture the lives in the past as a whole. I end the clip where the doctors are talking and as a viewer, I’m still curious about what they are talking about and how the story will develop in the next step. It represents the idea of the footage are both explicitly about memory and culture, which“…not only enacts the desire to turn archival fragments into a narrative but also suggests that certain fragments can never be contained by a story”(118).

I’m also considering the idea of “gap” discussed by Baron who argues that“…such a gap in the archive visible may give rise not only to intellectual acknowledgement of how the archive effect can be simulated but also to an intensified experience of the archive affect, the overwhelming sense of time’s passage and of all that has been irrevocably lost to the present”(121). In my understanding, the gap which exists in footages between narrating and meditating generates the “history desire” to explore the past and present among all the fragments. In this sense, looking into those gaps makes it more interesting than just sitting there and watching appropriation.