Food Porn from MJC on Vimeo.

I was having trouble doing anything productive with the hyper-short-form, so I decided to play around with conjoining two different types of (vintage) video instead: a ~1965 warning film on the dangers of pornography entitled Perversion for Profit, and several ads and educational documentaries on the food industry, including primarily the Miracles of Agriculture film produced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Of course, I had to call it “food porn.”

Using the audio decrying the moral filth, degeneracy, and destructive effects of erotic literature over shots of mass-produced agriculture and agricommerce is at heart “a film with a punch line, a joke on the audience who is always looking at and trying to understand the wrong image.” (Barron 132) If “the joke may be the form best suited toward exploring the archive” because every use of archival materials is in some way a misuse, this is the unjustifiable reinterpretation of the archival material par excellence: it literally just seeks to exploit the similar vintage effects (film coloration, etc.) of 1960s-era film to mashup two different topics for surreal comic effect.

Sure, here I could make a sweeping claim about how the juxtaposition of food and pornography examines the way we “consume” the female form (or the sexual encounter/description) in general the way we consume food, and how the former is rightly or wrongly pathologized in our culture. I could also say something about wanting to mix two forms of propaganda with negative and positive aspects respectively (pornography is destroying our nation vs. the modern supermarket is the marvel of our times.) The production also theoretically pokes fun at the moral panic of the anti-pornography movement, troubles our relationship to food by putting it within an eery audiovisual disjunct AND highlighting the “manufacturing” of the modern food industry, and directly juxtaposes the 60s-era fear of communism with images of well-known capitalist food advertisers as a version of the perceived communist “masters of deceit.”

And all of those things were on my mind in part (mostly during my choices for the last few seconds of the mashup), but: really it’s just meant to be a joke. I considered making it a 30-second film with the 27-second dramatic leadup from the pornography narrator, followed by three to five seconds of the cherries in the industrial bagger (possibly with cheery music; there was some in the film, but it faded too quickly to a voiceover.) The long lead-up followed by the sudden cut seems to be a very digital-age form of video mashup humor — especially if the content after the cut is itself ridiculously short in comparison or otherwise surreal/funny.

It’s possible I was overly influenced by Trash Night Video, though I don’t think I sunk-slash-ascended to that level of Dadaist supercut humor. I’m also looking at it and cringing at some of the sloppy editing, now, which sort of kills the joke on an experiential level, but this is one of the drawbacks of working with the Healey media lab software.

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.