Jamie Baron distinguishes between two nostalgias evoked by the archive affect (“the overwhelming sense of time’s passage and of all that has been irrevocably lost to the present” [121]). Restorative nostalgia idealizes the partiality of the archive and leads to a desire for the past that never was and reflective nostalgia takes an honest look at the past and the passage of time—in the case of the archive, images are not fetishized or fixed and our interpretation of the image remains flexible (129-130).

In my video, I try to take a nostalgic clip from 50s American culture that evokes restorative nostalgia and alter it to (hopefully) evoke a reflexive nostalgia. I chose an advertisement for snack foods) played during the intermission at drive-in movie theaters . Drive in movies were at their most popular in the 50 and early 60s, have been in decline since the 1970s, and are very rare today. The loss of this slice of American culture and the viewing of This advertisement has the capacity (for those who recognize it) to evoke the archive affect and restore the 50s/early 60s idealized past. It displays snack foods singing, urging people to buy snack food for the movie. This is followed by a popcorn machine and then four movie goers happily eating the snack food advertised. The ad is all underlain with the catchy “Let’s all go to the lobby” jingle.

In order to create a more reflective nostalgic experience, I try to re-edit this clip to emphasize the pervasiveness of the snack food products—the true purpose of these advertisements. Although some may remember the jingle in relation to drive in movies and an idealistic time, the intention of the original video is to push the viewer to consume snack food.

I start with the people eating, slow down the jingle to create a slightly disturbing effect, and then allow the food products marching down the movie aisles to appear below the layer of people eating. My intention was to give the impression that the food products have now become ingrained in the people’s (and perhaps our own) psyches through repetition. It’s not just a happy jingle, it’s a sort of invasion into the brain.

I’ll finish by pointing out that in order to recognize this archive affect (and archive effect) one must 1. Recognize that this is an old cartoon and not a contemporary cartoon and 2. Recognize the jingle and its context. If a viewer is unaware of the jingle and its role in advertising, then they will not understand the video, or its attempt to create a different nostalgic effect. This leads me to wonder about the extent of contextual knowledge necessary for nostalgia to be evoked. Is it only necessary to recognize time has passed?  Is it also necessary to recognize the ideal portrayed by the object being observed? In other words, can nostalgia (restorative or reflective) be evoked subconsciously?

So I may not have been as faithful to the guidelines of the prompt as I could have been. I say that only because you’ll notice that in the video I made there are clearly two video clips—one overlaid atop the other. The initial image that you see is of a deflated Navy life raft. This clip I acquired through the Public Domain Project. From this video clip I selected a roughly 5s section, and it more or less repeats 5-6 times. The major alterations to the clip involved opacity (which decreases than increases), as well as scale (which increases from 50% to 100%). As a side note, I did run into some issues with figuring out how to scale the clip so that it appeared in Premiere as it looked in its source file—a process which in turn lead to the “zooming in” decision as a compositional effect.

I appropriated the second clip, which also provides the video’s audio, from the Prelinger Archive. The selection is a 30s slow motion underwater shot of a group of female swimmers. The source video (which was a also an appropriation film) titled “AquaFrolic” also contained shots of male cliff divers. I appropriated part of the original title for my “FrolicFloat.”

I used this second clip as my temporal foundation to mark out an approximately 30s sequence onto which I could collage the life raft footage. While working with the two clips in this way it was clear that the interaction between the images generated the suggestion of a narrative, as well as a sense of distance from their original and archival sources. In the new context the levity and buoyancy, which the word “frolic” might connote seems to be not just overshadowed by a literal floating object, but also subverted, as what were playful swimmers appear more like ghostly figures reaching for (and failing to reach) the raft. I like the word “frolic”—and it seemed, given the material a place to explore Baron’s idea about the relationship between the archive and “the joke.” As she suggests,

the affinity…has to do with the fundamental ambiguity of the meaning of the archival fragment as both figurative (it stands for something else as a sign of history) and literal (it gains its evidentiary power from its specificity and particularity), which lends itself not only to factual assertion but also to “misuse” and play. (112)

Initially, the footage of the swimmers had a playfulness about it, as did the bright orange floating raft. However, the title of the video and the appropriated video fragments become much more ambiguous placed on top of one another and generate an unexpectedly dark/melancholic mood.

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.

The Voyagers in particular, of the appropriation footage films we’ve watched, collapses and simultaneously heightens the difference between “then” and “now.”

That might be a controversial statement. Obviously, the newness of audiovisual material in our cultural history means that – for now — most of the found or archival footage is going to be from within a single generation, featuring scenes which also exist in living cultural memory; there are probably people still alive from some portions of No More Road Trips? albeit probably rarer from the very earliest clips, and similarly there are still those alive from the era portrayed in The Maelstrom (although less than there were twenty years ago during that film’s creation.) And in fact the latter is one of the examples Barron uses for discussing the ironic distance that archival footage produces: the footage is “‘too close to home’ in both a literal and figurative sense […] we share in the same context of modernity.” (40)

But what to do then when the footage is even closer to home? One of the things that catches me about The Voyagers, especially in light of “the experience of the archive effect – as it occurs through the perception of temporal and/or intentional disparity” (29) is its concern with the temporal, and with the temporary: with the almost absurd temporality the audience is required to wrap their heads around, both the brevity of time and, paradoxically, its vastness.

Immediately after telling Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan’s love story from the launch in 1977, filmmaker Penny Lane inserts herself into the narrative in 1996: “I remember when Carl Sagan died. I was in high school. I guess you were in college.” Most of the film later, she muses on the visionary idealism of the Golden Record: “I wish I had lived in that time. It’s hard to imagine the Golden Record being made now.” This is the bizarre crux of the temporal issues of this film: the tension – the distance – between the portion of the story Penny personally remembers and uses as a way to daydream about her partner, and the portion that seems to her impossibly distant, is only a matter of only decades.

And that vast difference is marked perhaps by Carl Sagan’s particular lifetime (“I wish Carl Sagan were here…”), or maybe instead by the Challenger explosion that seems to serve as a “major temporal break” (Baron 40) at least as presented by the film: the dead silence around the sixth minute, the pause to play the familiar footage, the clip which shows a NASA(?) staffer stare in shocked silence before demanding that the cameras be cut. (We don’t see – can’t see — whether they are; within the context of the documentary, the film keeps moving.) Regardless, the “history” of the film seems compactly close to its personal memory and the present moment.

The distance between 1977 and 1996 (or even 1977 and 1986) seems immense here: one is a distant past and the other is a remembered experience. This is almost a hyper-temporal experience – what are its effects? One is to emphasize the brevity of life, the rapidity of change; the human lifespan being so short especially in comparison to the vastness of the universe, to the “thousand billion years” of cosmic time, which is just as much a timeline at play in this documentary.

But The Voyagers is a love story, too, and Carl and Ann have an answer to that: the sense of luckiness they had in an atheistic universe, “that fate could be so kind; that we could find one another in the vastness of space, the immensity of time.” By paying such loving attention to the temporal details of the space movement over a few decades of the 20th century, and situating it within the vast cosmic scales of time (the Voyager probes which are still traveling and their Golden Records which could stay intact for millions of years), the vastness of time is emphasized in counterpoint with the absolute importance, nevertheless, of the particular human moment. This is the heart, we seem to think by the movie’s end, of any love story: that it is impossible to know what will happen, but “why not try? Why not reach for something amazing?”

And if this reads as too optimistic, well, I’ll leave with Lane’s thoughts on the Golden Record: “Some people have criticized this, but I’m glad they did it that way. That’s what it’s like to look at the thing you love most. That’s why it’s a valentine.”

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?

Baron’s The Archive Effect has kept me considering something about the home mode movies of both audiovisual archive and private collection senses. On page 82, Baron defines the effects of home mode movies as “…the presence of such documents in appropriation films may represent a democratizing of history and contribute to public knowledge about or experience of past events by including traces of otherwise unknown individuals into histories that previously accounted only for those who held the most social and political power”. This definition, I think, exactly describes the meaning and the function of home mode documents. It also reminds me of the concept of reformulating these home mode documents with the sense of temporal disparity. In this sense, instead of being narrated officially and authoritatively as traditional archives, it is true that the footage and audiovisual appropriations, recording individual’s daily lives in the simple ways, not only reveal the democratic spirits but also visualize the life and society in the past.

Many now use smartphones or cameras to record their lives for various purposes, but once those private movies made by themselves are debunked in public no matter with or without their will, I think there will be some certain ethical issues even though the movies are just used by the professionals for academic or archival purpose. Baron also raised a similar question: “What are the ethical implications of using home mode documents in public texts?” (82). I think it’s hard to answer. Obviously, these footage and appropriations are precious and valuable for us to look back in public texts, but it also involves privacy problems and seems like “a voyeuristic peek into other people’s private lives”. Thus, the status of home mode documents will definitely change when they appear in different texts.

Another thing I’m also considering is how to understand properly while watching appropriation films, like The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle. Someone may feel a little bit confused about what is going on, if he or she barely has a good knowledge of the history in 1930s. I have no idea whether someone else feels this way, but I do. It seems like when watching the more authoritative archival films, say, BBC documentaries, I  usually have a fairly clear purpose for what I am watching, why I watch these or what I am supposed to do after watching, but after watching The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle, I am a little lost. Baron discusses the“video confession”, a kind of appropriated confessional video footage, which may present more complex human emotions. I’m curious about the reaction by somebody who watch it. Will he or she feel lost as I do? I assume these reactions, such as getting lost, feeling nervous or awkward, are probably parts of archival voyeurism.

The term “unruliness” is reiterated in the outset of this book, I can’t help thinking that is there any boundaries between the private footage collection and the archival appropriations? Is it necessary that some rules be established to make a clear distinction between the private and the public? If so, what will happen to the footage and audiovisual experiences in terms of archival effect?