“The Voyagers” is a beautiful short film by Penny Lane (that may or may not have made me cry a bit) in which we can find playfulness with many elements discussed in The Archive Effect. Here, however, I will focus on her creation of the archive effect through the use of temporal disparity through vocalization, rather than visualization, as is primarily discussed by Baron. Furthermore, I will explore the possible complication of Lane’s film to Baron’s presentation of temporal disparity in appropriation films.

Temporal disparity, defined by Baron as “the perception by the viewer of an appropriation film of a ‘then’ and ‘now’ generated within a single text” (18), is vacant from the visual elements of the film as all clips seem to emerge exclusively from the 80s. The sense of “then” and “now” is, rather, solely present in Lane’s voiceover of the short film, wherein she marks certain scenes with years—the Challenger disaster in 1986, etc.—and makes reference to “today” in contrast to the time of the creation of the golden disk in 1970s.

This vocal differentiation between what is being viewed and the present, which is being confronted by the voiceover, as well as the frequent indexing, cultivates the archive effect in relation to the viewed documents. Beyond the past-tense reference to the clips of the film, and a frequent shift into the variances of the world as we now know it creating the “then” of the past and the “now” of the relative present, Lane extends Baron’s idea of temporal disparity to include a future “then.” While there is no way to present a picture of the future world to which Lane refers—where the sun has burnt up the world and the Voyagers continue on for billions of years—the lack of this footage is irrelevant since the “then” and “now” of the past and present in the text are likewise solely presented through its vocality. Thus, Lane takes us to the future, a place apart from both the past of the footage and the present of her words, through the experience of viewers’ imaginations.

Interestingly, alongside these words of a distant time when the golden record remains floating in possibility without the existence of humanity behind it, Lane presents footage taken by the Voyagers of the deep expanse of space beyond Earth. This footage, presumably (by the matching quality of the film and the pattern of the rest of the footage) taken in the 80s, or the “then” past of the text, reflects what the same expanse of space looked like in the 80s, presently, and would look like in the vocal future of the text, when the Sun has scorched the Earth.

In this, the “then” of the past, “now” of the present, and “then” of the future that create the temporal disparity of the film and contribute to the working of the archive effect, coincide in a sublime moment where the temporal disparity of human life and time found throughout the film is disrupted by the comprehension that the nearly static existence of the great stretches of space exist(ed) in the “then,” “now,” and “then,” but in temporal similarity rather than disparity.

While this intrigues me, I’m not sure what to make of this understanding in relation to its implications on the archive effect. If the temporal disparity is complicated by a simultaneous temporality of sorts, such as we see in the footage of space, does the archive effect become capable of encompassing the nostalgia of temporal disparity as well as the sublimity of temporal similarity?