The Archive Effect

“History persists and seldom more powerfully than in filmed images – our
externalized form of memory. What happens when the past meets the present
in films that draw on archival films and photographs to engender meaning?
Baron’s explorations of this question are original and eye-opening. It will
change how we think about the archive and the persistence of history.”
Bill Nichols, San Francisco State University, specialist film consultant and
author

The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History
examines the problems of representation inherent in the appropriation of archival
film and video footage for historical purposes. Baron analyzes the way in which
the meanings of archival documents are modified when they are placed in new
texts and contexts, constructing the viewer’s experience of and relationship to
the past they portray. Rethinking the notion of the archival document in terms of
its reception and the spectatorial experiences it generates, she explores the
“archive effect” as it is produced across the genres of documentary,
mockumentary, experimental, and fiction films. This engaging work discusses
how, for better or for worse, the archive effect is mobilized to create new
histories, alternative histories, and misreadings of history.
The book covers a multitude of contemporary cultural artefacts including
fiction films such as Zelig, Forrest Gump, and JFK; mockumentaries such as
The Blair Witch Project and Forgotten Silver; documentaries such as Standard
Operating Procedure and Grizzly Man; and videogames such as Call of Duty:
World at War. In addition, it examines the works of many experimental
filmmakers including those of Péter Forgács, Adele Horne, Bill Morrison,
Cheryl Dunye, and Natalie Bookchin.

Jaimie Baron is an assistant professor at the University of Alberta, Canada. Her

research focuses on the production and transformation of human experience
through technology. She is also the founder and director of the Festival of
(In)appropriation, an annual international showcase of short, experimental found
footage films.
The Archive Effect

Found footage and the audiovisual

experience of history

Jaimie Baron
First published 2014
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2014 Jaimie Baron
The right of Jaimie Baron to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any
electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and
recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the
publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used
only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
The archive effect : found footage and the audiovisual experience of history / edited by Jaimie Baron.
pages cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Stock footage. 2. Archival materials. 3. Experimental films–History and criticism. 4. Context effects
(Psychology) 5. Time in motion pictures. 6. Motion pictures and history. I. Title.
PN1995.9.S6964B37 2013
025.17’73–dc23
2013022802

ISBN: 978-0-415-66072-3 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-0-415-66073-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-203-06693-5 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Cenveo Publisher Services
For Jonathan, my special effect
CONTENTS

List of figures
Acknowledgements

Introduction: history, the archive, and the appropriation of the indexical

document

1 The archive effect: appropriation and the experience of textual difference

2 Archival fabrications: simulating, manipulating, misusing, and debunking the

found document

3 Archival voyeurism: home mode appropriations and the public spectacle of

private life

4 The archive affect: the archival fragment and the production of historical
“presence”

5 The digital archive effect: historiographies and histories for the digital era

Conclusion: the audiovisual experience of history – and beyond

Works cited
Index
LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 49 Up: Neil at 7, 28, and 49 (Michael Apted, 2005).

1.2 A Trip Down Market Street: 1905/2005 (Melinda Stone, 2005). Courtesy of
the artist.
1.3 Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq (Jon Alpert, Ellen Goosenberg Kent,
2007).
1.4 Rize (David LaChapelle, 2005).
1.5 Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983).
1.6 Tearoom (William E. Jones, 2007). Courtesy of the artist and David
Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.
2.1 Forgotten Silver (Peter Jackson and Costa Botes, 1995).
2.2 Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994).
2.3 Capricorn One (Peter Hyams, 1978).
3.1 The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle (Péter Forgács, 1997). Simon
Peereboom in 1938 at the wedding of his brother Max. Courtesy of the artist
and Lumen Film.
3.2 Avo (Muidumbe)/Avo (Granny) (Raquel Schefer, 2009). Courtesy of the
artist.
3.3 Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003).
3.4 Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, 2008).
4.1 The Tailenders (Adele Horne, 2005). Photograph by Karin Johansson.
Courtesy of the artist.
4.2 okay bye-bye (Rebecca Baron, 1998). Courtesy of the artist.
4.3 Decasia: The State of Decay (Bill Morrison, 2002).
4.4 (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971).
5.1 Mass Ornament (Natalie Bookchin, 2009). Courtesy of the artist.
5.2 Lossless #3 (Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, 2008). Courtesy of the
artists.
5.3 Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill (Pat
O’Neill, Rosemary Comella, and Kristy H.A. Kang, 2002). Courtesy of the
artist.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Numerous people generously gave their time to help me with this project,
reading drafts and listening to me work through my ideas, offering provocative
questions I might otherwise have overlooked. I would like to thank Wendy
Belcher, Siobahn Byrne, John Caldwell, Greg Cohen, Heather Collette-
Vanderaa, Roger Hallas, Ilona Hongisto, Eve Luckring, Kathleen McHugh,
Michael Renov, Steven Ricci, Sharon Romeo, and Patrik Sjöberg for their
contributions to my thinking about the archive effect. Thanks especially to
Lauren Berliner, Allyson Field, Maja Manojlovic, and Victoria Meng for – in
addition to offering invaluable comments – always believing in me and boosting
my confidence when it began to flag.
I would also like to thank the many filmmakers who took the time to speak
with me in detail about their work, in particular Rebecca Baron, Natalie
Bookchin, Douglas Goodwin, Adele Horne, William E. Jones, Raquel Schefer,
and Leslie Thornton. Thanks also to Douglas Goodwin for his stunning design
work for the book cover.
I want to thank my editor Natalie Foster for supporting this project and my
anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on my manuscript.
My wonderful parents, Ruthellen Josselson and Hanoch Flum, have been the
ground that has allowed me to reach this place; and without the love and support
of Jonathan Cohn, this book would not have become a reality. He makes the
work – and my life – worthwhile.
Most of all, I want to thank my advisor, mentor, and friend Vivian Sobchack,
who gave so much time, energy, and attention to reading my work, commenting
thoroughly on everything from conceptual gaps to comma placement. She has
always pushed me to become a clearer thinker and better writer, and, without
her, I would not be the scholar I am. She embodies all that I value about the
intellectual project and I am truly lucky to know her.
INTRODUCTION

History, the archive, and the appropriation of the

indexical document

Silent black and white images, scarred by dust and scratches, of World War II
planes dropping bombs on the landscape below. Men in top hats dodging horse-
drawn carriages and early model cars on the streets of San Francisco during the
early-twentieth century. African-American protestors confronting the police and
members of the Ku Klux Klan during the Civil Rights Movement. Martin Luther
King Jr. telling us of his dream. Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon. A
Chinese student standing alone in front of a tank as it advances towards him in
Tiananmen Square. Despite the very different contexts from which they emerge,
all of these images might be referred to as “archival footage” and understood as
evidence of past events. Each of these images is compelling even if – at least
without added narration and contextualization – its precise meaning is
sometimes obscure. Such images seem to bring us into “contact” with the past,
to offer us a glimpse of a world that existed but has been erased and overlaid
with different faces, current fashions, and new technologies. Indeed, the past
seems to become not only knowable but also perceptible in these images. They
offer us an experience of pastness, an experience that no written word can quite
match.
But what is this experience of pastness? And how is it connected to “history,”
which generally connotes an official and objective account of past events? In
other words, what exactly is “archival footage” and how does it shape our
experience as well as our understanding of the past and, hence, of history?
Despite our frequent encounters with what we may recognize as “archival”
sounds and images, just what they are and how they contribute to the
construction of history has in recent years become increasingly uncertain.

The “crisis” in historiography and the problem of the

indexical archival document
In the past 50 years, the very notion of “history” has undergone a transformation
and, with it, our understanding of our relationship to the past. In written histories
before the 1970s, the past was often conceived as a linear narrative of cause and
effect with a relatively closed meaning that was assumed to be warranted by
historical documents themselves rather than narrative articulation by the
historian. Hayden White’s seminal 1973 book, Metahistory: The Historical
Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe, led to a reconsideration of historical
narratives as stories organized by the same tropes found in literature – metaphor,
metonymy, synecdoche, and irony – and mobilized, often unconsciously, by
historians.1
At a time when historical narratives were often regarded as transparent and
objective representations of fact based on archival research, White drew
attention to the ways in which tropes were deployed by historians in order to turn
the archival documentation of events not only into representational narratives but
also into particular kinds of narrative, emplotted according to the literary
structures of the romance, the comedy, the tragedy, and the satire. Over the years
that followed, White’s fundamental insight changed the way in which historical
narratives were understood, reframing historical representations in terms of their
construction rather than in terms of simple truth or falsehood.
In tandem with this “crisis” in historiography, a crisis occurred around the
concept of the archive. Since the professionalization of the discipline of history,
which began in the mid-nineteenth century, archives, originally defined as
official institutions in which official documents were preserved, have been the
foundation upon which modern history has been constructed.2 The contents of
these archives have long been venerated as the solid and objective evidence upon
which factual accounts of the past can be built. In recent years, however, the
objectivity of archival documents has been put into question, and as faith in the
archive as a comprehensive source of objective “evidence” has become
problematic, the distinctions between archives, libraries, collections, and other
gatherings of objects, including virtual objects in digital archives, have
increasingly blurred.3
Abstract theorizations of “the archive,” although sometimes incompatible with
discussions of specific archives, have also reframed the way in which historians
perceive individual archival institutions. Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida
have both discussed the archive less as a physical institution than as a system
that governs what can be said about the past. By the time of White’s
Metahistory, Foucault’s 1969 essay, “The Historical a priori and the Archive,”
had already offered a critical redefinition of the archive and its function.
Foucault writes:

The archive is the first law of what can be said, the system that governs the
appearance of statements as unique events. But the archive is also that which
determines that all these things said do not accumulate endlessly in an
amorphous mass, nor are they inscribed in an unbroken linearity, nor do they
disappear at the mercy of chance external accidents; but they are grouped
together in distinct figures, composed together in accordance with multiple
relations, maintained or blurred in accordance with specific regularities.4

Rather than viewing the archive as a repository of unmediated evidence about

the past, Foucault saw it as a particular structure of power in which particular
kinds of documents are kept in a particular order, thereby delimiting the
possibilities of what may be said about the documents and, indeed, of knowledge
itself.
Derrida extended this line of thought in his own discussion of “archive fever.”
He writes about the ways that archives are structured according to the logics of
power that determine which objects are preserved, stored, and revered and which
are excluded, thereby creating the past rather than simply preserving it.

The archive … is not only the place for stocking and for conserving an
archivable content of the past which would exist in any case, such as, without
the archive, one still believes it was or will have been. No, the technical
structure of the archiving archive also determines the structure of the
archivable content even in its very coming into existence and in its
relationship to the future. The archivization produces as much as it records the
event.5

Moreover, Derrida indicates the extent to which the administrators of archives –

once called the “archons” – control access to these traces of the past, thereby
keeping history in the hands of those who are deemed worthy of authority.6 Each
individual archive may have its own peculiarities, but such structures of power,
inclusion, and exclusion, Foucault and Derrida suggest, are inevitably at work.
 To be sure, the result of these reevaluations of “the archive” for historians was
not a rejection of actual archives and their resources but rather an instigation to
use archives in a more self-conscious way. Indeed, the coalescence of New
Historicist strategies in the 1980s led many historians to return to the archive in
search of “evidence” of something very different from what previous historians
had sought. New Historicism begins from the premise that there is no single,
universal history but rather many histories, based in the unique, the particular,
and the anomalous.7 New Historicists often search the archive for eccentric
anecdotes and enigmatic fragments as the basis for constructing counterhistories
that interrupt the homogenizing forces of previous grand historical narratives and
archival order by grounding themselves in the contingent and “the real,” all the
while acknowledging that “the real” is never accessible as such.8 It is, in fact, the
embrace of archives as a vast amalgamation of unrelated and unruly rather than
neatly ordered objects that makes the New Historicist project possible.
However, the unruliness of archival objects became even more pronounced
with the emergence of archives collecting indexical audiovisual documents such
as photographs, films, videos, and sound recordings.9 It is not only official state
and commercial institutions that have begun collecting audiovisual media: so
have unofficial grassroots or private collections as well as the designers of
digital, virtual archives. Yet, audiovisual documents pose many problems for the
historian/filmmaker that are absent – or at least easier to repress – in written
documents. Both cinematic and written histories share the problems of the
excess and inexhaustibility of the archive – there are always too many
documents and too many possible ways of reading them. However, citations of
written documents do not have the same simultaneously iconic and indexical
relationship to the historical world as do photographic, filmic, or other
audiovisual media, in which issues of excess are even more prominent. Written
documents may certainly always mean more – or have more potential meanings
– than the historian can account for, but indexical images and sound recordings
are even less easy to contain than written documents; their tangibility and
ambiguity is often even more unruly. They seem “closer” to the past they
represent and are potentially seductive in their seeming transparent textuality;
and although every trace, written or otherwise, is open to interpretation,
indexical audiovisual recordings are especially resistant to full comprehension or
interpretation.
In this regard, media theorist Friedrich Kittler has argued that the indexical
sign, unlike writing, records uncensored, unfiltered “noise,” which resists
signification.10 Given their unruly indexical excess, audiovisual media often
demonstrate (whether intentionally on the part of the recordist or not) the excess,
ambiguity, and disruption characteristic of “the real.” Following Kittler, film
theorist Mary Ann Doane has suggested that the ability of technologies of
mechanical reproduction to create indexical traces holds both the allure of
preserving the past and the threat of preserving too much of it, generating only
an “archive of noise.”11 Indeed, archives and the indexical traces they preserve
often escape the control of the archons as well as the historians and filmmakers
who use them. These traces mean subversively more than we might intend or
wish – or subversively less.12
In a similar vein, documentary theorist Stella Bruzzi writes, “Documentary has
always implicitly acknowledged that the ‘document’ at its heart is open to
reassessment, reappropriation and even manipulation.” Nonetheless, she argues,
this openness is qualified and does not obscure or render “irretrievable the
document’s original meaning, context or content.”13 Bruzzi thus suggests that,
despite its unruliness, there is something about the indexical document that
resists the extension of its potential meanings beyond a certain limit. Conversely,
however, documentary scholar Bill Nichols has shown that the meaning of
indexical images, for instance the video footage of the Rodney King beating in
Los Angeles, always depends on how the images are contextualized and
explained. The meaning of the footage is altered as it is placed in different
“interpretive frameworks,” although the tendency is to imagine that the meaning
is inherent in the footage rather than in the interpretive framework through
which we approach it.14 The fact that the prosecution and defense in the Rodney
King case both used the same footage to represent different versions of the same
event, one version arguing for the police officers’ guilt and the other for their
innocence, crystallizes the way in which decontextualization and
recontextualization of indexical archival documents have the power to generate
very different understandings of a past event. Thus, although, as Bruzzi suggests,
the indexical document may possess a certain resistance to wholesale
manipulation of meaning, it also possesses the potential to serve multiple
interpretative frameworks.
Although many academic historians have avoided working directly with
audiovisual documents because (at least in part) of the unruliness of the
indexical sign, filmmakers and other media practitioners have been drawing on
preexisting audiovisual documents for over a century. Many of these audiovisual
documents have been housed in official and institutionally-based archives
including government, university, and commercial archives. More recently,
however, as home video and digital photography collections as well as online
digital video and photography archives have grown, the reuse of such documents
in films has also expanded. As the sources from which audiovisual documents
may be appropriated shift and multiply, these appropriations give rise to a new
and altered sense not only of the documents but also of what constitutes “the
archive” in the contemporary social and historical moment. Thus, by looking at
how filmmakers have variously negotiated the problems of finding and reusing
photographic, filmic, video, and audio recordings, we may come to a clearer
understanding of how the relationship between the archive and history has
changed with the advent and expansion of audiovisual media.

“Rare archival footage! Never seen before!”

Since its invention, cinema has been a productive site for the representation and
exploration of historical events. While fictional recreations of historical
moments have been one method of trying to understand history, other film
practices have attempted to bring the viewer into a relationship with the past
through the use of archival film footage of the historical event in question – as
well as other indexical archival documents including photographs, sound
recordings, and, later, video footage. As film historian and theorist Jay Leyda
has shown, the appropriation and editorial linkage of film footage from disparate
sources dates back to the earliest days of film exhibition and to the establishment
of the newsreel format. However, the use of preexisting film footage in
documentary film to specifically reflect on historical events may be traced back
to the 1920s when Soviet filmmaker Esfir Shub reedited old newsreel footage
from the last years of the Czarist rule of Russia in order to tell a new – and
triumphant – narrative of the birth of Communist Russia in her film, The Fall of
the Romanov Dynasty (1927).15 This “repurposing” of preexisting film images
to illustrate new historical narratives and arguments in what Leyda termed the
“compilation film” became increasingly popular throughout the following
decades.16 Indeed, turning on the History Channel for even a few moments
reveals that films that appropriate and repurpose documents from various
contexts in order to produce narratives of historical events continue to be
produced en masse today. Such films frequently draw upon and appropriate
documents housed in official archival institutions to serve as “evidence” of some
argument or assertion about the past. The inclusion of archival evidence is one of
the major selling points for many historical documentaries – a sign of both
meticulous and tedious historical research as well as of historical “truths.” The
blurbs for such films often entice audiences with claims of providing “rare
archival footage” that has “never been seen before.”
Some films that use and promote new or rare archival footage augment an
already known (or received) historical “truth,” bringing into greater, visible (and
sometimes audible) detail or focus some element we already “know” more
generally. For example, Ken Burns’ PBS documentary, The War (2007), even
though it boasted a wealth of “rare” archival footage, was generally regarded as
complicit with established historical narratives of World War II. In her review
“Old Soldiers Never Lie: Ken Burns’ The War tells great stories, but is it great
history?” film critic Beverly Gage answers her own titular question:

The War, despite its graphic footage and remarkable personal testimony, is a
relatively safe film, unlikely to offend anyone’s political sensibility. Although
Burns successfully undermines the bloodless “good war” myth – after 14
hours, he amply demonstrates that World War II was, in his words, “the worst
war ever” – he happily affirms the popular image of a selfless and unsurpassed
“Greatest Generation.”17

By contrast, other films that proffer “rare” archival footage have been
experienced as generating a whole new narrative – or counternarrative – of the
past, upending the established or accepted historical record. For instance, Yael
Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished (2010) reframes footage that was accepted as
documentary evidence of life in the Warsaw Ghetto with outtake footage found
much later, revealing the “documentary” footage – which featured well-dressed
Jews entering a butcher shop while ignoring children begging in the street and
similarly prosperous-looking Jewish passers-by seemingly oblivious to corpses
lying in the street – to have been staged by the Nazis. In her review of the film,
Jeanette Catsoulis explains:

For almost half a century, an unfinished Nazi propaganda film of the Warsaw
Ghetto, simply titled “Das Ghetto” and discovered by East German archivists
after the war, was used by scholars and historians as a flawed but authentic
record of ghetto life … These images were subjected to a radical rereading
with the appearance of another reel in 1998: 30 minutes of outtakes showing
the extent to which scenes had been deliberately staged.18

The discovery of these outtakes and Hersonski’s use of the footage served to
radically shift our vision of Jewish life in the Warsaw Ghetto, revealing that
what we thought we “knew” was a Nazi fiction. As these examples illustrate, the
use of archival footage can support or be disruptive of established historical
knowledge. In both examples, however, the authority that adheres to the archival
document as evidence underpins the films’ claims to representing history.
Indeed, the ideas of both “archivalness” and rarity seem to promise truth-value
as well as an experience of evidentiary revelation. The footage has been “found,”
and it therefore has an aura of being directly excavated from the past. The sense
of the “foundness” of the footage enhances its historical authority because what
has been “found” has not (ostensibly) been fabricated or shaped by the
filmmaker who repurposes this footage. Paradoxically, then, something “old”
gains part of its power by also promising something “new,” something we did
not know or had not seen before. While the sheer volume of recorded – and
digitized – audiovisual documents now multiplies every day, this promise of
“rare” archival footage continues to exercise an epistemological seduction and to
feed the desire for a revelatory truth about the past that, of course, can never be
fully satisfied.
This seduction and this desire, however, beg the question of exactly what we
mean when we talk about archival footage and other indexical archival
documents. The term “archival footage” may once have referred specifically to
physical materials stored in archives controlled by state or other institutions,
collections officially sanctioned as authoritative repositories of audiovisual
evidence about the past. However, this definition is problematic in that it simply
refers to a location in which certain documents, whose contours are determined
by variously informed acts of inclusion and exclusion, are stored. Moreover, the
ideas of the location, provenance, and authority of an archive have become
increasingly uncertain as online digital archives are constituted and accessed not
only by institutions but also by individuals and groups all over the globe. The
notion of an archive as a particular place and of archival documents as material
objects stored at a particular location has ceased to reflect the complex apparatus
that now constitutes our relation to the past through its photographic, filmic,
audio, video, and digital traces.19 Although official archives continue to be
mined by historians and filmmakers as sources for audiovisual documents,
filmmakers have ever more frequently drawn on documents that are housed
outside of official archives. Increasingly, they have appropriated and repurposed
home movies, home video collections, and now user-generated documents
accessible through online digital databases along with, or instead of, documents
found in official archives. As a result, they are producing works – and historical
effects – that may differ greatly from those that draw only on institutions
authorized by state and commercial power. Thus, the meaning of the term
“archival” when applied to film footage or other indexical documents has
become increasingly difficult to define even as we as film viewers seem – in the
terms of the famous aphorism about pornography – to know it when we see it.
Indeed, it is this aspect of knowing it (or thinking we know it) when we see it
that I seek to theorize in relation to films that appropriate existing film and video
footage for various kinds of historical effects.
In this book, then, I argue that the contemporary situation calls for a
reformulation of “the archival document” as an experience of reception rather
than an indication of official sanction or storage location. I refer to this
experience as “the archive effect.”20 In this repositioning of the archival from
the authority of place to the authority of experience, I argue that archival
documents exist as “archival” only insofar as the viewer of a given film
perceives certain documents within that film as coming from another, previous –
and primary – context of use or intended use. This reformulation of archival
footage and other indexical archival documents as a relationship produced
between particular elements of a film and the film’s viewer allows us to account
not only for emergent types of archives and the diverse documents held within
them but also for the ways in which certain documents from the past – whether
found in an official archive, a family basement, or online – may be imbued by
the viewer with various evidentiary values as they are appropriated and
repurposed in new films.21 By looking at the ways in which found audiovisual
documents function within the films that appropriate them and at the various
relationships established between the viewer of these films and the documents
mobilized within them, we may come closer to an understanding of how these
films generate particular conceptions of the past and, ultimately, of history itself.

“The archival document”: from object to experience

In general, the terms “archival footage” and “compilation film” have been
associated with documentaries that are believed to convey “history” through
their use of and primary dependence upon appropriated documents. Conversely,
the terms “found footage” and “found footage film” have been associated with
experimental films that, rather than presenting “reality” or “history” and using
the footage they appropriate as historical “evidence,” problematize the
construction of “facts” through a reflexive interrogation of media images.
However, the boundaries between compilation film and found footage film and
between archival footage and found footage are often nebulous. Indeed, one of
the problems theorists have encountered stems from the attempt to classify films
that appropriate preexisting documents as a genre on the basis of what “kinds” of
sounds and images are used, of the method or strategies by which these sounds
and images are put together, and/or of the particular “objective” characteristics
of the finished film. Excellent studies of found footage film not only by Leyda
but also by William Wees, Cecilia Hausheer and Christophe Settele, Patrik
Sjöberg, Paul Arthur, Jeffrey Skoller, and Steve Anderson, for instance, have
articulated many of the ways in which found footage has been appropriated and
used. However, in these works, the fundamental question of what constitutes
“found” or “archival” footage remains unclear or, at very least, unstable.22
Thus, despite some very thoughtful attempts, no one as yet has adequately
explained what “archival” or “found” documents are and on what basis we
should make the distinction between them. In addition, the repeated binary in
which the formal strategies of the “found footage film” are valorized over those
of the “compilation film” often seems to be based on the personal preference of
the theorist rather than on a substantial theoretical foundation. Moreover, the
proliferation of terminology for both the source material – including “archival
footage,” “found footage,” “stock footage,” and “recycled footage” – and for the
films into which these sources are incorporated – including “compilation film,”
“found footage film,” “collage film,” and “appropriation” film as well as
“montage,” “détournement,” “mash-up,” and “remix” – is itself a signal that we
need a new way of talking about these objects.
This new way is suggested in film theorist Vivian Sobchack’s “Toward a
Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience,” which argues that we
understand “documentary” not only as a kind of filmic object but also and more
significantly as a mode of reception. She writes:

The term documentary designates more than a cinematic object. Along with
the obvious nomination of a film genre characterized historically by certain
objective textual features, the term also – and more radically – designates a
particular subjective relation to an objective cinematic or televisual text. In
other words, documentary is less a thing than an experience.23

Building on Sobchack’s notion that a genre such as “documentary” may be

understood as a relation between viewer and text, I offer my own revised
formulation of what I call the “appropriation film.” The films in this category
should not be seen merely as objects determined by their “inherent” and
“objective” characteristics or by their deployment of particular filmmaking
strategies but also – and perhaps primarily – as a set of films that may produce a
particular effect or evoke a particular kind of consciousness in the viewer,
however much that effect and consciousness can never be guaranteed.24 Indeed,
in my reformulation, the constitution of an appropriation film as such is
significantly dependent on the film viewer’s recognition that a film contains
what I will henceforth refer to as “archival documents,” which themselves are
also constituted only insofar as the viewer experiences them as “archival” – that
is, as coming from another time or from another context of use or intended use
(an experience I discuss in much greater depth in the next chapter). Thus, I am
calling for a reconceptualization of the appropriation film as not merely the
manner and matter of the text but also – and significantly – a matter of reception,
dependent on the effects the film produces, namely, the archive effect.
Although William Wees has used the term “appropriation film” to indicate
films that appropriate film footage only to generate postmodern pastiche, I wish
to rehabilitate the notion of appropriation as an act that transcends Wees’
categories (and his dismissal of postmodern effects).25 Appropriation occurs in
many ways and may have a variety of effects, but the act of recontextualization
that generates in the viewer a sense of textual “difference” always offers the
possibility of critique and the recognition that the contexts in which we live are
subject to change and are neither universal nor permanent. Moreover, the notion
of appropriation, which carries with it the ideas of both the “appropriate” and the
“inappropriate,” suggests a destabilizing of assumptions about what is “proper”
to the discourse of history. Thus, I use the term “appropriation film” here not as
a pejorative but rather as an overarching category in which many different kinds
of appropriation may occur and be experienced by the viewer. Furthermore, in
what follows, I use the term “appropriation film” to indicate works created in a
variety of media so long as they repurpose materials – thus, “film” here includes
films, videos, and digital media works of all kinds. When a distinction between
these different media is necessary, I specify the medium of the work in
question.26
The term “archival document” registers the fact that appropriation films have
implications for our conception of “the archive,” defined – following Foucault –
as the first law of what may be said: all the possible documents available for
appropriation at a given moment. Indeed, all appropriations refer to “the
archive” on some level and evoke a particular idea of what the archive is, what it
contains, and what role it may play in the construction of the past. My aim, then,
is to examine and to attempt to theorize the implications that audiovisual
appropriations may have not only for the films that use them and the viewers
who see them but also for how we understand the archive as the source of
historical knowledge. The archive, broadly conceived, is the point of access to
what counts as evidence of past events. What is at stake, then, is precisely how
certain film practices can help us to locate and trace the changing ways in which
we think about history and our access to it and how we may be able to transcend
reified notions about our relationship to the past.
My use of the term “document” responds to the work of theorists who have
focused on the transformation of the indexical “document” into a
“documentary,” and, thereby, into a representation of “history.” Philip Rosen has
attempted to account for this transformation and compares it to that of modern
historiography, suggesting that the difference between the document and
documentary is a difference in temporality and sequenciation. He argues that this
transition – the conversion of primary materials to a secondary, historicized
understanding – is characteristic of the modern historiographic project, and that
it is the act of sequenciation of documents that generates the interpretive
meaning that is fundamental to both documentary as it is edited and history as it
is written. In both cases, the document must be transformed through its
(re)contextualization. Indeed, like written documents, indexical documents must
be converted into a narrative at a point in time after the event they record. In
parallel to White’s argument that primary source written documents must be
“emplotted” by the historian, Rosen argues that audiovisual documents must be
arranged in a particular order by the documentary filmmaker to produce an
historical narrative. Documents, with their fragmentary status, are distinct from
documentary in that documentary, in order to narrate history, must provide both
sequence and meaning.27
Bill Nichols has also explored this link between document, documentary, and
history, arguing that the relationship between documentary and history is
characterized by “excess” in that history is always in excess of what a
documentary can capture and beyond the full control of the filmmaker.
Documentary tries, in one way or another, to contain this excess, but history –
the “real” – will always exceed this attempt at containment. Thus, Nichols
suggests that although the indexicality of the audiovisual document guarantees a
certain ontological relationship to its referent, it cannot guarantee the meanings
of these referents when the “document” is (re)contextualized within a
“documentary.”28
In addition to its theoretical pedigree in relation to indexical traces and their
appropriation into films, the term “document” is also useful in that it can be used
to refer to both material and virtual objects. In our daily lives, the term
“document” is now used for both printed paper and digital files. Unlike the term
“archival materials,” which emphasizes the physical materiality of an archival
object, the term “archival documents” offers a discursive space in which we may
account for the different kinds of documents that circulate in both material and
virtual form.
As we shall see, reformulating the “appropriation film” and the “archival
document” as co-constituted by the experience of the viewer in relation to an
audiovisual text and establishing the notion of the “archive effect” allows us to
account for variable experiences of reception of the same text; to see how
“archivalness” manifests itself and produces historical effects across the generic
boundaries of films usually categorized as documentary, experimental, fake
documentary, and even fiction film; and to account for a variety of different
kinds of appropriated documents that appear in a film and the different
epistemological effects these different kinds of documents may produce. In the
chapters that follow, I examine the potential relationships that may be
constituted between the viewer of an appropriation film, the archival documents
whose recognition constitutes the appropriation film as such, and the (potentially
historical) events and objects represented in those documents. My goal is not to
write a history or comprehensive account of the appropriation film but rather to
establish a broad theoretical framework for thinking about such films.
Nevertheless, appropriation films must be understood within the context of the
social and technological changes that have influenced the forms these films have
taken. My focus is trained primarily on films made in the West in the past 20
years because I believe they stage a confrontation with the archive and history
that is unique to a particular cultural and historical moment, in which
technologies that record, preserve, circulate, and manipulate sounds and images
have changed and continue to change how we think about documents, archives,
and history. Thus, even as I attempt to establish a framework that may be useful
for thinking about films from other times and places, I seek to locate these
particular film practices within the particular and complex matrix of theoretical,
social, and technological concerns from which they have emerged. However,
although these contexts are important, my emphasis will ultimately remain on
the form of these appropriation films and on the modes of their reception.
In regard to the latter, one problem posed by any study structured around the
viewer’s experience is the impossibility of accounting for every viewer’s
experience of a given film. Here, it is my premise that the archive effect may
occur for some viewers of a given text while other viewers watching the same
text at the same time may not experience the archive effect at all – or may
experience it differently. Indeed, one of the films I later examine – Tearoom
(William E. Jones, 2007) – dramatically demonstrates different viewer responses
to the same text. Drawing on film reviews, film publicity, filmmakers’
statements, post-screening “question and answer” sessions with filmmakers,
documented responses to particular films, and viewer comments posted online, I
attempt to gauge certain tendencies that have prevailed in the reactions to
particular films. However, when such evidence is unavailable, I deploy my own
close textual examination to suggest how the archive effect might occur.
Combining these two strategies, I read both the films themselves and the
discourses produced around them as symptomatic of larger social conceptions of
the archive and of history.
Chapter 1, “The Archive Effect: Appropriation and the Experience of Textual
Difference,” delimits the category of films that I refer to collectively as
“appropriation films,” which are those films that, appropriating previously
recorded textual material, give rise to the viewer’s experience of the “archive
effect” – a sense that certain sounds and/or images within these films come from
another time and served another function. Through an analysis of several
documentary films, I suggest that the two constitutive experiences that make up
the archive effect are a sense of “temporal disparity” and “intentional disparity”
between different sounds and/or images within the same film. In addition,
drawing on the understanding of irony put forth by literary theorist Linda
Hutcheon, I suggest that irony is the constitutive trope of the archival document
since the very experience of the archive effect is dependent on an experience of
multiple possible contexts of reception and, therefore, possible meanings.29
Using a case study of the complex reception of William E. Jones’ Tearoom
(2007), I argue that, like the experience of irony, the experience of the archive
effect can never be guaranteed.
Chapter 2, “Archival Fabrications: Simulating, Manipulating, Misusing, and
Debunking the Found Document,” explores the demonstrated spectatorial desire
to believe in the authenticity and evidentiary authority of archival documents –
even though we know the signs of the archive effect can easily be “faked.” It
also explores the corollary suspicion of iconic archival images, especially those
used over and over again, that seem – at least to some – to have “too much”
authority. In the first half of the chapter, I examine several films that
demonstrate the ways in which the archive effect may be simulated or
manipulated and explore the various reactions to these archival fabrications,
which range from celebratory enjoyment to dire predictions about the fate of
historical knowledge. I also discuss claims that particular uses of archival
documents may be considered “misuses,” producing what some consider
illegitimate meanings. The second half of the chapter deals with the corollary
desire to “debunk” the authenticity and/or accepted meanings of certain widely-
circulated documents – and hence of accepted historical knowledge. I examine
the way in which Holocaust deniers and moon hoaxers have attempted to
undermine the accepted meanings of Holocaust photographs and the Apollo
moon landing footage, respectively. The media produced by these deniers and
hoaxers simultaneously attempt to inscribe a new (and very tenuously founded)
archive effect – using the archival documents themselves to “expose” the
historical “hoax.”
In Chapter 3, “Archival Voyeurism: Home Mode Appropriations and the
Public Spectacle of Private Life,” I explore the way in which appropriations of
snapshots, home movies, and home videos into other films produce a particular
kind of archive effect in which documents that read as originally intended for a
private or limited audience are repurposed as public documents available to
anyone. Through an analysis of several films, I suggest that the use of home
movies expands the territory that we regard as historical, enabling personal
micronarratives to emerge as a significant element of our understanding of past
events. However, I also contend that, at the same time, because they read as
private documents that have been made public, the reception of these
appropriated home movies always entails a certain form of ethical transgression
that I refer to as “archival voyeurism.” I nonetheless argue that this particular
form of ethical transgression is sometimes necessary to a responsible writing of
history.
Chapter 4, “The Archive Affect: The Archival Fragment and the Production of
Historical ‘Presence,’” seeks to account for our affective experience of archival
documents, in other words, how archival documents make us feel. I suggest that
certain appropriation films engage directly with the fragmentary nature of the
archive to produce a sense of the “presence” of history rather than its meaning.
Indeed, by deploying archival documents as metonymic fragments without fully
explaining them or fitting them into a coherent, causal narrative, these films
evoke our desire for an affective encounter with the past that cannot be reduced
to a desire for its meaning. Moreover, these films reveal the fact that our desire
for the presence of history is always accompanied by our recognition of its
absence and of the loss incurred through the passage of time and change. This
aspect of the “archive affect” is inextricable from nostalgia. Following Svetlana
Boym, however, I suggest that this may be either a “reactionary” nostalgia that
seeks to restore an idealized past that never existed or a “reflective” nostalgia – a
self-conscious awareness of the longing that points to the gaps in the archive and
informs the relationship between past and present.30
Chapter 5, “The Digital Archive Effect: Historiographies and Histories for the
Digital Era,” begins with an examination of the ways in which certain
appropriation films engage with documents appropriated from digital archives,
and reveal certain aspects of the digital archive as a whole. The chapter thus
raises questions about how digital storage and distribution may affect our
encounters with the historical past. In contrast to the “material” archive effect
with which the rest of my study is mostly engaged, the “digital archive effect”
can be said to articulate a new set of conditions for trying to know the past
through its digital traces. I argue that several recent films that explicitly draw
from digital archives can be regarded as an emergent form of “digital
historiography.” I then outline a different kind of digital archive effect in which
documents from the material archive are appropriated into and made accessible
through digital interfaces including hypertexts and videogames. In contrast to the
films in the first part of the chapter, I regard these as part of the nascent form of
“digital history,” which begins to reframe the reader or viewer of history as the
“user” of history.
If the archive is indeed, as Foucault put it, “the first law of what can be said,”
my study seeks to trace the contours of that law as it emerges in and through
appropriation films. Although the archive and its contents are constantly
changing, at any given instant the archive is static, waiting for someone to enter
and appropriate particular documents and put them into motion, giving them a
direction or an intentionality in order to articulate some idea about or
relationship to the historical past. Every film that is made and preserved also
becomes part of the archive, awaiting new (and frequently unanticipated) use.
The freedom to continually use and reuse archival documents means that we will
never determine a stable, objective truth about the past, but it is that freedom that
makes the archive a site not only of repression and limitation but also of
possibility.

Notes
1 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
2 Ernst Breisach, Historiography: Ancient, Medieval, Modern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1983), 233.
3 Marlene Manoff, “Theories of the Archive from across the Disciplines,” portal: Libraries and the
Academy 4, no. 1 (2004): 10.
4 Michel Foucault, “The Historical a Priori and the Archive,” in The Archive, ed. Charles Merewether
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 28–29.
5 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 16–17.
6 Derrida, 2.
7 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000), 6.
8 Gallagher and Greenblatt, 49.
9 The term “indexical” derives from the theorizations of Charles Sanders Peirce, who distinguished
between three kinds of signs: symbols, icons, and indexes. Most photographic, filmic, and video images
as well as sound recordings of a live sound can be considered iconic because they resemble the object
or sound represented (known as the referent). They can also be considered indexical because they were
produced in the presence of the referent. See James Hoopes, ed. Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic
by Charles Sanders Peirce (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 30.
10 Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999), 86.
11 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 65.
12 For instance, Allan Sekula has shown that while still photography offered nineteenth-century police
departments a means of regulating criminals’ bodies and the bodies of the lower classes in general,
these photographs also threatened to overwhelm the police through proliferation of details. Sekula
writes, “Photography promised more than a wealth of detail; it promised to reduce nature to its
geometrical essence … This archival promise was frustrated, however, both by the messy contingency
of the photograph and by the sheer quantity of images.” Allan Sekula, “The Body and the Archive,”
October 39 (Winter, 1986): 17.
13 Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000), 12.
14 Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1994), 29. See also Frank Tomasulo, “‘I’ll See It When I Believe It’: Rodney
King and the Prison-house of Video,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the
Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack, 69–88 (New York: Routledge, 1996).
15 Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films: A Study of the Compilation Film (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 23–
28.
16 Leyda, 9.
17 Beverly Gage, “Old Soldiers Never Lie: Ken Burns’ The War tells great stories, but is it great history?”
Slate, 20 September 2007. www.slate.com/id/2174386/. Accessed 13 April 2013.
18 Jeanette Catsoulis, “An Israeli Finds New Meanings in a Nazi Film,” The New York Times 18 August
2010, C1.
19 Of course, there are many other kinds of traces preserved in archives, but this study is focused on
audiovisual traces.
20 I thank Roger Hallas for the term “archive effect,” which he suggested after I first presented a portion
of this study at the Visible Evidence Conference in Bochum, Germany in December 2007.
21 Of course, “the viewer” here is a theoretical construct given that the experiences of individual viewers
of the same film text may greatly vary. However, as I discuss further below, an examination of film
reviews, user comments, and other similar sources, as well as of the film text itself, offers clues to the
ways in which actual viewers might experience the text.
22 See Jay Leyda, Films Beget Films: A Study of the Compilation Film (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964);
Cecilia Hausheer and Christophe Settele, eds. Found Footage Film, (Luzern: VIPER, 1992); William
Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York: Anthology Film
Archives, 1993); Patrik Sjöberg, The World in Pieces: A Study of Compilation Film (Stockholm: Patrik
Sjöberg, 2001); Paul Arthur, A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Film Since 1965 (Minneapolis,
MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Jeffrey Skoller, Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History
in Avant-Garde Film (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Steve Anderson,
Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricities of the Past (Lebanon, NH: Dartmouth
 College Press, 2011).
23 Vivian Sobchack, “Toward a Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience,” in Collecting Visible
Evidence, ed. Michael Renov and Jane Gaines (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1999), 241.
24 I hesitate to refer to appropriation films as a genre since an appropriation film’s categorization as such
depends on a given viewer’s experience. Since subjectivist definitions of genre are often problematic, I
prefer to think of appropriation films as a category of films that may exist across genres.
25 William Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York: Anthology
Film Archives, 1993), 40–42.
26 An objection to my use of the term “appropriation” might also arise from those who regard it as a
Marxist term referring strictly to the appropriation of forms of cultural production and resistance by the
capitalist system, which transforms everything into a commodity to be consumed. However, I am
interested here in the other valences of the word “appropriation” and the etymological roots it shares
with the words “propriety,” which has to do with socially acceptable usage, and “property,” which has
to do with legally acceptable usage.
27 Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001), 237.
28 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991), 14.
29 Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge, 1994).
30 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 49.
1
THE ARCHIVE EFFECT
Appropriation and the experience of textual
difference1

In the past several decades, the archive as both a concept and an object has been
undergoing a transformation. Although official film and television archives still
promote their holdings as the most valuable and authentic basis for documentary
films on historical topics, other kinds of audiovisual archives have begun to
compete with them. Online databases and private collections, in particular,
threaten to unseat official archives as the primary purveyors of evidentiary
audiovisual documents. Indeed, while amateur photography, film, and video
have always existed in an uneasy relationship with official archives, the
increased availability of video cameras, analog and then digital, has led to a
proliferation of indexical documents outside of official archives. It has also
prompted questions about the nature of “archival documents” and their historical
value as well as about their preservation.2 Since the 1990s official archives have
been archiving amateur films, including home movies, but the rise of amateur
video in particular has made the preservation of such documents increasingly
partial.3 There are simply too many of them, and it is difficult to decide which
documents should be preserved by technologies rarely available outside of
official film archives. At the same time, however, amateur documents, as well as
almost any other kind of document, are becoming increasingly available for
appropriation, this in part due to internet sites on which an official archive or
anyone else may upload or download digital (or digitized) photographs or videos
with the click of a mouse.
In my view, this relatively recent situation points to a breakdown in the
distinction, which was never very stable, between “archival” and “found”
documents. Although filmmakers and theorists have frequently used the term
“found” to refer to documents found on the street, in the trash, or at a flea market
and reserved the term “archival” for documents found inside a bona fide archive,
this dichotomy is becoming increasingly difficult to justify. Indeed, the
extension of the word “archive” in common discourse to stand for all kinds of
collections – particularly online collections – calls for an expansion of the idea
of the archive and the term “archival” to also include what might once have been
referred to only as “found” documents. Film theorist Michael Zryd has argued
that “found footage is different from archival footage: the archive is an official
institution that separates historical record from the outtake.”4 Although Zryd
offers an important insight about exclusion, I would suggest that the line
between archival and found footage has become increasingly blurred both by the
changing notion of what constitutes an archive and its “proper” contents and by
the myriad uses to which even the most “official” documents are being put.
Moreover, while the term “archival footage” has in the past been associated
primarily with documentary film and the term “found footage” associated
primarily with experimental film, this distinction obscures the continuities
between documentary and experimental appropriations. Thus, rather than
opposing the terms “found” and “archival,” I suggest we regard “foundness” as a
constituent element of all archival documents as they are perceived in
appropriation films, whether they were “found” in an archive or “found” on the
street. This “foundness” of the archival document exists in contradistinction to
documents that we perceive as produced by the filmmaker specifically for a
given film, and this sense of “foundness” is integral to the experience of the
archive effect. It is part of what lends the archival document in the appropriation
film its aura of “authenticity” and enhances its seemingly evidentiary value.
Of course, there are still structures of power in place that determine what is
included or excluded from official archives, and these structures have important
political, social, and historiographic ramifications for what is considered by most
to be “properly” archival and, therefore, “properly” historical. Nonetheless,
within the contemporary media context, I would argue that the archival
document may be better understood less as a reflection of where the particular
document has been stored than as an experience of the viewer watching a film
that includes or appropriates documents that appear to come from another text or
context of use. Moreover, I would argue that the “found” document becomes
“archival” as it is recontextualized within an appropriation film and is
recognized by the viewer as “found.” Conceptualizing the archival document in
this way undoes the previous hierarchy, in which “archival” footage is given
more value than “found” footage, and suggests that amateur and other
documents often excluded from official archives may have as much potential
historical value as documents stored in an official archive.

Temporal disparity and intentional disparity

But how do “archival documents,” thus construed, come into being? “Archival
footage” has, in common discourse, frequently been defined in opposition to
footage created – rather than found – for the film we are watching. However, I
would argue that what makes footage read as “archival” is, first of all, the effect
within a given film generated by the juxtaposition of shots perceived as
produced at different moments in time. For example, in Alain Resnais’ canonical
Holocaust documentary, Night and Fog (1955), black-and-white images of the
Auschwitz concentration camp shot during and just after the Third Reich are
contrasted with color images of the abandoned camps shot by Resnais and his
crew for the film ten years later. Nearly all descriptions of the film mention this
evocative combination.5 Enhanced by the difference in color, the contrast
between the “then” of the operational death camps and the “now” of Resnais’
own footage of the empty camps produces the black-and-white images as
archival documents.
This contrast between “then” and “now” is not necessarily a matter of who
shot the footage. In Michael Apted’s Up series (1964 onwards), for instance,
Apted has continually filmed the same film subjects every seven years
(beginning when they were seven years old) and then edited footage from all of
these interviews together in various ways in each subsequent film. Thus, in all of
the films in the series after the first installment, 7Up (1964), we can see the
physical changes that have occurred in each of the film subjects as footage from
the previous films is edited into each new film. Through the juxtaposition of
images of the same people at different stages in their lives, we are witness to the
changes wrought by the years. In 49 Up (2005), the footage of “Neil from
Liverpool” at seven years old saying, “When I grow up, I want to be an
astronaut. But if I can’t be an astronaut, I think I’ll be a coach driver,” placed
beside footage of Neil’s gaunt 49-year-old self, who as an adult has struggled
with mental illness and homelessness, produces a shocking recognition of time’s
passage (Figure 1.1). Indeed, this is a large part of the film series’ fascination.
Although Apted (or his crew) shot all of the footage, the footage from the earlier
films is nevertheless experienced as “archival” in the context of each subsequent
film. That is, Apted himself has created an archive of documents that he must
return to each time he makes a new Up film so as to “find” footage that produces
historical effects as it stands in contrast to documents of his subjects at the
present moment of his newest installment in the series.
Hence, I suggest that we regard archival documents as – in part – the product
of what I call “temporal disparity,” the perception by the viewer of an
appropriation film of a “then” and a “now” generated within a single text.6
Indeed, the experience of this temporal disparity within a given film is one of the
things that gives rise to the recognition of the archival document as such, or, in
other words, to the archive effect. Through its (re)contextualization in an
appropriation film and the consequent production of temporal disparity and the
archive effect, then the document becomes “archival.”
The notion of temporal disparity, however, raises questions about when and
where the line of significant difference between past and present may be drawn.
At what point does the past become history? At what point does historical
hindsight emerge so that a new temporal context of knowledge is put into play?
In appropriation films, the break between past and present is brought about by
visible (and perhaps audible) change apparent to the viewer. This may be the
change marked by aging. Like the Up series, David Sington’s In the Shadow of
the Moon (2007) contrasts images of the American astronauts who went to the
moon in the 1960s and 1970s with interview footage of them shot in the 2000s
by Sington and his crew. However, unlike the Up films in which temporally
disparate images are edited together in succession, this film uses a split screen to
produce temporal disparity within a single composite shot. In one frame, we see
the youthful astronauts at the height of their achievement, while in the other
frame we see old men reminiscing about their younger days. The contrast
between the same faces at two different historical moments produces an
experience of the youthful images as archival documents.
 FIGURE 49 Up: Neil at 7, 28, and 49 (Michael Apted, 2005).
1.1

As Night and Fog indicates, temporal disparity may be produced by images of

places as well as people. Similarly – although much less disturbingly – Melinda
Stone’s Interactive Film Comparison: Market Street 1905–2005 (2005)
emphasizes temporal contrast in relation to place using a split-screen with four
quadrants.7 In the first quadrant, from a film camera mounted on a trolley, we
see Market Street in San Francisco in an uninterrupted black-and-white forward
tracking shot of the entire length of this street in 1905.8 In the second quadrant,
this time from a video camera mounted on a car, we see a color image of the
same space and the same uninterrupted tracking shot repeated in 2005. In the
third quadrant, we see another tracking shot in black and white of the same street
in 1906 just after the Great 1906 Fire and Earthquake, and in the fourth quadrant,
we see black-and-white film footage almost identical to the 2005 video footage
in the second quadrant (Figure 1.2). The first two quadrants place side-by-side
similar moving images of Market Street separated by one hundred years. The
fascination of this contrast lies in the opportunity it provides for us to compare
the two spaces, separated not by geography but by temporality, and to
contemplate the play of differences and similarities that separate and unite two
moments in time.
 FIGURE A Trip Down Market Street: 1905/2005 (Melinda Stone, 2005).
1.2 Courtesy of the artist.

Temporal disparity, then, may be the result of gradual temporal change: the
aging of the human face or the changes in the landscape over years. In these
cases, we do not see the aging or change occur, but we see the difference it
makes. However, temporal disparity may also be traced back to a particular
instant in time. Indeed, in Stone’s Interactive Film Comparison, we can also
witness the difference between the footage in the first quadrant of Market Street
in 1905 – lined with buildings, bustling with cars, carriages, trolleys, bicycles,
and people – and the footage in the third quadrant of Market Street after the
Great 1906 Fire and Earthquake.9 In the 1906 footage, most of the buildings
visible in the 1905 footage are collapsed and pedestrians huddled under
umbrellas pick their way through the ruins. In this case, the temporal disparity
can be located at a particular and abrupt moment in time, the earthquake and fire,
which destroyed much of the city. Thus, temporal disparity is generated in the
contrast not only between the footage taken in 1905 and 2005 but also between
the footage taken in 1905 and 1906. The 1905 footage reads as archival in
relation to both the 2005 footage and the 1906 footage.
It is worth noting that this temporal disparity must be visible (or sometimes
audible) and that it may occur either at the level of the profilmic object – a shot
of an old man placed beside his younger image, an image of a street placed next
to an image of the same street a century later – or at the level of the filmstrip
itself – the type of film stock, the color or lack thereof, its degree of damage or
disintegration, and so on. Indeed, quite often this visible difference occurs on
both levels at the same time. Differences at the level of the filmstrip (or video
file), however, may be misleading. In the fourth quadrant of Stone’s Interactive
Film Comparison, black-and-white 35mm film footage – shot simultaneously
with and almost identical to the video footage in the second quadrant except that
it is shot on film and lacks color – plays with the conventions in which color
(video) footage signifies the present while black-and-white film footage signifies
the “archival” past. Although, at first, we might imagine a temporal disparity
between the footage in the second and fourth quadrants because one is color
video and the other black-and-white film, the footage is, in fact, of the same
street shot at the same time in 2005. There is no temporal disparity or archive
effect generated through the juxtaposition of these two shots, and the inclusion
of the contemporary black-and-white film footage indicates that chromatic
contrast and image format may be deceptive as signifiers of temporal contrast.
Another experience of temporal disparity that can be traced back to a
particular moment of temporal break but that is inscribed on the human body
rather than a landscape is produced by the HBO film entitled Alive Day
Memories: Home from Iraq (Jon Alpert, Ellen Goosenberg Kent, 2007), in
which returned US military veterans who served and were seriously injured in
the Iraq War are interviewed about their experiences. Most are missing limbs,
and they refer to the day they were wounded as their “alive day.” Some of these
interviews are cut together with amateur film and video footage of the veterans
before their injuries occurred. In the case of one soldier, 25-year-old Sgt. Bryan
Anderson, who lost both legs and one arm in the war, footage of him after his
injury is edited together with footage of him in high school performing
gymnastic feats. This footage is experienced as archival not only because
Anderson looks older in the present tense framework of the film and because the
high school footage is clearly amateur rather than professional video, but also
because we already know that he later lost his limbs. Anderson’s “alive day” is
the moment of temporal break that guarantees an experience of the high school
footage as archival, of a significant “then” and “now” retroactively produced
within the appropriation film. The amateur video footage thus sets the lost
“then” against the ground of what the film sets up as the normative “now.”
Moreover, the production of temporal disparity often produces not only the
archive effect but also what I call the “archive affect.” When we are confronted
by these images of time’s inscription on human bodies and places, there is not
only an epistemological effect but also an emotional one based in the revelation
of temporal disparity. In other words, not only do we invest archival documents
with the authority of the “real” past, but also with the feeling of loss. In the Up
series, In the Shadow of the Moon, Night and Fog, Market Street 1905–2005,
and Alive Day, the production of temporal disparity forces us to recognize that
the past is irretrievable even as its traces are visible. The youthfulness of the film
subjects in the Up series and In the Shadow of the Moon is nothing more than an
indexical trace of bodies that have since aged and withered. The wholeness of
the soldier’s body in the archival documents in Alive Day can never be regained.
The century between 1905 and 2005 on Market Street cannot be reversed. Those
who died at Auschwitz can never be restored. Thus, our desire for the “presence”
of the past through its archival traces (which I discuss at much greater length in
Chapter 4) is always accompanied by the recognition of its absence, of all that
has been lost.
It is important to emphasize here that the temporal disparity associated with
the archive effect is, as I have formulated it, a potential experience produced for
the viewer within and by the appropriation film. There is, however, always an
experience – albeit with varying degrees of intensity – of temporal disparity
between the moment of the production of the appropriation film and the moment
of its reception by an audience. In Night and Fog, the “now” of Resnais’ 1955
production of the documentary is not the “now” in which we watch it decades
later. In Stone’s film, the color footage of Market Street in 2005 may be close
enough to our “now” (at least at the time of my writing in 2013) so that it feels
contemporary, but, in 20 years, the 2005 footage may also produce a sense of
temporal disparity between the making of Stone’s appropriation film and its
reception. Moreover, with the passage of time, our extratextual knowledge of
and about the world changes, thereby altering our experience of and relationship
to the appropriation film. Thus, there are always at least three temporalities at
work in appropriation films: the “then” of the archival footage, the “now” of the
production of the appropriation film, and the “now” of watching the
appropriation film.
However, for the archive effect to occur, there must be a gap between the
“then” of the document’s production and the “now” of the appropriation film’s
production made evident within the film. Certainly, there is always some
temporal gap between the moment of any film’s production and its reception;
indeed, older films make us particularly aware of the difference between the
“now” of the film’s production and our own “now.” Screening an old film,
however, does not, in my formulation, produce the particular temporal disparity
associated with the archive effect. The experience of watching Nanook of the
North (Robert Flaherty, 1922) at the time of its first release was, of course, very
different from the experience of watching it nearly a century later. Not only have
both media technologies and cultural attitudes toward the representation of non-
Western “others” changed, but also part of the experience of watching Flaherty’s
film now is knowing that all of the people onscreen are long dead.10 However,
arguing that any screening of any film is a temporal recontextualization obscures
the very different investments the viewer may make in different kinds of sounds
and images within a given film. The archive effect – and, hence, the recognition
of a document as archival – is a function of the relationship between different
elements of the same text, between a document placed within a new textual
context, and not of the relationship between a text and the extratextual context in
which it is shown. (As I will demonstrate below, however, this difference
between a new textual and extratextual context is not always clear.)
Moreover, although the viewer’s experience of temporal disparity is one
means by which the archive effect may be produced, there is another catalyst to
the experience of a document as archival. In a different segment of Alive Day,
for instance, we see a grainy video image shot from a hillside as on a road below
an American truck approaches a particular spot where it explodes, accompanied
by the sounds of men off-screen shouting “allahu akbar,” meaning in Arabic,
“God is great.” The image is labeled “Insurgent released video,” a title that was
clearly added after the fact by the makers of Alive Day (Figure 1.3). With the
help of the title, for most viewers (at least those with sufficient extratextual
knowledge) it will be apparent that these images were shot by the Iraqi
insurgents who planted the bomb and then waited for it to explode so that they
could record their handiwork. Indeed, images like this have been sent to US
military headquarters and posted online as a glorification of the Iraqi insurgency.
The makers of the video footage of the bombing may have intended this footage
as a warning to American troops or as an insurgent recruiting tool, but its
relocation in a documentary supportive of American veterans repurposes this
footage in a way that the original makers were unlikely to have anticipated.
Thus, footage taken from one context of use and placed in another may carry
with it a trace of earlier intended uses. This footage generates the dominant sense
of coming not from some other time but from a different intent – and this is the
experience of what I call “intentional disparity.” By this, I do not mean a
disparity that is produced “on purpose” but rather a disparity based on our
perception of a previous intention ascribed to and (seemingly) inscribed within
the archival document. While I have chosen to use the term “intentional
disparity” because of the way in which the viewer is frequently called upon to
“divine” the intention “behind” the document, I might have also easily used the
terms “social disparity” or “rhetorical disparity.” When we attribute an “original
intention” to the archival document, we may be attributing it not to a filmmaker
but to a social milieu or rhetorical situation that is in some way “other” to that of
the appropriation filmmaker.

FIGURE Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq (Jon Alpert, Ellen Goosenberg
1.3 Kent, 2007).

Media theorist Catherine Russell notes that “the found image always points,
however obliquely, to an original production context, a culturally inscribed niche
in the society of the spectacle, be it Hollywood, home movies, advertising, or
educational films.”11 I would add that the found image not only points to a
previous production context but also to a previous intended context of use and
reception. Moreover, our experience of intentional disparity, like that of
temporal disparity, is based in part on our own extratextual knowledge. If we do
not recognize that the insurgent video in Alive Day was made by Iraqis in order
to celebrate their bombings of American trucks and cannot distinguish this
previous intent from the video’s intended function in Alive Day, we may not
experience intentional disparity or the archive effect.
Of course, these previous contexts of use or intended use are to some degree
imaginary – that is, a projection of the viewer – since the actual “original”
intended context cannot be definitively determined. Indeed, the archive effect
does not suggest a naïve return to the intentional fallacy, in which a single author
(or filmmaker) is positioned “behind” the work and is the arbiter of its meaning.
As Roland Barthes, among many others, has demonstrated, the meaning of a text
depends to a great extent on the reader or viewer.12 In the context of discussing
both irony and parody, literary theorist Linda Hutcheon acknowledges the
presence of the perception of “intentionality” in communication. She writes:
“Even in a theoretical age like our own that has cast deep suspicion on the
concept of intentionality, the experience of interpreting parody in practice forces
us to acknowledge at least an inference of intention and to theorize that
inference.”13 My examination of the role of intention in the experience of the
archive effect in this study refers precisely to this inference of intention that, in
practice, occurs on the part of the viewer. As documentary filmmaker Errol
Morris puts it:

We read correctly or incorrectly a photographer’s intentions into every

photograph we see. We also imagine the intentions of the people in a
photograph. We see intentions everywhere. We even see them in the blind
patterns of nature.14

Indeed, the archive effect and its experience of intentional disparity is dependent
on the individual viewer, who may respond to a variety of cues within the
appropriated footage as well as to his or her extratextual knowledge about why
this footage was made and for whom it was “originally” intended. Of course,
none of these textual cues are a guarantee of the accuracy of a particular
viewer’s perception, nor is it possible to know definitively what the “real”
intentions behind such documents were or who previously saw and interpreted
them. Experimental filmmaker Standish Lawder writes eloquently about the
result of such cinematic recontextualization:

Stripped of its original context, the shot becomes veiled with layers of
speculation, subjective evocation and poetic ambiguity. Questions of
intentionality and meaning become slippery. The true significance of the a
priori original image hovers just off-screen; we cannot be certain exactly why
 it was filmed. Yet what was filmed remains firmly fixed, only now surrounded
by a thousand possible new whys.15

Nevertheless, despite the “thousand possible whys,” I would argue that based on
certain socially, culturally, and historically specific cues as well as extratextual
knowledge, viewers may come to probable conclusions about the original
purpose behind the production of particular documents. And these conclusions
affect the way in which viewers understand these documents as they are
appropriated and recontextualized.
The experience of intentional disparity has, moreover, epistemological
consequences. In contrast to documents we read as produced specifically for a
given film, the documents recontextualized in appropriation films seem in excess
of the appropriation filmmaker’s intentions. That is, they carry traces of another
intention with them and seem to resist, at least to some degree, the intentions that
the appropriation filmmaker – by argument and design – imposes upon them.
Historian and theorist Carolyn Steedman points out that, like the reader of a
letter sent to someone else, the historian who uncovers any object in the archive
will always, in some sense, steal or “misuse” it. She writes:

The Historian who goes to the Archive must always be an unintended reader,
will always read that which was never intended for his or her eyes. Like
Michelet in the 1820s, the Historian always reads the fragmented traces of
something else … an unintended, purloined letter.16

Like the historian, the appropriation filmmaker who draws on found documents
is always an unintended – or, at the very least, an unanticipated – reader and user
confronted by the “something else” that eludes his or her own uses and strategies
of containment in a larger work. This sense of “something else” – of a document
intended for other purposes – undermines the establishment of any singular or
definitive meaning for these sounds and images recorded in the past. Indeed, it is
this sense of the document’s resistance to definitive comprehension that makes it
perceived as intentionally disparate – and gives it its aura of evidentiary
authority.
Archival documents – if the viewer recognizes them as such in an
appropriation film – thus always generate a sense of multiple contexts and
double meaning, even if these are vague and indeterminate. In other words, the
very fact of the recontextualization of the found document in an appropriation
film creates the opportunity for multiple readings of that document. Archival
institutions often make great claims for the historical and evidentiary value of
their collected documents, and these documents are often used to bolster
established historical narratives in many documentary films that address
historical topics. As we know, however, the same archival documents can also
be used to undermine the very same narrative and to belie their own status as
transparent, factual evidence. By recontextualizing found documents,
filmmakers may produce new and sometimes perverse or contradictory
meanings from them – and, yet, the potential meanings and effects of these
indexical archival documents will also always exceed the intentions of the
appropriation filmmaker.
I would suggest, however, that found documents may be used in appropriation
films in ways that either augment or repress (if never completely) intentional
disparity, or, in other words, augment or repress the resistance of these
documents to their new textual context. Indeed, I see all appropriation films as
points along a continuum in which intentional disparity – that “something else” –
is repressed to a greater or lesser degree, this against what I see as a false
dichotomy between “realist” compilation documentaries that use found
documents in a non-dialectical, illustrative manner and “modernist” self-
reflexive experimental collage films that use found documents in a critical,
dialectical manner. For example, Ken Burns’ immensely popular television
documentary, The Civil War (1990) makes use of photographs taken during the
American Civil War and weaves them together through a panning camera,
editing, and voiceover commentary and interviews. Within their new textual
context, these images produce an experience of both temporal disparity – the gap
between the taking of the photographs and the making of the documentary – and
intentional disparity – the fact that the photographs clearly could not have been
originally intended by their makers for a PBS documentary. The photographs
were taken at a different historical moment and with a different (if uncertain)
intent and, thus, they resist full incorporation into the film. They remain
“archival documents” that we recognize as such. However, the sense of
intentional disparity is minimized. The images were not intended for Burns’ film
but their previous intended purpose (whatever it was) does not seem strongly at
odds with the intent of the documentary. It seems that the images’ “simple”
intentions were to preserve a significant historical moment or event and, thus,
are perceived as historically significant but also nearly “empty” of historical
interpretation – that is, until they are incorporated into a larger historical
narrative.17
In contrast to Burns’ film, however, the intentional disparity between the
found documents and their new textual context may be magnified and
intensified. For example, in Emile de Antonio’s Millhouse: A White Comedy
(1971), de Antonio’s portrait of former US President Richard Nixon, footage of
Nixon giving speeches and posing for the camera seems to have been originally
intended for immediate broadcast on television, its purpose mainly to record and
celebrate Nixon’s accomplishments. However, when in Millhouse footage of
Nixon’s “I See a Day” speech is edited together with a clip of Martin Luther
King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, or Nixon’s “Let’s win this one for Ike”
speech in which he accepted the 1968 Republican presidential nomination is
placed beside a clip from the “win this one for the Gipper” scene in Knute
Rockne All American (Lloyd Bacon, 1940), the juxtaposition reveals Nixon as a
plagiarist – or, at least, as unoriginal. Similarly, when we see an image of Nixon
saying that, through the war in Vietnam, the US “will have gained nothing for
ourselves except the possibility that the people of South Vietnam will be able to
live in peace and choose their own way without any foreign domination,”
Nixon’s words are belied by added titles that alphabetically list the many US
corporations – from Alcoa to Warner Bros. – that profited from the war. Thus,
the intentional disparity between the inferred original intended purpose of the
Nixon footage and its use for satiric intent in Millhouse is heightened. Stella
Bruzzi describes de Antonio’s use of such found footage thus:

De Antonio refutes entirely the purely illustrative function of archive material,

instead the original pieces of films become mutable, active ingredients.
Imperative to de Antonio’s idea of “democratic didacticism,” though, is that
the innate meaning of this original footage, however it is reconstituted, is
never entirely obscured. One vivid, consistent facet of de Antonio’s work is
that his collage method does not attack hate figures like Richard Nixon, Joseph
McCarthy or Colonel Patton directly, but rather gives them enough rope by
which to hang themselves – turning often favourable original footage in on
itself.18

Whereas Bruzzi suggests that de Antonio turns “favourable footage in on itself,”

I would suggest that it is the viewer’s perception of footage originally intended
to celebrate or aggrandize these political and military figures now used to
condemn them that produces a strong sense of intentional disparity and,
therefore, of a double consciousness that produces irony. Nonetheless, the
important point here is not that Millhouse is critical and dialectical while The
Civil War is illustrative and non-dialectical, but rather that the experience of
intentional disparity is variable and may be stronger or weaker depending on the
appropriation film and, of course, on the viewer.19
 Unsurprisingly, temporal and intentional disparity often work in tandem in the
appropriation film. For instance, in Rize (David LaChapelle, 2005), a
documentary about “clown” and “krump” dancers in South Central Los Angeles
who paint their faces and dance in an intense, expressive fashion, footage of
these dancers painting their faces and dancing is intercut with what appears to be
ethnographic footage of tribal rituals shot in Africa (Figure 1.4). The
ethnographic footage is not labeled, so it is unclear exactly where and when it
was shot, but the slightly faded quality of the images and the subject material
itself suggest that this footage is relatively old. This contrast establishes a “now”
of the clown and krump dancers as opposed to the “then” of the African rituals.
At the same time, the footage of the African rituals also generates a sense of
intentional disparity within LaChapelle’s documentary. Despite the lack of
labeling, we may, with a certain degree of extratextual knowledge, infer that the
footage was shot sometime in the twentieth century by Western anthropologists
who intended to document their encounter with African tribes in order to
“salvage” these African rituals for anthropological study or simply to offer
“exotic” images to a Western audience. LaChapelle’s film, however, repurposes
these ethnographic images to establish a visual comparison that seems to equate
the dancers in South Central in the early twenty-first century with the dancers in
Africa from an earlier date. Thus, the footage generates the archive effect
through both temporal and intentional disparity even if the exact temporality and
the original intended use of the footage are both somewhat unclear.
(LaChapelle’s montage generated some critical disapproval, in part because of
the lack of labeling, but also because it suggests an equation between “then” and
“now” as well as “there” and “here,” and thus was understood by some as
asserting an essential black identity that persists across space and time.20
Clearly, in addition to epistemological consequences, the archive effect can also
have ethical and ideological implications.)
 FIGURE Rize (David LaChapelle, 2005).
1.4

In fact, it may be impossible for an appropriation film to generate an

experience of temporal disparity without at least a certain degree of intentional
disparity. Documents produced at an earlier historical moment can never fully
anticipate their future uses. Thus, there is always a sense that found documents –
whether of Nixon’s speeches or African rituals – were intended for “something
else” in the past, never precisely “this” in the present moment. It is much more
likely, however, for a film to produce an experience of intentional disparity with
very little experience of temporal disparity. In Passage à l’Acte (1992), for
instance, Austrian experimental filmmaker Martin Arnold took footage from To
Kill a Mockingbird (Robert Mulligan, 1962), optically reprinted individual
frames of the footage, and reedited them to make the action move a few frames
forward and a few back, creating a stuttering effect on both the image track and
the soundtrack. Here, the initial intended purpose of that footage – to serve as
part of a narrative fiction film – is subverted for experimental, formalist
purposes and artistic (rather than historical) effects. While there is, indeed, a
temporal disparity between the “then” of the making of To Kill a Mockingbird
and the “now” of Passage à l’Acte’s production, this temporal disparity is not
made clearly manifest in the film itself. There is no visible or audible contrast
between a “then” and a “now.” It is precisely this minimization of temporal
disparity in favor of an augmentation of intentional disparity that, I would argue,
leads to the exclusion of Passage à l’Acte and many other appropriation films
from the categories of the “documentary” and the “historical.” In works like
those of Arnold, the historical effects of the archive effect read as incidental to
the intentional subversion. Thus, unless an appropriation film produces a
relatively strong experience of temporal disparity, it is unlikely to be
experienced as “historical.”
It is important to emphasize, however, that in all appropriation films the
production of both temporal and intentional disparity – and hence, the archive
effect – depends, at least to some extent, on the viewer’s own extratextual
knowledge. If the viewer of Passage à l’Acte, for instance, is unaware of To Kill
a Mockingbird or does not recognize the cues that this footage was part of a
narrative fiction film, the archive effect might not occur. In her essay, “The
Charge of the Real: Embodied Knowledge and Cinematic Consciousness,”
Vivian Sobchack articulates the complex relationship between the viewer and his
or her experience of a film as documentary or fiction, this sometimes moving
from one mode of consciousness to another in the course of watching the same
film. She writes:

However weighted on the side of social consciousness and convention, our

actual viewing experiences are best described as containing both documentary
and fictional moments co-constituted by a dynamic and labile spectatorial
engagement with all film images. And although the nature of these moments
may be cued, structured, and finally contained by conventional cinematic
practices, ultimately it is our own extracinematic, cultural, and embodied
experience and knowledge that governs how we first take up the images we
see on the screen and what we make of them.21

Without such extratextual knowledge, the experience of the archive effect – as it

occurs through the perception of temporal and/or intentional disparity – can
sometimes be difficult to guarantee, at least without some explicit form of
labeling provided by the filmmaker.
This is particularly true when all of the documents in a film produce (or have
the same potential to produce) the archive effect. For instance, Emile de
Antonio’s Point of Order! (1964) was constructed entirely from television
kinescopes of the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings that had aired a decade earlier
on CBS.22 After his film’s initial run, however, de Antonio added a voiceover
prologue explaining that he had not shot the footage himself but rather had
“found” it and edited it into a feature-length documentary.23 Clearly, de Antonio
wanted his film to generate the archive effect. He wanted audiences to
experience a strong sense of intentional disparity and to read the footage through
a satirical lens in a way not intended by the original producers of the footage. In
this case, the added and explicit voiceover explanation was necessary so that
audiences would recognize the footage as archival and the perspective of de
Antonio’s film as critical.
Indeed, there are many films in which the status of certain footage is unclear,
this impacting their epistemological effects. In much of Chris Marker’s work, for
instance, it is often difficult to know whether Marker shot certain footage, found
it on the street, or found it in an official archive. Watching his films, it is easy to
become preoccupied by questions of where the footage came from, whether he
shot it or used preexisting documents. In fact, this confusion is made explicit in
Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983). The first image we see is that of three blonde
children walking up a path (Figure 1.5). A woman says in voiceover:

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in Iceland in
1965. He said that for him, it was the image of happiness and also that he had
tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked. He wrote me:
One day I’ll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece
of black leader. If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see
the black.

FIGURE Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983).

1.5
The image of the three children is otherwise silent and is followed by black
leader, then an image of a military airplane, and then black leader again. The
voiceover, speaking in the past tense about a “he” who speaks in the future tense
of what seems to be the film we are watching, immediately destabilizes the
viewer’s position vis-à-vis this image. Are we looking at the film that “he” says
he will “one day” make? Is this image of the three children an image that “he”
shot in 1965 or was it made for the 1983 film we are presently watching? Is this
“he” the filmmaker of Sans Soleil, Chris Marker, or the (fictional) filmmaker we
learn is named Sandor Krasna? To whom does this image of the children
belong? Was this image really shot in 1965 and only appropriated 18 years later?
Sans Soleil revels in ambiguities such as this one without ever offering a
conclusive answer, and the status of the document as archival or not, while
foregrounded in the viewer’s experience, remains impossible to decide.24
In my view, the indeterminable status of this image (as well as others) in Sans
Soleil illustrates the complexity of our relationship to the appropriated
document. Marker, by complicating the archival status of certain images, makes
it clear how much our reading of an image is based in our ability to locate the
temporality of it and the intentions “behind” it. This reading determines whether
or not the archive effect occurs, which, if it does, gives rise to a particular
experience of the historical past. 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. It is this attribution
that forms the basis for our mediated encounter with the past. In what follows, I
explore the ways in which the archive effect may or may not occur for different
viewers of the same appropriation film, thereby resulting in very different
experiences and understandings of a single text.

Con/text, irony, and the variability of the archive effect

On 8 June 2008 at Los Angeles Filmforum, a heated debate arose during the
question and answer session with filmmaker William E. Jones following the
screening of his latest film entitled Tearoom (2007). Several members of the
audience voiced concerns about the historical value, artistic value, and ethics of
the film. Tearoom consists exclusively of silent 16mm film footage originally
shot surreptitiously in 1962 by the Mansfield, Ohio police department through a
two-way mirror in a men’s public bathroom during a three-week sting operation
targeting homosexual men (Figure 1.6). The images reveal men of various ages
and races in the men’s room performing homosexual acts with one another –
although much of the actual sexual activity is hidden behind the doors of a stall
and is therefore inferred rather than seen. The footage was used to prosecute and
convict many of the men under sodomy laws at that time. Jones acquired this
footage many years after the event from another filmmaker, Bret Wood, who had
received the material from John Butler, who had been Police Chief at the time of
the sting operation. For several decades, the footage had been stored not in an
archive but, rather, in Butler’s garage. Jones had earlier seen some of this
footage online incorporated into a police “how-to” film entitled Camera
Surveillance, which Jones then reedited, including some of the how-to film’s
reenactments, into a film called Mansfield 1962 (2006). However, when the film
was screened, Jones’ audiences found Mansfield 1962 funny and campy due, in
part, to the poorly produced reenactments – not the effect Jones had intended.
When he later acquired from Wood the original surveillance footage – itself
slightly edited for the trials of these men – Jones decided to make a film that
would show the footage (almost) as it was shown in court, silent and without
additional editing except for one change: Jones moved images of the police
demonstrating how they set up the operation using a camera hidden behind a
two-way mirror on a towel dispenser from the end of the footage to the
beginning. He then gave the film its title of Tearoom – a slang term for a public
restroom where gay men meet to have brief, anonymous sex – and put his
signature on it.25
 FIGURE Tearoom (William E. Jones, 2007). Courtesy of the artist and David
1.6 Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles, CA.

The members of the 2008 Filmforum audience who objected to the film did so
on several grounds. Their first objection was that Jones did not make the film,
that it was just found footage and not his film. Their second objection was that
since similar images could be shot in plenty of public bathrooms now this
footage had no historical value. Their third objection was that this kind of
surveillance footage could not be repurposed as either “history” or “art”; it was
merely surveillance footage used to unfairly convict men for consensual sex acts.
Finally, their fourth objection was that showing the film was unethical, if not
illegal, since the men in the footage had not given their consent to Jones’ use of
their images and might feel or be exploited by Jones’ use of the footage.
Jones – and his many allies in the audience – argued in response that these
men had already been exploited, not only by the making of the footage but also
by its use in court to prosecute them for sodomy in 1962. Furthermore, Jones
was reclaiming this footage as a part of queer history and one of the few
indexical recordings of the underground culture of the “tearoom” in the 1960s.
Jones also suggested that both his act of placing the footage within the textual
context of a new film – which now had a title, signature, and a single but
significant edit – and his act of screening this footage in the extratextual context
of a museum or an experimental screening series like that of Los Angeles
Filmforum transformed the footage into both art and history. Clearly, however,
the audience members who objected to the film were persuaded neither by
Jones’ response nor by those of Jones’ supporters.
The arguments made on both sides of this debate involved several broader
questions implicit in this interchange: where is the line between document and
documentary? Where is the line between text and context? How does the
placement of such boundaries alter the way in which we think about the film
footage in question, its meaning and its value (or not) as art and/or history?
Finally, how does appropriation of old footage make it new? In what follows, I
will attempt to unravel this complex set of questions raised by the production,
promotion, and reception of Tearoom.
Like Ken Jacobs’ A Perfect Film (1986), which consists of a reel of film that
Jacobs says he found in a trash can on Canal Street in New York City and
screened exactly as it was except for a slight adjustment to the soundtrack,26
Jones’ Tearoom raises the question of what exactly constitutes an appropriation
film, a new text. This question is crucial in relation to the appropriation film and
the archive effect. While Jones’ film was listed as Tearoom (1962/2007) in the
catalog for the 2008 Whitney Biennial, Jones’ website lists it as Tearoom: A
Document Presented by William E. Jones.27 This difference in titles is
illuminating because it asks us to consider whether old film footage is simply
being presented in a new historical context of reception (specifically in which
homosexuality is not a crime and is increasingly accepted as both act and
identity), or if it is an appropriated document that is part of a new work. Is the
film a document or a documentary? Does the fact that Jones made one edit, titled
the footage, called it a film (rather than simply footage), put his signature on it,
and exhibited it at festivals and museums make it a different text than what it
was “originally”? Indeed, Tearoom points to the much larger question of what
constitutes the frame that marks off the text from its context. Are title and
authorial signature inside the text or outside of it? Does one edit constitute a new
text? How do the ways we answer the previous questions affect the ways we
attribute meaning and give some form of historical – or archival – value to a
given piece of footage?
In the question and answer session at Los Angeles Filmforum, Jones said that
he tries to show the film in an “unalienated” viewing situation; that is, only in
contexts in which it will be regarded through a critical lens. I would suggest that
his idea of an “unalienated” viewing situation refers precisely to an audience that
will recognize (or produce) a temporal and/or intentional disparity between the
present context of Jones’ use and an “other” previous context of (intended) use
and therefore will experience the archive effect. Clearly, however, this
recognition is very much dependent on certain cues – not only the film’s
minimal ones of a title and attribution but also the materials that Jones provides
to his audiences in the form of program notes and his own presence at some of
the screenings, all of which are more obviously extratextual than his title,
signature, and single edit. Nonetheless, Jones himself seems unclear about
whether he is screening a new text containing appropriated surveillance footage
or an old document in a new extratextual context. His desire to preserve an
“unalienated” viewing situation is at odds with his claim that this text is, in fact,
his film entitled Tearoom, which retains its identity as such in different
screening situations.
Jones clearly wishes to control the way in which his films are received. When
he made Mansfield 1962, he was distressed by the way in which audiences
reacted. He writes:

When the work I made from this material [footage from Camera Surveillance,
of which Jones found a degraded copy online], Mansfield 1962, was shown to
audiences, I discovered that some spectators laughed at the footage. Laughter
is a fairly common reaction to unexpected images, but in this instance, there
was more than discomfort in the response. Camera Surveillance’s clumsy
reenactments of police procedure lent a campy aura to the video, and worse
yet, gave rise to the suspicion that the entire work was somehow fraudulent. In
this era of fake documentaries and of falsification in many aspects of public
life, an elaborate simulation might seem plausible. From this point of view, the
degradation of the image could serve to cover up problems in art direction or
acting. … To satisfy skeptics, only the clarity and artless instrumentality of the
original would truly suffice.28

Here, Jones primarily blames the degradation of the image and the awkward
reenactments for the audience’s “misunderstanding” of Mansfield 1962 and
expresses his belief that the (almost unaltered) original footage will make his
intended meanings clear. However, despite Jones’ belief in this regard, the angry
members of the Filmforum audience for the Tearoom screening, from Jones’
point of view, also “misread” the film. These objectors did not see the document
as a documentary or, in other words, did not experience Jones’ appropriation of
the footage as a recontextualization into a new text and, as a result, they did not
experience the historicity of the archive effect. For them, any difference between
the surveillance footage itself and Jones’ appropriation of it lay outside the frame
of the text. In other words, for them, the only difference lay in the time and place
of reception, which they did not “count” as a recontextualization of the footage
within a new text or, as a result, an alteration of the footage’s meaning. In their
experience, the document – and its original intended meaning (or their projection
thereof) – remained intact.
However, the rest of the audience read Tearoom as an appropriation film and,
thus, the surveillance footage as an archival document recontextualized by its
appropriation. Although Jones’ interventions may have been minimal, for these
viewers, they were enough not only to contrast a “then” and a “now” but also to
generate intentional disparity and thus to constitute a new text. Indeed, the single
edit that Jones made in the film is not insignificant in terms of the placement of
the dividing line between document and documentary. A major variable in the
transformation of a “document” into a “documentary” is the construction of
temporal sequence within the film. Film theorist Philip Rosen has argued that the
difference between a newscast and a documentary about the same event has to
do with the production of a break between past and present and with the act of
putting events in a sequence. Moreover, he suggests that when a series of
documents are placed in a chronological sequence in which cause and effect are
at play, their meanings are thereby restricted and, as a result, the texts into which
they are appropriated begin to read as “documentaries” and, therefore, as
“history.” Discussing the difference between NBC anchor Bill Ryan’s newscast
on the day of John F. Kennedy’s assassination and a later documentary called
JFK: A Time Remembered (Mark Oberhaus, 1988), Rosen writes:

No one would argue, I think, that JFK: A Time Remembered is not a

documentary. In our standard expectations and mode of apprehension, it is
recognizable as such both in its use of footage from the actuality of the events
being depicted, and also because they are arranged in careful sequence and
thus presented in a form that places and makes sense of the actuality. Such a
“well-formed” sequence is justified precisely as History; sense can be made
because the event is over. From this perspective, Bill Ryan’s commentary is
only a halting start to the ongoing project of converting a relatively unbridled
visual indexicality into sense.29

Here, Rosen notes not only our expectations and recognition of the “kind” of
archival documents used – “footage from the actuality of the events being
depicted” – but also the way in which they are used. They are placed in a
sequence, one thing leading to another, thereby acquiring a particular meaning
and making “sense.” Most historical documentaries follow Rosen’s description.
Archival documents produce a strong, clear sense of temporal disparity between
the making of the documents and the making of the documentary, and these
documents are placed within a narrative sequence of cause and effect.
Within Rosen’s schema, Tearoom hovers on the line between document and
documentary. Jones’ film draws on “footage from the actuality of the events
being depicted.” Indeed, surveillance footage can be regarded as the nonfiction
document par excellence. Given Jones’ one edit, Tearoom produces a particular
causal sequence. This sequencing is, in part, based on the editing done by the
police as they prepared the footage to serve as court evidence, but it more
significantly occurs through Jones’ replacement of the images of the police
setting up their hidden camera from the end of the film to its beginning. The
police reenact their surveillance for the camera (and the court) after the fact, but
Jones’ placement of this footage at the film’s beginning makes chronological
sense in that the police set up their camera behind the two-way lavatory mirror
before the surveillance footage was shot. This minimal rearrangement also
transforms the footage into the very bare bones of a narrative, which emphasizes
police surveillance and makes what follows understood as clandestine footage.
Moreover, since time has passed between the occurrence of the event in
Mansfield, Ohio in 1962 and the “making” of Tearoom, an experience of
temporal disparity may potentially occur. If the viewer recognizes Jones’
editorial intervention and considers it (along with title and signature) as creative
and a marking off of a “then” from a “now,” then the film produces both a
causal, temporal sequence and an experience of temporal disparity between the
making of the “document” and the making of the “documentary.” However, if
the viewer does not perceive this difference as a difference within the text, the
archive effect will not occur and the text will remain a document, not a
documentary and not an appropriation film.
Yet Rosen’s distinction between document and documentary is also based on
the ways in which the documentary makes “sense” of documents – and thereby
the events depicted within them. The meaning of an archival document is always
closely linked with the viewer’s perception of an intention “behind” the initial
creation of and later use of that document. Tearoom’s production of the archive
effect depends not only on the viewer’s recognition of temporal disparity but
also on the viewer’s experience of intentional disparity, which, if it occurs,
fundamentally alters the meaning of the footage. Indeed, by appropriating police
surveillance footage, giving it a title, and placing it into both a new order and a
new context of viewing far removed from its initial public screening in a 1962
Ohio courtroom, Jones suggests that footage once used to put men in jail for
their consensual sexual practice may now mean something else – may be
redeemed and experienced as an archival document valuable to queer history.
While never obscuring its prior (intended) use and meaning, Jones is attempting
– successfully or not – to produce a sense of intentional disparity between the
original and current uses of the surveillance footage. In fact, the production of
this intentional disparity is perhaps what is most at stake in the film: the claim
that his one edit – which emphasizes the repressive and homophobic attitude of
the police – along with title, signature, and different context of reception
transforms the surveillance footage into a significant piece of queer history.
Unsurprisingly, given that the signs of Jones’ manipulation or argument are
minimal and his intervention appears only at the very edges of the text, the
resistance of this archival document to its new use is exceptionally strong.
Indeed, Tearoom’s attempted redemption of this surveillance footage as queer
history is fundamentally ironic, an attempt to “reverse” the footage’s original
intended meaning or use while never obscuring it. Yet, rather than critiquing the
content or purpose of the footage outright, the screening of the footage as a film
titled Tearoom draws our attention to details of the image and meanings that are
in excess of the “crimes” the police wanted to expose. We may be fascinated by
the way these men looked, the clothes they wore, the way black and white men
related to one another in Mansfield, Ohio in 1962. These indexical traces signify
more than evidence of illegal acts of sodomy and are given new “meaning,” even
though what they “mean” exactly is never asserted by the film. In fact, it is, at
least in part, the fragility and precariousness of the intentional disparity (as well
as of the temporal disparity) and the accompanying ambiguity of meaning that
may – at least for some – exclude Jones’ film from the category of documentary
and place it within the realm of experimental film. Were the ironies of the film
more overt and used explicitly in the service of critique or satire (for instance,
through a voiceover criticizing the police), Tearoom would be much more likely
to be read simply as a documentary and, thus, much less likely to generate
epistemological controversy.
Tearoom and its varied reception open onto the wider issue of how irony
functions within and around appropriation films more generally. In fact,
appropriation films – particularly those that use found documents for social
critique – are often said to operate through the trope of irony. Film theorists and
cultural critics have often described the appropriation films of Emile de Antonio,
Craig Baldwin, and Bruce Conner, for instance, as ironic – as well as satiric.
Indeed, as I will elaborate, irony is fundamental to the production of the archive
effect, which is based on the viewer’s awareness of multiple meanings and
contexts surfacing within a given appropriation film. However, appropriation
films may produce ironic readings in a variety of ways and with a range of
effects. The ambiguity of meaning in Tearoom, for instance, suggests a form of
irony that does not just “reverse” meaning but rather puts it in question
indefinitely. Moreover, it suggests that irony may or may not “happen,”
depending on the viewer.
In this regard, Linda Hutcheon defines irony not merely as a textual
characteristic but rather as a relation and a communicative process, in much the
same way as I have defined the “archival document.” She writes:

Irony is a relational strategy in the sense that it operates not only between
meanings (said, unsaid) but between people (ironists, interpreters, targets).
Ironic meaning comes into being as the consequence of a relationship, a
dynamic, performative bringing together of different meaning-makers, but also
of different meanings, first, in order to create something new and, then … to
endow it with the critical edge of judgment.30

Significantly, Hutcheon’s definition suggests that if the interpreter does not infer
(or produce) different meanings, then irony is not in effect. While ironies may be
intended or unintended, if the interpreter does not perceive irony, the irony does
not “happen.” Irony, like the archive effect, is produced within a given
enunciative situation, and ironic meaning, like the archive effect, is dependent on
the interaction between the text and the particular interpreter of that text – whose
interpretation is always to some degree dependent on his or her own extratextual
knowledge.
Hutcheon also distinguishes between a simple form of irony called
“antiphrasis” and a more complex form called “inclusive” irony. “Antiphrasis” is
an ironic structure in which the unsaid is the exact opposite of what is said, as in
the statement, “That movie was great,” when the interpreter infers from the
context and tone of the statement that its intended meaning was that the movie
was, in fact, terrible. “Inclusive” irony, in contrast, is a polysemic form of irony
in which multiple meanings are held in tension with one another indefinitely.
The difference between the operation of antiphrasis and that of inclusive irony is
that the antiphrastic presumes that the meaning of a phrase or sequence can be
resolved, while in inclusive irony, meaning is never fully resolved: multiple
meanings hang in the balance, and two (or more) contradictory meanings are
presented as both possible in the same moment. Hutcheon writes:
 The inclusive pleasure of irony – similar to that claimed for jokes and puns –
might then be said to reside precisely in the discovery of two or more
“isotopies” or principles of coherence in an utterance thought to be single and
homogenous. … The ironic sign would thus be made up of one signifier but
two different, but not necessarily opposite signifieds.31

For Hutcheon, it is this continuous oscillation between these two (or more)
signifieds that constitutes the truly radical potential of irony.
Building on Hutcheon’s definition of irony, I would argue that all
appropriations of found documents are potentially ironic (whether antiphrastic or
inclusive) because there is always a certain double awareness inherent in –
indeed, constituent of – the archive effect. Like irony, the archive effect is
defined by the recognition or inference of an “other” meaning – stemming from
an “other” context, temporal and intentional, in which a given document meant
(or was intended to mean) something else. Moreover, Hutcheon defines irony
not only in terms of its semantic structure but also in terms of its pragmatic
entailment of judgment, what she refers to as irony’s critical “edge.” She further
notes that satire often works through the vehicle of irony to make its critique of
something or someone in the social, historical world.32 Thus, the doubleness and
ironic possibilities of the archive effect may be particularly attractive to
appropriation filmmakers who seek to perform a satiric critique of something in
the social, historical world.
Whether irony in an appropriation film serves the goal of satire or not,
however, a certain critical distance between the viewer and the documents on the
screen must be established in order for the viewer’s act of ironic judgment to
occur. This distance may occur in relation to contexts that the viewer
experiences as “other,” whether this be another temporal context or another
intentional context. In other words, this distance may function not only in
relation to past contexts but also in relation to contemporary contexts from
which we feel detached (even if they are our own). Indeed, whenever
appropriation films produce the archive effect, they are simultaneously
constructing relationships of similarity and difference between the viewer’s own
temporal and intentional context and the temporal and intentional contexts from
which the found documents derive. Moreover, appropriation films often
implicitly ask us to evaluate these documents, the objects they represent, and the
previous contexts from which they emerge. As a result of this distanciation, there
may be a gap opened between “us” “here” and “now” and “them” “there” and
“then,” or between “our” values and “theirs.” While antiphrastic irony draws a
clear line between “our” context and “theirs,” however, inclusive irony
simultaneously establishes and troubles this line.
The difference between these two structures of irony – antiphrastic and
inclusive – has important implications for how we think about our ethical
responsibility toward the people and events depicted in the archival documents
within an appropriation film. If we experience “their” context as wholly different
from “ours” and our position as detached and superior, we may feel we have no
moral or ethical obligation to the “others” we see on the screen. By contrast,
when a more inclusive form of irony is at play in an appropriation film, we may
experience a much more complex and ambivalent relationship between “our”
context and the “other” contexts from which the archival documents derive.
Indeed, inclusive irony, which confounds judgment or refuses to resolve into a
final, singular meaning or value, places the viewer in a more complex
epistemological and moral position. As a result, the function of irony in the
appropriation film constitutes an ethics of the archive effect.
When antiphrastic irony is at play in an appropriation film, the lines drawn
between “us” and “them” are obvious, and “we” can laugh at “them” without
necessarily feeling implicated in their context. For instance, midway through
Bowling for Columbine (2002), Michael Moore’s tragicomic documentary about
gun violence in America, footage appears from an educational video addressed
to schoolteachers, warning them about the danger of allowing students to wear
baggy clothing to school. As a woman’s teacherly voiceover explains how
students can hide weapons in their oversize shorts, we see an image of a high
school-age boy wearing baggy clothes removing more than ten different guns –
including enormous automatic weapons – from underneath his shirt and pants.
What seems to have been intended as a serious public service announcement
about how to combat gun violence in schools becomes, in the context of Moore’s
film, utterly absurd. The fact that baggy clothes are not the real problem is left
unsaid but blatantly obvious. When this educational video is followed by an
image of three beautiful, smiling children over which we hear Moore’s voice
stating, “Yes, our children were indeed something to fear,” it is clear that the
original intention (always inferred, not inherent) of the video has been subverted.
Moreover, “we” as viewers are distanced from the “absurd” educational video
and those who made it. Thus, this particular instance of the archive effect –
which occurs mainly through intentional disparity – is most closely aligned with
antiphrastic irony, a reversal of meaning that rejects the original meaning as
belonging to some “other.”
Crucially, however, irony in the appropriation film becomes historical only
when it works primarily through temporal disparity rather than or in addition to
intentional disparity. Here, too, it may take an antiphrastic form. The Atomic
Café (Jayne Loader, Kevin Rafferty, Pierce Rafferty, 1982), for instance,
generally encourages a detached, ironic attitude. The film is made up entirely of
found documents edited together without voiceover but with titles that identify
the documents and establish a chronological sequence by periodically noting the
date of the event under scrutiny. Atomic Café appropriates a wide variety of
documents from newsreel footage to US military propaganda films to footage of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the survivors after the US dropped an atomic bomb
on each city. The sections of the film that read most ironically are the various US
propaganda films about the atomic bomb and how to survive an atomic blast. In
this case, the irony involves not only another intentional context (as in Bowling
for Columbine) but also another temporal context. On the one hand, the irony is
pointed at the intentional context – which is also a social and rhetorical context –
of the propaganda genre originally used to “educate the public” but used in The
Atomic Café to reveal how the US government frequently misled the public
regarding the level of danger surrounding not only the blast but also atomic
radiation. For instance, the famous “duck and cover” educational film that taught
children how to duck down and cover their heads with their hands in case of an
atomic blast is, for contemporary viewers of The Atomic Café with our own
extratextual knowledge of radiation, blatantly absurd. Thus, within the context of
The Atomic Café, this and other sequences can be read from a critical, ironic
perspective on the intentional context from which these archival documents
emanate: the US Cold War propaganda machine. On the other hand, the irony
can be read as also directed at the temporal – or historical – context in which the
footage was made and shown, an earlier moment in history when Americans
believed that one could survive an atomic blast by wearing a special radiation
suit or hiding in a bomb shelter for an hour. This past is dismissed as naïve and
deceptive, divorced from our contemporary knowledge about atomic weapons.
This kind of irony depends on the sense that the viewer knows something that
the film subjects do not know (or at least seem not to know). As Rosen points
out, “We now always know more than they did then. The gap between this ‘we’
and this ‘they’ is … a basic condition for modern historiography.”33 While this
“knowing more” may be fundamental to all modern historiography, it is made
palpable in the ironic temporal disparity established between the viewer and the
“naïve” or “deceptive” filmmakers and subjects of the footage used within the
context of this appropriation film. The irony of Atomic Café is both historical
and antiphrastic – we now know the opposite of what the footage asserts.
When a more inclusive irony is in play, however, the line between “us” and
“them” becomes unstable or permeable. Indeed, Hutcheon writes:

Distance can, of course, suggest the non-committal, the inferred refusal of

engagement or involvement, and so its more pejorative associations are with
indifference or even Olympian disdain and superiority. But distancing reserve
can also be interpreted as a means to a new perspective from which things can
be shown and thus seen differently. … A related and equally approving
reading of the distancing function of the new perspective induced through
irony is the one that sees it as refusing the tyranny of explicit judgments.34

Ironically, then, irony may function as judgment and/or as a refusal of judgment.

It is structured on distance, which allows the interpreter to inhabit either a
position of detached superiority or a more complex position in which multiple,
contradictory meanings are held simultaneously and cannot, therefore, simply be
resolved and dismissed as wholly “other.” Moreover, for Hutcheon, when
inclusive irony is in play, the construction of relationships between interpreter
and text is never complete since meaning remains equivocal and finally
undecidable.35
Watching The Maelstrom (Péter Forgács, 1997), for instance, which
appropriates the home movies of the Dutch-Jewish Peereboom family made just
before the family was almost completely annihilated in the Holocaust, we know
something terrible that the Peerebooms do not. Indeed, we know that these
people we see looking so happy and alive are about to die. The footage retains its
status as home movies but also serves as a trace of a world that was annihilated,
the two meanings of the footage – innocent amateur shots of family life and
memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe – held in tension with one another.
Moreover, while some appropriation films may solicit laughter at a past context,
The Maelstrom produces a sense of irony – of doubled meaning – that causes not
laughter but a mournful meditation on what we now know has been lost. There is
still ironic distance, but not superiority. Rather, the contrast between “then” and
“now” provokes a fruitless desire to undo what we know is, for the people in the
archival footage, still to come. Furthermore, we cannot fully dissociate ourselves
from the temporal or intentional contexts from which the archival documents in
The Maelstrom derive in part because they are “too close to home” in both a
literal and a figurative sense. The Holocaust is an event that represents a major
temporal break in history. However, while events that occurred before the
Holocaust still remain part of an “other” context to some degree, in that there is
no return to innocence after Auschwitz, this distance between “then” and “now”
may not be as distant as we might like to think – particularly given the acts of
genocide that have occurred around the world since then. While we do not share
the same temporal context as those who lived before and died in the Holocaust,
we share in the same context of modernity (even if some would argue that we
are now postmodern). Moreover, the context of the human condition in which
we are all faced with the inevitability of our own deaths has the potential to
break down the boundaries between different historical contexts. As a result, we
may feel implicated, at least to some small degree, in the contexts in which these
terrible traumas occurred. In these instances, the ironic detachment established is
not so much a position of “disdain and superiority” but rather, as Hutcheon
suggests, a position of enlightenment, “a new perspective from which things can
be shown and thus seen differently.”36 Inclusive irony, in this case, includes
“us” with “them.”
In fact, certain appropriations in Bowling for Columbine begin by producing
antiphrastic, ironic superiority in relation to an “other” context but then give way
to a more inclusive form of irony. For instance, in one interview, Moore asks
Evan McCollum, a Public Relations Officer for Lockheed Martin, the world’s
largest weapons manufacturer, if he sees any connection between the US
production of weapons of mass destruction and the shootings at Columbine.
Standing in front of a giant missile in the Lockheed Martin factory in Littleton,
Colorado, McCollum answers:

I guess I don’t see that connection, that specific connection, because, the
missiles that you are talking about were built and designed to defend us from
somebody else who would be aggressors against us. … We don’t get irritated
at somebody and just because we’re mad at him drop a bomb or shoot at him
or fire a missile at him.

The film then cuts to images of the US intervening in various conflicts around
the world in which the US was the aggressor, defending not civilians but US
economic and military interests abroad. This montage of documentary footage of
world leaders, revolutions, invasions, and genocides throughout the world is
accompanied by written text that describes the many instances in which the US
has contributed aggressively not to democracy but rather to the rise of
dictatorships and violence against civilians. Titles such as “1963: US overthrows
Prime Minister Mossadeq of Iran,” followed by “US installs Shah as dictator,”
accompany the images. This juxtaposition of McCollum’s words and these
images and titles generates an antiphrastic contradiction, in which McCollum
plays the fool: clearly, we do get irritated at other countries and drop bombs on
them. Moreover, as these violent images appear on the screen, we hear Louis
Armstrong sing “What a Wonderful World.” In this case, a deeper and wider
critique of US leaders and military actions arises from ironic juxtaposition.
Indeed, antiphrastic irony is produced from the contradiction between the words
and images onscreen and the words sung on the soundtrack.
However, this irony undermines distance as quickly as it establishes it: this
combination of sound and image suggests that we are implicated in the violence.
This scene is antiphrastic in that the vision onscreen is precisely the opposite of a
wonderful world, but it is the same world, the same context – it implies – to
which we all belong. Moreover, while throughout the sequence there is no
location sound, at the very end, the sound becomes suddenly synchronous as we
watch a plane crash into the second tower of the World Trade Center on
September 11, 2001. The unexpected sound of the videographer and those
around her screaming in shock collapses the irony and any distance it may
create. The traumatic temporal break that took place when the plane hit the
second tower supersedes the irony produced by Moore’s appropriation of the
image. Any sort of ironic distance is overwhelmed by the specter of real,
indexical death and destruction.
Indeed, images of the human body often undermine the viewer’s sense of
ironic detachment in relation to the appropriated document. A sense of moral
implication and/or guilty complicity may emerge through our confrontation with
footage that we might prefer to keep at an ironic distance. This sort of
implication and guilty complicity is enacted in a very different way in New
York-based experimental filmmaker Leslie Thornton’s Another Worldy (1999).
This film was serendipitously conceived when Thornton bought a reel of film
labeled “military” from a junk dealer and happened to screen the footage while
playing a collection of 1990’s German industrial music called Tyranny Off the
Beat [sic]. The footage turned out to be a compilation of black and white images
mainly of white women dressed in various ethnographic guises, dancing for the
camera. Presumably, this reel would have been shown to American soldiers
during World War II. Thornton found that the women dancing matched up
almost perfectly with the industrial music she was listening to, and this
combination of archival footage and industrial music first became a film entitled
Old Worldy (1998). Thornton later decided to incorporate other found elements
including footage from ethnographic and educational films about dance until she
had created the new film she called Another Worldy.37
A double consciousness is clearly at play in the relationship between the image
and the soundtrack. The combination of the 1940s American footage and the
1990s German techno music generates an experience of the absurd, of two
temporal and intentional contexts that do not go together, and thus generates the
archive effect through both temporal and intentional disparity. There is great
pleasure in watching the dated images juxtaposed to more contemporary music
and it is easy to be seduced by the “found” synchrony. What is striking is not
that the “meaning” of this footage has been explicitly altered by the soundtrack
but rather that two things we know “should not” go together mesh as if they had
been created for one another. Moreover, because the dances the women perform
are quite ridiculous – they gyrate and perform acrobatic feats while repeatedly
lifting their skirts over their heads – the film produces a sense of antiphrastic
ironic superiority in relation to a past moment. The dated images are seemingly
mocked from the vantage point of the “now” of the appropriation film (and of
the music). At the same time that its matching of the image is pleasurable,
however, the dark, industrial contemporary soundtrack also calls for a different
reading of the image. Although we are watching what might at the time the films
were made have seemed innocuous, the dances and costumes in which the
women are dressed are revealed as Orientalist imitations of cultures around the
world. The combination of sound and image emphasizes not only the
inappropriateness of these women performing these absurd dances but also the
camera’s fetishization of their synchronized kicking legs. Indeed, the fact that
the images so clearly belong to an historical moment different from that of the
historical moment of the music (so much closer to our own) draws attention to
both the objectification of the women, who are displayed as a collection of body
parts, and to the racist and Orientalist undertones of their pseudo-ethnographic
dances. Yet, it seems that we can still divorce “us” from “them” and “now” from
then. “We” are not sexist or Orientalist like “them.”
While offering this position of ironic superiority, however, through its
solicitation of a powerful bodily response from the viewer, the film
simultaneously elicits a sense of the viewers’ complicity with the very thing that
Thornton’s film seems to critique. We are encouraged to look at this footage
from a detached perspective but we are simultaneously compelled by the music’s
rhythms to participate in the spectacle from which we might prefer to stand
apart. While the critique of the footage is nearly impossible to ignore, the beat of
the music and its synchrony with the women’s dancing is seductive, affecting
our bodies even as we may intellectually reject what we see onscreen. Even if
our minds are unwilling to enjoy the spectacle of the dancing female bodies
before us, our bodies are implicated in the production of this spectacle. This
feeling of perverse enjoyment becomes even more pronounced when an image
of a man in blackface performing a grotesque racist dance appears. Thus, even as
we acknowledge the distance between “us here and now” and “them there and
then” and the contradiction between the moment of the production of the image
and that of the production of the soundtrack, our bodies are drawn in as
complicit participants to these sexist and racist representations. The affect of the
archive effect here takes the form of both simultaneous pleasure and horror.
At the same time, it is important to acknowledge that the film does not set up a
dichotomy between the racist and sexist “West” and the innocent, victimized
“East.” Footage that Thornton added as she reworked Old Worldy into Another
Worldy includes sound and image from a Hindi video in which a group of men
are dressed up in “African” garb. The men are put in a cage while a woman
taunts them with her body. In addition, Thornton incorporates footage from a
Western ethnographic film of an Arab woman dancing in front of a group of
Arab men until she drops from exhaustion. Thus, the film cannot be read as a
simple critique about racist and sexist Western representations. Indeed, the film
acknowledges that racist and sexist practices, as well as the representation of
these practices, emerge in many times and places. However, because of the
compelling “tyranny [of] the beat,” we are prevented from seeing ourselves as
innocent in relation to either a temporal or cultural other. Moreover, while many
appropriation films use archival documents in the service of nostalgia and an
idealization of the past, this film reveals an ugly side of the past that we might
wish to disavow but refuses us this disavowal. The irony in Thornton’s film is
that we are forced to see the “us” in “them” and the “them” in “us” while we are
nevertheless aware of the difference between the two. We both are and are not
“like them.” We both are and are not them.
Clearly, while some appropriation films may work solely through a detached,
antiphrastic irony, others deploy a more inclusive form of irony that provokes
not only multiple, contradictory meanings but may also include us as participants
in a context from which we might prefer to stand apart. In other words, certain
uses of archival footage allow 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. The ethical
implications of this dissolution of the boundaries between contexts cannot be
overstated. When there is a definitive break between us/them, here/there,
now/then, by definition, we do not feel we are morally implicated in this “other”
context, whether it be “somewhere else” or at “some other time.” In contrast,
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.
Tearoom is perhaps a limit case in terms of its potential to produce ironies – or
not – depending on how we as viewers experience the footage and the film. If we
read the film according to Jones’ intended meaning as he articulates it in writing
and at screenings, it is a deeply ironic – yet also deeply romantic – film. The
very idea that police surveillance footage is now being used by a gay filmmaker
to write a chapter of queer history is undeniably ironic. The film reverses (or
attempts to reverse) the initial intentions of the footage and substitutes an
“opposite” meaning. At the same time, Jones performs a romance of the archive,
the fantasy that a document used to send gay men to jail can be “redeemed” and
given new meaning as redemptive queer history. This ironic/romantic reading,
however, is dependent on the viewer’s experience of the film as Jones’
appropriation film entitled Tearoom – as a new text made within a new and
different temporal and intentional (or historical and social) context. This reading
also posits a clear difference between “our” context here and now and “their”
context there and then, which means that we do not have any ethical
responsibility vis-à-vis the initial use of the footage. That responsibility belongs
to someone else (the Mansfield police), someplace else (Mansfield, Ohio) at
some other time (1962).
It is also possible, however, to watch the footage without any experience of
irony at all. As has been seen, if the viewer does not experience this footage as
Jones’ film but rather as a piece of unedited surveillance footage of men having
sex together in a public bathroom, there is no irony. If we read the program notes
we may find out that this surveillance footage was used to prosecute these men
for sodomy in Mansfield, Ohio in 1962, but this information may not generate an
experience of irony. Indeed, if this footage remains, in the viewer’s experience, a
document rather than a documentary, then there is no break between “their”
context “then” and “there” and “ours” (and that of Jones, in particular) “here”
and “now.” The footage is just a lot older now and is being shown in a different
venue. As one of Jones’ critics said, you could shoot footage like that in a men’s
public bathroom right now and screen it to an audience and there would be, from
this perspective, no significant difference. The position that there is no temporal
disparity or intentional disparity within the text also undermines the viewer’s
distance from the events. If it happened here and now rather than there and then,
we as viewers are part of the same context and therefore partially responsible for
what happened to the men in the footage. Within this framework without irony,
to show the footage now would seem to commit further violence against these
men.
However, there is also a third stance, in which the film remains on the line
between document and documentary, historical and contemporary, art and
surveillance. Indeed, in this view, Tearoom is riddled with ironies of the
inclusive kind, in which meaning and identity remain indeterminate, radically
disruptive to the regime of meaning in which a text has only one meaning. This
irony may not be intended by the filmmaker, but because Jones does not draw
the clear line between “our” context “here” and “now” and “their” context
“there” and “then” offered by many appropriation films that deploy the trope of
irony – a more clearly antiphrastic, satiric, judgmental form of irony – it is
impossible for us to decide once and for all what Tearoom’s footage “means.”
By minimizing his intervention, limiting it to one edit, a title, and a byline, Jones
(perhaps unintentionally) invites viewers to receive his film in multiple,
contradictory ways. Despite Jones’ efforts to control the meaning of the film
after the fact during the Filmforum question and answer session, the film cannot
be reduced to a single meaning or a clear-cut critique.
Although Jones may wish to emphasize the difference between “then” and
“now” and thereby recuperate “then” for the present as a positive rather than
negative depiction of gay men, his film troubles precisely this distinction. While
there is also certainly a difference between 1962 (the year in which the footage
was made) and 2007 (the year in which Tearoom was “made”), there is also,
unavoidably, its sameness. The footage may be regarded as queer history, as
something “other” than what it was when it was used to prosecute homosexual
men in Mansfield in 1962. However, despite Jones’ intervention, the footage is
also still surveillance footage that was used to prosecute homosexuals. It is both
oppressive surveillance footage and liberating queer history (two completely
incompatible texts) at the same time. If we think of the archive effect as a
potentially ambiguous experience in which multiple meanings for the same
document may coexist simultaneously, we may also be able to better
acknowledge both the ruptures and the continuities between “our” and the
“other” historical and social contexts presented to us in archival documents as
they are constituted as such in appropriation films. Rather than feeling distanced
and superior to these “other” contexts, we may be able to see ourselves as both
different and the same, and thereby as ethically implicated in those contexts we
may wish to disown.
The members of the Filmforum audience critical of Tearoom were, in my
view, either unable or unwilling to recognize the difference in meaning produced
by Jones’ act of appropriation. By the same token, in their emphasis on the
difference between the surveillance footage’s initial intended meaning and the
new meaning with which Jones had imbued it, Jones and the rest of the audience
perhaps neglected the continuity and sameness within the document as it
becomes – or verges on becoming – documentary. In fact, of all the objections
made against the film, the one that perhaps holds the most weight is the one
made on the grounds of ethics, on the fact that some of the men in the
surveillance footage may still be alive and might not be pleased that this footage
has been shown as “art” and “history.” Jones and his supporters have the luxury
of feeling nostalgia for the “tearoom” at a time when gay identity was
clandestine – a nostalgia Jones and several audience members explicitly
acknowledged during the Q&A. For them, this lost context is alluring precisely
because its object seems a distant part of the past. For the men in the footage,
however, whose lives may have been ruined by this document, the historical
context in which the footage was originally made and initially used may not
have fully passed. Indeed, this footage is still a part – and most likely a painful
part – of their lives. For them, no matter how it is reused, this footage is the
surveillance footage that sent them to jail. Thus, the lesson of Tearoom may be
that to be able to hold in one’s mind simultaneously both sameness and
difference is to fully recognize the complex irony of the archive effect and the
appropriative gesture.

Notes
1 Sections of this chapter were previously published in Jaimie Baron, “The Archive Effect: Archival
Footage as an Experience of Reception,” Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind 6, no. 2
(Winter 2012): 102–20 and Jaimie Baron, “Translating the Document Across Time and Space: William
E. Jones’ Tearoom.” Spectator 30, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 51–54.
2 I use the term “amateur film” here to refer to a broad range of audiovisual documents that are produced
outside of mainstream commercial and government channels and are often excluded from state and
commercial archives.
3 Patricia R. Zimmerman, “The Home Movie Movement: Excavations, Artifacts, Minings,” in Mining the
Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, ed. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R.
Zimmerman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 13.
4 Michael Zryd, “Found Footage as Discursive Metahistory: Craig Baldwin’s Tribulation 99,” The
Moving Image 3, no. 2 (Fall 2003): 41.
5 The Criterion Collection description of the DVD version of the film, for instance, reads: “Ten years
after the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, filmmaker Alain Resnais documented the
abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek. One of the first cinematic reflections on the horrors of
the Holocaust, Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) contrasts the stillness of the abandoned camps’ quiet
empty buildings with haunting wartime footage.” DVD case, Alain Resnais’ “Night and Fog”, The
Criterion Collection, 2003.
6 Of course, a “then” and “now” is also frequently produced in relation to characters in fiction films,
through changes in make-up, special effects, or even the use of multiple actors to represent one
character at different points in time. The difference is that the perception of temporal disparity in the
series is produced by indexical documentary recordings of the same face and body, altered by time’s
passage rather than by make-up or special effects.
7 The Interactive Film Comparison is, in fact, an extra on the DVD for A Trip Down Market Street:
1905/2005, which presents the same images of Market Street in succession rather than through split-
screen.
8 A title in A Trip Down Market Street: 1905/2005 reveals that the 35mm film image may have been shot
by Jack Kuttner, but that there is controversy among film historians about who shot it and when.
9 A title in A Trip Down Market Street: 1905/2005 says that the filmmaker of this footage is unknown.
10 This kind of temporal disparity may also occur in relation to fiction films. We may watch fiction films
as, for instance, documentary indexical records. Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) is not only a
fictional narrative but also an indexical document of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman, among
others, when they were alive. When we watch a film in this way, we are focused on the visible
difference between the then of filming (when these actors were alive) and the now of watching
(knowing that these actors are dead). However, I limit the archive effect to an experience of temporal
disparity generated within the text itself.
11 Catherine Russell, Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1999), 238.
12 Roland Barthes, “The Death of the Author,” in The Rustle of Language (Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1989 [1968]), 49–55.
13 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2000 [1985]), xiv.
14 Errol Morris, “The Case of the Inappropriate Alarm Clock (Part 4),” The New York Times, 22 October
2009.
15 Standish Lawder, “Comments on Collage Film,” in Found Footage Film, ed. Cecilia Hausheer and
Christoph Settele (Luzern: VIPER/Zyklop, 1992), 115.
16 Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press,
2002), 75.
17 Of course, Burns’ film generated controversy among historians, some of whom claimed that Burns
misrepresented elements of the Civil War. Indeed, an entire book was written in response. See Robert
Brent Toplin, ed., Ken Burns’ The Civil War: Historians Respond (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1996).
18 Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000), 24.
19 As Millhouse suggests, intentional disparity may be cued also by generic difference. That is, it may
derive from the insertion of fictional footage into the context of a documentary film as well as vice
versa. For instance, in History and Memory (1992) Japanese-American filmmaker Rea Tajiri intercut
footage from Bad Day at Black Rock (John Sturges, 1955), a Hollywood film about white racism
against Japanese-Americans during World War II, with the documentary photographs taken by
Japanese internees at the Japanese internment camps. Generic difference may also occur when fiction
films make use of what we recognize as documentary footage. For instance, Oliver Stone’s
appropriation of the Zapruder footage of John F. Kennedy’s assassination for his historical drama JFK
(1991) caused controversy because of its generic mixing. Like all other instances of the archive effect,
however, the intentional disparity produced through generic difference depends on the viewer
recognizing these clips as coming from a different genre and, therefore, source.
20 Kathleen M. Kuehn, “The Commodification of Blackness in David LaChapelle’s Rize,” Journal of
Information Ethics 19, no. 2 (Fall 2010): 60.
21 Vivian Sobchack, “The Charge of the Real: Embodied Knowledge and Cinematic Consciousness,” in
Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley, CA: University of California
Press, 2004), 273.
22 Douglas Kellner and Dan Streible, “Introduction: Emile de Antonio: Documenting the Life of a Radical
Filmmaker,” in Emile de Antonio: A Reader, ed. Douglas Kellner and Dan Streible (Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 16–17.
23 Kellner and Streible, 20.
24 Bruzzi has noted that film critics and theorists often attempt to reduce the polyvocality and
inconclusivity of Sans Soleil to a unified speaker identified with Marker himself, and the film “is thus
 perceived to be ‘autobiographical,’ to contain the ‘highly recognisable’ voice of Chris Marker, and its
narration is interpreted as nothing more than the collected statements of the ‘cameraman,’ although the
film itself consistently problematises such notions of centralization.” Bruzzi, 60.
25 A written account of the events in Mansfield, Ohio in 1962 is included in William E. Jones, Tearoom
(Los Angeles, CA: 2nd Cannons Publications, 2008).
26 William Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York: Anthology
Film Archives, 1993), 5.
27 Henriette Huldisch and Shamim M. Momin, 2008 Whitney Biennial Exhibition (New Haven, CT: Yale
University Press, 2008), 158–59; and www.williamejones.com/collections/view/11. Accessed 7
February 2013.
28 Jones, Tearoom, 6.
29 Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2001), 232.
30 Linda Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony (London: Routledge, 1994), 58.
31 Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 63–64.
32 Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 52–53.
33 Rosen, Change Mummified, 226.
34 Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 61.
35 The fact that irony may take the form of a refusal to judge is also what distinguishes it from the
dialectic in which synthesis – a single meaning – must occur, whether within a text itself or within the
reader of that text. Many theorists, including Stella Bruzzi, William Wees, and Paul Arthur, have made
a distinction between what they see as dialectical and non-dialectic, critical or illustrative, collage or
compilation uses of found documents. These distinctions are useful up to a point. However, I wish to
make a distinction between two forms of irony whose structures solicit different responses in the viewer
that are not accounted for by the dialectic.
36 Hutcheon, Irony’s Edge, 61.
37 Mary Ann Doane, “In the Ruins of the Image: The Work of Leslie Thornton,” in Women’s
Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks, ed. Robin Blaetz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2007), 258.
2
ARCHIVAL FABRICATIONS
Simulating, manipulating, misusing, and
debunking the found document

“In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods near
Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. … A year later their
footage was found.” With this line of text begins the fake documentary The Blair
Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999), and from this
beginning statement until the end of the film, the possibility that the footage was
“found,” rather than constructed by filmmakers Myrick and Sanchez, is never
denied. The film consists only of film and video footage supposedly shot by the
three students: Michael Williams, Joshua Leonard, and Heather Donahue. (The
characters’ names are, in fact, the names of the film’s actors and the actors did
shoot most if not all of the footage used in the final film, which adds an extra
layer of “reality” to the film.) Marketing material about the film as well as its
associated website was ambiguously worded and suggested that the makers of
The Blair Witch Project, Myrick and Sanchez, simply edited together into
chronological order footage shot by Williams, Leonard, and Donahue.1
Soon after the film’s release and to the surprise of the local inhabitants, fans
began flooding the tiny town of Burkittsville, Maryland, where the missing
students were said to have disappeared and where the students’ films and tapes
were purportedly found. Indeed, some fans went camping in the Maryland
woods in the hopes of running into the Blair Witch herself while others formed
search parties to look for the three missing film students. The Burkittsville
Sheriff’s Office was inundated with calls from people asking about the film and
the town hall answering machine message was changed to say, “If this is in
regard to The Blair Witch Project, it is a fiction.” Other Burkittsville residents
set up a website explaining to eager fans that there is no Blair Witch.2 Despite
all signs that the film was a cleverly marketed but entirely fictional horror film,
however, some viewers continued to believe – or at least pretended to believe –
that the footage might, just might, be “real.”
Although I have argued that the distinction between “archival” and “found”
footage has ceased to be meaningful in the contemporary context, the Blair
Witch fans attest to the fact that the sense of the “found” nevertheless persists
within my broadened definition of the archival document. Indeed, it is the
viewer’s experience of the “foundness” of certain documents – whether found in
an official archive, an online database, or in someone’s closet – that produces
archival documents as such within appropriation films. “Foundness” generates
an experience of temporal and intentional disparity in an appropriation film
based on the viewer’s perception that a document left behind by its maker has
been repurposed by another person (or the same person sometime later) who has
found and used it rather than created it for the present purpose. Thus,
“foundness” is one of the perceived qualities through which certain documents
produce the archive effect and attain both their “aura” and their evidentiary
authority.
Nonetheless, the found document and, hence, the archival document and its
accompanying archive effect can be simulated. When we are told – directly or
through implication – that certain documents were found or discovered rather
than newly produced for an appropriation film, we may be tricked into
experiencing the archive effect. Thus, the sense of the found may be described as
a “lure.” Jacques Lacan uses the French word leurre to discuss the relationship
between the desiring subject and the subject’s desired object, a relationship
constituted through the look and the seen image. Lacan further relates the idea of
the lure to his notion of méconnaisance or “misrecognition.” He writes, “From
the outset, we see, in the dialectic of the eye and the gaze, that there is no
coincidence, but on the contrary, a lure.”3 The terms “lure” and “allure” connote
both deception and desire, both appropriate to our specular relationship to the
found document. Even as we want to believe in the “foundness” of the document
and its promise of possible revelation, we know that we can be “tricked” and
may therefore, on occasion, find ourselves second-guessing the veracity of the
archive effect.
The recognition that the “foundness” of archival documents may be simulated
has the potential to destabilize our epistemological faith in appropriation films
that purport to convey knowledge about the past. Moreover, anxiety about the
simulation of found documents is paralleled by the fear that, between the time
they are found and appropriated, such documents may be invisibly manipulated
and altered through special effects. Through such manipulation, the ostensibly
found document may be used to falsify the historical record. Finally, the
apprehension that the found document may be neither simulated nor manipulated
but nevertheless “misused” and placed in an “inappropriate” context so that it
takes on an “illegitimate” meaning also inflects our relationship to the document
in the appropriation film and thus to the archive effect itself. In each of these
instances, if we have once been “tricked,” we may cease to give found
documents evidentiary authority in the future and, hence, distance ourselves
from the archive effect.
Both the desire to believe in the authenticity of the found document and its
accompanying archival anxieties have at times been provoked through the
format of the fake documentary as well as by fiction films that appropriate and
manipulate documentary footage. Over the course of film history, a variety of
films have thematized, enacted, interrogated, undermined, and exploited the lure
and allure of the found document. Audience reactions to the fake documentaries
Forgotten Silver (Peter Jackson and Costa Botes, 1995) and The Blair Witch
Project not only demonstrate our desire to believe that such revelatory
documents can suddenly be discovered but also simultaneously reveal that found
documents can be staged, producing a “false” archive effect and thereby
subsequently undermining our faith in the archive effect as an index of the truth-
value of documents about the past. Critics’ reactions to Zelig (Woody Allen,
1983) – a fake documentary – and Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) – a
fiction film – each of which appropriates and manipulates found actuality images
reflect both pleasure and unease involved in the manipulation of found
documents through special effects. (There seems to always be some worry that
viewers will be “fooled” by the “trickery” even when it is announced.)
Moreover, JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991) and Underground (Emir Kusturica, 1995),
fiction films that appropriate found actuality footage without manipulating the
images themselves, generated controversy by placing this footage in the context
of ideologically-charged fictions, thus suggesting meanings for the footage that
some critics believe were historically misleading and therefore a “misuse.” Any
notion of “misuse,” of course, is necessarily based on the assumption that some
uses of found documents are legitimate while others are illegitimate, evaluations
grounded in the subjective stance of a given interpreter depending on his or her
extratextual knowledge and beliefs. Furthermore, every (recognizable)
appropriation of found documents is, on some level, a “misuse” in that the
original intended use of a found document is never coincident with its later use
in an appropriation film.
Simulations and manipulations of found documents as well as instances of
their supposed “misuse” may teach us to be more critical of the archive effect.
On the one hand, such critical skepticism may encourage a more active,
discerning kind of spectatorship. Indeed, films that explicitly play with “found”
documents have the potential to lead us to think more critically about our faith in
audiovisual documents as they are recontextualized into appropriation films. On
the other hand, such films may also lead us to doubt any found document’s truth-
value as well as its accepted meaning – especially when it may serve as evidence
for something we wish to disbelieve or discount. This critical attitude toward the
archive effect – taken to an extreme – points toward a paranoid approach to
archival documents advocated and practiced by people who dispute established
historical facts, these including Holocaust deniers who say the Nazis did not
commit genocide and “moon hoaxers” who claim that the Apollo astronauts
never went to the moon. Their denials of the veracity and established meanings
of images of Auschwitz or of the moon landing are seemingly based in a desire
precisely opposite to that of the desire to believe in the “found” archival
document evoked by The Blair Witch Project. Rather than the desire to believe,
these conspiracy theorists enact the desire to debunk and deny, a desire that may
in part be generated by the fear of and anger at being “duped” that has emerged
around certain fake documentaries. This is not to say that fake documentaries or
fiction films that simulate, manipulate, or “misuse” documentary found footage
are to blame for the claims of Holocaust deniers and moon hoaxers. Conspiracy
theorists have political and ideological agendas that have nothing to do with the
fear of being “tricked” by “simulated,” “manipulated,” or “misused” documents;
rather, it is to suggest that fake documentaries that simulate “found” documents
and fiction films that use and manipulate actual found documents have at times
provoked both the desire to believe in the archive effect and the impulse to doubt
or debunk it, each of which plays an important role in establishing and
maintaining historical truths.
Interestingly, conspiracy theorists tend to target documents that are so
pervasive in cultural discourse and have been reused in so many contexts that
they are almost inevitably experienced as “archival” no matter where they next
appear. Indeed, every time certain iconic images like those of the skeletal bodies
of dead Jews being shoveled into mass graves at Auschwitz or of US astronauts
walking on the moon are recontextualized once again in a new text, they
inevitably produce the archive effect. Yet it seems that precisely because these
“meta-archival” documents always produce the archive effect – since we seem
always to have seen them before in some other context – they become targets for
conspiracy theorists who wish to debunk their authenticity or established
meaning. The desire for the “found” document is thus paralleled by the
conspiracy theorist’s desire to “find out” that this document is a “forgery” of
some kind. Rather than discovering a document, conspiracy theorists discover
the “telltale signs” within the meta-archival document that “prove” that it was
simulated, manipulated, or “misused.”
This process perversely echoes Alexandra Juhasz’s definition of the fake
documentary, in which the viewer at some point recognizes the fakery, “finding
out” that the documentary is not “real.” She writes:

Fake documentaries are fiction films that make use of (copy, mock, mimic,
gimmick) documentary style and therefore acquire its associated content (the
moral and social) and associated feelings (belief, trust, authenticity) to create a
documentary experience defined by their antithesis, self conscious distance. …
I use the word “fake” because it registers both the copying and its discovery. A
fake documentary is close to the real thing, but not so close as to not be found
out.4

Holocaust deniers and moon hoaxers perceive what the majority of viewers
accept as documentary and read it as a fake documentary, claiming they have
“found out” the “truth” behind the documentary façade.
These extreme denials in the face of established archival evidence placed
alongside enactments of an intense desire to believe in “found” documents in
fake documentaries as well as worries about the use and manipulation of
documentary footage in fiction films illuminate the complex interplay between
desire, belief, doubt, and denial when it comes to “found” and, hence, archival
documents. An examination of this interplay may shed light on the authority of
archival documents in appropriation films, as well as on the instability of the
“found-ation” that grounds this authority. What is at stake is precisely our initial
willingness to perceive archival documents in appropriation films as “found”
rather than created or manipulated for a given appropriation film, as well as our
belief in the particular meanings attributed to those documents in that film.
While historical revision is an important part of the historiographic process, the
boundary between productive revision and dangerous denial can be easily
blurred. The archive effect and the lure of the “found” document play a crucial
but always unfinished role in establishing the setting of this boundary.
Simulation, manipulation, and “misuse”
Although there may be earlier examples of a simulation of the archive effect in a
fiction film, Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) revealed to a wide audience the
fact that found documents may be mimicked in a convincing way. Early in the
film, just after Charles Foster Kane (Orson Welles) dies, a newsreel entitled
News on the March is shown to a roomful of journalists. While this fake
documentary sequence has often been discussed as a critique of the March of
Time newsreels (1935–51), it may also be productively examined in terms of its
relationship to the idea of archival documents.5 The newsreel is structured as a
montage of Kane’s life showing Kane at different ages. Like the March of Time,
this newsreel is comprised of a series of disparate images from different times
and places joined together by bombastic voiceover narration. A temporal break
is established within the fiction by the fact that Kane is now dead, and additional
temporal disparities are produced in the newsreel through images of Kane at
different ages. In addition, the film fragments of his life, which seem to have
been part of previous newsreel footage, are repurposed for this retrospective of
his life. All of this occurs, of course, within the fictional diegesis. Orson Welles
is made up to look like Kane at different ages in order to achieve an effect
similar to that which occurs in Michael Apted’s Up series (see Chapter 1). The
temporal disparities in the Up series, however, are based on the inscription of
lived time on human bodies and not primarily the effect of make-up and
costume. In addition, in order to simulate the look of old images drawn from an
archive, many of the film images in News on the March are scratched and dirty.
Hence, they are clearly staged to look like archival images within the context of
the fictional narrative of the film.
Viewers of Citizen Kane, however, are unlikely to think that these are actually
“found” and therefore archival images. The image of Kane standing next to
Hitler look-alike Carl Ekberg, for instance, is apt to be recognized by the viewer
as a staged shot since Orson Welles and the real Adolph Hitler would never have
been in the same shot together. Nevertheless, the archive effect is effectively
mimicked within the fictional space of the narrative. As a result, the News on the
March sequence reveals how staging, editing, and distressing a filmstrip can
make a series of images look like they have been taken out of some previous
context of use and repurposed. At the same time, some of the more generic
images in the newsreel – those that do not include Kane – may, in fact, have
been actuality footage drawn from actual archives. An image of the White House
included in the sequence, for instance, is simply an image of the White House,
which could have been shot by various filmmakers at various times – what we
know as “stock footage.” This combination of “fake” and “real” archival
documents points towards a blurring of the line between the two. However,
because the fake archival images of the fictional Kane are clearly images of
Welles playing Kane at different ages, there is likely to be little if any confusion
about these images’ status as staged fiction.
Like Citizen Kane, two films of the last two decades, Forgotten Silver and The
Blair Witch Project, have made use of fake archival documents to produce a
“false” archive effect. However, unlike Citizen Kane, both promote their own
veracity and operate within the genre of fake documentary. Both of these films
have encouraged viewers to believe, at least for the duration of the film, that
their appropriated documents were actually found. Moreover, each of these films
has explicitly thematized and played on the desire for the found as it occurs
outside of official archives. Thus, while both these films are fake rather than real
documentaries, they and the discourses around them reveal to us the affective
investment people make in the archive effect as well as the pleasures involved in
discovering and seeing such suddenly “found” documents. The conceit that film
and/or video footage has been suddenly found has tricked viewers even without
photographic or digital manipulation of the footage. The lure of the found alone
has proved itself an effective means of evoking viewers’ desire for the revelatory
value promised by the “found” document and its archive effect.
In 1995, New Zealand television aired what appeared to be a documentary,
entitled Forgotten Silver, directed by Peter Jackson and Costa Botes. The film
told the story of Jackson’s discovery of a long lost film pioneer from New
Zealand by the name of Colin McKenzie (Figure 2.1). Support for this story
consisted of fake “found” documents created by Jackson and Botes as well as
footage of Jackson and his team in their search for traces of McKenzie’s life and
work, and interviews with people who knew McKenzie or famous “talking
heads” from the Hollywood film industry who supported the find and its
importance. When the film was aired on television, many viewers were fooled
into thinking it was a documentary and that the archival documents had really
been “found” as claimed by the filmmakers. Viewers began to celebrate the
discovery of the previously unknown New Zealand film pioneer, Colin
McKenzie, only to find the next day that the film was a fake documentary and
that the “found” documents had been staged for Jackson and Botes’ camera.
While some viewers had realized the fakery as they watched the film and others
appreciated the joke, many viewers were furious that they had been duped. For
their part, given the cues they had placed in the film as to its status, the film-
makers were surprised that so many people had believed the film to be true.
According to Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight:
 FIGURE Forgotten Silver (Peter Jackson and Costa Botes, 1995).
2.1

Peter Jackson and Costa Botes … apparently intended that their audience
would realise the joke while viewing the programme. Jackson has expressed
surprise that there was a group of viewers who seemed unable, or unwilling, to
move from a documentary mode of viewing to an appreciation of the
filmmakers’ original intention.6

Indeed, the idea of a “suddenly found” New Zealand film pioneer was so
compelling that numerous viewers overlooked (or did not understand) the clues
that should have indicated the joke – for example, the fact that one of the
interview subject’s name is identified in a subtitle as “Alexandra Nevsky,” a
reference to Sergei Eisenstein and Dmitri Vasilyev’s famous film Alexander
Nevsky (1938) that at least most cinephiles would recognize. Moreover, the film
literalizes the notion of “finding” rare footage that would allow for a major
revision of history. As Roscoe and Hight note:

Over the previous couple of years, the [New Zealand] Film Archive had been
 conducting a nationwide film search, encouraging the public to hand over old
films that had, in most cases, been left to disintegrate in garages and attics. …
Although most of the material collected by the Archive was home movies and
similar short excerpts of film, it was certainly the hope (if not the reality) that
the search would uncover material of historical importance.7

Forgotten Silver’s literalization of the notion of “found” footage is in fact

hyperbolized throughout the film. Peter Jackson begins the film by actually
“leading us down the garden path” to show us the shed where he first
“discovered” the early films of Colin McKenzie inside an old trunk. The film
comes to its climax with the discovery of the footage of McKenzie’s “lost”
masterpiece, Salome. This latter section verges on the absurd. After hiking
through the jungle, Jackson, Botes, and their companions “find” a lost city that
McKenzie had built as a set for Salome. To top it off, the film archaeologists
“discover” a sarcophagus engraved with a suggestive bull in which they “find”
the reels of McKenzie’s footage, which he had supposedly hidden there decades
before.8
Many New Zealanders were genuinely angered by the hoax. Tricked by the
film, they had gained and then lost a national hero in the figure of Colin
McKenzie. However, the New Zealanders’ desire for this “found” treasure trove
of filmic traces of the past is by no means unique to them. The film teases us all,
provoking our desire for that “found” film reel that will change the way we see
history, a piece of celluloid that has never been touched by the official archival
bureaucracy, a private trove of “the real” suddenly coming into public light.
Indeed, within the American context, the fake documentary The Blair Witch
Project also literalized the notion of “found” footage discovered outside of any
official archive, generating a performance of desire similar to that provoked by
Forgotten Silver. Marketed as a documentary (although soon recognized by most
as a fiction narrative), the film uses hand-held camera movement, gaps in time
when the cameras were off, bad exposures taken at night with flashlights, and
other techniques that quite convincingly mimic footage that might have been
“found” unedited in the woods. In addition to the clever construction of the film
itself, the website associated with it extended the conceit of the film, offering
photos of the evidence “found” by the police, including rusty cans of film and
audio tapes. An additional “documentary” called Curse of the Blair Witch, which
was shown on the Sci Fi Channel just before the film was released in theaters,
also appears as an extra on the DVD. This “documentary” combines “found”
footage – the students’ own footage, local newscasts about the missing students
and the police search for them after they disappeared, footage from a
“documentary” called Mystic Occurrences – with “new” footage, such as
interviews with the families of the missing students. This mimicry of temporal
disparity reemphasizes the “archival” status of the film and video shot by the
students. None of these documents were actually found, but they are presented as
such so that, within the context of The Blair Witch Project, Curse of the Blair
Witch, and the film website, they produce the archive effect.
Like naïve viewers of Forgotten Silver, some people were fooled into
believing, at least to some degree, that the “archival” footage in Blair Witch had
really been found in the woods in rural Maryland. In her study of emails from
internet newsgroups about Blair Witch, Margrit Schreier found that, while most
discussants were aware that the film was fiction, approximately 40 percent were
at least “temporarily uncertain” as to whether the film was fiction or
documentary.9 As Schreier points out, the very fact that this question was
debated in the newsgroups suggests that the generic and ontological status of the
film was at least partially unclear to some viewers.10 These viewers were, most
likely, the eager fans who arrived in Burkittsville, Maryland and formed search
parties to look for the missing students. While some of these movie tourists
might have genuinely believed the story to be factual, it seems to me that many
more were possessed by the desire to believe that the “found” footage was
“evidence” to be investigated.11 This desire – whether in relation to Forgotten
Silver or The Blair Witch Project – reveals itself as a powerful force, convincing
viewers to overlook the details that give the game away or the rational
explanation that undermines the revelatory “find.” Whether New Zealand
television audiences eager for a new national hero or American teenagers
looking for a good scare, moviegoers are ready to buy into the conceit that such
artifacts may surface at any time in the present, provoking a triumphant revision
of the historical record or the revelation of a real-life mystery to be solved. The
lure of the “found” document calls to us even if we know that the archive effect
can be (or is) simulated.
The lure of the found and the production of a “false” archive effect, however,
become much more epistemologically threatening when they operate in what
Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight call a “hoax” film that consistently claims to be a
documentary rather than a fake documentary in which the “trick” is meant to be
(eventually) recognized.12 This can happen when a documentary neglects to
label reenacted or manufactured sequences that read as “archival.” For instance,
Mighty Times: The Children’s March (Robert Houston, 2004) won an Academy
Award in 2005 for Best Documentary Short but became embroiled in
controversy when it was revealed that some of the “archival” shots of the march
were actually reenactments – without being labeled as such. The film concerned
a civil rights march that occurred in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963 in which
thousands of children marched to protest against racial segregation. The
filmmakers “recreated scenes using vintage cameras and distressed film stock to
shoot more than 700 extras, trained dogs and period automobiles and fire
engines on various locations in Southern California,”13 but did not mark these
sequences as reenactment. Although the filmmakers eventually admitted they
had recreated certain scenes, they claimed that only 10 percent of the footage
was staged, whereas cinematographer Jon Else, who was asked to examine the
film to evaluate its archival authenticity, contended that at least half was
reenacted. Houston, using a somewhat bizarre metaphor, defended his use of
reenactment without labeling, saying:

The way we make our films is like baking a biscotti. We make a classic
documentary using the archival record. We then make another layer of film.
We bake the cookie twice, like a biscotti. That second layer fills in the gaps,
and what you end up with is a seamless telling and definitive telling of
unknown chapters from civil rights history.14

The question of the recognition of the “gap” or “seam” – or the lack thereof –
between “real” and “fake” archival footage is the crux of the issue. Without
labeling, many viewers felt tricked. Of course, a number of documentary
filmmakers, Errol Morris perhaps the most prominent, have used reenactments in
their films. The trouble with The Children’s March was that, unlike the stylized
reenactments of the shooting of Police Officer Robert Wood in The Thin Blue
Line (Errol Morris, 1988), the reenactments in Houston’s film were too
convincing.15 Houston obscured the “seam” and produced the archive effect
where there should have been none. This same problem arises from less
controversial films such as Bontoc Eulogy (Marlon Fuentes, 1995) and The
Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996). These two films, although they
simulate the archive effect through the production of fake archival documents,
confess the simulation at the end of the film (a strategy I discuss in Chapter 4).
Although Fuentes and Dunye may trick viewers through most of the film, the
admission within each film that these “archival documents” are staged seems to
excuse these films from the accusations made against The Children’s March.16
Thus, we can see that the experience of being “tricked” by the simulated
“found” document and, hence, of experiencing a “false” archive effect has been
explored through and played out in the reception of many films including fiction
films, fake documentaries, and actual documentaries. What is crucial to the
maintenance of the evidentiary value of “archival documents” in general,
however, is precisely the recognition – immediate or eventual – of the simulation
of the “found” document. So long as the particular instances in which a “false”
archive effect occurs are recognized as such, the simulation of the archive effect
may generate pleasure without undermining the epistemological and historical
value of archival documents in general. However, from the examples above, it is
clear that this recognition cannot be guaranteed for every viewer in every
instance. As a result, simulations of “found” documents may produce the archive
effect and be experienced by some as genuine historical evidence.
Simulating “found” documents, however, is not the only way in which a
“false” archive effect can be produced. Indeed, actual found documents can also
be manipulated after they are found. When it was released, multiple critics
compared Woody Allen’s fake documentary Zelig (1983) to the newsreel in
Citizen Kane.17 However, in contrast to Citizen Kane, Allen’s film made use of
actual found documentary images to a much greater extent. In this film, Allen
plays the character Leonard Zelig, the “human chameleon” whose mind and
body transforms to match the people around him, while Mia Farrow plays Dr.
Eudora Fletcher who treats and eventually marries Zelig. The film takes the form
of a fake biographical documentary recounting Zelig’s life. In order to simulate
the archive effect, black-and-white footage of Zelig and Fletcher is contrasted
with tongue-in-cheek color footage of famous talking heads such as Susan
Sontag and Saul Bellow in contemporary interviews discussing Leonard Zelig.
As in the Citizen Kane newsreel, certain footage in the film was staged to look
like archival footage from the 1920s and 1930s and some of the footage – the
more generic images that do not directly bear on the narrative of the film –
appear to be actual found images – stock footage – from that era. Zelig differs
from News on the March, however, in its use of actual found actuality footage
that has been optically altered through special effects in order to integrate Allen
and Farrow into the images. For instance, Allen is optically inserted into the
background of a moving image of the historical Hitler – not an actor – giving a
speech. In these composite images, the archive effect is meant to be recognized
within the space of a single shot, and audiences were expected to enjoy the
temporal and intentional disparity within the film frame. Film critics at the time
of the film’s release were generally thrilled by both the staged “archival” footage
and the integration of the fictional characters into the actual found footage. New
York Times critic Janet Maslin, for instance, extolled the artistry of the film:
 Even the most jaded movie audiences, the ones already bored with today’s
most sophisticated special-effects wizardry, may never stop marveling at the
technical feats accomplished in Woody Allen’s Zelig. That couldn’t be Mr.
Allen, as the title character, waving from behind Adolph Hitler on a speaker’s
podium or lolling on a baseball diamond beside Babe Ruth – could it? The
simulations are indeed simulations. But probably no other film has ever
attempted so many different ways of integrating modern-day characters into
historical footage, and none has ever done it so seamlessly.18

Some critics also noted that the film could be construed as a critique of the
newsreel format. Peter Hogue and Marion Bronson, for instance, suggest that the
fake documents “remind us of the manipulability and unreliability of
photographic images, thereby provoking a critical awareness which must
pervade our ultimate responses to the film.”19 However, few critics suggested
that there was anything harmful or dangerous in creating these effects.
This was not true, however, a decade later in regard to the manipulation of
actual found actuality footage in Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994). In
contrast to Zelig, Forrest Gump is not a fake documentary; it is a scripted fiction
film, which generally excludes the tropes of documentary form mimicked so
well in their entirety in Zelig. However, in a manner similar to that of Zelig,
Zemeckis’ film visually and audibly incorporates the title character, played by
Tom Hanks, into actual found footage. Yet technology had changed significantly
between the production of Zemeckis’ and Allen’s films and, with it, attitudes
toward such manipulations of the archive effect. Indeed, the alteration of the
found document – and, hence, of the archive effect – through digital technology
raised troubling questions about the status of archival evidence that did not arise
for critics in relation to Zelig. Forrest Gump used computer-generated effects to
integrate the image of Hanks into found images of politicians, including
Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, as well as of other historical
personages, shot long before Zemeckis’ film was made (Figure 2.2). Now, of
course, computer-generated special effects have become so widespread in movie
production that the effects in Forrest Gump no longer seem particularly
impressive or problematic. However, at the time, the digitally composited
images in the film gave rise to both critical admiration for their technical
accomplishment and anxiety about the epistemological and historiographic
implications of this technological breakthrough. Boston Globe film critic Jack
Thomas, for instance, both celebrated and expressed unease at the manipulation
of the found footage, writing:
 The appearance of Hanks in historical footage gives Forrest Gump an eerie
psychological realism. … The scene [in which Gump meets President
Kennedy] is woven so deftly that Kennedy and Hanks appear to be not only in
precisely the same film, but also in precisely the same frames. … What about
technology that not only enhances reality, but creates it, or at least the illusion?
And is truth endangered when directors can manipulate images even in so-
called documentaries so that historical characters say and do things they never
said or did?20

FIGURE Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994).

2.2

It is unclear why exactly Forrest Gump raised questions that might have been
raised earlier by Zelig but were not. In both Zelig and Forrest Gump, the
technological trick is to generate the archive effect within the frame of a single
shot. Only Gump, however, seems to have given rise to the fear that the viewer
might not perceive these different elements of the same shot as coming from
different sources and thus read the manipulated image as a unified, indexical
archival document of a nonfiction event. Presumably, if the manipulation within
the single frame of an archival document is made invisible, the viewer’s
perception of the historical document and, hence, history – or the viewer’s
experience of history – will be altered. At the same time (and paradoxically),
however, the viewer’s recognition of the manipulation of the archive effect is
precisely the point. As Vivian Sobchack notes:

Digitally inserting its fictional hero into documentary footage and into an
 interactive relation with “real” historical events and persons, Forrest Gump
confuses the fictional with the historically “real” in an absolutely seamless
representation – and yet it does not, for a second, presume that the audience
will be at all categorically confused. Indeed, it depends for its humor on the
audience’s conscious recognition of the distinct terms of this confusion.21

The gimmick in Forrest Gump, its technological feat, thus depends on the
viewer’s recognition of temporal and intentional disparity within the single
frame – on realizing the trickery. However, if the gimmick goes unrecognized,
the historical record is potentially changed for the viewer. Thomas’ comments
suggest that one of the most disturbing things about Forrest Gump was that it
actually changed what the historical figures said not only by adding different
dialogue but also by changing the movement of their lips to match. This kind of
change to the historical record is, perhaps, less easily perceived than the
insertion of Hanks in the scene. Moreover, the notion of “seamlessness,”
mentioned by both Maslin and Sobchack, suggests that it is the fear that the
“seam” – which marks the boundary between the found actuality elements and
the fictional elements of the image – will not be recognized that is ultimately
most worrisome, particularly in relation to viewers with insufficient extratextual
or historical knowledge of the imaged events.
The implications of this seamless integration of fictional elements into archival
footage in Gump have been illuminated by Stephen Prince, who has argued that
computer-generated effects, particularly digital effects with their ever more
seamless blending into indexical images, has brought about a split between two
kinds of realism, which he terms referential realism and perceptual realism. He
writes:

Referentially realistic images bear indexical and iconic homologies with their
referents. They resemble the referent, which, in turn, stands in a causal,
existential relationship to the image. A perceptually realistic image is one
which structurally corresponds to the viewer’s audiovisual experience of three-
dimensional space. … Perceptual realism, therefore, designates a relationship
between the image or film and the spectator, and it can encompass both unreal
images and those which are referentially realistic. Because of this, unreal
images may be referentially fictional but perceptually realistic.22

The anxiety surrounding Forrest Gump, then, is partially due to the fear that
viewers will not be able to distinguish between the referentially and perceptually
realistic and will therefore misconstrue such play with the archive effect.
 Certainly, there is a danger that the digital manipulation of images can “trick”
viewers and alter evidence that may become accepted as part of the historical
record. Instances of “photoshopped” images that were initially published in
newspapers or online as “real” are too numerous to recount. Although some of
these manipulations are ultimately discovered, there may be cases in which
doctored photos have been published and stand as indexical evidence of the
“real.” Of course, such doctoring is not limited to digital manipulation. The
manipulation of photographs has been ongoing since the beginning of
photography. Digital technology seems, however, to erase the visibility of the
manipulation – of the seam – to a greater degree than does optical printing,
making us that much more vulnerable to such alterations, which, at worst, may
trick us into believing in the historical fact of an event that never happened or
happened differently than we have come to believe based on the archival
evidence at hand.
Another concern surrounding Forrest Gump, however, is of a different order
than the critiques lodged at the film in terms of its seamless manipulation of
“found” footage. Critics also took issue with the meanings that the film’s
particular recontextualizations produced, arguing that the uses of the footage
constituted a “misuse.” For instance, theorist Thomas Byers writes:

The effect of such rewritings, and in general of the historical sequences [in
Forrest Gump], is to neutralize history. Memory of crucial figures and events
is evoked, either through cinematic restaging or through use of actual archival
news footage. But the images of this memory are visually altered to include
Forrest himself and narratively reinscribed as parts of the private story of one
rather marginal individual, so that the comedy of their eccentric connections to
Forrest’s life supplants and covers over their larger import.23

In this regard, the issue is not merely of trickery but also of an irresponsible
“misuse” that generates what Byers deems an inappropriate or illegitimate
meaning. Similarly, Jennifer Hyland Wang notes that in the sequence in which
Forrest is placed in a televised interview with John Lennon, the song Imagine is
converted from a revolutionary anthem into a celebration of religion and
consumerism, which Hyland implies is a “misuse” of both the song and the
found footage of Lennon.24
These critiques are based on the assumption that there are “appropriate” or
“inappropriate” uses of “found” documents, and the appropriation of such
actuality footage into fiction film seems particularly contentious in this regard
when it relates to historical events. Anxieties about the meaning of well-known
archival documents were thus provoked by Oliver Stone’s use of found
documentary footage – particularly the Zapruder footage – in JFK (1991), his
fictional dramatization of the events surrounding the Kennedy assassination. In
this case, critics were first of all concerned that the combination of archival
footage and fictionalized reenactment would confuse viewers, this despite the
fact that, as Janet Staiger has shown, the combination of found and reenacted
footage dates back at least as far as early newsreels and has been a widespread
practice ever since.25 Staiger writes:

The issue is that the mixing [of documentary footage and fictional
reenactments] may confuse the audiences as to what is documentary evidence
versus what is speculation or hypothesis by the filmmaker. It is supposed that
audiences will be less capable of judging the validity of the interpretation if
they are confused into perceiving the re-enactment as an authentic “trace” of
the real.26

Thus, one aspect of the debate surrounding JFK is about whether viewers can
tell the difference between the found actuality footage and fictional
reenactments, which will, of course, depend on their own extratextual
knowledge. Like The Children’s March and Forrest Gump, then, JFK is
imbricated in the debate about the recognizability of the “seam” between found
and created footage within the appropriation film. When the existence and
location of this seam is ambiguous, some of the most powerful desires and
anxieties surrounding the archive effect are revealed. The other aspect of the
JFK debate concerns whether the meaning Stone attributes to the found footage
within the context of the film – and hence the historical narrative produced – was
“legitimate.” Marita Sturken writes:

The inability of the documentary photographic image to reveal the reasons for
the Kennedy assassination constituted a kind of cultural trauma. A film like
JFK responds to the inability of the image to provide answers by “filling in”
what the image could not tell, and attempting to complete the fragmented
images of memory.27

What counts as a legitimate “filling in,” however, is unclear. As Staiger notes,

“What is undecidable, finally, is who is appropriately authorized to fill in the
missing narrative material.”28
Another film whose use of “found” documentary images in a fiction context
has generated claims of “misuse” is Kusturica’s Underground, a film about a
group of Yugoslavs who are driven literally underground during World War II.
However, due to the manipulations of their leader, Marko, they do not know that
the war is over and, thus, they continue to live underground for 25 years after it
has ended. Combining this fantastical narrative with the narration of actual
events in Yugoslav history, the film raises immediate questions about telling the
historical “truth,” and the incorporation of documentary footage makes the
question of “truth” all the more pressing. As Sean Homer notes:

A key point of contention in the film was the use of documentary footage
portraying Slovenes in Maribor and Croats in Zagreb cheering and welcoming
Nazi troops in contrast to the footage of devastation wrought on Belgrade by
Nazi bombers, the fairly obvious implication being that the Croats and
Slovenes were collaborators while the brave Serbs resisted the occupation.29

While Underground, like Zelig and Forrest Gump, at times incorporates the
fictional character Marko into documentary footage including Yugoslavian
dictator Tito, this appears to have been less of a problem for critics than the brief
insertion of unaltered, unstaged found documentary footage because of its
implications about Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs and their respective attitudes
toward the Nazis. Thus, in the case of Underground, as in JFK, it is not the
simulation or manipulation of the found documents themselves that was
primarily at issue but, rather, the fact that these documents were recontextualized
so as to imply particular historical and ideological meanings, which some
regarded as a “misuse” of the footage, while others did not.
Thus, it is clear that while the simulation or manipulation of “found”
documents may be objectively demonstrated given sufficient evidence, what
counts as a “misuse” is always dependent on the viewer’s judgment. On some
level, every use of a found document is a “misuse,” because recontextualizations
always reconfigure meaning. However, responses to Forrest Gump, JFK,
Underground, and other fiction films that appropriate found actuality footage
reveal an acute concern that the intentional disparity between fictional and
actuality footage may not be recognized, may remain ambiguous, or may lead
viewers to “illegitimate” beliefs about the past. Hence, these films are perceived
by some as a threat to the always-tenuous boundary between factual and fictional
accounts of the past.

Conspiracy theorists and the “debunking” of the meta-

archival document
Of course, despite fears that the films above heralded the end of photographic
and cinematic evidence, archival documents have not completely lost their
authority, and they continue to function in appropriation films as historical
evidence. Nevertheless, the simulation, manipulation, or “misuse” of found
documents has provided fodder for conspiracy theorists who seek to debunk
those documents that stand in the way of their desired version of history. Indeed,
the flipside of the desire to believe in the authenticity of the found document and
to experience the archive effect is demonstrated by those who seek to undermine
the authenticity and thus the historical authority of certain audiovisual
documents that have been widely accepted as historical evidence. This tendency
is most clearly seen in relation to widely-circulated and well-known “meta-
archival” documents, which include the films and photographs taken at Nazi
concentration camps, the footage of US astronauts landing on the moon, the
Zapruder footage of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, the Holliday footage of
the Rodney King beating, and other documents that most people will have seen
many times in films, on television, on the internet, or through some other media
platform. Although the majority of people accept these documents as authentic
and authoritative evidence of an established historical narrative, there are those
who challenge their authenticity, authority, and established meaning. In fact, it
seems that the more widely these meta-archival documents are repurposed and
recontextualized, the more likely it is that their evidentiary authority and
accepted meaning will be challenged, at least by a fanatical few. Sometimes the
issue is the authenticity of the documents themselves (whether the document is
simulated or manipulated), while, at other times, the question is whether the
“correct” meaning and status has been attributed to a given document.
The debates surrounding these meta-archival documents reveal a contradictory
situation. Although we may tend to believe in the authenticity and “foundness”
of archival documents as they are produced as such through the archive effect in
appropriation films, we also may be reticent to put our faith in such documents.
If found documents and, hence, the archive effect can be faked or manipulated,
how do we know when documents are actually found? The stakes of this
question are very high. At issue is the belief that documents that read as found
(whether in the woods or in an official archive) can ever be trusted as evidence
about the historical past. Moreover, also at stake is the question of who decides
the “legitimate” meaning of the document, which involves the issue of historical
authority, of who has the right to evaluate a given appropriation and the version
of history it serves.
 Certainly, a critical attitude toward found documents can be of great value
when it leads viewers to question what they see and to seek extratextual
verification for what they are told through appropriation films. Taken to an
extreme, however, this critical attitude is transformed into a reading strategy that
can only be called paranoid. The discourses produced by Holocaust deniers and
moon hoaxers about the respective meta-archival documents they attempt to
debunk crystallize the nether side of the crucial contradictory dynamic of belief,
doubt, and denial involved in the contemporary experience of the archival
document. Today, the veracity of the archival document is always, to some
degree, in doubt since the signs of “foundness” can be easily mimicked. Indeed,
“Aged Film” software, which can add “shake, jump, scratches, dirt, hair, gamma,
[or] brightness flicker” to make new footage look old, is available to anyone
with a video editing program on his or her home computer.30 Hence, the
historical authority of the archival document in the appropriation film is
relentlessly threatened by digital technology. Within this context, conspiracy
theorists oppose the discourse of the “found” with their own discourse of
“finding out.” Both discourses are based on a notion of revelation but each
locates this revelation in a different place. For the most part, the “found”
operates at the level of the entire document whether it is “found” in an official
archive, in a basement, or in the woods, while “finding out” is located in minor
details within the image which are then used to discredit the document’s
documentary status and/or its established historical meaning.
Conspiracy theories in general have a great deal to do with the projection of
intention onto or “behind” documents, a projection that intersects with the
perception of intentional disparity within the appropriation film. Their theories’
basic premise is that someone “behind the scenes” intends to mislead you. In his
treatise on “Holocaust negationism,” or Holocaust denial, Alain Finkielkraut
analyzes the way in which certain Holocaust deniers go about negating the vast
quantity of established archival evidence of the Nazi’s extermination of the Jews
of Europe. He shows that early Holocaust deniers’ strategies frequently touched
on the notion of a hidden intention as they “condemned antifascism with the
unremitting vehemence of those who would no longer be duped.”31 Finkielkraut
demonstrates how later Holocaust deniers’ claims are also based on their having
“uncovered” or “deciphered” a secret intention beneath the surface of the
documents that – for most people – attest to the reality of the Holocaust. As
Finkielkraut writes, “In terms of method, the negators of the gas chambers are
the spiritual sons of the great Stalinists [who denied the existence of the Gulag].
With the same critical fervor, they disqualify annoying testimony on the basis of
its secret intent.”32 Holocaust deniers thus analyze documents not in terms of
their apparent content but rather in terms of their hidden agenda. Paradoxically
and hypocritically, however, when deniers are accused of intentionally distorting
the historical record, they take on the mantle of the martyrs of history. As
Finkielkraut writes:

If one charges [Holocaust deniers] with intentions that they never had, “those
who put the dead back on their feet” become reinvigorated by this slander and
see within it the flattering image of martyrs of truth, thereby assuring
themselves that they are the victims of a plot to stifle history.33

The refusal to be “duped” is the hallmark both of Holocaust deniers who refute
the authenticity and the generally accepted meaning of images from and
testimony about the Nazi concentration camps and of “moon hoaxers” who
argue that the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing footage was staged by the US
government. Believing that they have “seen through” the images to the secret,
deceptive intent behind them and their usage, Holocaust deniers and moon
hoaxers claim to stand outside of ideology. However, whenever they themselves
are brought to task for uncritically accepting evidence as “truth” when it
supports their own (pseudo)historical claims, they only believe themselves
further justified in their belief that “someone” is trying to “hide the truth.”
The stakes of projected intention are exceptionally high in regard to the claims
of Holocaust deniers. Anti-Semitism of the kind encouraged by The Protocols of
Zion, itself a forgery, is based on the notion that “the Jews” are plotting to “take
over the world.” The main weapon of Holocaust deniers confronted with the
photographic and filmic documentation of the murder of millions of Jews (as
well as Gypsies, homosexuals, and partisans) is that of suggesting that
“someone” has either mislabeled, doctored, or faked these meta-archival
documents. In other words, when Holocaust imagery is appropriated to serve the
established narrative of the Nazi genocide of the Jews, Holocaust deniers “find”
an intentional disparity hitherto obscured – ostensibly by Jews, Zionists,
Americans, and/or Communists. In general, this nefarious intention is identified
as an attempt to either pass off “faked,” “staged,” or “manipulated” images as
documentary or to assign “incorrect” meanings to actual documentary images.
German Holocaust denier Udo Walendy, for instance, has written an article
provocatively entitled “Do Photographs Prove the NS Extermination of the
Jews?” His answer, of course, is “no.” He arrives at this conclusion, however,
through several strategies of reading that directly parallel the anxieties
articulated around the appropriation films discussed earlier.
 In some cases, Walendy claims, meta-archival Holocaust images are
“forgeries,” and he locates a conspiratorial intention at the very foundation of
such documents. For instance, he writes that some Holocaust photographs are, in
fact, just very realistic “photographed drawings.”34 They are, in his analysis, not
even indexical but, rather, iconic images with no evidentiary value. Other
Holocaust images, he claims, were in fact scenes staged by Americans “from
beginning to end,” so that fictional images are passed off as documentary.35 Like
the fictional images in The Blair Witch Project and Forgotten Silver that some
took to be documentary, Walendy implies, in both of these cases what we
perceive to be indexical documentary images may not actually be documentary.
We may have been tricked into perceiving the “real” in the wrong place. In other
cases, he claims that “genuine” documentary images have been “altered as to
their details” after the fact.36 While he notes that many such “manipulations”
can be easily recognized as such, he worries that computer technologies have
made it too easy to pass off “falsifications” as real. He writes that, “today,
advanced computer technology allows for the almost limitless manipulation of
photo documents, and changes are no longer provable.”37 Like the film critics
who worried about the consequences of the use of computer effects in Forrest
Gump, Walendy implies concern that the archive effect – the experience of
temporal and/or intentional disparity – which “should be” experienced by the
viewer when two different images are combined into a single composite image,
will not be perceived. In order to be “true” to history, the historian must detect
the seam – the “hidden” disparity within the single frame – if it is in fact there.
Of course, all of Walendy’s “revelations” serve his political purpose. By
Walendy’s logic, any photograph that might prove Nazi atrocities against Jews
and others must have been drawn, staged, or else altered by someone who was
simply very talented in concealing the act of compositing. In these cases, it is the
job of the Holocaust denier to “find” and “expose” the hidden intention behind
the only “apparent” documentary status of the image.
At other times, however, Walendy’s critique is aimed not at the authenticity of
the image itself but, rather, at how a meta-archival Holocaust document has been
contextualized – in other words, he claims that it has been “misused.” He
suggests that many of the photographic documents used to prove the factuality of
the Nazi genocide of the Jews are “genuine” documentary photographs to which
“false” captions have intentionally been added. He asserts that in these cases,
“Genuine and unretouched photographs are given false captions. This is not a
falsification of the photos per se, but rather a false account of what is shown.”38
He shows several concentration camp photographs, denying the “false” caption
and proffering a “true” new one – albeit with nothing but references to other
Holocaust deniers’ works to corroborate the new meaning over the established
one.39 In this scenario, the document itself is deemed “genuine” but the “false”
caption is intended to deceive as to the document’s meaning. Here, not unlike
the critics of Forrest Gump, JFK, and Underground who feared that audiences
would “misinterpret” the meaning of the appropriated documents, Walendy
expresses the fear that the archival document has been “misused” to intentionally
produce an “illegitimate” meaning. He assumes, however, that he and his fellow
Holocaust deniers are the only ones equipped to determine whether the meaning
produced through a particular archive effect is “legitimate” or not.
Ultimately, the matter of historical proof is one of corroboration. No
photograph or piece of film can incontrovertibly prove anything. However, the
thousands of pages of written testimonies and the thousands of hours of recorded
testimonies of prisoners who were held in Nazi concentration camps serve as
much stronger corroboration than Walendy’s references to the books and articles
written by other Holocaust deniers and his sloppy and inconsistent “analysis” of
the photographs he claims to be forgeries. Nevertheless, some are swayed by this
kind of pseudo-analysis. Clearly, the desire “not to be duped” can result in
precisely the opposite effect; indeed, the lure of the found is paralleled by the
lure of “finding out,” an experience of “discovery” that may be equally – if not
more – illusory.
While Walendy makes his case in a written essay, other conspiracy theorists
have made appropriation films in the service of their theories. In the case of the
moon hoaxers, the projected “someone behind the scenes” is the US government
or, more specifically, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(NASA), possibly in collaboration with Hollywood. According to NASA and
other official accounts, the footage of American astronauts landing and walking
on the moon in 1969 was shot in order to record a historic event in human
history. According to the moon hoaxers, however, this was a diabolic plan put
into effect to deceive the American people and the rest of the world. In fact, a
number of feature-length films that purport to be documentaries have been
produced around the idea that the footage of the moon landing was actually
staged in a movie studio, among them What Happened on the Moon? (David S.
Percy, 2000) and Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? (John Moffet,
Fox Television, 2001), which I analyze here. These films deploy a strategy of
comparison that “reveals” so-called “inconsistencies” within the meta-archival
documents under examination. While never suggesting that the moon landing
footage itself has been manipulated, each of these moon hoax films attempts to
suggest that the footage was staged and, hence, to generate doubt about the
established meaning of these meta-archival documents. Indeed, their contention
is that staged, fictional footage has been “misused” and “mislabeled” as
documentary footage. They imply that films that appropriate the moon landing
footage – In the Shadow of the Moon (David Sington, 2007), for instance, which
tells the story of the moon landing through “found” documents and
contemporary interviews – are themselves hoax films.
Using a method similar to Walendy’s, the moon hoax films make their
arguments by pointing out differences between different images of the same
thing and suggesting that these images were made to deceive. Moreover, like
Walendy’s article entitled Do Photographs Prove the NS Extermination of the
Jews?, both What Happened on the Moon? and Conspiracy Theory: Did We
Land on the Moon? are titled with a question, and each film uses voiceover
narration phrased in the interrogative form. In the moon landing conspiracy
films, this repeated use of questions functions to sow doubt about the official
archival record without ever explicitly claiming that the moon landing did not
happen. Indeed, it may be the question mark that allows both of these films to
walk the line between documentary and speculative fiction since they do not
assert that the moon landing was a hoax but rather ask whether the moon landing
might have been a hoax.
What Happened? works, in part, through antiphrastic irony (see Chapter 1),
casting doubt on the authenticity and accepted meaning of a given archival
document and transforming it into evidence of deception. The film begins with a
montage of what read as meta-archival images, due in part to their familiarity –
photographs and film footage of astronauts, images of rocket launches –
interspersed with images of star charts and the front pages of newspapers from
around the world from July 21, 1969, the day after Neil Armstrong and Buzz
Aldrin walked on the moon for the first time. After this montage, a man
identified in written text only as Ronnie Stronge appears sitting within a bizarre,
blurry blue screen environment surrounded by what look vaguely like TV
monitors. No identification other than his name is offered.40 Stronge’s narration
begins:

The main thrust of this program is to question the validity of the official record
of mankind’s exploration of the moon. Sending men to the moon and bringing
them back safely is widely held to be the greatest technical achievement of
mankind so far, in fact, the greatest achievement of the second millennium.
But this story of Project Apollo presents an alternative viewpoint. The material
you will see uncovers numerous inconsistencies in the official NASA record of
 manned missions to the moon. The anomalies presented bring into total
question whether over the period of three years from 1969 to 1972 twelve
named Apollo astronauts really did travel through deep space and walk upon
the surface of our celestial neighbor, the moon.

Stronge’s opposition of the terms “official record” and “alternative viewpoint”

immediately asserts the film as a rebel voice speaking the truth in order to
challenge established historical narratives, and his reference to “numerous
inconsistencies” and “anomalies” suggests that the archival images we have just
seen in montage are not what we believe them to be. He continues:

New evidence throws into serious doubt the authenticity of the Apollo record
and suggests that NASA hoaxed the photographs taken on the surface of the
moon. … This production is the result of painstaking and extensive research.
You’ll hear the testimony of many people from various disciplines, including
those who can be described as whistleblowers. These are individuals who have
spoken out or left a legacy of clues.

Stronge’s claim that this debunking of the moon landing footage as “authentic”
is the result of “painstaking and extensive research” and the appearance of “new
evidence” attempts to establish What Happened? as objective and scientific
rather than paranoid. However, his mention of the “legacy of clues” left by
“whistleblowers” sets up the paranoid approach to archival documents that
follows.
The film offers a plethora of interviews with such “whistleblowers,” whose
testimony casts doubt on the established meaning of the footage of the moon
landing, and suggests an alternative meaning – it is evidence of NASA’s
deception. Bill Kaysing, for instance, who is identified in the film as having been
the Head of Technical Publications at Rocketdyne from 1956–63 (and who is
also regarded as the initiator of the moon hoaxer movement), asserts that the
chance we had of successfully sending astronauts to the moon in 1969 was
miniscule. This claim is immediately followed by archival images of President
John F. Kennedy announcing the goal of landing a man on the moon before the
decade was out. Through its placement in relation to Kaysing, Kennedy’s goal
and the likelihood that it was, in fact, fulfilled is potentially undermined.
Similarly, a few scenes later, Stronge asserts that there is no wind on the moon.
This statement is followed by the familiar, famous footage of the astronauts on
the moon planting an American flag that looks like it is waving in the wind. One
of the astronauts even says that it looks like it is blowing in the wind. The film
then inserts Bob Dylan into the audio track singing “How many times can a man
turn his head and pretend that he just doesn’t see? The answer, my friend, is
blowing in the wind.” This song has an ironic effect because it suggests that the
footage we are looking at is staged fiction footage and that we have been
“duped.” Of course, the strategy of using meta-archival documents in order to
undermine their accepted meaning is not unique to the conspiracy film. Indeed,
Michael Moore frequently appropriates such footage in order to ironically mock
its apparent content (see Chapter 1). However, in this case, the footage is
appropriated precisely in order to establish that its accepted meaning is a ruse
and to assert an alternative meaning that would change the established history of
the moon landing.
Ironically, of course, these alternative meanings attributed to the meta-archival
footage in What Happened? remain largely unsubstantiated. Indeed, the logic of
the film itself is based on assuming a certain answer to one question is “yes”
before posing another question based on this assumed “yes.” For instance,
Stronge asks:

So did Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, Ed Mitchell and their named comrades
sacrifice their personal integrity on the altar of NASA’s reputation? Did other
unnamed astronauts sacrifice their lives, and, if so, for what reason? Was it to
cover for the fact that in the late ’60s it was not possible to guarantee the safe
return to Earth of the Apollo astronauts? Such a scenario would answer that
inevitable question: why? And justify the serious anomalies in the official
record this investigation reveals.

In this narration, Stronge switches from “Did they do this?” to “Why did they do
it?” implying that the answer to the first question must be “yes.” This paves the
way for the search for “serious anomalies in the official record” that will “prove”
this unsubstantiated “yes.”
Like Walendy’s reading of Holocaust photographs, this reading of the moon
landing footage is based on looking for and “finding” signs of deception.
Moreover, just as Jackson and Botes left “clues” in Forgotten Silver that Colin
McKenzie’s story was a hoax (for instance, the interview subject labeled
Alexandra Nevsky), the makers of What Happened? believe that NASA
whistleblowers left clues for discerning viewers to decode. In the next segment,
David S. Percy – photographer, co-author of a book about the moon hoax: Dark
Moon: Apollo and the Whistle-Blowers, and the (uncredited) producer of What
Happened? – asserts that many of the Apollo images were “encoded with
deliberate mistakes” by “whistleblowers … individuals deeply unhappy with the
fraud they were perpetrating, that in all likelihood created the errors in the
anticipation that one day these mistakes would be discovered and exposed.”
Percy then holds up an old videocassette, saying that the live TV coverage that
was filmed off a TV monitor has now finally been transferred to tape so that
people can look at it “in detail.” Next, Percy shows video footage of an astronaut
jumping on the moon – the “jump salute” – while another astronaut takes a
picture referred to as “the Hasselblad photograph.” He argues that a small
discrepancy – a triangular flap of fabric in a different position – between these
two images supposedly taken at the same time, suggests that the images must
have been staged. He refers to this as a “continuity error,” which is a term
usually only applied to fiction films. He then shows us a view of the Earth from
the Apollo aircraft accompanied by the voices of the astronauts and ground
control. A moment later, a shadow covers part of the left side of the image.
Percy explains that, if the astronauts were shooting directly out of the window,
“it would not then be possible for anything to get midway between the camera
and the Earth.” Percy concludes that the astronauts were not shooting directly
out of the window and that, therefore, this is in fact a staged fictional image, the
astronauts actually photographing a photographic transparency of the Earth
clipped up against the window. Percy also shows us how the “real earth” would
have looked if the astronauts had “really” shot the image from the spaceship.
None of these claims about how it “should have looked” are substantiated except
with a variety of graphics that illustrate what Percy is saying. Although Percy’s
claims are not impossible, they are not proven in the film. Nevertheless, he
proceeds to take these claims as established facts once he makes them, and then
comes to new conclusions based on their extension.
Percy’s suggestion that the Apollo images were staged in a studio and that
these “errors” in the images were put there intentionally by “whistleblowers” is
strikingly similar to the narrative of Capricorn One (Peter Hyams, 1978). In this
feature fiction film, three astronauts are forced by the government to stage a
Mars landing when, in fact, they have never left the Earth’s surface. When one
of the astronauts, Charles Brubaker (James Brolin), is about to “leave” for Mars,
he says to his wife (Brenda Vacarro) that when he gets back he is going to take
their son to Yosemite like he did “last year.” Later, we find out that, in fact,
Brubaker and his family did not go to Yosemite the previous year but had gone
to Flatrock where they saw a movie being shot. At the time, Brubaker had said to
his wife that with cinematic technology, filmmakers could fake almost anything
and make it look real. This is the hint that allows the detective played by Elliot
Gould to find out and expose the conspiracy. The makers of What Happened?
find similar clues left by NASA dissidents who did not want to participate in the
cover-up. Traces – until now “unrecognized” – exist within NASA’s deceptive
footage for what Stronge refers to as the “intelligent viewer” to find.
While some viewers of What Happened? may come to question the status and
established historical meaning of the moon landing footage, the film addresses
viewers only as potential converts to the cause, rereading meta-archival
documents for viewers who remain passive recipients of this new historical
“knowledge.” Fox Television, in contrast, following up on the popularity of
conspiracy theories (and bringing the moon hoax to a much wider audience),
produced a film entitled Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? which
addresses viewers as active agents who must reinterpret meta-archival
documents for themselves.41 Even before the film begins, there is a short
preview aimed at luring the viewer in. A bombastic male voice is interspersed
with archival sound recordings and laid over familiar visual and audio
recordings of astronauts and rockets in a montage similar to the opening of What
Happened? Unlike Stronge, however, this narrator addresses the viewer directly
as a participant in the “discovery”:

We investigate the most extraordinary event of the 20th century: man landing
on the moon. But believe it or not, some people say it never happened. Decide
for yourself as we explore the evidence, analyze official government photos,
examine the films, and hear the testimony of one former astronaut who’s not
afraid to speak his mind. Could the government have orchestrated the
deception of the century? You be the judge on Conspiracy Theory: Did We
Land on the Moon?

Here, Fox invites the viewer to decide what is true or false based on the evidence
presented. This type of address obscures the fact that the show itself has a
perspective while letting Fox off the hook for making any libelous claims since
it is – purportedly – up to the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions.
Like What Happened?, Did We Land? casts doubt on the established meaning
of the moon landing footage by blurring the line between fiction and actuality
footage. When the program itself begins, Mitch Pileggi, an actor famous for his
role as Assistant Director of the FBI Walter Skinner in the television show The
X-Files, takes over as voiceover narrator. The fact that Pileggi hails from a show
that promotes the idea that the government is constantly conspiring to cover up
the truth about alien abductions and other extraterrestrial or paranormal activity
suggests the audience Fox expected to be interested in the film. Moreover,
Pileggi’s narration begins by invoking the language of the science fiction
television show Star Trek saying, “During their eight-day voyage, the Apollo 11
astronauts saw spectacular views of the Earth, floated in a weightless
environment and supposedly went where no man had gone before.”
Immediately, the moon landing is framed by the science fictional.42
As in What Happened? the narration in Did We Land? frequently takes an
interrogative form, challenging previous assertions made by (or derived from)
meta-archival documents. In doing so, Did We Land? attempts to alter the
archive effect of the footage by changing our perception of the original
intentions behind the footage. For instance, we next hear the frequently used
recording in which astronaut Neil Armstrong says, “The Eagle has landed.”
Pileggi immediately counters this, asking, “But did it? Did they really land on
the moon? … Most of us think so. But even today there are those who claim that
believing in man’s one small step requires one giant leap … of faith.” Following
Bill Kaysing (who also appears in this film), the film asserts and demonstrates
that there were three main reasons to believe the moon landing images were
staged in a studio: despite the clarity of deep space, the stars were missing from
the lunar sky; the American flag is waving even though there is no air on the
moon; and there was no blast crater seen beneath the lunar lander to indicate
where its powerful rocket engine had been fired. Each of these “reasons” are
based on visual “inconsistencies” in the archival images of the landing that, as
the film attempts to demonstrate, do not match what is “known” about the moon
and/or about photography. The moon landing images are thus mobilized as proof
of their own status as fictional rather than historical documents of a real event.
The film also further undermines the documentary status and established
meaning of the moon landing footage by mixing it with archival footage from
the aforementioned science fiction film Capricorn One. Through Kaysing, the
film suggests that the Apollo launch was real but that the astronauts simply
orbited the Earth for eight days without landing on the moon as NASA,
meanwhile, showed the staged images of men on the moon on television. Pileggi
then notes that “the Apollo footage is strikingly similar to the scenes in
Capricorn One. Producer Paul Lazarus suggests that the film’s plotline could be
more fact than fiction.” We then see the Apollo footage followed by footage
from Capricorn One in which the camera pulls back to reveal a moon landing
studio set, implying that the Apollo footage could been staged in the same way
(Figure 2.3). Lazarus weighs in, saying,

I believe, had they wanted to, that NASA could indeed have pulled off the
greatest hoax of all time, never sent anyone to the moon, and recreated it in a
television studio. And I believe it could have been done at that time. The
technology was in place.
In this way, archival footage from a fiction film is used to cast doubt on the truth
status of the meta-archival footage of the moon landing.
In its address, Did We Land? promotes an historiographic model in which the
viewer seems to be given the agency to decide what is “real” and what is not,
and to determine the “real” status and meaning of the meta-archival footage. The
film raises questions that sow doubt about the authenticity of established
archival evidence of the Apollo moon landing and simultaneously offers the
promise of spectatorial agency: “You decide!” Those who, like Fox Mulder
(David Duchovny) in The X-Files, “want to believe” that the government is
covering up will presumably feel empowered by the knowledge that they have
come to “their own conclusions” based on the archival evidence at hand.
However, like What Happened? the Fox film works through leaps of logic,
asking a question, pretending that the question has been answered, and
proceeding forward on that basis. While the interrogative tense seems to offer
the viewer agency in judging the truth-value of the footage, the film nevertheless
structures the viewer’s reading of these meta-archival documents through its
questions. Thus, depending on the viewer’s extratextual knowledge or lack
thereof, he or she may be swayed by the film’s rereading of the moon landing
footage as fiction footage.

FIGURE Capricorn One (Peter Hyams, 1978).

2.3
 Walendy, Percy, and Fox Television each have different motivations for
casting doubt on the authenticity and/or established meaning of meta-archival
documents. However, their strategy is essentially the same: raising doubts about
established historical narratives by “finding” traces of a deceptive intent within
the meta-archival document while offering questions, suppositions, and logical
fallacies as evidence of their counternarratives. Of course, the fact of the matter
is that the only people who know with absolute certainty what happened in the
Nazi concentration camps and during the moon landing are those who were
present at the time. All other assertions about the past are based on discourses
and texts, whether archival documents, eyewitness accounts, or some other
traces. All that Walendy, Percy, and Fox need do is point out that meta-archival
documents can and might be simulated, manipulated, or used to serve multiple,
contradictory narratives in order to cast doubt. Of course, the truly “intelligent”
viewer – rather than the viewer who takes speculation as revelation and
congratulates him or herself for “not being duped” – will recognize that even
though archival documents can be simulated, manipulated, and “misused,” they
can also be corroborated. The vast amount of Holocaust survivor testimony, the
array of Nazi documents written and photographic, and the physical traces of the
camps themselves affirm the established historical account. Testimony and
scientific explanations also suggest that the moon landing footage was not
staged.
The interrogative form, however, establishes a seemingly impenetrable barrier
against those who would challenge the status and meaning attributed to these
meta-archival documents by the Holocaust denier or the moon hoaxer, for one
cannot disprove a question. One cannot even argue with a question. Fox’s Did
We Land? is very careful never to actually make a claim about the status or
meaning of the moon landing footage on its own behalf, always displacing any
concrete claims onto its interview subjects. Moreover, as Pierre Vidal-Naquet
has noted, it is impossible to counter conspiracy theorists. He writes that “in the
final analysis, one does not refute a closed system, a total lie that is not refutable
to the extent that its conclusion has preceded any evidence.”43 As a result, the
“logic” of a given conspiracy theory cannot be derailed by any amount of
corroborating evidence. Indeed, each new photograph, film image, or testimony
presented as evidence of the event is immediately subjected to the same
tautological argument that renders any new evidence already moot. According to
this logic, the authenticity and established meaning of any document can be
questioned and, if it suits the conspiracy theorist, dismissed as simulated,
manipulated, or “misused.”
 Ironically, one tactic that has emerged to challenge the closed logic of
conspiracy films is the fake documentary – the very form that may have cast
doubt on the archival document’s authority in the first place.44 Director William
Karel’s parodic fake documentary entitled Dark Side of the Moon (2002), for
instance, interrogates and interrupts the logic of moon hoax films.45 Through
parody, Karel renders the conventions of conspiracy discourse and their readings
of archival documents absurd. As with Forgotten Silver, if viewers are aware (or
become aware during the course of the film) that Dark Side of the Moon is a fake
documentary, the film is quite hilarious. In a manner similar to What Happened?
and Did We Land? it poses an initial question. The narrator’s British male voice-
of-god voiceover says:

For 25 years, critics have been asking one question about the stunning visuals
of Barry Lyndon [Stanley Kubrick, 1975]: Why did NASA’s top officials and
Werner von Braun, the father of space conquest, agree to lend Stanley Kubrick
this famous camera and its legendary lens, the only one of its kind in the
world?

The answer laid out by the rest of the film is that the camera was lent as
“payback” and that NASA and the US government under Richard Nixon had
asked Kubrick to fake the moon landing footage on the same set he used for
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). According to the film, the Apollo astronauts
really did land on the moon but were unable to capture the landing itself on film,
so the footage had to be faked in a studio.
Not surprisingly, the film’s next sequence narrates a revelatory “find.” The
narrator tells us of a folder marked “Top Secret” that he says was “found” by
Christiane Kubrick, the director’s widow, soon after her husband’s death. We are
told that in this file was the answer to the Barry Lyndon question. The voiceover
then goes on to give a version of the history of the space race and is
accompanied by meta-archival footage of John F. Kennedy speaking to a crowd;
Yuri Gagarin, the Russian astronaut who was the first man in outer space, in his
spacesuit; as well as various other meta-archival images of rockets, astronauts,
and politicians, which illustrate the voiceover narration in a generic way.
However, the voiceover soon strays from the standard history of the space race.
NASA is portrayed as a behind-the-scenes power broker that controlled not only
the space program but also the US presidency through Johnson, Nixon, Reagan,
Bush Sr., and Bush Jr., all of whom came from one of the three “mafia” states of
California, Texas, and Florida. The narrator also suggests that the moon landing
was not only a way of garnering public support for space research, but also a
cover up for the Star Wars defense weapons system. While there are elements of
truth in these statements, their extravagance and conspiratorial bent are likely, at
least for the savvy viewer, to call the voiceover’s authority into question.
Indeed, as Henry M. Taylor points out, the narrator of Dark Side of the Moon
is an “unreliable narrator,” whose words undermine the factual authority of the
narrator’s tone and voice.46 Taylor suggests that the major effect of the film is to
lead viewers to question the reliability of ostensibly factual discourses and to pay
attention to how truths are constructed in documentary films. I agree but here
wish to focus specifically on the construction of the archive effect in the film. I
would argue that meta-archival documents and other found footage in Karel’s
film are (mis)used in two major ways. To begin with, the film plays with the
convention of using relatively generic images or stock footage to illustrate what
is being said in the voiceover narration. While these generic images sometimes
seem to illustrate what the voiceover is saying, at other times, we are shown
what seem “inappropriate” images. In fact, as the film continues, the images
become increasingly inappropriate relative to the content of the voiceovers
(whether spoken by the narrator or an interview subject).
In an interview with the film’s purported producer, who is identified by the
label “Jack Torrance” (the name of Jack Nicholson’s character in Kubrick’s film
The Shining, which should provide a major clue to many viewers that this film
not a straight documentary), “Torrance” says: “The White House and the Space
Administration (NASA) quickly realized that the race to the moon was really a
war of images between the Russians and the United States because our facilities
were pretty rudimentary and the space center was really laughable.” This
statement is accompanied by an image of what looks like a 1960s shot of a
single rocket standing in an empty field as if it is the sum total of the US space
center. “Torrance” continues, “So they decided that the space race had to be
turned into a pure Hollywood product.” As he speaks, we see an image from a
generic science fiction film in which a man with a jet pack flies along just above
the ground. Other shots of rockets and people working in what look like space
stations seem to mix archival actuality footage with footage from old science
fiction films. Such images disconcertingly illustrate the words too literally rather
than providing an actual indexical link to the specific events he is talking about.
A viewer with a certain degree of extratextual knowledge will understand that
one rocket in a field is not the totality of the US space program and that the
images do not prove what “Torrance” is saying. Through this overly literal and
therefore completely “inappropriate” use of archival footage, the approximate
match between voice and generic archival images in conventional documentaries
is parodied. The archive effect is – if the viewer becomes aware of the
problematic and often hilarious relationship between words and image, and their
own extratextual knowledge – shown to be a manipulated construction.
Dark Side also uses editing to make certain interview subjects sound as if they
are talking about the moon hoax when, in fact, it is impossible to tell what they
are referring to. For instance, “Eve Kendall” (the name of Eva Marie Saint’s
character in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 film North by Northwest), who is identified
in subtitle as Nixon’s former secretary, says in a talking head interview that
Nixon ordered NASA to film footage of the men landing on the moon in a studio
in case they were unable to get footage on the actual moon. “Kendall’s”
statements are placed within a montage of interviews with non-actors and
politicians including Donald Rumsfeld (Nixon’s actual Secretary of State) and
Alexander Haig (Nixon’s actual Chief of Staff), which are edited together to
make it seem as if they are all in the same room in conversation with each other
and also responding directly to what “Kendall” says. However, the differing
backgrounds of each interview reveal that they are not in the same room.
Moreover, the statements that Rumsfeld and Haig make could be referring to
something completely other than the moon hoax. For instance, after “Kendall”
says that Nixon gave an order to stage the footage, we see Rumsfeld saying,
“That was big. It was a big idea, it was an important thing and a lot of effort
went into it.” Then Haig says, “It was an anguishing decision for President
Nixon to make.” In a move that is directly contrary to the filmmakers who
attempt to simulate found footage and thereby produce a “false” archive effect,
this film attempts to make these appropriated interview clips look like footage
that Karel shot for the film we are watching.47 In this case, the footage is not
meant to look “archival.” Of course, since the film is a fake documentary this
obscuration is done in the service of humor rather than outright deception.
Nevertheless, it reveals the way in which footage that is, in fact, found footage
has been intentionally diverted to seem like footage shot specifically for the film.
In addition to the ludicrous claims of the narrator and interview subjects,
interview subjects named after fictional movie characters, and the false
continuity established between interviews, the relationship between what is
being said and shown in the appropriated images becomes increasingly tenuous
and hilarious. When a former CIA agent/now priest relates that one man who
knew about the hoax had to be silenced and was burned alive, we see a painting
of a man lying on the ground surrounded by a group of men all dressed up as
Santa Claus. When the priest says another man involved in the hoax was found
drowned, we see an image of a man throwing a dog into a pond. When the priest
says another man was found cut up into pieces but that the police ruled it a
suicide, we see a crowd of penguins. This sequence in particular makes a total
farce out of the usual illustrative function of appropriated footage in
conventional documentaries. The relationship between narration and archival
image is made completely nonsensical.
Given all of these hyperbolic and “inappropriate” elements, it seems
impossible that anyone could think Dark Side of the Moon a serious
documentary. Nevertheless, according to the online message boards, some
YouTube viewers ignored all of the signs of farce and posted messages that
make it clear that they found some credibility in the film, at least until another
user posted a message revealing it as a fake documentary.48 The reception of this
film’s claims as true makes clear that even in contradiction to the most basic
logic, this kind of (false) production of the archive effect can be persuasive –
whether or not the filmmaker intends or expects it to persuade. Like Jackson and
Botes, who were shocked that so many people did not realize that Forgotten
Silver was a fake documentary, Karel might be surprised to see how many
people mistake his film for truth. Indeed, although Dark Side succeeds as a
parody of conventional documentary form and conspiracy films, the audience
responses to the film suggest the ambiguity of the archive effect and the limits of
parodying it. Linda Hutcheon has noted that although parody can be
revolutionary, it is also conservative in that it repeats the very thing it sets out to
attack.49 Thus, while Karel’s film may target the logic of conspiracy theorists, it
simultaneously lends credence – or, at the very least, publicity – to their claims.
Moreover, the fact that not everyone will recognize the parody as parody means
that some viewers will take the film’s claims seriously.
The knowledge that the archival document can be simulated, manipulated, or
“misused” renders the evidentiary authority and established meaning of even
widely-authenticated meta-archival documents unstable. It forces us to
acknowledge that archival documents can never be proven once and for all to be
authentic, indexical traces of “the real” with a singular, accepted, and
incontrovertible meaning. Nevertheless, the sense of the “foundness” of such
documents and our continued willingness to attribute the status of “evidence” to
them within appropriation films attests to our desire to believe in their indexical
connection to actual events. Audience responses to the fake documentaries
Forgotten Silver and The Blair Witch Project, in particular, enact this desire to
believe in the revelatory, “found” document, which persists despite cues within
each of the films that it is not a documentary. Like The X-Files’ Mulder, we still
“want to believe.”
 At the same time, Holocaust deniers, moon hoaxers, and other conspiracy
theorists see only simulation, manipulation, and “misuse” in meta-archival
documents and pursue their agenda of “finding out” a hidden, revelatory “truth”
that will discredit these documents. Of course, on some level, Holocaust deniers
and moon hoaxers are practicing a form of critical thinking; however, their
version of critical thinking is wedded to tautological argument and unassailable,
predetermined conclusions. The difference between the discourse produced by
the Holocaust deniers and moon hoaxers and the discourse produced by careful
historical examination is the difference between evaluating evidence in order to
suit preestablished fantasies and a balanced assessment of all available
documents and testimonies within an argument that is never seen as irrefutably
closed. This is not to say that historians do not bring bias to their work, but
rather to say that they are – or should be – willing to go where the evidence leads
them rather than forcing found documents to fit an already-established narrative
or, if they do not fit this narrative, discarding them as simulated, manipulated, or
mislabeled. Of course, the line between critical examination and paranoid
fantasy may be blurred, especially by those who do not like the version of
history offered by established historians and therefore use the trappings of
critical inquiry to decorate their alternative views of what the past “must have
been.” This is the price of freedom of expression – the version of history based
on the study of many verified documents and credible sources may be uprooted
by important new findings or by a baseless or ideologically-motivated rumor.
Certainly, parody offers the possibility of intervention into the debunking
practices of conspiracy films that mobilize found documents, but it also points to
the instability of any meaning attributed to an archival document in any
appropriation film. Fake documentaries, too, continue to be an important
practice in relation to interrogating and playing with the archive effect. Indeed,
fake documentaries that produce the archive effect in “inappropriate” ways
remind us that the veracity and meaning of any document is always open to
debate and question. Such films may also provoke an awareness of the complex
ways in which archival documents elicit desires and produce particular
epistemological and historiographic effects, thereby moving us beyond a
simplistic debate about whether a given document and its corollary archive
effect is “real,” “fake,” or “manipulated” and whether or not viewers will be
“tricked.” While we must constantly interrogate why, when, and how we lend
our belief to archival documents and their claims to historical truth in the service
of particular historical narratives, we must ultimately – and always provisionally
– decide under what conditions our belief is justified.
Notes
1 The film was a sleeper hit and grossed $148 million domestically and $249 million worldwide. With a
budget of $25,000, according to a 2009 Variety article, it was then the most profitable film of “all time”
in terms of the investment and the return. See Pat Saperstein, “‘Paranormal’ Versus ‘Blair Witch’: With
$249 Million Global B.O., ‘Blair’ Most Profitable,” Variety, 17 October 2009.
www.variety.com/article/VR1118010070.html?categoryid=1019&cs=1. Accessed 10 June 2012.
2 Jeremy Redmon, “‘Get Out,’ Say Town’s Residents to Moviegoers on Wild Witch Hunt,” The
Washington Times, 11 August 1999, A1.
3 Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan
Book XI, trans. Alan Sheridan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1973),
102.
4 Alexandra Juhasz, in “Introduction: Phony Definitions and Troubling Taxonomies of the Fake
Documentary,” in F is for Phony: Fake Documentary, and Truth’s Undoing, eds. Alexandra Juhasz and
Jesse Lerner (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 7.
5 See, for instance, James Damico, “News Marches in Place: Kane’s Newsreel as a Cutting Critique,”
Cinema Journal 16, no. 2 (Spring, 1977): 51–58.
6 Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking It: Mock-documentary and the Subversion of Factuality
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 47.
7 Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, “Forgotten Silver: A New Zealand Television Hoax and Its Audience,” in
F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and the Truth’s Undoing, ed. Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 172.
8 The making-of documentary that accompanies the DVD is entitled, “Behind the Bull,” indicating that
the engraved bull was a clue to the film’s bullshit.
9 Margrit Schreier, “‘Please Help Me; All I Want to Know Is: Is It Real or Not?’: How Recipients View
the Reality Status of The Blair Witch Project,” Poetics Today 25, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 305.
10 Schreier, 329.
11 The Blair Witch Project also helped initiate a found footage disaster/horror genre, which includes
Paranormal Activity (Oren Peli, 2007), Diary of the Dead (George Romero, 2007), and Cloverfield
(Matt Reeves, 2008). These films are based on the premise that something terrible is happening and a
character wielding a video camera decides to record it. While all three films are clearly fictional, they
attest to a desire not only to find footage obscured by time and/or disaster, but also a desire to leave
traces behind. As in Blair Witch, the video camera in each of these films is the last witness, containing a
trace left by the missing or the dead to be found by the unknown reader of the future. These fiction
films enact the fantasy of leaving documents behind for “someone” to find when everyone involved in
the making of the film is dead, a time capsule waiting to be discovered. Indeed, the viewers of these
disaster/horror films are placed in the position of the reader who finds and bears witness to these
audiovisual traces. However, none of these films produce much epistemological confusion – the
“found” documents are clearly staged fiction.
12 Roscoe and Hight, Faking It, 2–3.
13 Irene Lacher, “Documentary Criticized for Re-enacted Scenes,” The New York Times, 29 March 2005.
14 Lacher, “Documentary Criticized for Re-enacted Scenes” (emphasis added).
15 Morris writes, however, that he has encountered viewers who thought the reenactments in The Thin
Blue Line were actually documentary images shot at the time of the crime, that Morris had just
happened to be present when the shooting of Officer Wood occurred. This demonstrates that the
perception of certain images as documentary depends on the individual viewer. See Errol Morris, “Play
It Again, Sam (Re-enactments, Part One)”, The New York Times, 3 April 2008.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/03/play-it-again-sam-re-enactments-part-one/. Accessed
 30 June 2012.
16 However, as Robert Reid-Pharr has noted, some viewers of The Watermelon Woman have continued to
believe in the foundness and documentary status of the footage despite an explicit admission within the
film that it is a fiction, further attesting to the “lure of the found.” See Chapter 4 for more on this topic.
Robert Reid-Pharr, “Makes Me Feel Mighty Real: The Watermelon Woman and the Critique of Black
Visuality,” in F Is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, ed. Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse
Lerner (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006): 131–32.
17 For instance, Robert Stam and Ella Shohat, “Zelig and Contemporary Theory: Meditation on the
Chameleon Text,” in The Films of Woody Allen: Critical Essays, ed. Charles L.P. Silet (Oxford:
Scarecrow Press, Inc., 2006), 214.
18 Janet Maslin, “How the Graphic Arts Feats in ‘Zelig’ Were Done,” The New York Times, 1 August
1983, C11 (emphasis added).
19 Peter Hogue and Marion Bronson, “Zelig,” Film Quarterly 38, no. 1 (Autumn, 1984): 30.
20 Jack Thomas, “History in the Remaking: Wizards of ‘Gump’ Tell How They Did It,” The Boston
Globe, 21 July 1994, 53.
21 Vivian Sobchack, “Introduction: History Happens,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television,
and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 3 (emphasis added).
22 Stephen Prince, “True Lies: Perceptual Realism, Digital Images, and Film Theory,” Film Quarterly 49,
no. 3 (Spring 1996): 31–32.
23 Thomas B. Byers, “History Re-membered: Forrest Gump, Postfeminist Masculinity, and the Burial of
the Counterculture,” Modern Fiction Studies 42, no. 2 (1996): 427.
24 Jennifer Hyland Wang, “‘A Struggle of Contending Stories’: Race, Gender and Political Memory in
Forrest Gump,” Cinema Journal 39, no. 3 (Spring 2000): 96.
25 Janet Staiger, “Cinematic Shots: The Narration of Violence,” in The Persistence of History: Cinema,
Television, and the Modern Event, ed. Vivian Sobchack (New York: Routledge, 1996), 42.
26 Staiger, 44.
27 Marita Sturken, “Reenactment, Fantasy, and the Paranoia of History: Oliver Stone’s Docudramas,”
History and Theory 36, no. 4 (December 1997): 73.
28 Staiger, 52.
29 Sean Homer, “Retrieving Emir Kusturica’s Underground as a critique of ethnic nationalism,” Jump
Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 51 (Spring 2009),
www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/Kusterica/index.html. Accessed 9 June 2012.
30 www.cgm-online.com/eiperle/cgm_aged_film_le_e.html. Accessed 14 May 2013.
31 Alain Finkielkraut, The Future of a Negation: Reflections on the Question of Genocide, trans. Mary
Byrd Kelly (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 18.
32 Finkielkraut, 39.
33 Finkielkraut, 29–30.
34 Udo Walendy, “Do Photographs Prove the NS Extermination of the Jews?” in Dissecting the
Holocaust: The Growing Critique of “History” and “Memory”, ed. Ernst Gauss (Chicago: Theses &
Dissertations Press, 2000), 244.
35 Walendy, 258.
36 Walendy, 244.
37 Walendy, 244.
38 Walendy, 243–44.
39 Walendy, 243–44.
40 The obviously low-budget graphics suggests that What Happened? might possibly be intended as a
parody of moon hoax documentaries. However, as the film continues, this reading becomes
 increasingly untenable due to the seeming sincerity of its interview subjects and the film’s sympathetic
treatment of these subjects.
41 The production values of Did We Land? also far outdo the amateur graphics of What Happened?
42 I would argue that, in contrast to What Happened? whose ironies are aimed exclusively at NASA and
their “faked” documents, there is a certain self-reflexive irony on the part of the producers of Did We
Land? While the Fox film never actively pokes fun at the moon hoaxers or their theories, there is a
sense that the producers themselves do not necessarily believe in the moon hoaxers’ claims. The
science fictional elements seem to attest to this possibly tongue-in-cheek attitude.
43 Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Assassins of Memory: Essays on the Denial of the Holocaust, trans. Jeffrey
Mehlman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 82.
44 Another approach has been taken by the Discovery Channel show Mythbusters (2003-) in Episode 104,
“ NASA Moon Landing,” which investigates the claims of moon hoaxers by testing them through
reenactment, restaging certain photographs and footage in order to debunk the claims of the debunkers.
Through their experiments, the Mythbusters, Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman, who are both
Hollywood special effects artists, conclude that NASA did not stage the moon landing.
45 Aired in France on Arte television network in 2002 as Operation Lune, this film is now accessible in
extended clips on YouTube, where one can also see how some users have responded to the film in
written posts. See www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7Ge8-
KiaWTA&playnext_from=TL&videos=ledyWA48vcM. Accessed 22 May 2013.
46 Henry M. Taylor, “More than a Hoax: William Karel’s Critical Mockumentary Dark Side of the Moon
Post Script 26, no. 3 (Summer 2007): 90–104.
47 This use of archival footage is similar to the use of documentary news footage of then-President Bill
Clinton in the fiction film Contact (Robert Zemeckis, 1997) to support its science fiction premise. For a
discussion of this appropriation, see Vivian Sobchack, “The Charge of the Real: Embodied Knowledge
and Cinematic Consciousness,” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2004), 258–59.
48 The first part of Dark Side of the Moon with user comments on YouTube can be found at
www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7Ge8KiaWTA. Accessed 11 November 2009.
49 Linda Hutcheon, A Theory of Parody: The Teachings of Twentieth-Century Art Forms (Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2000 [1985]), 74–75.
3
ARCHIVAL VOYEURISM
Home mode appropriations and the public
spectacle of private life

Reformulating the home mode

Despite a climate in which we know that the found document can be simulated,
manipulated, and “misused” (see Chapter 2), viewers nonetheless continue to
seek “authenticity” through found documents, and one site regarded as
particularly “authentic” is that of home movies. These seemingly “innocent”
images, often of family life, hold out the promise of an “uncorrupted” view of
the past. Indeed, home movies, home videos, and snapshots have generally been
aligned with the “private” and the “found” rather than with the “public” and the
“archival,” which endows them with an added aura of unmediated “truth.” At the
same time, however, such audiovisual documents are now being ever more
frequently regarded as “proper” to history and treated as such. While in the past
what theorist Richard Chalfen refers to as “home mode” documents – snapshots,
home movies and, later, home videos – were rarely collected in official archives,
they are now being reevaluated in terms of the history of everyday life.1 In fact,
archivists are actively seeking to preserve these kinds of documents, many of
which are in danger of being lost to material corrosion or digital decay.2
Meanwhile, a number of contemporary media scholars, including Karen
Ishizuka and Patricia Zimmerman, have attempted to reclaim home mode
documents as valuable historical evidence. Zimmerman defines “home movies”
as “a subset of the amateur film movement located within individual and/or
familial practices of visual recording of intimate events and rituals and intended
for private usage and exhibition,”3 and Ishizuka and Zimmerman’s theorizations
suggest that home movies offer a trove of counterhistories of the everyday that
may trouble monolithic grand narratives of history. Indeed, Zimmerman aligns
the examination of home movies as historical evidence with the new social
history movement, referred to as “history from below.”4 She notes that, until
now, “home movies too often have been perceived as an irrelevant pastime or
nostalgic mementos of the past, or dismissed as insignificant byproducts of
consumer technology.”5 She goes on to argue that “amateur film provides a vital
access point for academic historiography in its trajectory from official history to
the more variegated and multiple practices of popular memory, a concretization
of memory into artifacts that can be remobilized, recontextualized, and
reanimated.”6 In fact, as Zimmerman implies, home mode documents are being
ever more frequently “remobilized, recontextualized, and reanimated” into
appropriation films. Thus, it is clear that, in multiple discursive arenas, home
mode documents are becoming a valued source of knowledge about the past.
The inclusion of home mode documents in appropriation films, however,
raises a number of questions about the significance and function of such
documents as they are mobilized in public films: what effects do home mode
documents have on our comprehension and/or experience of the past events
depicted in the appropriation films in which they appear? Do home mode
documents retain their status as such when they appear in texts clearly intended
for public exhibition outside of the home? What are the ethical implications of
using home mode documents in public texts? Do such “private” documents
contribute to “history” by producing a sense of meaning and magnitude for the
larger public, or do they merely produce a sense of “the past” – or a particular
person’s “past” – and a voyeuristic peek into other people’s private lives?
In what follows, I explore the function of home mode documents in a number
of appropriation films, suggesting that these documents produce a specific kind
of archive effect based on a particular experience of intentional disparity. I
contend that 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. However, I also suggest that the interest we may have in
such documents as they appear in appropriation films is also fundamentally and
unavoidably voyeuristic – offering us the pleasure of seeing something we were
not “meant” to see – and may come with an ethical price.
 A discussion of the role of home mode documents in appropriation films,
however, must begin with a clarification of what constitutes a “home mode
document,” particularly relative to the wider category of amateur audiovisual
documents. In her earlier study, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur
Film, Zimmerman illuminates and historicizes the distinction between amateur
film and home movies. She traces the history of amateur film from 1897 to 1962
and locates the 1950s as the moment when the distinction between amateur film
and home movies collapsed. She writes:

By the 1950s popular discourse in magazines and instruction books

accentuated the social functions of amateur filmmaking as a commodity for
use within nuclear families rather than its aesthetics. … “Togetherness”
situated amateur filmmaking as “home movies” – private films as a confined
diversion for the home. This domestication of amateur filmmaking as a leisure-
time commodity erased any of its social, political, or economic possibilities.7

Zimmerman argues that amateur film and home movies, while equated in
popular discourse, are not the same. Indeed, she contends that “home movies,” in
contrast to the larger field of “amateur films,” which at least have the potential to
be produced and exhibited anywhere, may be defined in terms of their (intended)
site of both production and consumption: the home. Thus, Zimmerman also
implicitly suggests that home movies, unlike amateur films, are constituted by a
particular kind of address, soliciting a particular, limited audience.
Other theorists of home mode documents have also defined their objects, at
least in part, in terms of their audience or, more precisely, their intended
audience. In his ethnographic study Snapshot Versions of Life, in which he
interviewed middle-class American families about their snapshots and home
movies, Chalfen describes “home mode communication” as “a pattern of
interpersonal and small group communication centered around the home.”8 He
further emphasizes the importance of the intended audience:

People using home mode channels know each other in personal ways.
Photographers usually know or know of the people in their pictures; and
viewers, [sic] usually know the photographer, and, most of the time, either
know or can identify the subjects of the pictures. … Photographers and
viewers both must share certain kinds of background information in order to
make sense of their pictures.9

Mass communication, in contrast, includes “transient messages that have been

produced through public symbol systems for mass distribution to large,
heterogeneous, anonymous audiences.” Nonetheless, Chalfen also notes that the
same mediums “can be used for both mass communication and home mode
communication.”10 Moreover, given that home mode documents are frequently
used in the service of mass communication, he suggests that “our belief in the
evidentiary, truthful qualities of amateur photographs allows them to be used
effectively by the mass media.”11 This contradiction between Chalfen’s
definition of the home mode as a form of communication in which the film
subjects, photographer/filmmaker, and audiences know each other personally
and his acknowledgment of the fact that home mode documents are frequently
used in mass media points to the fact that there is a difference between what we
read as the intended audience for a particular photograph or piece of footage and
its actual audience, which may – potentially – be anyone.
However, Chalfen also describes the home mode in terms of its predominant
subject matter. He shows that home mode documents are generally characterized
by “patterned eliminations,” in which only positive and seemingly significant
family moments are preserved.12 For instance, weddings are much more likely
to be photographed or filmed than either funerals or daily chores. He notes that
“the snapshot version of life appears to be characterized by outwardly visible
evidence of socially accepted and positively valued change.”13 Chalfen thus
suggests that certain kinds of subjects are deemed appropriate for the limited,
private community within which the home mode documents are intended to be
viewed.
As James Moran has shown, however, the invention and dissemination of
inexpensive home video cameras brought about a definitive shift that has altered
both the content and circulation of home mode documents and, indeed, troubled
the very definition of the home mode. While amateurs using film could, in
theory, shoot almost anything, the expense of film stock and processing and the
frequent lack of synchronous sound limited their choices of subject to some
degree. The impulse to record happy, socially significant family moments tended
to dominate. Moran shows, however, that home videos veer away from
Chalfen’s notion of the home mode’s “patterned eliminations” in which only
privileged moments of everyday life are selected for recording on film. Moran
points out that “video has liberated the constraints of the photographic apparatus
pressuring home mode practitioners toward these eliminations.”14 Thus, with the
advent of analog video and then digital cameras, moments that previously might
not have been preserved on film – seemingly unimportant or meaningless
moments as well as very unpleasant moments in the videographer’s life – are
now recorded and retained. Thus, today, ever more “private” video is being
produced. Paradoxically, however, seemingly “private” video is increasingly
becoming public through various forms of digital distribution, namely, through
the internet. Indeed, while analog video allowed for – and perhaps to some
degree provoked – the initial expansion in subject matter described by Moran,
digital video is distinguished from analog video by the ease with which it can be
distributed, viewed, and appropriated across the globe.
Given these changes in both technology and practice, I would argue that we
can no longer define the home mode in terms of its content or its actual site of
reception. Rather, drawing on the work of the theorists above, we may say that
home mode documents may be best understood as constituted by our perception
of their intended context of reception and their address to a limited intended
audience. Whether or not we belong to this limited intended audience
fundamentally determines our experience of a particular home mode document.
Vivian Sobchack notes that our experience of home movies may well depend on
whether we were present for the events evoked by these movies. She writes that
“it is often boring to watch other people’s home movies insofar as we are
unfamiliar with their cinematic objects and have never experienced their evoked
events.”15 Thus, when faced with images of a birthday party – one of the
archetypically “appropriate” subjects for the home mode – of a child we do not
know, we may not feel interested. Whether we are part of the initial intended
audience for a home movie or not determines what kind of experience of the
movie we will have – and this remains true in the digital era when we are ever
more likely to be confronted with someone else’s home mode documents.
Nevertheless, some home mode documents may hold a certain interest for us
even if we as viewers fall outside of the boundaries of this initial intended
audience. While someone else’s home movies can be boring, there is also
evidence of a contemporary fascination with certain home mode documents that
are not our own. Despite the common dread of being forced to watch a
neighbor’s endless vacation footage, some home mode documents made by and
for others are, in fact, intensely compelling. Indeed, the willing viewing of
strangers’ home movies and home videos is becoming ever more prevalent. This
tendency is exemplified by both shows like America’s Funniest Home Videos
(ABC, 1990 onwards), a television show where entrants compete to have their
home video named the funniest and to receive a prize, and screening series such
as Home Movie Day, during which attendees bring home movies and screen
them for public audiences at venues across 15 countries (and counting). The
interest of America’s Funniest Home Videos is mainly that of physical comedy
coupled with the game show competition format, which seems to justify its mass
appeal.16 Home Movie Day, however, does not necessarily involve humor and
does not create competition or award anyone a prize, making it more surprising
that the event has a devoted audience. While Home Movie Day is an event and
cannot be regarded as an appropriation film,17 it sheds light on the interest –
other than the seemingly universal appeal of physical comedy – that viewers
may find in home movies that are recontextualized in appropriation films.
In general, the movies shown at Home Movie Day are at least a few years old,
allowing for a certain degree of temporal disparity in relation to the
contemporary moment of viewing. As a result, even if we do not recognize the
people in the home movie footage, we recognize the texture of daily life – the
shape of a sofa, the style of a woman’s hair, a toy that would now be considered
antique – in its difference from the contemporary moment. On the Home Movie
Day website, the Frequently Asked Questions include: “Nobody really wants to
see my dumb old home movies, do they?” The organizers of Home Movie Day
respond, saying:

Sure they do, otherwise Home Movie Day wouldn’t be happening. Lots of
people are interested in home movies – of completely normal people, doing
completely normal things – for lots of really good reasons. Home movies from
just a few years ago show a world that looks pretty different from the one we
live in now: kids rode their bikes without helmets on; men wore hats and spats,
and women wore gloves and girdles; public beaches and facilities in the South
were segregated – these are just a few examples! Seeing this world in home
movies is useful for historians, writers, documentary filmmakers, costume
designers, and even the ordinary people who live in those same (but somehow
different) places today.18

Clearly, the fascination of temporal disparity – the same but somehow different
– between the moment of the home movie’s production and the moment of
reception at Home Movie Day, is one of the main selling points for these
screenings. The differences accrued through gradual temporal change generate
the feeling of a lost moment or temporal context constituted by its visible
difference from the present. Thus, temporal disparity is one basis upon which
home movies and videos as well as snapshots may achieve what Bill Nichols
calls “magnitude,” a connection between the particular and the general that may
generate meaning or interest for a wider audience.19
The home mode and the archive effect
The experience of temporal disparity is also one of the main reasons viewers
may find interest in certain home mode documents as they appear within
appropriation films and produce the archive effect. When home mode documents
are (re)used, as they frequently are, in appropriation films, they may not alter
historical narratives in any dramatic fashion. However, they often produce an
experience of temporal disparity within the text as a whole. Indeed, the allure of
such documents often lies in the visible difference between different moments in
time, producing an experience of a “then” of the production of the home mode
documents and the “now” of the production of the appropriation film itself.
For instance, in Péter Forgács’ film The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle
(1997) (discussed briefly in Chapter 1), in which Forgács appropriated the home
movies of a Dutch Jewish family from the 1930s, we watch the members of the
Peereboom family – a family with which very few people would be familiar
before watching this film – grow, change and visibly transform (Figure 3.1).
Despite the fact that we do not know these people outside of Forgács’ film,
watching them change is compelling as a visualization of the passage of time.
The inscription of temporal change on the body is fascinating in itself. In
addition, of course, we are also privy to extratextual knowledge of their future.
As Nichols has argued in his analysis of the film, we are aware of what is going
to happen to this Jewish family when the Nazis arrive.20 Thus, there is also a
strong sense of temporal break between the historical moment in which the
Peerebooms’ home movies were produced and the moment at which Forgács
made his film. Historical hindsight produces a double consciousness for the
viewer of Forgács’ film. We know what will happen to these people, but at the
moment portrayed in their amateur films, they clearly have no idea what is in
store for them, a fact that produces a tragic sense of loss – the archive affect (see
Chapter 4). Moreover, as these home movies become archival documents within
the context of Forgács’ appropriation film, they attain magnitude for viewers
other than the Peerebooms because they carry the traces of a private world
rendered irretrievable by historical events that produced perhaps the defining
temporal break of the twentieth century – World War II and the Holocaust.
These home movies do not alter the historical narrative of these events but they
become meaningful for a contemporary audience because they show us not just
the bodies but the everyday lives that were lost.
 FIGURE The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle (Péter Forgács, 1997). Simon
3.1 Peereboom in 1938 at the wedding of his brother Max. Courtesy of the
artist and Lumen Film.

The experience of temporal disparity is also produced in another film that

appropriates home movies: Avo (Muidumbe) (2009) by Portuguese experimental
filmmaker Raquel Schefer. Avo (Muidumbe), however, both produces and
explicitly troubles the line that marks off past from present. In Schefer’s film,
the filmmaker’s personal exploration of her family’s history merges with the
larger history of Portugal’s colonization of Mozambique. The kernel of the film
is a strip of found footage shot in Mozambique in 1960 – just before the
beginning of the Mozambican War of Independence – by Schefer’s grandfather,
who was then a Portuguese colonial administrator. Avo begins with handheld,
scratched film images of a large house and garden pummeled by rain and filled
with lush tropical plants, and later we see a group of people standing on the
porch of the house: two young white men in khakis, a young white woman
wearing a red-and-white striped shirt, a little white boy, a young black man, and
a young black woman (Figure 3.2). The white woman – whom we later learn is
the filmmaker’s grandmother – is the central focus of the footage as she smiles,
move her hands back and forth, spins around in an awkward little dance, and
then pretends to spank the little boy. These images, which – because of their
subject matter and amateur qualities – read as home movies, are played and
replayed, paused and reanimated. Interspersed with these archival images, we
see video images of Schefer in a tailor’s shop as she has an outfit identical to her
grandmother’s made. Then, dressed in a copy of her grandmother’s clothes, she
reads from a somewhat nostalgic text her grandmother wrote in 2008 about the
place and time the archival footage was taken, describing a “peaceful life” and
the native Mozambicans as “friendly and orderly people.” Soon after, Schefer,
still dressed like her grandmother, appears on film, a film stock that resembles
that on which the archival footage from 1960 was shot in a landscape that
resembles the one in the archival footage. Schefer performs her grandmother’s
recognizable little dance and spin and frolics among the trees. The film ends
with more archival images of Schefer’s grandparents and others sitting smiling
on their porch. In voiceover and subtitle, Schefer says over these images:

FIGURE Avo (Muidumbe)/Avo (Granny) (Raquel Schefer, 2009). Courtesy of

3.2 the artist.
 The grandparents’ house in Mozambique. Peaceful life, friendly and orderly
people. Granny. Grandpa. Mum. Yumbe. Images from Muidumbe in 1960. …
In June 1960, the Massacre of Mueda, 30km from there, was neither filmed
nor photographed. According to the Portuguese official report, 14 people were
murdered. As maintained by the FRELIMO (Liberation Front of
Mozambique), the dead were 600.

With this last line, what seemed like relatively innocent (if recognizably
colonial) home movie footage is transformed into something much darker – and
more significant.
A clear temporal disparity is produced between the archival film footage of
Schefer’s grandmother in 1960 and the video footage of Schefer herself at the
tailor’s being measured for her outfit. Through much of the film, the archival
footage and its dated quality have the potential to generate a sense of nostalgia
for a colonial lifestyle that has since disappeared. However, the final sentence of
the voiceover undermines such nostalgia, pointing toward the crimes of the past
rather than its luxuries. At the same time, the comfortable temporal disparity
marking off “us” from “them” and “then” from “now” is disturbed as Schefer
appears on film replicating her grandmother’s gestures. The experience of
temporal disparity does not disappear, but in reenacting the archival footage,
Schefer’s film seems to bring these very different historical moments into
proximity to one another, owning a connection between generations that
includes colonial crimes against the colonized. Indeed, by dressing up just like
her grandmother and restaging the home movie footage with herself in her
grandmother’s role, Schefer points to the ways in which descendants of
colonizers must still come to grips with the colonial legacy on a personal as well
as political level.
While the appropriation of home movie footage in The Maelstrom and Avo
(Muidumbe) allows these films to bring us closer to the everyday lives of people
in the past, Adrian Goycoolea’s documentary The Geographical Center of North
America (2004) explicitly raises the question of why some people might want to
watch someone else’s home movies. In this film, Goycoolea appropriates the
serendipitously “found” footage of a previously unknown amateur filmmaker, a
man named Chester Swavel (1909–82), who traveled through and shot film of
many parts of the United States heartland. Goycoolea’s voiceover explains that
his friend bought an 8mm projector on e-Bay, which arrived accompanied by
several canisters of 8mm film labeled “Chester Swavel.” According to the
voiceover, Goycoolea and his friend programmed these films at Anthology Film
Archives in New York and, to their complete surprise, people turned out in large
numbers for the event. Clearly, the people who came to see these dated images
never knew the filmmaker or anyone in the images, but they recognized the
places Swavel recorded, which are still there but have inevitably changed. The
lure of Swavel’s images is, at least in part, the visibility of temporal disparity,
the opportunity to witness the effects of time’s passage on the American
landscape. In Goycoolea’s film, this temporal disparity is established not only
between the “then” of Swavel’s shots and the “now” of contemporary audiences,
but also between the “then” of the old film footage and the “now” of
Goycoolea’s titles and voiceover reflecting on the meaning of these old home
movies in the contemporary moment. No new historical narrative emerges to
disrupt established historical truths but this experience of pastness, of a past
America seen through the eyes of an unknown amateur, is itself enough to
fascinate at least some contemporary viewers.
However, although this experience of temporal disparity may constitute some
of the interest in strangers’ home movies, videos, and snapshots, it does not
account for the specificity of the archive effect produced by home mode
documents. Indeed, many kinds of documents may produce a sense of temporal
disparity as they are appropriated into new texts. It is the viewer’s experience of
a particular kind of intentional disparity, rather, that is constituent of the home
mode document as it is appropriated into a new text. “Of course,” narrates
Goycoolea in voiceover, “Chester, the newly discovered auteur, is a fiction. We
don’t really know for sure who shot this footage. And whoever it was could
never have expected to see it screened in a cinema.” In other words, all we really
know about the intentionality of the footage is that the maker probably never
imagined that it would be shown in public – or appropriated into a documentary
intended for public exhibition.
In fact, one of the things that Home Movie Day, The Maelstrom, Avo
(Muidumbe), and The Geographical Center of North America have in common is
that they all produce for the viewer a particular kind of intentional disparity,
bringing footage that seems to have been intended only for private viewing into
public light. Indeed, I would argue that what distinguishes home mode
documents and, in fact, constitutes them as such in appropriation films is the
viewer’s experience of a document’s movement from a perceived intended
private context of reception with a private or limited audience to an actual public
context of reception – an appropriation film – with an unlimited intended
audience. Thus, they produce a particular kind of archive effect.
Péter Forgács’ Private Hungary series is explicitly focused on this movement
from private address to public exhibition as an historiographic strategy. In a film
from the series, Land of Nothing (1996), Forgács appropriates film footage shot
during World War II by an obscure Hungarian soldier named László Rátz. The
images include footage of a family at leisure as well as of a countryside shot
from a train and of soldiers at rest. The footage is recognizable as archival in
Forgács’ appropriation film in part due to an experience of temporal disparity.
The appropriated images look weathered and the style of dress of the people in
the images belongs to a bygone era. In addition, titles note that a soldier named
László Rátz “was shooting films from his entrainment in June 1942 until the eve
of the catastrophe at the Don. He took the films home on his Christmas leave so
this chronicle survived together with the family pictures.” Thus, the titles
establish a temporal break by informing us that the footage came from the 1940s
while Forgács’ film was made in 1996. Other identifying titles appear
throughout the film, which, along with tinting, solarization of the images and
added sound effects, reinforce the temporal distance between the making of the
found images and the making of Forgács’ film. The temporal disparity is further
emphasized by Rátz’s own voiceover, which makes explicit observations about
the images that he shot many years before. He says, for instance: “Very pleasant
pictures. I will cherish them for a long time.”
These instances of temporal disparity, however, do not insure that these
archival images will be perceived as home movies. Indeed, it is the production of
intentional disparity that encourages the viewer to read Rátz’s footage as home
movies in contrast to other appropriated footage in the film. Rátz’s films are
edited together with “official” footage of various political leaders giving
speeches. Like Rátz’s footage, these images are weathered, black-and-white, and
contain both the visual and verbal markers of an earlier time. Unlike Rátz’s
footage, however, these images have synchronous sound. The content of these
speeches locates the footage at an earlier moment in Hungarian politics and
history. Certainly, the official footage, too, is temporally disparate from the text
and voiceover within Forgács’ film. The main difference between Rátz’s footage
and the political footage, however, is that they each produce a different kind of
intentional disparity and, hence, a different kind of archive effect. Although
whoever made the official footage could never have imagined its incorporation
into Forgács’ experimental documentary, the makers (as well as the film
subjects) anticipated a public audience. By contrast, Rátz’s footage seems to
have been originally produced by Rátz only in order to preserve these images to
be seen by himself and his friends and family.
Unlike the footage of the highly staged public events, Rátz’s footage begins to
seem more “authentic” than the political statements and speeches staged for the
public eye that are more likely to have been regarded as “historical” in the
traditional sense. Forgács’ abstract for the film reads:
 An amateur film journal sometimes contradicts the “official,” the so-called
“public history” from a private history view. Sometimes [it] offers a radically
different, emblematic, or even banal aspect. But rarely may we see the unseen,
a private view of the bloody WW2, diary footage of László Rátz that was
never aimed for the public eye, made only for family memory. Rátz, ensign of
the Second Hungarian Army, 18th Szekszárd Infantry, was shooting 9,5 mm
[sic] family films from 1938. His private film eye just the observant’s gaze
around [sic] without ideological filter.21

Although every film gazes through an ideological filter, this description is

illuminating in that it emphasizes the different kinds of displacements that occur
through Forgács’ appropriations. While the official footage is diverted from one
intended public audience to another unintended (or at least unanticipated) public
audience, Rátz’s footage is displaced from its intended private audience to a
public one. The combination of these two forms of intentional disparity in
Forgács’ film emphasizes the contrast between official history and personal
experiences of the past. While the official speeches seem to address a wide
audience, intending to persuade its members to a particular political point of
view, Rátz’s own footage seems to seek to preserve without any ulterior motive
– except that of family or personal memory.
Indeed, it is precisely this sense of resistance to public exhibition that is
constituent of the archive effect of home mode documents as they are
appropriated into texts intended for public consumption and become archival
documents. In fact, although the word “home” may immediately connote a cozy
space shared by a happy family, any single image of home would be insufficient.
The only thing that these documents ultimately share is that they are, in some
way and on some level, private and personal and not intentionally directed
toward public consumption. Hence, the “home” in home mode documents is
defined here as a previous, private context in which the recorded documents
were (or are imagined to have been) intended to be shown. As home movies,
videos, and snapshots are mobilized in the context of appropriation films, they
are diverted from an intended private context into a public one.
This sense that certain documents have been relocated from their intended
private reception to their actual public reception in an appropriation film may
also be perceived as a change in their function. Michael Renov has argued that
documentary has four basic functions: to record, reveal or preserve; to persuade
or promote; to analyze or interrogate; and to express.22 I would suggest that
these different functions are projected onto film footage by the viewer as a set of
perceived initial intentions, and I would argue that home mode documents – in
order to be viewed as such – suggest that their initial purpose was purely to
“record, reveal or preserve” for a particular audience consisting of either the
filmmaker alone or perhaps people close to the filmmaker. Indeed, it is this
original (if imagined) intention and intended audience that imbues home mode
documents with their supposed “authenticity.” Home mode documents seem to
have been made in order to “simply record” – without higher aesthetic,
expressive or rhetorical aims. When home mode documents are recontextualized
within appropriation films, however, this initial purpose is necessarily harnessed
for an additional purpose. As these documents are appropriated, the new
intended function projected onto them by the viewer may fall into one of
Renov’s other categories: to visualize temporal change; to narrate a relationship
between the past and the present; or to analyze, persuade, and/or express.
However, the new function overlays the initial one. As on a palimpsest, the
initial intended function is still perceptible underneath.
This movement of documents from private to public and from simple
preservation for a limited audience to appropriation into a public text for a
“higher” purpose, however, becomes more complex in the age of digital media.
As more home videos are produced, recording not only happy private moments
but also – potentially – terrible ones, these same videos become increasingly
available for appropriation. This availability raises the question of whether and
to what degree these appropriated home mode documents are contributing to a
new conception of our relationship not only to previous distinctions between
public and private but also to history. Do such documents enrich our
understanding of our shared past? Or do some function merely to titillate by
allowing us to vicariously dig through other people’s dirty laundry?

Archival trespassing
While the films of Forgács, Schefer, and Goycoolea certainly involve a bringing
of private images into public light, their status as experimental documentaries
means that the public who will see these films and the home mode documents
they appropriate is still quite limited. However, a number of major mainstream
documentaries of the past decade have appropriated what read as home mode
documents and brought them to a very wide audience, while also raising the
question of what functions both the production and appropriation of such
documents may serve in contemporary culture.
Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003), for instance, points to the
way in which video technology has expanded the scope of amateur documents
available for appropriation into documentaries beyond the traditional home
mode, thereby allowing “private” stories that are less than ideal to become
public. Jarecki’s documentary combines formal interviews and vérité-style
shooting with “properly” archival news and courtroom footage as well as family
photographs, home movie footage, and home video footage. In the documentary,
it becomes clear that when the Friedman family made their home movies on
film, they mostly portrayed the happy family moments “appropriate” to the
home mode. Indeed, the Friedmans’ home movie footage suggests an idealized
family of five, always performing for each other and for the camera. Any
negative moments – and dark secrets – have been excluded, and the interest we
may find in these images is largely dependent on our experience of temporal
disparity, seeing the Friedmans “then” and “now.” However, after Arnold
Friedman and one of his sons, Jesse Friedman, were accused of sexually
molesting young boys, the oldest son David Friedman bought his first home
video camera. David’s video recordings reveal a family falling apart, screaming
at one another, accusing one another, and doubting family loyalties. This would
not seem to be the kind of thing that one wants to record or remember. As
Marsha and Devin Orgeron, following Moran, suggest:

The use of home movies and videos in Capturing the Friedmans supports the
representational dichotomy [between film and video]. The home movies [on
film] in Capturing the Friedmans – of birthday parties, children growing up –
are typical of the genre: their visual register of cheerful familial togetherness
offers a stark contrast to the contemporary images of this family captured on
video.23

Clearly, video makes a difference. In fact, the Friedmans come off as odd
precisely because of their seemingly bizarre desire to record – or participate in
the recording of – such horrible family moments. In the film, Detective Frances
Galasso of the Sex Crimes Unit, one of the police officers involved in the
conviction of the Friedmans for molestation, sees the fact that David and the
third brother Seth were shooting video footage of Jesse Friedman goofing off in
front of the courthouse during the trial as evidence of Jesse’s guilt and lack of
remorse for his (alleged) crimes. Her argument, although implicitly disparaged
by Jarecki’s film, speaks to a more general doubt about the Friedmans’ use of
the home video camera. While the documentary acts as a sort of trial by video, it
is also a trial of video and its appropriate uses.24 Indeed, all of the family
members seem to be willing, competent participants in the recording of intensely
private interactions with each other (except wife and mother, Elaine Friedman,
who mostly avoids the camera). At some level, this seems incomprehensible.
The Friedman video footage violates all the traditional norms of the home mode
and its “patterned eliminations,” begging the question: why would the Friedmans
have shot this stuff?
Nevertheless, the Friedmans’ footage, despite its unconventionality, seems to
primarily anticipate private family viewings, individual viewings, or perhaps no
viewings at all. While there is a great deal of performativity in their home movie
and home video footage, these performances seem to be addressed only to
family members – or perhaps to themselves. In fact, some of David Friedman’s
video footage is explicitly addressed not to the family but to himself – that is,
from David Friedman in the present moment of shooting to David Friedman in
the future. Through his use of the video camera, David seems to be attempting to
create a distance between the “now” of shooting and the “then” of a future
viewing, actively producing a temporal break that holds the potential for some
sort of self-revelation in the future. In fact, in an interview with Jarecki later in
the film, David describes his reasons for filming his family the day before Jesse
went to jail thus:

Maybe I shot the videotape so that I wouldn’t have to remember it myself. …

Cause I don’t really remember it outside of the tape. Like when your parents
take pictures of you, do you remember the being there or do you remember
just the photograph hanging on the wall?

Here, shooting the home video footage is justified as a conscious effort by David
to create a temporal break between traumatic experiences in the present moment
by anticipating a future moment in which he – and he alone – will watch the
video and these things will all be seen as in the distant past. In this sense, it
seems a productive and cathartic way for him to deal with the horror of his
family’s situation.
Despite the fact that David states that these recordings were addressed to
himself (and perhaps his family), however, they were eventually “found” and
appropriated by Jarecki and seen by the viewing public as part of Jarecki’s
documentary. This contrast between the intentional address of the video and its
recontextualization as part of Capturing the Friedmans is most pronounced in
the confessional video David shot in 1988, at which time his father and brother
were under investigation. Above Jarecki’s title labeling the footage as a “video
diary,” David, wearing only a T-shirt and underwear, speaks into the camera:
“This is private, so if you’re not me, then you really shouldn’t be watching this,
because this is supposed to be a private situation between me and me. This is
between me now and me in the future” (Figure 3.3). He goes on to worry that it
may be the police watching this footage. Then, sobbing and covering his face, he
confesses how scared he is about losing his family. He realizes that his video
may be watched or appropriated by an unintended audience, that it may become
public. Nevertheless, it is clear from David’s words and his agitated manner that
the video was intended only for his own eyes. Ironically, however, this private
“confession” becomes part of a very public film. In this footage, beyond David’s
fear of the police watching his video, there is no sense that these documents
were intended to be made public. For this reason, it feels as if David has
betrayed his past self by allowing Jarecki to use this confessional footage in his
documentary.

FIGURE Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003).

3.3

In terms of its archive effect, appropriated confessional video footage may

intensify the intentional disparity produced through the appropriation of home
mode documents. In his discussion of “video confessions,” Renov has shown
that, although amateurs shooting on film certainly have recorded intensely
private moments, those using video have a greater propensity to do so because,
in addition to being a cheap, accessible, synchronous-sound medium, video is
also a medium through which a person can more easily record him or herself
alone. Hence, many people have used the video camera to record their most
intimate moments while alone.25 If home mode documents seem to be addressed
to a limited audience, confessional videos seem to be addressed to the
videographer him or herself – or to no one at all. While I do not wish to collapse
the difference between home mode documents and video confessions, I would
argue that, in terms of their archive effect as they are recontextualized into
appropriation films, they produce a similar experience of intentional disparity. In
both cases, we feel we are watching something we were not “supposed” to see.
With video confessions, however, this sense is multiplied.26
I would suggest that this sense of “misuse” and betrayal is part and parcel of
the intentional disparity produced by the appropriation of home mode footage,
intended only for private reception but ultimately distributed as part of a public
film. If it were not for Jarecki, it is likely that no one but the Friedmans would
ever have watched their video footage. While David’s attempt to cope with
trauma rationalizes (at least to some extent) the shooting of these perverse
videos, there is something fundamentally disturbing about his and his family’s
willingness to allow Jarecki to use this footage in a public documentary. In
addition to the question of why the Friedmans shot such painful video material,
the finished documentary thus raises the question of why the Friedmans would
share these documents with the world.
At the same time, however, the confessional footage and the footage of the
Friedmans screaming at one another is, in fact, the most compelling of all the
appropriated documents in the documentary. This footage feels “real” precisely
because it seems so clearly intended for private viewing – not for us to see – but
has been repurposed into this public text. We as viewers of Jarecki’s
documentary become belated voyeurs whom the family never anticipated when
David was shooting the videos. Indeed, the film allows/forces us to participate in
a transgression of a private space through its incorporation of private documents
in a public text.
Building on the spatial notion of the home, “trespassing” offers us an
appropriate metaphor for the act of entering and appropriating a private space
uninvited – or at least a private space into which we possibly should not have
been invited. Of course, when an innocent recording of a birthday party or a
happy family snapshot is reused in a new film, watching it does not necessarily
incur a feeling of ethical transgression. As viewers of an appropriation film that
includes such images, we may be trespassing in someone else’s “home,” but the
recording of such images is part of a social ritual we know and recognize. The
photos and amateur film footage of the Friedmans before Arnold and Jesse
Freidman were first accused, for instance, show only happy and recognizable
family moments. Despite the fact that these documents were never intended for
the public eye, these images would be hardly objectionable (and very likely
boring) if it were not for the scandal hidden beneath the surface and revealed
through the other footage. David’s confessional videos and the videos in which
the family members are screaming at one another, however, produce a definite
sense of trespass as they are incorporated into Jarecki’s documentary. Whether
this act of trespass is projected onto the Friedmans for making these videos
and/or allowing Jarecki to use them, onto Jarecki for appropriating them into his
documentary, or onto the viewer him or herself for watching images that were
clearly not initially intended for public consumption, the archive effect in this
film is intimately linked to this feeling of the transgression of private space.
At the same time, however, this film was the Friedmans’ chance to tell their
side of the story and to attempt to exonerate themselves, which rationalizes, at
least to some degree, their participation in the film and the permission they
granted Jarecki to appropriate their home movies and videos. As Kristen Fuhs
has noted, the film acts as a sort of “retrial,” or the trial that the Friedmans never
actually had.27 Moreover, their story speaks to larger questions about the
fairness of the American justice system. It is not only the Friedmans’ family
history but also the history of the ways in which fears about pedophiles during
the 1980s may have perverted justice and led to the conviction of innocents. In
some sense, the Friedmans stand in for other people whose lives have been
destroyed by what may be false or exaggerated accusations. This case, of which
only a very limited group of people seem to have been aware before Jarecki’s
film was released, reveals a “private” history that puts a stain on public, official
history in which two dangerous pedophiles were rightly imprisoned. In washing
their dirty laundry in public, the Friedmans – via Jarecki – force the police to
wash theirs in public, too, confronting, for instance, their possible misuse of
hypnosis (fashionable at the time) in interviewing alleged victims. In this
respect, the Friedmans’ home movies and videos function as “history from
below,” speaking the “truth” (if it is true, after all, since Jarecki’s film does not
and cannot say for certain) to power, rewriting or at least casting doubt on the
official history that stood for so many years. From this perspective, found home
mode documents from a personal archive – in combination with other kinds of
footage – produce a disruption of the history supplied by and contained in the
official archive through their public appearance as archival documents in an
appropriation film.
 There are other appropriation films, however, in which the use of certain
“private,” titillating footage feels less like “history from below” and more like
rubber-necking and/or raises the question of the “authenticity” of certain
documents that initially appear in such films as archival documents in the home
mode. For example, when Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2003) was released, it
was widely celebrated because it was “produced” for only $218, shot on a
consumer video camera and edited on iMovie software on a home computer.
Before its commercial release, a great deal more money was invested in the film,
particularly for purchase of rights to the many copyrighted images and
soundtrack elements Caouette appropriated from other sources.28 Nonetheless,
the film was received as almost entirely “home-made.” Clearly autobiographical,
Tarnation can also be considered an example of what Renov has called
“domestic ethnography,” an anthropological investigation of one’s own self and
family.29 The film narrates the lives and experiences of Caouette’s grandparents,
Adolph and Rosemary Davis; his mother, Renee LeBlanc; and Caouette himself.
Many of the documents within Tarnation read as archival due to the temporal
disparity inscribed on the bodies of Caouette and his family and the gap
established between the “then” of the production of family snapshots and home
movie footage and the “now” of the production of the appropriation film. We
watch each of the family members grow up or grow older and go through the
rituals of family life: birthdays, weddings, and so on. Moreover, to an even
greater degree than Capturing the Friedmans, Tarnation models the splitting
between past and present self. Strikingly, the written titles, penned by Caouette
himself, are articulated in the third person, so that Caouette refers to himself as
“Jonathan” and never as “I.” Voiceover narration and voices in the home video
and audio recordings, however, speak in the first person. In one scene, for
instance, a voiceover that seems to belong to a teenaged Jonathan and therefore
marked as “past,” says, “See, I got hold of a drug. I’m not exactly sure what
kind. I believe it was either PCP or LSD, and it depersonalized my mind … I’m
depersonalized … I feel like I’m in a dream all the time.” The next series of
titles reads:

In the fall of 1986, Jonathan was visiting Renee at her apartment. He

befriended a drug dealer. Jonathan wanted to try marijuana. The dealer gave
him two joints. Jonathan took them home and smoked both joints in
succession. Both joints, it was later learned, were dipped in formaldehyde.
From that evening on, Jonathan couldn’t concentrate and felt as though he
were living in a dream.
The repetition of the telling of the same event, with its discrepancy between the
first-person and third-person voice as well as between the facts of the matter,
crystallizes the way in which documents made by the same person may still
produce the archive effect through the production of temporal disparity. Past and
present self are never exactly the same person. Indeed, Caouette’s past self
becomes an “other” to be reframed and manipulated within the documentary. In
the change of voice, the continuity between Caouette’s past and present self is
implicitly denied. Thus the archive effect in Tarnation is produced partly
through a perception of temporal disparity between Jonathan Caouette “then”
and “now.”
Moreover, some of the documents in the film read as “found” home mode
documents initially intended for a private context of reception but now
recontextualized within a public context of reception, thus producing the
intentional disparity associated with home mode documents. Like the film
footage in Capturing the Friedmans, the photographs and amateur film footage
in Tarnation – of Caouette’s grandparents’ wedding photos and of Renee and
Jonathan as children, for instance – read as intended to simply preserve
particular happy moments in time. As in Jarecki’s film, however, the video
footage is darker. Once again, the cheap cost and ease of video allow for the
revelation of a more sinister side of family life that film is less likely to capture.
Caouette’s decision – as a grown man and filmmaker – to videotape his
grandmother after she has suffered a severe stroke, his mentally-disturbed
mother singing and laughing madly about a pumpkin for several minutes without
a cut, and confrontations between his family members regarding child abuse –
all moments in which the video’s subjects have in some way lost control of
themselves before the camera – fly in the face of the notion of the home mode’s
primary justification as the retention of happy family memories for posterity.
The “patterned eliminations” of the traditionally-defined home mode are actively
challenged. In this regard, some critics have suggested that Caouette was
exploiting his family by recording them in these vulnerable moments, and, no
doubt, his act of filming raises ethical questions about what home video should
be used to record and what its effects are on the human beings both in front of
and behind the camera.30 However, Caouette’s decision to use these videos in a
public documentary also raises questions about whether some of his footage can
even be considered to be in the “home mode.”
In contrast to David Friedman, it often seems as if Caouette intentionally
anticipated using these intimate video documents in a public documentary even
as he was shooting them. Indeed, much of the home video footage – his mother
dancing with the pumpkin, for instance – produces almost no sense of temporal
disparity because the footage seems to have been shot simultaneously with the
production of the documentary. In this sense, these are not “found” home mode
documents like those of Friedman but, rather, documents created for the
documentary. Moreover, the experience of intentional disparity – the movement
from intended private reception toward public exhibition – in relation to
Caouette’s video documents is particularly ambiguous. There is a sense that
Caouette was filming these seemingly “private” scenes with his public film
already in mind. As Orgeron and Orgeron note, “In some ways, the commercial
film we’re watching has been in production since Caouette first got access to a
video camera.”31 Unlike David Friedman, Caouette did not make his videos – or
at least not all of them – for private use and then later decide to use them in his
documentary, which would constitute an appropriation. Instead, he seems to
have made some of these very personal videos for his documentary. Even some
of the older documents, which produce an experience of temporal disparity
between Caouette “then” and “now,” seem to have been produced with a public
audience in mind. In some sequences, 11-year-old Caouette dresses up as an
abused housewife enacting a “testimony.” In others, Caouette (at various ages)
seems to be performing himself for the video camera – images of himself in the
mirror, smoking, cutting himself, or simply gazing seductively into the lens. It
feels as if Caouette, even as a child, was already seeing himself “from the
outside” with an eye to eventually making these videos public. Thus, many of
his video documents do not read as “home mode” documents but rather as
amateur footage Caouette shot of himself and his family for his documentary.
Viewers may seek to “trespass” on Caouette and his family’s private life but find
that they were already invited in by the filmmaker, who eagerly seeks to publicly
display his own and his family’s most intimate moments.
Tarnation gestures toward the particular ways in which we, as contemporary
subjects, have become aware of the circulation and ubiquity of audiovisual
recordings. We are increasingly likely to anticipate the way other people might
see us. By videotaping ourselves, we are placed outside of ourselves, looking at
ourselves through the lens, wrenched from first-person experience to third-
person spectator and back. With increased accessibility to video technology, this
phenomenon is becoming increasingly prevalent. Anyone’s home videos may
easily be posted online or included in a documentary for public consumption.
Every “private” space is always potentially public with the advent not only of
video but also of YouTube and Facebook. In this context, amateur documents
and home mode documents cease once again to be synonymous; they may be
distinguished by their (inferred) address.
This renewed distinction has implications for how we understand the historical
effects of amateur documents in appropriation films. In the past, we may have
assumed that audiovisual documents shot in or around the home conveyed a
certain degree of “authenticity” based in “everyday life.” However, as Tarnation
suggests, “everyday life” may itself be less “private” and “authentic” than we
might like to believe. Cultural theorist Ben Highmore notes that “everyday life”
is a “vague and problematic phrase” and that the term can be used in multiple
ways. On the one hand, he writes that the notion of “everyday life” suggests
“those practices and lives that have been traditionally left out of historical
accounts, swept aside by the onslaught of events instigated by elites. It becomes
shorthand for voices from ‘below’: women, children, migrants and so on.”32
However, Highmore also notes that, on the other hand, “everyday life” is not
necessarily synonymous with resistance to ideology. Indeed, on some level, its
relation to ideology is ambiguous. He suggests that the everyday provide the
grounds for resistance to conformity or may, in fact, encourage conformity. It
may provide either “a realm of submission to relations of power or the space in
which those relations are contested.”33
I would argue that Tarnation enacts precisely this ambiguity. On the one hand,
the film can be read in terms of its significance as a record of a man growing up
gay and the survivor of an abusive family in the contemporary United States. In
this reading, his performativity – like that of the Friedmans – plays like a
strategy for survival and the enactment of a forbidden identity. This intensely
personal history represents a life experience that is generally excluded from
official archives and may have historical value especially in terms of queer
history. In this view, Caouette’s amateur documents of his “everyday life”
speaks truth to power, resisting the homogenizing force of grand narratives of
history in which his experience and that of his family would likely be left out.
On the other hand, the film draws attention to the fact that Caouette’s “everyday
life” has been so colonized by the gaze of the video camera that it ceases to be
that unspectacularized, private “everyday” that we apparently expect or desire
from home mode documents. Caouette is performing for us, conforming to an
identity that will (and did) make him famous – and, perhaps, intentionally
exploiting his family for his own gain. This may be “history from below,” but it
also reveals the fact that amateur movies and videos shot in the home do not
necessarily offer a less mediated and more “authentic” truth that stands in
opposition to “official” discourse. Rather, amateur documents may be addressed
to the public just as much as official documents. Moreover, Caouette’s
exhibitionistic amateur videos evoke, feed, and frustrate our own voyeuristic
desires for the prurient details of other people’s private lives through the home
mode. Although we may seek a more complex, diverse and multivocal history
through such documents, Tarnation proves that we may also find ourselves in
the position of archival peeping toms.
Like Capturing the Friedmans and Tarnation, Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man
(2005) also serves as an instance of “history from below,” telling the story of a
marginal figure whose story would likely have been excluded from public
discourse – were it not for the existence of hundreds of hours of amateur video
footage (in the home mode and otherwise) and the appropriation of some of this
footage into a famous filmmaker’s documentary. Grizzly Man, however, further
elucidates the problems of misuse, trespass, and voyeurism that accompany, to
some degree, all uses of home mode documents and confessional documents and
their archive effects in appropriation films. Herzog’s film consists mainly of
footage culled from the approximately 100 hours of video shot between 1999
and 2003 by Timothy Treadwell, a man who rejected human society and went to
live with grizzly bears in Alaska each summer, taking his video camera with him
to record his experiences. Treadwell and his girlfriend Amie Huegenard were
eventually killed and eaten by a grizzly bear, and Herzog later appropriated parts
of Treadwell’s video footage to make Grizzly Man. Treadwell shot almost all of
this footage himself – only a few shots were taken by Huegenard – but Herzog
notes explicitly in his voiceover the many registers of Treadwell’s address to and
through the camera. Treadwell uses his camera to record intimate confessions
and hysterical rants as well as images of his home among the bears, some of
which were intended – Treadwell says in the footage – for a television program
for children.
The movement of “private” footage into a public text exemplified by
Capturing the Friedmans and the blurring between public and private modes of
address exhibited by Tarnation are simultaneously illuminated in Herzog’s film,
revealing the way in which amateur footage may shift in and out of the home
mode even within a single shot. Like David Friedman and Jonathan Caouette,
Treadwell acts out a split subjectivity in front of the camera. In the sections
clearly intended for a public audience, he frequently speaks of himself in the
third person: for instance, he asks his imagined audience, “Could Olie, the big
old bear, possible kill and eat Timothy Treadwell?” Even though in Herzog’s
film this becomes an ominous foreshadowing of his death, in the video it seems
more to be a part of Treadwell’s construction of himself as an adventurer “living
on the edge.” Thus, although these sections might be categorized as “home
video” in the sense that Treadwell is an amateur filmmaker shooting in a place
he calls his home, the address and performativity of this footage already
anticipates a wider audience whom he addresses with a rhetorical question.
Treadwell also frequently changes his mode of address within a single shot – for
instance, switching from performing as the “host” of a “kid’s show” about nature
to personal confession to paranoid rant directed at the Park Service or other
“enemies of the bears.” Furthermore, even in the most intimate moments,
Treadwell sometimes switches from the first person to third. For instance,
speaking to the camera as he is walking, he says, “I always cannot understand
why girls don’t wanna be with me for a long time, because I have a really nice
personality. … I always wished I was gay. Would’ve been a lot easier.” When he
is speaking in the first person, it is unclear who he addressing. Clearly, this
footage was not meant for the Park Service or the children he is speaking to in
some of the other scenes. If anything, he seems to be speaking aloud to himself;
however, seconds later, Treadwell reverts to the third person saying, “But you
know what? Alas, Timothy Treadwell is not gay.” It is impossible to fully
disentangle the different modes of address and performance in Treadwell’s
footage. Nevertheless, there is a sense that, although some of the footage was
meant for public viewing, other sequences were never intended to be shown
publicly. The confessional sections, in particular, generate an ethical
disturbance, a strong sense that Herzog (with full consciousness) is “misusing”
Treadwell’s footage and that we are voyeurs trespassing in Treadwell’s private
space.
To begin with, the fact that he could not ask Treadwell for permission to use
his video footage makes Herzog’s decision to make a movie based around
Treadwell’s footage ethically complex. Certainly, on one level, Treadwell was
obviously constructing his own legend for public consumption and Herzog’s
film realizes and extends his myth, which, in his death by one of his bear
“friends,” seems to take on greater – if also ironic – meaning. However, on
another level, it seems clear that Treadwell did not intend for all of his footage,
particularly his confessional footage, to be shown publicly. Indeed, this footage
often undermines the heroic public persona he seems to be creating for himself.
Moreover, since Treadwell died before Herzog began making Grizzly Man,
Treadwell had no influence over how his footage was used. When Herzog uses
footage in which Treadwell’s performance changes registers, from angry,
epithet-laden tirades to teacherly lecture for kids and back again, we can easily
see where Treadwell might have made a cut. Herzog ignores the markers that
suggest the “patterned eliminations” that Treadwell might have made in editing
his footage in order to preserve a positive public images of himself and his
happy wilderness home. Moreover, Herzog, through both editing and his own
added voiceover, intentionally exposes the gap between the multiple
“Treadwells.” At times, one cannot help but feel that the film is mocking
Treadwell, or at least using his footage to point to the inconsistencies in his
character and his lack of self-awareness for all his self-consciousness. For
instance, Herzog muses about the more public, performative sections: “It was as
if he became a star by virtue of his own invention. … Treadwell saw himself as
the guardian on this land and stylized himself as Prince Valiant, fighting the bad
guys with their schemes to do harm to the bears.” At another point, Herzog
acknowledges the “other” Treadwell in the footage:

Beyond his posings, the camera was his only present companion. It was his
instrument to explore the wilderness around him, but increasingly, it became
something more. He started to scrutinize his innermost being, his demons, his
exhilarations. Facing the lens of the camera took on the quality of a
confessional.

Given that he is aware of these different “Treadwells,” by making footage of all

of these registers available for public consumption, Herzog seems to betray his
dead subject, or, at least his dead subject’s desired conception of his public self.
Even though Treadwell seems to see himself “from the outside” even in his most
intimate moments, we sense that in some of these moments, like David
Friedman, he is performing himself for himself alone through his video camera.
Thus Herzog’s film, despite the elements of Treadwell’s performativity that
persist even in these confessional sections, invites us to enter a place we were
never meant to go.
The recording of Treadwell’s actual death, however, becomes a limit point at
which Herzog stops using Treadwell’s footage to more fully explore his own
existential and ethical questions about human beings, nature, and filmmaking. It
is not clear whether Treadwell tried to turn on the camera as he was being
attacked by the bear that killed him – Herzog says only that there was no time to
take the lens cap off. As a result, there is only an audio recording of Treadwell
and Huegenard’s deaths. Although the coroner, who listened to the tape,
describes the audio in salacious detail onscreen, and we watch Herzog listening
to the tape without actually being able to hear it ourselves, Herzog excludes the
sounds of their deaths from his film. Indeed, Herzog tells Jewel Palovak, a close
friend of Treadwell’s who inherited his tapes (and who serves as one of the
producers of Herzog’s film), that she should destroy the tape. It seems to me that
this tape, which we never hear, is probably the only footage entirely free of
posturing – but, as Herzog recognizes, to listen to this particular recording of the
“real” seems utterly unethical. Even as he “misuses” other portions of
Treadwell’s video by making them public, Herzog – and his film – acknowledge
that some things should remain private and should even be destroyed in order to
keep them from being heard by anyone else. The tape of Treadwell and
Huegenard’s death becomes a limit case for the recording and appropriation of
“home mode” documents.
Thus, although he uses Treadwell’s footage for his own ends, Herzog
explicitly acknowledges that there is something suspect in taking someone else’s
most personal moments into the public sphere. Nonetheless, speaking of
Treadwell’s footage at the end of the film, he tells us, “It is not so much a look at
wild nature as it is an insight into ourselves, our nature.” Here, he moves from
his own or Treadwell’s use of the singular first or third person to the collective
“we.” This shift to the collective “we” is a transformation that has profound
implications for our understanding of the way that home mode documents are
made or assumed to function. As Michael S. Roth has noted:

The problem of home movies is the problem of particularity, trying to find a

way to make sense of something individual, on its own, distinct, without
erasing its oneness, its distinction. This is a problem because making sense of
something, knowing something, means to put that thing in relation to
something else, or to subsume it under some broader conceptual scheme.34

Indeed, there is both liberation and violence in using home mode documents in a
documentary. For home mode documents to have significance for the rest of us,
they must be forcibly transformed from private documents into public ones and
this intentional disparity informs their archive effect. Grizzly Man reveals that,
while it may be worth the price in terms of a collective revelation about human
(and animal) nature, the appropriation of recordings of the “everyday life” of
“ordinary people” is, in fact, always a form of violence. As Herzog appropriates
the found footage of Treadwell’s videos and transforms it into archival footage,
he potentially produces a gain in understanding of the human condition and
transforms Treadwell’s life into something socially and (perhaps) historically
meaningful for others – his death and, therefore, his life potentially become
significant to a wide audience. Yet, there is also a strong sense that, were he
alive to edit his own footage, this is not the story Treadwell himself would tell.
Sometimes, however, this act of violence through appropriation may
participate in enacting justice by bringing something hidden into the public eye.
The home mode in the era of digital media has been taken to its perverse but
perhaps logical extreme by the digital photographs shot by United States soldiers
in Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which created an international scandal when they
first came to public light in 2004. Many of these photographs read as not
intended for the front page of the New York Times but, rather, as “personal”
documents intended for a very limited audience that were subsequently made
public. Errol Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure (2008), a film made several
years after the scandal emerged, explores the complex question of the “original”
intentions “behind” these documents, which also function as archival documents
within Morris’ film. Morris appropriates many of the digital photographs and
several digital video clips shot by the American soldiers in Abu Ghraib and
combines them with footage of his interviews with many of the soldiers and
military officials made several years after the scandal first broke and with
stylized reenactments of what the soldiers said went on in the prison. His film
sets up a tension between what the soldiers say they intended by shooting the
photos and videos and the images themselves, which, because of their disturbing
content, resist the soldiers’ explanations. Indeed, as Jonathan Kahana has
pointed out, these explanations function less as explanations or confessions than
as excuses that cannot “undo” the horror of the images.35
Directed by a filmmaker whose films constantly reflect on the truth-value of
the documentary image, Standard Operating Procedure is as much about the
Abu Ghraib photographs as it is about the abuses in Abu Ghraib prison. When
the images of American soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners first came out, what was
shocking was not only the abuse of the Iraqi prisoners but also the stupidity of
the US soldiers who took digital photographs and shot digital videos of this
abuse. In Morris’ film, these photographs and videos are not appropriated so
much as “evidence” of the abuses but rather as cryptic texts that do not tell the
whole story. In fact, the question of the soldiers’ intended purpose and audience
for the photographs and videos is the crux of the film. (In fact, in his focus on
the soldiers and their photographs, Morris avoids interviewing any Iraqis about
their experiences of either abuse or the images themselves, a rather glaring
omission that contributes to the further silencing of the Iraqis in the images.) Of
course, when Morris made Standard Operating Procedure, the photographs had
already been leaked to the public and circulated in newspapers around the globe
and websites across the internet. They caused an international scandal that
tarnished the image of the United States as a benign champion of human rights
and freedom. It is telling, however, that while the abuses themselves were
appalling, viewers of the images often expressed less surprise that these abuses
had happened than shock that the soldiers had recorded them. Why did these
soldiers take pictures? Why would they incriminate themselves in this way?
Didn’t they realize that these images would get out? How could they be so
dumb? These were some of the questions asked once the images became public,
and they are all based on the assumption that the soldiers never intended the
images to be seen by the world. The appalling content of the images – for
instance, Specialist Charles Graner grinning and giving a thumbs up as he leans
over the body of a dead Iraqi man – implied to most people that the soldiers
would never want anyone else to see them. In the context of their emergence in
the international media, they read as the vacation snapshots of a group of
psychopaths.
Indeed, I would argue that some of the most shocking images from Abu
Ghraib – within the context of the international news media and of Morris’
documentary – are those that read as “home mode” documents. In both venues,
the images produce a sense that we are entering a private space, not just the
space of the notorious Abu Ghraib prison or the scene of a crime, but also a
space shared by the soldiers and at least temporarily shielded from the public
eye, a space the soldiers never anticipated would be made public or whose
depiction would become evidence against them. In their arrogance (and that of
the United States itself), these soldiers, it seems, believed that they could
“privatize” and appropriate this space as their own perverse playground. In fact,
the images gain part of their authority as evidence precisely through the sense
viewers have of the soldier/photographer’s seeming lack of anticipation of a
wider audience than themselves. Graner is posing but posing for his friends, not
for us. In this sense, the images Morris includes of the soldiers horsing around
with a banana with no prisoners in sight and the images of Graner and Specialist
Lynndie England giving a thumbs up from behind a pyramid of naked Iraqi
prisoners, in fact, both produce a sense that we are excluded from their address.
The images of the prisoners being abused and humiliated while the American
soldiers smile for the camera, in particular, read as documents intended for
private reception. As soon as the images were made public, however, what read
as snapshots were transformed into evidence both inside and outside of the
courtroom. The soldiers in the pictures were publicly denounced and convicted
of criminal charges on the basis of the photographs. They were perhaps most
vilified, however, because the photos seem to be intended to preserve for
themselves the soldiers’ pleasant memories of humiliating, degrading, and
otherwise abusing helpless Iraqi prisoners. According to this narrative, no one
else was intended to see these images. The soldiers took them just for
themselves, just for “fun.”
(At the same time, the very existence of these photographs also seem to
warrant not only the soldiers’ stupidity but also the arrogance of their superiors
who – according to the soldiers in Morris’ film – told the soldiers that what they
were doing was acceptable and may even have ordered them to abuse the
prisoners. The fact that they took such pictures suggests that the soldiers did not
feel they were doing anything wrong in terms of their actions vis-à-vis the
prisoners. They were doing what Military Intelligence was telling them to do –
although the military apparently had told them not to take pictures.)
Thus, as perverse as it may seem, in terms of their address, these images read
precisely as home mode documents. In Morris’ film, however, as well as in the
book of the same name that Morris wrote with journalist Philip Gourevitch, the
soldiers attempt to reframe the images and to revise the initial effect produced by
their perceived status as home mode documents.36 The film and book provide
testimony from the soldiers in which they suggest that what seemed to be
intended for a limited, private audience was, in fact, originally produced as
“evidence” for the whole world to see. In the film, Morris focuses on Sabrina
Harman, who reads aloud from the letters that she wrote to her wife while she
was at Abu Ghraib and in which she claims that she began taking pictures in
order to document the abuses against Iraqi prisoners and to show the world what
was going on in Abu Ghraib. In the book, Morris and Gourevitch reveal that
Harman was an aspiring forensic photographer, suggesting that she also had a
professional goal in mind. Morris was unable to interview Charles Graner for the
film but, in the book, which draws on transcripts of Graner’s interview by the
Army’s Criminal Investigative Division, Graner claims that he, too, was taking
the photos as evidence because no one had believed his stories when he returned
from the first Gulf War. In other words, while some soldiers may have been
taking snapshots as souvenirs to be shared only privately, Harman and Graner
say they were intentionally producing evidence to share with the public. They
suggest that we were, in fact, meant to see these images. Unfortunately, Harman
says in the film, the photos were leaked to the press before she had a chance to
share her evidence voluntarily.
In the film, Harman may seem like a nice person whom we want to believe;
and, in fact, many of the photos taken at Abu Ghraib could be construed to be
intended as evidence. The images in which only the prisoners appear could have
been covertly taken in order to show what was going on inside the prison. A
photograph of an Iraqi man alone tied to a bed with underwear over his face
could read as evidence of abuse. The photograph in which Harman is smiling
and giving a thumbs-up in front of the dead Iraqi’s body, however, violently
undermines her claims (Figure 3.4). She says in both the film and the book that
her pose was a reflex, that whenever someone pointed a camera at her, she
automatically smiled and gave a thumbs-up. She also suggests that she smiled
and played along so that she could continue taking pictures as evidence. Yet the
photographs themselves resist her claims. Harman, Graner, and England just
look too much like they are having a good time, which suggests that they took
the photographs because they wanted to remember that moment. Of course, all
of these conjectures about any “original” intended use of a document are
subjective and dependent on the particular viewer. Nevertheless, cues within the
photographs produce a sense of their intended address. As Gourevitch and
Morris note in their book (which is much more overtly critical of the soldiers
than is the film):

There’s a big difference between photographing the outrages of war and using
them as the backdrop for staged trophy shots. Seeing Harman and Graner
mugging over the dead prisoner, there is no escaping the impression that these
soldiers were celebrating his death, and the suggestion that perhaps they had
some hand in it. The pictures may have been taken as a gag – “for personal
use,” as [Sergeant Ivan] Frederick said of his photos of Gilligan [the iconic
hooded figure standing on a box holding electrical wires] – but they seem
starkly at odds with Harman’s claim to a larger documentary purpose in taking
pictures at Abu Ghraib.37
 FIGURE Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, 2008).
3.4

Thus, despite Harman and Graner’s claims, many of the images still read as
intended for a limited audience only – as home mode documents and, therefore,
damning.
Ultimately, neither the film nor the book comes to unequivocal conclusions
about the address of the images. The soldiers’ “original” intentions are
impossible to know for certain. (In fact, it is important – and ironic – to note that
the photography expert enlisted to participate in the military investigation ruled
many of the photographs that are likely to look quite disturbing to a civilian as
“standard operating procedure.” Some of the images Harman said she took as
evidence – such as the prisoner tied to a bed with underwear over his face – may,
in fact, for viewers from a military background, read not as dirty secrets but
simply as documentation of “approved methods.”) However, even if the soldiers
truly took some of the pictures intending to present them as evidence, even if the
wires “Gilligan” was holding were not really hooked up to electricity, the smiles
on the faces of the soldiers standing beside a human pyramid of naked Iraqis
read as intended for the soldiers’ eyes alone, for those who shared in what
Sobchack refers to as the “evoked events” of the home mode document. Thus,
even as Morris and Gourevitch complicate the truth, illustrating the ways in
which the photographs may – or may not – have been misinterpreted, the
pictures themselves insist that the soldiers in Abu Ghraib were having fun and
that they wanted to remember these shared moments, not that they wanted to
prove something. Indeed, the home mode’s claim to unselfconscious
“authenticity” helped condemn the Abu Ghraib soldiers and send them to jail.
If the appropriated documents in Capturing the Friedmans, Tarnation, and
Grizzly Man sometimes evoke the sense that this wresting from private to public
viewing does a certain violence to their subjects, the revelation and appropriation
of the Abu Ghraib photographs in Standard Operating Procedure (and other
films that mobilize these images) suggests that sometimes this violence is
purposeful – that it allows for secret, shameful histories to be brought to light so
that crimes may be punished.38 Although Morris’ appropriation of the Abu
Ghraib photographs may play to our voyeuristic desires (even though many of us
had seen them already), it also implicitly calls for justice for the Iraqi prisoners
who appear in the photographs and videos. By making such private images
public, a counterhistory of the US presence in Iraq comes to light.39 At the same
time, however, Standard Operating Procedure urges us to interrogate images
that read as home mode documents, to look at each photograph in terms of what
various intentions “behind” each one could be, as well as to contemplate the
institutional structures and ethical stance (or lack of one) that enabled their
production. The photos may be documents of these soldiers’ crimes, but they
also suggest that the worst culprits – those who authorized the abuse, if not the
photography – are not in the pictures. Nonetheless, such perverse home mode
documents may bring previously “hidden” histories to light, stories that must be
told so that justice can be done.
Home mode documents serve and help constitute new forms of history,
offering the basis for counterhistories and microhistories that may nevertheless
have magnitude and meaning for a wide audience. However, we must recognize
that our desire for home mode documents is necessarily in part a voyeuristic
desire – the desire to see precisely what we were not meant to see. Digital video
may either fulfill this desire by allowing amateur filmmakers to film their most
private secrets or thwart it by encouraging amateur filmmakers to imagine a
public audience for their videos, this latter undermining their home mode status.
Moreover, we must also recognize that appropriating home mode documents
into a new text always involves a certain kind of violence toward the film
subject, who, by definition, did not anticipate this public use. The cost of such
violence may be justified, however, particularly in cases where crimes are
uncovered, as in Abu Ghraib, but also in the service of historical knowledge.
History from below may require a violation of the private sphere and of
everyday life but it may also offer us a more complex and nuanced
understanding of the past than accounts based only on the official documents
housed in official archives. As the films in this chapter attest, the archival
document found in a basement, attic, or prison may have just as much, if not
more, revelatory power and historical potential than documents housed in the
traditional archive.

Notes
1 Richard Chalfen, Snapshot Versions of Life (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University
Popular Press, 1987), 8.
2 Thom Powers, “Home Movie Buffs: A New Generation of Film Archivists is Salvaging History from
the Attics and Ash Heaps of Everyday Life,” The Boston Globe, 12 December 2004, K2.
3 Patricia R. Zimmerman, “The Home Movie Movement: Excavations, Artifacts, Minings,” in Mining the
Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, ed. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R.
Zimmerman (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2008), 8.
4 Zimmerman, “The Home Movie Movement,” 2–3.
5 Zimmerman, “The Home Movie Movement,” 1.
6 Zimmerman, “The Home Movie Movement,” 1.
7 Patricia R. Zimmerman, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington, IN: Indiana
University Press, 1995), 113 (emphasis added).
8 Chalfen, 8.
9 Chalfen, 8.
10 Chalfen, 8.
11 Chalfen, 153.
12 Chalfen, 93.
13 Chalfen, 99.
14 James M. Moran, There’s No Place Like Home Video (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002), 43.
15 Vivian Sobchack, “Toward a Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience,” in Collecting Visible
Evidence, ed. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press,
1999), 248.
16 For an extended discussion of America’s Funniest Home Videos, see Moran, 152–62.
17 Of course, curating a group of films does, on some level, create a new, composite text in which
connections can be made across different films. However, I would classify this as an act that occurs
outside the text rather than as the constitution of a (single, unified, new, persisting) appropriation film.
18 Home Movie Day website. www.homemovieday.com/faq.html. Accessed 8 June 2010.
19 Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (Bloomington, IN:
Indiana University Press, 1994), 2.
20 Bill Nichols, “‘The Memory of Loss’: Péter Forgács’s Saga of Family Life and Social Hell,” Film
 Quarterly 56, no. 4 (Summer 2003): 2–12.
21 www.forgácspeter.hu/eng/main/films/privatehungary/landofnothing/landofnothing.htm. Accessed 8
June 2010.
22 Michael Renov, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary,” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov
(New York: Routledge, 1993), 21.
23 Marsha Orgeron and Devin Orgeron, “Familial Pursuits, Editorial Acts: Documentaries after the Age of
Home Video,” The Velvet Lightrap 60 (Fall 2007): 51.
24 The Friedmans were never actually tried, because they both pleaded guilty. However, the film suggests
that they may have been innocent but confessed because they did not think they would have had a
chance of being cleared in a trial and would have had to serve even longer sentences.
25 Michael Renov, “Video Confessions,” in The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis, MN: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004), 198.
26 Renov includes in his category of “video confessions,” confessions made to the camera specifically for
a film intended to be shown in public as part of an artwork. I, however, am defining video confessions
by their inferred address only to the self, not to others.
27 Kristen Fuhs, “Documentary as Double Jeopardy: Retrying Criminals in the Court of Public Opinion,”
Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, 2006.
28 Roger Ebert, “‘Tarnation’ a Labor of Love for Director.” The Chicago Sun-Times, 15 October 2004,
Weekend Plus 31.
29 Michael Renov, “Domestic Ethnography and the Construction of the ‘Other’ Self”, in The Subject of
Documentary (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2004): 216–29.
30 Most critics lauded the film and tended to dismiss the idea that it was exploitative, embracing it for its
“honesty” and “bravery” as well as its miniature budget and its evidence of the “democratizing” of
filmmaking through digital editing software. For critical reviews, see Elbert Ventura, “Tarnation,”
Reverse Shot (Spring 2004): www.reverseshot.com/legacy/spring05/tarnation.html, accessed 9
November 2012; Matthew Plouffe, “In Vain,” Reverse Shot (Winter 2004):
www.reverseshot.com/legacy/winter04/tarnation.html, accessed 9 November 2012.
31 Orgeron and Orgeron, 54.
32 Ben Highmore, “Questioning Everyday Life,” in The Everyday Life Reader, ed. Ben Highmore
(London: Routledge, 2002), 1.
33 Highmore, 5.
34 Michael S. Roth, “Ordinary Film: Péter Forgács’ The Maelstrom,” in Mining the Home Movie:
Excavations in Histories and Memories, ed. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmerman (Berkeley,
CA: University of California Press, 2008), 66.
35 Jonathan Kahana, “Speech Images: Standard Operating Procedure and the Staging of Interrogation,”
Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 52 (Summer 2010).
www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/sopkKahana/index.html. Accessed 10 August 2012.
36 Philip Gourevitch and Errol Morris, Standard Operating Procedure (New York: Penguin Press, 2008).
37 Gourevitch and Morris, 179.
38 Other films that use the Abu Ghraib photographs and videos include Ghosts of Abu Ghraib (Rory
Kennedy, 2007) and Taxi to the Dark Side (Alex Gibney, 2007).
39 The complexity of Morris’ film and its own ambiguous politics are explored in much greater depth in
Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 52 (Summer 2010.)
www.ejumpcut.org/currentissue/index.html. Accessed 10 August 2012.
4
THE ARCHIVE AFFECT
The archival fragment and the production of
historical “presence”1

The archival fragment, the joke, the gap

Adele Horne’s documentary The Tailenders (2005) begins with an image of a
flat, square piece of cardboard labeled “Cardtalk.” Two hands reach into the
frame, unfold the cardboard to form a box equipped with a tiny record needle,
place a phonograph record beneath the needle, and then use a pen inserted into a
hole in the record to spin the disc (Figure 4.1). What emerges from the record is
a man’s voice speaking in English and reciting a simple, didactic lesson that
answers the question, “What is a Christian?” His voice is slightly distorted by
the fact that the record is cranked by hand, but it is nonetheless legible. The
Tailenders’ odd inaugural object sets up an enigma, one not so much resolved by
the film as used as an entry point into complex issues of archivization,
information dissemination and power. Over subsequent black-and-white archival
images of people standing near similar hand-cranked phonographs, a woman’s
voice, Horne’s, tells the story of Gospel Recordings, an evangelical missionary
group founded in 1939 with the intention of recording Bible stories in every
existing language and dialect in order to spread the same Christian message,
translated but unchanged, across the world. The missionaries call their potential
converts “tailenders,” because the missionaries believe that these people are the
last on earth to learn about the Christian faith and therefore to be “saved.” The
film then cuts to interviews with contemporary Gospel Recording missionaries
explaining their project and showing off their archive, which, they boast,
contains recordings of more languages than any other archive in the world. The
Cardtalk record in the first shot turns out to be a fragment from this vast
collection.
In its opening sequence, Horne’s film points immediately to one of the
paradoxes of the archive: it is constituted by both absence and excess. A
filmmaker (or even all of the filmmakers of the world combined) can never use
all of the indexical traces of the past in one film or even in many films. Every
document is always only a fragment of the vast trove of indexical recordings
scattered throughout the world in physical or digital form.2 At the same time,
however, there are certain gaps in the archive – whether records never made, lost
or discarded, or gradually degraded or disintegrated over time. Indeed, since it is
impossible for every – or any – single event to be recorded from every possible
angle, there will always be missing pieces in the histories we are able to tell. As
a result of this situation, historians and appropriation filmmakers engaged in the
activity of representing history have developed a range of strategies for coping
with both the excess of archival documents and the gaps in the archival record.

FIGURE The Tailenders (Adele Horne, 2005). Photograph by Karin Johansson.

 4.1 Courtesy of the artist.

As discussed at the beginning of this study, New Historicism begins from the
premise that there is no single, universal history but rather there are many
histories.3 New Historicism thus widens up the range of topics considered
worthy of historical investigation, allowing almost any aspect of cultural
production to serve as a potential historical site for reading and interpretation.
New Historicists also acknowledge the fact that any exploration of history is
necessarily in part subjective, and based in the historian’s desire to experience
the “touch of the real.”4 Thus, although they acknowledge that the historical
“real” can never be accessed as such, New Historicists often search the archive
for eccentric anecdotes and enigmatic fragments that interrupt and exceed the
homogenizing force of grand narratives by grounding themselves in the
contingent and unruly “real.”5
In what follows, I argue that certain appropriation films are particularly allied
with New Historicist strategies in their self-conscious exploration of the archive
and their emphasis on the fragment that disrupts grand narratives. Indeed, these
particular films may themselves extend the power of New Historicism to
interrogate and disrupt grand historical narratives – because written documents
do not have the same indexical relationship to the historical world as do
photographic, filmic, or other audiovisual media, in which issues of excess are
even more pronounced. Given their unruly excess, audiovisual media often
demonstrate (whether intentionally or not) the excess, ambiguity, and disruptive
“real” that are key elements upon which New Historicists base their work.
While New Historicism provides one framework for understanding certain
contemporary appropriation films that are engaged with history, elements of
deconstructive practice also emerge forcefully within these films as well.
Deconstructive practice extends from the premise that language and signification
are inherently multivalent and that, therefore, meaning itself can never be
stabilized. Its practitioners often interrogate the processes by which texts are
made to “mean” something in order to question larger cultural assumptions. In
other words, deconstruction brings out the inclusive ironies that accompany all
uses of language (see Chapter 1). Some New Historicists, such as Catherine
Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, explicitly distance themselves from the
critical practice of deconstruction, arguing that it does not take cultural and
historical specificity into account.6 Others, such as Carolyn Steedman, while
aware of this criticism, demonstrate the connection between the two.7 I would
argue that the appropriation films discussed in this chapter discover and
dramatize shared ground between New Historicism and deconstruction; that is,
through their deployment of the archival fragment, they generate and maintain a
productive tension between the description of the specificity of a given cultural
and historical situation and an interrogation of textuality itself.
Indeed, whereas many appropriation films obscure the sources of the archival
documents they appropriate (except, at times, for a rather unhelpful list of
archives at the end of the credits), The Tailenders explicitly and actively figures
the Gospel Recordings archive and, further, simulates for the viewer the
experience of being in an archive, of following and trying to make sense of
fragments and traces. Beginning with the image of the Cardtalk record, the film
follows not the defined trajectory of a journey, but, rather, the tentative
movements of an exploration. This exploration is indirect, dispersed, and non-
linear. It foregrounds process, digression, and discovery rather than a
straightforward recovery of “the facts.” Moreover, its first archival fragment
leads to further fragments, and more specifically, to an actual archive. Part of
what is discovered in the film is the archive itself as well as varying forms of
archivization. Thus, The Tailenders not only treats the archival fragment as a
point of contact with the contingency of “the real” but also simultaneously
interrupts any such unmediated relationship. The film articulates a tension
between the figuration of the archive and the use of its fragments, as well as
between the acts of finding things and reusing them (in this case, to make a
film). By refusing to assert a stable, linear narrative of the past, The Tailenders
offers an experience of confrontation with the vast yet always partial and
discontinuous archive of documents that precedes any construction of historical
understanding. Thus, I would argue that Horne’s film exemplifies an emergent
strategy within appropriation filmmaking for dealing with indexical traces of the
past while simultaneously rejecting any simple notion of “access” to historical
meaning. The Tailenders expresses and thematizes the desire for a coherent,
stable history confronted – and made ironic – by the unruly vestiges of its
passage, and it does so primarily through the logic of the joke. Indeed, on several
levels, Horne’s film is structured like a joke. This is not to say that it is overtly
comic (although it certainly is comic at certain points), but rather to point to its
particular productive “misuse” of the archival fragments it appropriates.
In this regard, Steedman has noted that deconstruction uses the form – albeit
not the affect – of the joke, which employs “the calculated naivety involved in
the literal interpretation of a trope,” thereby “missing the point, in order to make
another one.”8 Steedman, in fact, makes use of this joke structure in her own
book, Dust, using Derrida’s figurative notion of “archive fever” (mal d’archive)
to examine the literal way in which nineteenth-century archives harbored the
anthrax virus in the binding of books and thus could cause illness. Steedman
literalizes the metaphor of “archive fever” in order to begin historicizing
bookbinding and industrial diseases, including diseases often suffered by
“bookish” scholars.9 The joke, which literalizes a metaphoric trope, is thus a
form of “misuse” that is also, in this instance, historically productive. In all of
the appropriation films discussed in this chapter, metaphors associated with the
archive and the archival document are literalized, thereby revealing slippages in
meaning. In the production of this particular form of reversal, a phrase we
recognize as figurative is made literal through the particular way in which the
document is deployed. In this sense, the form of the joke can be considered to be
a particular, deconstructive operation through which a film may produce an
experience of intentional disparity for the viewer. The literality of these “jokes,”
however, is grounded in particular in the specificity of the indexical audiovisual
trace, thereby mitigating the New Historicist concern that deconstruction is
ahistorical and decontextualizing.
I would suggest that the affinity between the historical archive and the joke 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. In contrast to
Tearoom (see Chapter 1), The Tailenders makes very clear the line between text
and context, document and documentary, but Horne’s film recognizes the way in
which the documentary text itself is implicated in the production of particular
meanings, of transforming the literal fragment into something that takes on
metaphorical value. Indeed, the film never unequivocally differentiates itself
from the missionaries’ project of attributing specific meaning to archival
fragments, and this acknowledgement of shared ground between the missionaries
and the filmmaker herself who subtly critiques these missionaries has both
epistemological and ideological consequences.
The Tailenders produces jokes in a variety of ways. To begin with, Horne
herself actively “misuses” the archive of recordings collected by Gospel
Recordings, and “misses” the intended point of their archive in order to show not
only its ambiguous nature but also the ambiguous effects of “archiving” on the
communities the missionaries target. In the manner of the New Historicists,
Horne uses an odd archival fragment – in the form of the Cardtalk record – to
disrupt the grand narrative of the West’s “civilizing” the non-Western world
through religion and technology. Never appearing onscreen, Horne follows a
group of Gospel Recordings missionaries to the Solomon Islands; Baja,
California; and India to document them carrying out their work. Rather than
focusing solely on the missionary organization, however, Horne uses their hand-
cranked record player and archive of Bible recordings to explore the experiences
of the consumers of the missionaries’ wares, the power of the disembodied
voice, and the complexities of transporting and translating a particular message
across languages and cultures. Without ever overtly condemning their project,
Horne is able to use Gospel Recording’s archival mission to trace the legacy of
colonialism and the flow of evangelism, in concert with the spread of global
capitalism and consumerism, into poverty-stricken communities whose traditions
and languages are quickly being quashed by all these forces. Thus, while telling
the history of Gospel Recordings through the archival traces they have collected,
Horne also tells another history, which is one of exploitation, oppression, and
extinction rather than one of uplift and salvation.
On this most basic level, the film’s use of archival fragments can be seen as a
joke on Gospel Recordings in which archival irony is deployed to critical effect.
Yet The Tailenders also emphasizes the breakdown of any clear opposition
between subject and object, in this case between the filmmaker and the
missionaries. Indeed, the film is also concerned with its own textuality, as well
as with the question of textuality itself. Horne’s voiceover, while not the male
voice of authority associated with more traditional documentary practice, is, like
the sound that emanates from the Gospel recordings, disembodied. Rather than
ignore this “voice of God” transcendence, Horne interrogates the form as she
mobilizes it. Over images of sound recording and playback devices, her
disembodied voice asks, “Why are disembodied voices so captivating? …
Separated from its body, the voice becomes superhuman. It can speak to more
people than any single person could. Evangelists began using the disembodied
voice in the 1920s and 1930s.” So, too, one might add, did documentary
filmmakers, who began using “voice of God” narration at that time. In fact, the
film slyly points to the fact that the Gospel Recordings records literalize the
notion of the “voice of God” to which conventional documentaries aspire since
transmitting God’s words is precisely what the missionaries are trying to do.
Moreover, without overt wordplay, Horne metaphorizes the notion of
“Cardtalk,” a card that literally talks, asking what it means for an inorganic
object (like a record, like a film) to speak with – and substitute for – a human
voice. Thus, without being overtly comic, Horne not only mobilizes the structure
of the joke in order to move from a literal and singular archival object to much
broader questions of power in which her own practice is implicated, but also
disrupts the convention of the documentary voiceover that so often, like the
voices in the missionary recordings, speaks with disembodied and transcendental
authority.
The Cardtalk record player, which emits the disembodied voice, derives from a
much larger archive of such voices, and the film points toward a consideration of
the power of archives in general. Horne’s film functions, in many ways, as a
meditation on the processes of archiving and the collection of the indexical trace,
in this instance the audio trace. Like the disembodied voice, archives have
power. As Derrida has pointed out, the archives in ancient Greece were
administered by “archons,” who controlled the gathering and preservation of
documents as well as their interpretation and hence their meaning.10 Here, the
Gospel Recordings missionaries take on the role of the archons, choosing what is
to be collected. Without overtly judging the collection of recordings, The
Tailenders produces a sense of ambivalence about the missionaries’ archive,
which contains recordings of over 5,000 languages and dialects, many of which
are no longer spoken or are soon to be lost. Clearly, there is an allure to this
archive of dead or disappearing languages, but there is also a clear sense of the
archive’s selectivity, the fact that whoever decides what to archive also controls
what traces will be available in the future. On the one hand, these are valuable
indexical traces of certain languages that are gone or soon to be gone. Indeed, it
is difficult not to admire an organization that has been able to amass and
preserve recordings in so many languages and dialects. On the other hand, this
admiration is accompanied by the realization that these recordings are only of
Christian Bible stories: what is saved is determined by the missionaries, who
have the privilege of deciding what counts.
Yet (and this is part of the joke, too), the film also points to the fact that
archives and the indexical traces they preserve often escape the control of the
archons. These traces mean more than the archons might intend or wish. Mary
Ann Doane, following Friedrich Kittler, has suggested that the ability of
technologies of mechanical reproduction to create indexical traces holds both the
allure of the preservation of the past and the threat of preserving too much, of
generating only an “archive of noise.”11 New Historicists Gallagher and
Greenblatt also emphasize the seductive lure of the archive as the place where
one may encounter “the touch of the real” and the “luminous detail,”12 but, at
the same time, they acknowledge the potential problem of the practice of
counterhistory, in which anything may constitute a trace of the real.13 Horne’s
film expresses a similar experience of allure and threat. For one thing, the
missionaries’ recordings themselves go beyond the control of meaning as
intended by the missionaries. Most fundamentally, the film illustrates the
problem of the subtle transformations of meaning inherent even in an “accurate”
translation from one language to another. Furthermore, in one interview, a
Gospel Recordings member discusses some of the additional problems of
making recordings in languages that the missionaries themselves do not
understand. Sometimes, he explains, the translators themselves “misuse” the
recording process, making mistakes and taking liberties with the Biblical stories,
as in the instance of one translator who turned the story of The Prodigal Son into
the story of The Prodigal Pig. The intended Biblical meaning is transformed into
something different, if not into apparent “nonsense.” Even more crucial to the
“archive of noise” in the film, however, are the literal noises on these missionary
soundtracks. Missionary interviews and written archives attest to the fact that
local conditions often do not allow for clean, crisp recording. Crickets, domestic
animals, children playing, and other noises are captured on the recording and
cannot be eliminated. The “thickness” of the indexical sound recording produces
an unintended encounter with and description of “the real” and thus generates
the threat – for the missionaries – of excess and inexhaustibility and of losing
control of meaning. However, rather than seeing “noise” as a threat, The
Tailenders celebrates its liberatory effect in the breakdown of the missionaries’
control. For Horne, the problems encountered by Gospel Recordings point to the
fact that local realities cannot be fully contained or silenced by the proselytizing
voice of Western missionaries and the global marketplace. An archive of
instrumental power is subverted, (mis)used for different ends – or for no end at
all but play. While, on the one hand, the film satirically narrates the archive as an
instrument of social control rather than of truth, it also reasserts the comedy –
the joke – of the archive as a site of misuse, play, and liberation from these very
sources of control.
Appropriately, the film itself refuses to offer a definitive account of the
historical significance of the archival documents it mobilizes. Like the New
Historicists, Horne uses archival fragments and anecdotes not to construct a
grand narrative but to throw such narratives off track without establishing any
other unitary meaning. The film offers potential insights into the archival process
and its consequences and yet, by withholding explicit judgment, it hovers on the
edge of itself becoming “noise.” It works to provoke and evoke rather than to
judge or explain. In the end, although we know much more about it, the
disembodied voice emanating from the Cardtalk record player remains a subtly
disturbing enigma.
Indeed, I would argue that the structure of The Tailenders and the jokes it
mobilizes is most closely aligned with Hayden White’s notion, in Metahistory,
of historical satire, which he contrasts with that of the historical romance. He
writes that romance is “a drama of the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over
vice, of light over darkness, and of the ultimate transcendence of man over the
world in which he was imprisoned by the Fall.” Satire is the opposite:

a drama dominated by the apprehension that man is ultimately a captive of the

world rather than its master, and by the recognition that, in the final analysis,
human consciousness and will are always inadequate to the task of
overcoming definitively the dark force of death.14

If the Gospel Recordings missionaries are enacting a romance of the archive,

seeking to create and preserve their Bible stories in every language and dialect
so that all of the people of the world may be saved through the acceptance of
Christian doctrine, The Tailenders recognizes the inability of any narrative to
create a single, stable history in the face not only of the passage of time and of
the inevitability of death but also of the contemporary proliferation of archival
documents. The vacillation between the literal and the metaphoric, and the very
glut of signification, renders the presumed meaning – let alone mastery – of any
signification suspect. No matter how many archival documents we may uncover
(or perhaps because we have uncovered too many), a comprehensive – and
comprehensible – history is always just out of reach.
If there is one overarching joke to which The Tailenders subscribes, it may be
that, when it comes to history, the joke is on us. Nevertheless, along with this
irony, the joke is also comic. Freud notes that the joke is associated not only
with anxiety but also with freedom, play, and the opportunity to think outside the
habitual confines of rational thought.15 The liberatory potential of the joke – the
possibility for a playful attitude toward history in the act of writing it – allows
Horne’s film to reassert the partial redemption offered by the comic. In addition
to this, according to White, comedy in historical emplotment opens up the
possibility of some partial redemption. He writes, “In Comedy, hope is held out
for the temporary triumph of man over his world by the prospect of occasional
reconciliations of the forces at play in the social and natural worlds.”16 The
missionaries have an agenda that we may not support, but the people whom they
attempt to convert assert their own identities and mark their own presence in
these recordings in a variety of ways, subverting the authority of those who seek
their meaning as the only true one. Furthermore, the missionaries, too, are
subverted by their very belief in a unitary meaning that drives their mission of
recording and translation; the joke is on them: Prodigal Pig, indeed. The
Tailenders produces, shares, complicates, and subverts meanings in such a way
that provokes laughter (a laughter, in this case, unintended by the archons). It
thereby eludes both the paralysis induced by the notion that nothing means
anything and the rule of the archons who believe their meaning is absolute.
Of course, Horne is not alone in her attempt to confront and tackle the
excesses and absences within the archive. Like The Tailenders, Rebecca Baron’s
okay bye-bye (1999) both represents and interrogates archival forms. It takes an
epistolary form and is a cinematic “letter” addressed to an unspecified “you”
from a quasi-autobiographical “I” narrated by the filmmaker.17 Here, again, the
film is structured around a joke that literalizes a metaphor of the archive. The
letter is, of course, one of the most common forms of (non-indexical) archival
document. Indeed, along with the official record, the written letter may be the
archival document par excellence. In this film, a fragment of found film was not
only the actual instigation of the film but also became the impetus for the
narrator’s search to understand its meaning in relation to herself. In a few silent
seconds of a Super-8 film fragment, a Cambodian man gestures and talks, as if
telling an exciting story (Figure 4.2). The filmmaker/narrator – who are not
entirely coincident – found this piece of film, labeled with the name of a
Cambodian city, on a sidewalk in San Diego, California, and it serves as a
starting point for (among other things) an investigation of the Cambodian
genocide under Pol Pot, the role of the United States in Cambodia during the
Vietnam War, and the Cambodian immigrant population in Southern California.
The film makes use of a variety of found documents: microfiche copies of The
New York Times, old ethnographic and military footage, and – most strikingly –
the online databases of photographs of the victims of the Cambodian genocide,
taken, in fact, by Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge in the S-21 camp right before the
prisoners were shot and killed. All of these archival documents are explicitly
presented as found by the filmmaker/narrator, not simply given. In fact, the film
– the form of a letter – is very much about the personal process through which
these further fragments were discovered, and about their promise of an historical
coherence and comprehension that ultimately cannot be realized.
 FIGURE okay bye-bye (Rebecca Baron, 1998). Courtesy of the artist.
4.2

Steedman points out that like the reader of a letter sent to someone else, the
historian who uncovers any object in the archive will always, in some sense,
steal or misuse it. She writes:

The Historian who goes to the Archive must always be an unintended reader,
will always read that which was never intended for his or her eyes. Like
Michelet in the 1820s, the Historian always reads the fragmented traces of
something else … an unintended, purloined letter.18

okay bye-bye literalizes this situation by not only enacting this historian’s
trespass and theft of someone else’s letter (the footage found on the sidewalk)
but also actually putting the viewer in the same position in relation to the film.
Indeed, we never find out exactly who the narrational “I” is or to whom she is
writing, but we remain intensely aware that we are reading (or hearing) someone
else’s letter, now ambiguously addressed to us.
While the epistolary format puts the film viewer in the position of an
unintended reader, the narrator is explicitly aware that she herself is reading a set
of “letters” that are not addressed to her. The S-21 archive is perhaps the most
distressing of these, for its contents were “written” by the Khmer Rouge, who
took pictures of their victims moments before their deaths. To whom could these
images have been addressed? For what purpose were they intended? Is this some
grisly historical joke? The Khmer Rouge photographers surely could not have
imagined the contexts into which the images they made would be put: a museum
exhibit, a coffee table book, an online database, or an experimental documentary
film. These “letters,” “sent” by the Khmer Rouge (perhaps to themselves), have
been archived, appropriated, and “misused.” Thus, like The Tailenders, Baron’s
film raises the question of how archival documents circulate and how they are
made to speak according to circumstances that long postdate their production.
The narrator of okay bye-bye also consciously realizes that she is responding to
the appropriated images in what might seem inappropriate ways: finding strange
beauty and uncanny attraction in the people’s hair and beards, the lighting of the
shots. Certain thoughts, it seems, are inappropriate to the objects, and yet there is
no denying the aesthetic allure of these death masks, now archived online. Here,
the digital archive in particular raises questions about the leveling of images and
their meanings. The digital archive, and perhaps any technology of memory, is
both selective and valueless. What finds its way into the digital archive depends
on who finds what images and chooses to make them available. Furthermore, all
images on the internet have the potential for a problematic equivalence because
of their endless number and their often random emergence. At the same time, the
utopian dream of the internet and the digital archive is that of access,
communication, and connection: the potential for relatives of the S-21 victims to
recover their dead through the web. While the first view coincides with the
recognition of the possibility of archival meaninglessness, the second offers
some hope for the redemption of meaning.19
Thus, the found fragment of film (a piece of detritus on the street) that
generates the epistolary missives of the narrator and the many archival fragments
shown in okay bye-bye remain equivocal and ambivalent. They neither cohere as
a unified narrative nor establish a definitive meaning. Instead, 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.
Nonetheless, the film asserts the need to continue to sort through archival traces
even if they will never yield any definitive conclusions. Thus, this film is
explicitly about memory and how technologies of archiving affect what and how
a culture remembers as well as what and how it forgets. Baron’s film 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. Indeed, the film fragment
that sets off the narrative is ultimately inassimilable to narrative; its meaning is
left open and unresolved. Although films categorized as “found footage films”
often engage with the archive in various ways, okay bye-bye may be better
classified as a “finding footage film,” in which the found fragment provides only
a starting point for the documentary filmmaker’s confrontation with and attempt
to convey some aspect of the historian’s impossible task. The film discovers not
only a fragment but also the vast archives that give the fragment the promise –
unfulfilled, because it cannot be fulfilled – of meaning.
The Watermelon Woman (Cheryl Dunye, 1996) and Bontoc Eulogy (Marlon
Fuentes, 1995) are also structured around archival fragments and can be read as
“jokes” that are not necessarily comic. However, unlike the jokes in the films
above that are based on reversals of literalization and metaphorization, these
jokes are based on “tricking” the audience through the simulation of the archive
effect and then revealing the trick in a form reminiscent of the “punch line.”
While these films bear some similarity to Peter Jackson and Costa Botes’ fake
documentary Forgotten Silver (see Chapter 2) in that they initially present
themselves as documentaries, they differ in that they explicitly reveal their
fictionality in the end titles and credits.
In The Watermelon Woman, a “scripted documentary” in which Dunye plays a
filmmaker also named Cheryl making a film called The Watermelon Woman, we
learn about Fae Richards, an African-American actress, nicknamed “The
Watermelon Woman,” who acted in a number of Hollywood films in the 1930s
and is “rediscovered” by Cheryl during the course of the film.20 Cheryl
continues to research Richards’ life and discovers that Richards was, like Cheryl,
a lesbian who had an affair with a white woman director. The film follows
Cheryl as she interviews various people about Fae Richards and her life and as
she investigates a lesbian community archive called The Center for Lesbian
Information and Technology (CLIT), where the archivist attempts to prevent
Cheryl from photographing any of the poorly preserved artifacts. By the end of
the film, Fae Richards has emerged as an elusive but believable and complex
historical figure. However, when the credits roll, we read, “Sometimes you have
to create your own history. The Watermelon Woman is fiction. Cheryl Dunye.
1996.” If the viewer has not realized by this point that the Watermelon Woman,
Fae Richards, is a fictional character, the joke is on the viewer who must later
reevaluate her experience of the film.21
Robert Reid-Pharr has read The Watermelon Woman in terms of its ability to
force us to recognize our own investment in particular kinds of “evidence.” He
writes of a viewer who saw the film – presumably including the title at the end –
and, in spite of the “punch line,” told Dunye that if she wanted more information
about Fae Richards, she could go talk to the Richards family in North
Philadelphia. Reid-Pharr interprets this anecdote thus:

The film does its work too well. Dunye uncovers the way an essentially
materialist conception of history has become so deeply ingrained in our
discourses of identity that, even when audiences are told explicitly that the
object they are being offered is fake, they will insist on the object’s
authenticity if it is offered alongside a formulaic allegiance to the notion of a
material reality behind the ephemeral image.22

Of course, this desire to believe in Fae Richards despite her stated fictionality is
related to the allure of the historical project’s “raising the dead” and to what I
have called the “lure” of the newly “found” document, which generates a
powerful desire to believe in its authenticity and evidentiary value – a desire that
operates even when such “found” documents and their archive effect are faked
(see Chapter 2). However, the simulation of archival footage of Fae Richards
also fills a “gap” in the historical record that has ideological and ethical
consequences that simulated “archival” documents in many other fake
documentaries do not. Reid-Pharr notes that Dunye’s film draws our attention to
the fact that authentic indexical representations of African-Americans and
lesbians tend to be absent from the archive. The images that are available are
“always lacking.”23 Thus, Dunye attempts to fill this lack with archival
documents that are not, in fact, found – that is, by simulating the archive effect.
There is much more at stake, however, in this fakery than in that of Forgotten
Silver. Although the possible existence of an early film pioneer from New
Zealand may be important to some (and certainly to many New Zealanders), the
general lack of images – at least, positive and complex images – of African-
Americans, lesbians, and particularly African-American lesbians elides the
histories of whole groups of people who existed, but have been excluded from
the archive. Dunye has said that she wants to build a “visual language for black
lesbian life that focuses on our creativity, our culture, and our concerns about a
world where we are forgotten.”24 As film historian and theorist Kathleen
McHugh points out,

Dunye’s use of the term forgotten rather than the often-used invisible shifts the
focus of her endeavor from a theoretical quality ascribed to women overall
 (‘invisible’) to altering a situation in which black lesbians have been put by the
active agency of others (‘forgotten’).25

Indeed, while the fictional New Zealand filmmaker Colin McKenzie of

Forgotten Silver, who, despite the implications of the film’s title, was never
really “forgotten” since he never really existed (surely a straight, white man’s
story of invention and art would likely have gained admittance into the archive),
real African-Americans, lesbians, and African-American lesbians have been
actively forgotten by historians. Thus, to simulate “found” footage of Fae
Richards, “The Watermelon Woman,” and to flesh out her complex biography
and identity is to place a single fictional figure in a space in which many very
real figures once stood but were not acknowledged or their traces preserved in
the archive. The Richards we see on the screen thus functions as a placeholder
for those women who existed but were never admitted – except as stereotypes
and clichés – into the archive. In this joke, the fictional Watermelon Woman
becomes a metaphor for the literal women whose stories are irretrievable.
In a similar fashion, Bontoc Eulogy fakes an archival document in order to fill
in a very real “gap” in the historical archive. Like Dunye, Fuentes constructs a
character, Markod, who both did and did not actually exist. The film begins – in
a manner strikingly similar to The Tailenders – with a man (Fuentes) setting a
record in a record player. In the next few scenes, we come to understand that
Markod was the grandfather of the narrator, who seems to be Fuentes himself,
and that he was one of the Igorot men brought from the Philippines to St. Louis
to be put on exhibit for the 1904 World’s Fair. Further, we are led to believe that
the record that we see Fuentes playing and from which a voice speaks in a
foreign language is a recording made at the World’s Fair of Markod speaking
about his experiences there. The voiceover narration, spoken by Fuentes, reads
as if Fuentes was translating from the first person account on the record to a
third person account of Markod’s thoughts, memories, and experiences. It is this
voice recording that structures the entire narrative of the film and on which the
staged reenactments of Markod’s dreams and experiences at the fair seem to be
drawn. Moreover, images of the 1904 World’s Fair that read as unstaged,
archival documents further flesh out the space in which Markod’s experiences
supposedly took place. In the end credits of the film, however, we find out that
the voice on the record is, in fact, spoken by an actor, not Fuentes’ grandfather
Markod, and that the words did not belong to a Filipino Igorot exhibited at the
World’s Fair but were written for the film by Fuentes himself. If one reads the
credits, the authenticity of all aspects of the film are thrown into doubt. Indeed,
the mixing of meta-archival documents and images of Fuentes in the physical
archive with the audio recording of Markod’s voice that we later discover is not
genuine complicates our relation to all of the documents that read as archival.
We are left with the impression that some of the instances of the production of
the archive effect were “real” while others we find out were not.
Like the “archival” documents of Fae Richards in The Watermelon Woman,
however, the “archival” gramophone record in Bontoc Eulogy serves to fill a
void in the archive – the absence of any description of the 1904 World’s Fair by
the people brought to Chicago to be exhibited as ethnographic spectacle before
an audience of gawking Americans. Moreover, other images in the film point
insistently at the reality of these people, from whom we have no recorded
statements. Fuentes’ film also directly confronts the physical archives of once-
living bodies, in this case, the skulls, bones, and organs of dead people, who
were not considered human enough by American standards to be given a human
burial. The sight of the body parts preserved in jars that we witness as Fuentes
walks through museums of natural history and anthropology grounds the fake
gramophone record of Markod in a violent and disturbing materiality. While
most of the indexical remains of the African-Americans and lesbians of the
early-20th century are insulting stereotypes, the Philippine Igorots have been
reduced to anthropological taxidermic body parts; and while the gramophone
record may not offer us the indexical authenticity we crave, these bodies that can
no longer speak suggest that someone – in this case, the filmmaker, one of their
indirect descendants – must speak for them.
In both The Watermelon Woman and Bontoc Eulogy, the archive effect is
purposefully constructed and “misused,” a fact we only find out at the end of
each film. Indeed, for their jokes, these two films each depend on a “punch line,”
an unexpected twist at the end of the film that forces us (if we read it) to
reevaluate everything that has come before. By “filling in” a gap within the
archive and then withdrawing the authenticity of this “completion,” Dunye and
Fuentes draw attention to that gap, make visible in relief an empty space that we
may not have noticed before.
Making 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. In her study of
gay and lesbian archives and strategies of producing public memory, theorist
Ann Cvetkovich suggests that “there are resonant juxtapositions between past
and present whose explanatory power is not causal or teleological; instead, the
affective charge of investment, of being ‘touched,’ brings the past into the
present.”26 I would argue that a confrontation with the gaps in the historical
record can “touch” us, can produce an “affective charge of investment” in the
awareness of what cannot be retrieved, even as a trace. When there is no trace
against which to juxtapose the present and produce the experience of temporal
disparity, an awareness of gaps in the archive may thus substitute for visible or
audible difference.
At the same time, films such as The Watermelon Woman and Bontoc Eulogy
assert the right of the filmmaker to create these lost records, to fill in the gaps in
the archive in order to at least imagine the voices of African-Americans,
lesbians, Philippine Igorots, and all of the other groups whose thoughts and
experiences were never recorded and certainly not preserved in any indexical
form. Media theorist Laura U. Marks, in her discussion of “intercultural
cinema,” a category in which she includes both The Watermelon Woman and
Bontoc Eulogy, writes that “intercultural artists are in a position to interrogate
the historical archive, both Western and traditional, in order to read their own
histories in its gaps, or to force a gap in the archive so that they have a space in
which to speak.”27 According to this logic, these constructed/created “found”
fragments, despite their inauthenticity, still offer an entry point into a past that
has been obscured. In this way, the created fragments operate as false metaphors
that nevertheless serve an historical, political, and emotional purpose.
Indeed, the archival fragments in these films function tropologically as a form
of catachresis, a false metaphor that names an object for which there is no
appropriate word. In his seminal linguistic study The Rule of Metaphor, Paul
Ricoeur explores the difference between figurative language and catachrestic
instances of language. He argues that while figurative language intentionally
places two ideas together, catachresis is a forced use of language in which an
existing word is used to fill a gap in language – hence, the “arm” of a chair.
Ricoeur explains, citing Pierre Fontanier:

The difference has to do with the fact that certain ideas lack signs: “In general,
catachresis refers to a situation in which a sign, already assigned to a first idea,
is assigned also to a new idea, this latter idea having no sign at all or no other
proper sign within language. Consequently, every trope whose use is forced
and necessitated, every trope that results in an extension of pure meaning, is a
case of catachresis.”28

Ricoeur further emphasizes that in true metaphorical use, “the thing that should
draw our attention in the figure-trope is its characteristic of being free.”29
Sobchack clarifies this defining lack of freedom in catachresis, writing that

borrowing a term from one context to name something in another, we speak of

the ‘arm’ of a chair or the ‘head’ of a pin for want of anything else we might
appropriately call it. Catachresis is differentiated from proper metaphor insofar
as it forces us to confront a gap in language.30

Fae Richards and Markod each function to confront and fill a gap in the
historical archive and Dunye and Fuentes’ uses of them are not “free” in the
sense that they could not choose from a genuine trove of extant historical
audiovisual documents. If their simulation of “found” documents is
“inappropriate,” it is because there are no appropriate documents to find and
appropriate. Indeed, it is the lack of records of actual 1930s African-American
lesbians and Philippine Igorots at the 1904 World’s Fair that forces these
filmmakers to create “found” documents that catachrestically mark and fill this
gap while nevertheless retaining it – at least for those who read the films’ end
credits. Thus, in each of these films, the joke is a means of making us look at or
imagine what is not in the archives, the dead who cannot be “raised” even
through their indexical images because such images do not exist. These instances
of the “misuse” of the archive effect proffer an historical trace only to snatch it
away, reminding us that the “touch of the real” is always both elusive and
illusory, based in a desire for contact with the past that can never be fulfilled.
Of course, filling in “gaps” in the archive is a common practice in the making
of appropriation films both experimental and mainstream. Makers of television
documentaries, for instance, frequently “add” audio and visual elements into and
around archival documents, a practice that raises questions about what makes
history “come alive” and what, in contrast, “distorts” it. As Paul Arthur has
noted, “Documentarists who would never dream of restaging an event with
actors do not hesitate in creating collages which amount to metaphoric
fabrications of reality.”31 Sonic collages of this sort appear in many mainstream
documentary films. Such films frequently unify disparate images of, for
instance, World War II by adding a “realistic” soundtrack that works to suture
found film fragments – of, for instance, soldiers fighting in different areas or at
different times – into a seemingly continuous whole. As in mainstream narrative
cinema, we are not supposed to notice the editing but to accept that we are
watching a documentary rather than a fiction film and, thus, a “real” depiction of
the war. In this regard, Steven Ricci has shown how archivists whose mission is
to “restore” a film often find that they have more sound than image and therefore
add pieces of stock footage to fill in the image track.32 The gaps within the
archive and between archival fragments are filled and thus obscured.
Other appropriation films, however, not only preserve but also emphasize
these gaps as gaps, which has the effect of making us aware of the dissonance –
both figurative and literal – between past and present. For example, in one scene
in Erika Suderburg’s Decline and Fall (2007), a documentary that examines the
vestiges of past empires, we see archival images of German women clearing
rubble from city streets and a title that indicates this footage was shot in Berlin
just after World War II. As the women pick up and drop the stones, the
soundtrack mimics the sounds of their actions, but the “foleys” never quite
synchronize with the women’s movements. Even as we watch and “hear” the
images, we are intensely aware of the absence of the “correct” sonic
accompaniment. Oddly enough, however, this “unrealistic” soundtrack on some
level makes history feel more “present” than might a more “realistic”
soundtrack. A shudder of historical awareness emerges from the slippage
between the image and the soundtrack, and we experience the archive effect –
and affect – produced in the temporal gap between visual and aural tracks.

The desire for historical “presence”

This shudder is deeply entwined with historical desire, the desire to know and/or
“experience” history, to make present what is by definition absent – the past –
when all we have left are its fragments. Philosopher of history Eelco Runia
explores this desire for history’s “presence” and argues that today the key trope
of historical narrative is no longer metaphor but metonymy, which points to its
own gaps in knowledge. For Runia, unlike the metaphor (which is concerned
with a “transfer of meaning”) the metonym is concerned with a “transfer of
presence”; that is, a transfer of experience and affect generated by the uncanny
contrast between words, objects, and contexts that are incommensurable with –
and install a gap between – one another.33 In other words, the metonym, like the
archive effect, produces a sense of disparity.
Thus, the metonym – like the joke that literalizes a metaphor – rejects the
seamlessness of metaphoric substitution and its promise of a comprehensive
meaning. Each archival fragment in the films discussed in this chapter can be
seen as a metonym in that it does not so much make meaning as offer a point of
entry – through something (temporally and/or intentionally) out of place – to an
experience of the uncanniness of history simultaneously both as an absence and
a presence in the present. Metonymy, unlike metaphor, refuses to reduce or fully
comprehend meaning: “Whereas metaphor ‘gives’ meaning, metonymy
insinuates that there is an urgent need for meaning. Metaphor … weaves
interrelations and makes ‘places’ habitable. Metonymy, on the other hand,
disturbs places.”34 Indeed, the films discussed in this chapter constantly question
textuality and signification and do not purport to be comprehensive or fully
coherent, closing the book, as it were, on the meaning of its subject. Rather, in
Runia’s terms (and much related to the New Historicists’ “touch of the real”),
they offer a brush with the presence of history. The films of Horne, Baron,
Dunye, Fuentes, and Suderburg do not try to contain the meanings of their
appropriated fragments and, instead, allow the found fragment to disrupt any
closed interpretation of the film as a whole. They foreground the experience of
intentional disparity – these fragments are openly “misused” – but the intended
meanings of these archival fragments within the appropriation films remain
ambiguous. Thus, the most powerful effect of each film is a sense of the
disturbing and overwhelming presence of the cultural archive, which is
seemingly infinite but is, nonetheless, always partial and lacking. In my view,
the found fragment always acts as a metonym – a partial and “out of place”
representation, an associated trace – of a past moment. However, while certain
films attempt to minimize the uncanny effects of the fragment (usually through
continuity editing, which sutures heterogenic gaps), others foreground and
deconstruct it. Indeed, in the appropriation films discussed above, it is the
metonym rather than the metaphor that offers an alternative to the satire of
historical meaning evoked by each film. Rather than offering us a “meaning”
that can all too easily be undermined and destabilized, these films allow for a
transfer of and an affective sense of the presence of history that cannot be so
easily dismissed. The joke, the fragment, and the metonym thus all hold the
potential for epiphany.
While all of the films analyzed previously are, at least to some degree, self-
reflexive and actively explore the question of filmic and archival meaning, the
desire for historical presence is also expressed in less self-conscious films that,
intentionally or not, also produce literalizing jokes that further illuminate the
status of the found document at this historical and archival moment. In fact, the
desire for an encounter with history – its presence – is solicited as much by
certain mainstream documentaries as by experimental ones. When television
documentaries advertise their “rare archival footage,” they often speak to the
potential viewer’s desire not only for historical meaning but also for an
experience of historical presence. A whole genre of films, for example, has
appeared based around previously “lost” or recently “found” images of World
War II “in color!”35 These films do not promise to provide any new
“information” or a radical “revision” of the established historical narrative but
rather a revelatory affective experience generated by found color footage of what
was previously only known in black-and-white. The advertising on the back of
the DVD box for WWII in Color (Vincent Kralyevich, 1998), for instance,
makes great claims:

Until today, our collective memories of World War II have lived almost
exclusively in black and white. But the recently re-discovered archival
materials of this remarkable series will permanently alter the way we look at
the war and those who fought it. Assembled after years of research, this rarely
seen color film footage offers a graphic and extraordinary new perspective on
the greatest military struggle the world has ever endured. … This is World
War II, quite literally, as you’ve never seen it before.

The promoters’ joke about “literally” seeing World War II “as you’ve never seen
it before” draws attention to the way in which the film does, in fact, literalize
this common figure of speech. Moreover, the themes of (re)discovery and a new
perspective evoke the lure of the found document and its promise of historical
revelation. Once the film begins, the rhetoric of the voiceover narrator, John
Thaw, goes one step further:

Only by confronting the horror of World War II can we truly know its
heroism. What you are about to see is raw and shocking. This is World War II
the way the soldiers saw it – in color and full of terror, chaos, blood and
courage. Only now, more than fifty years after the war, can these images be
fully understood. At the time, military leaders worried how the public would
react to these color films. The brutal images you are about to see will allow
you to experience a little of what these brave soldiers went through.

Instead of just any new perspective, we are promised not only the perspective of
the (American) soldiers who fought in the war but also their experiences.
Moreover, the narration suggests that while earlier audiences might have reacted
too strongly to these color images, we are prepared – in fact, primed – for the
shock. Furthermore, while the narration says that it is only now that these images
can be fully “understood,” the film has very little to do with intellectual
understanding. Throughout, Thaw reminds us that we are seeing the war “like it
was” rather than offering us new factual knowledge about it or a new
interpretation of these facts. Rather, as he narrates over footage from the Battle
of Midway, Thaw explicitly focuses on the archival status of this footage:

This historic motion picture footage documents the battle’s full fury, captured
by the unsung cameramen of the Navy Signal Corps, directed by the legendary
John Ford. But this is no Hollywood movie you’re watching. These men are
fighting and dying right before your eyes. … Remember, these are not
recreations. You are watching the real thing in real time, as the pilots saw it.

Since the film does not provide any new information about World War II or any
of its participants, its appeal is not to those who want strictly to acquire more
factual knowledge about the war. Instead, it feeds the viewer’s desire for an
affective experience of the “presence” of World War II, of “the real thing in real
time.”
The comments about the film posted online by viewers verify that the
experience of watching these films is not so much informative as affective and
generative of “presence.” One viewer, for instance, writes that

seeing things in color that I have always seen in black and white before
somehow brings them closer to home – it makes it easier to identify with the
people. For me, this helps bring more immediacy to the stories my stepdad
told me about his experiences in that war.36

Similarly, another viewer writes,

It is very different to watch WWII movies in color. Most of us are accustomed

to the black and white scenes that are so very familiar. World War II in color is
rather chilling. To see the war, its graphicness, its horror, even the mundane, in
color you get a more realistic view.

A third viewer writes:

I have seen many documentaries on WWII, most of those in black and white.
This surpasses much of the footage I have seen. Finally being able to see it in
color adds a whole new dimension to the war. It makes you realize that this
war was fought not that long ago, and the people who fought it, either at the
front lines or on the home front are still alive today. I am very glad to see it the
way they saw it, raw and brutal.

The emphasis on the film bringing the war “closer to home,” making it “more
realistic,” and the sense that it happened “not that long ago,” as well as a sense
of identification with the soldiers’ experiences point toward an experience of
presence that is not tied to factual detail or intellectual comprehension of the
events. Indeed, some viewers note the lack of historical analysis. A fourth
viewer suggests, “Just watch it with the sound off.” This response implies that
the voiceover – which usually establishes the meaning of the images used in
historical documentaries – is irrelevant and perhaps even distracts from the true
appeal of the film: its color images and their ability to evoke presence.
These color fragments, as metonyms, point to an historical world with which
they are contiguous but not representative or synecdochic. That is, the
experiential difference or disparity between these color fragments and the black-
and-white fragments of World War II footage with which we are so familiar is –
at least judging from many viewer comments – that the world toward which
black-and-white fragments gesture is somehow less “ours.” In contrast, the color
fragments point towards a world that brushes closer to our own time and space
without, however, being coincident with it. Thus, in response to another World
War II documentary that makes use of such footage, WWII: The Lost Color
Archives (The History Channel, 2000), one viewer writes:

If you weren’t alive during WWII (and that means a lot of you) then you
should see this. It has the clarity and appearance of the color footage from the
Vietnam War. I’m 30 years old, and this DVD made me realize just how
recently these events took place, and how swiftly they escalated. Color brings
a humanity and reality to film that strikes home. Some of the scenes are quite
disturbing because they’re real images of real events involving real people just
like us.37

This comment, which suggests both presence and the “touch of the real” the
New Historicists strive to evoke, crystallizes the common drive to find archival
fragments that allow us to almost – but never quite – bridge the distance between
past and present. As metonyms, these color fragments of World War II open
onto and feel closer to – although never coincide with – our own time and space
than the same images might in black-and-white. Thus, presence arises from the
experience of temporal disparity but also, simultaneously and paradoxically,
undoes this disparity, at least for a brief moment breaking down the boundary
between “then” and “now.” The above viewer’s comparison of the World War II
color footage to the (all) color footage of Vietnam suggests that the footage
reminds him of other metonyms of the past, but a more recent past, that of the
Vietnam War era, a time or context even closer to our own. Indeed, the viewer’s
comment that certain scenes are “quite disturbing because they’re real images of
real events involving real people just like us,” suggests that a renewal of the
sense of the presence of history may be an ethical obligation for the reader or
viewer of history – as well as for the historian and filmmaker.
It is important to note that this discourse of newly found color footage of
World War II is very different from that surrounding film colorization. If we
know that a film has been colorized, the newly added color may generate the
archive effect in relation to our awareness of the original black-and-white
footage – the image is found but the color is not. However, if we are not aware
of the colorization, the archive effect may not occur; we may believe we are just
watching an old color film. This is what many opponents of colorization seem to
fear, and this fear of colorization is very much linked to the fears surrounding
the use of digital technologies to simulate the archive effect by altering the
archival footage. Colorization has been applied almost exclusively to fiction
films, however, and would likely have different implications for many viewers if
it were applied to documentary images because of the documentary image’s
perceived obligation to “the truth,” which is frequently equated with its
indexicality – this despite the fact that most people see the world in color so that
colorized images are actually closer to our lived perception of the world than are
black-and-white images. Colorizing images of, say, Nazi concentration camps,
would likely be considered a travesty to the original footage and the very
thought seems blasphemous. To colorize World War II battle footage might be
regarded as slightly less sacrilegious, but even so it would doubtless be
contentious. When color footage of World War II is found, however, the archive
effect is enhanced rather than undermined as the footage is appropriated. The
“foundness” of this color footage offers a guarantee of its “authenticity” while
simultaneously giving us something revelatory – a greater sense of presence –
that allows us to see and thereby experience the war “anew.”
This promise of revelation brings us back to the joke and the literalization of
metaphor. Indeed, all of these films literalize the often nonsensical or at least
redundant phrase “in living color.” This phrase is often used to describe
something that is somehow really “present,” expressing our desire for images
that can bring its subjects “to life” (to “raise the dead”) while – at least when we
are dealing with the archive effect – simultaneously reminding us not only of
mediation but also that these “living” beings are, in fact, lost to time if not to
history. Moreover, the joke emerges once again in the use of the phrase “rare
archival footage,” a paradox in which the successful advertisement and
circulation of the object, particularly in the age of electronic reproduction, by
necessity destroys the fundamental lure of its referent. It is precisely “rarity” that
we seek – the lure of the (recently) found – not because it will tell us more but
because it will help us re-experience the “realness” of the past and its loss, a
renewed experience of the archive affect. Yet, of course, the irony is that in
finding and distributing the “rare” image, it quickly loses its rarity and, most
likely, the intensity of our experiences of the past’s presence.

The archive affect and nostalgia

It seems to me that in this case banality – rather than absence – is the opposite of
presence. The desire for presence is the desire for the archive affect, for an
awareness of the passage of time and the partiality of its remains, for an
embodied experience of confronting what has been lost, and the mortal human
condition. We seek to renew this affect again and again in order not only to know
the past but also to feel it. There is a danger, however, that accompanies the
archive affect insofar as it verges on nostalgia for a romanticized and idealized
past and a fetishization of the archive. In this latter regard, Bill Morrison’s
Decasia: The State of Decay (2002) is a stunningly beautiful film that visually
and aurally immerses the viewer in the loss through decay of nitrate film prints.
The film was originally part of a live performance that took place in Basel,
Switzerland in 2001. For this event, Morrison took a cache of ill-preserved
nitrate films he had found in the process of decay and reprinted them – including
the sections of the films that had partially decayed so that the images were no
long clearly visible – on safety stock. He then edited this footage into a visual
symphony in which faces and objects emerge and then disappear only to
reappear from “behind” the decay. Initially, the images were screened as the
Basel Sinfonietta played a score written by Michael Gordon, and this score later
became the soundtrack for the film as it has since been distributed. The final film
is nothing short of mesmerizing. The combination of the literally scintillating
images taken from nitrate – an Egyptian dancer whirling in a circle, a camel
walking along a desert ridge, schoolgirls walking in a line under the eyes of two
nuns – and the rhythmic cacophony of the music invite us into a trance as we
trace the film’s flow of legibility to illegibility and back again. Although there
are four “movements,” there is no explicit narrative to the film. However,
miniature narratives emerge briefly and then subside.
The images’ evanescence accompanied by the music seems to me to tap into a
desire for an inchoate “more,” a correlate to the sense of loss.38 Indeed, the
experience of watching Decasia is one of a constantly evoked desire for
something that has been lost, since these fragments are only metonyms for a
larger whole that we can never see or experience as they once were – the very
desire that animates the project of history itself. Nonetheless, were these images
not decayed, they would lose much of their affective power. Their magic lies in
their partiality, which emphasizes their metonymic relationship to a whole that is
gone forever and whose traces are also flickering their last (Figure 4.3). As a
result, the uncanny partial presence of the past may be overwhelmed by
nostalgia for something that not only can never be recovered but, at least in its
idealized state, also never was. Susan Stewart emphasizes the inauthentic and
ideological nature of nostalgia, writing:

Nostalgia is a sadness without object, a sadness which creates a longing that of

necessity is inauthentic because it does not take part in lived experience.
Rather, it remains behind and before that experience. Nostalgia, like any form
of narrative, is always ideological: the past it seeks has never existed except as
narrative, and hence, always absent, that past continually threatens to
reproduce itself as a felt lack. Hostile to history and its invisible origins, and
yet longing for an impossibly pure context of lived experience at a place of
origin, nostalgia wears a distinctly utopian face, a face that turns toward a
future-past, a past which has only ideological reality.39

This nostalgia has a frightening power to shape political movements that seek to
“return” the individual, the nation, or the world to an idealized past that obscures
history’s darker side – for one example, colonialism. In this regard, many of the
images in Decasia consist of colonial era footage of exotic “others” most likely
filmed by Western colonizers and tourists. There is a definite danger of
aestheticizing and fetishizing these images in the film and thereby ignoring and
thus becoming complicit with the violent gaze of colonialism.
 FIGURE Decasia: The State of Decay (Bill Morrison, 2002).
4.3

Yet nostalgia need not be a completely negative value. Svetlana Boym

distinguishes between “restorative” and “reflective” forms of nostalgia. She
writes:

Restoration (from re-staure – re-establishment) signifies a return to the

original stasis, to the prelapsarian moment. The past for the restorative
nostalgic is a value for the present; the past is not a duration but a perfect
snapshot. Moreover, the past is not supposed to reveal any signs of decay; it
has to be freshly painted in its “original image” and remain eternally young.
Reflective nostalgia is more concerned with historical and individual time,
with the irrevocability of the past and human finitude. Re-flection suggests
new flexibility, not the reestablishment of stasis. The focus here is not on
recovery of what is perceived to be an absolute truth but on the meditation on
history and passage of time.40
I would suggest that the archive effect and its accompanying affect have the
potential to lead to either a productive, reflective nostalgia – the awareness of
the presence of history – or to the more reactionary restorative nostalgia, which
Boym associates with nationalists and conspiracy theorists. Indeed, the archive
affect may encourage either a nostalgic desire to recreate the past in the image of
the “perfect snapshot” or a nostalgic but self-conscious awareness of the past as
past. On the one hand, Decasia constantly implies that there was once a whole, a
context that we can no longer recover; thus, Morrison’s film can be read as a text
that generates restorative nostalgia, a desire for a wholeness to which we can no
longer return. On the other hand, however, building on Boym’s suggestion that
the restorative nostalgic believes the past “is not supposed to reveal any signs of
decay,” we might understand Decasia – as well as the other films above that use
fragments as historical metonyms – as participating in a reflective form of
nostalgia, one that produces a sense of historical presence without demanding
that this presence be fully “re”-created and “re”-stored. Rather than attempting to
restore the nitrate prints to some original (and unattainable) state, Morrison
offers us the disintegrating ruin, the present fragment of a past that can never be
resurrected.
Moreover, in addition to nostalgia, Decasia produces a tension between the
visual and the tactile, the representational and the material, that constantly
renews our desire to see and perhaps to touch. Indeed, Decasia may also be
understood in terms of what Marks has described as “haptic visuality,” which
she contrasts with “optical visuality.” In her view, optical visuality appeals
primarily to the viewer’s eye and appeals to the viewer’s voyeuristic desire to
see and master while haptic visuality appeals to the viewer’s body as a whole,
transforming voyeurism into an embodied mimesis. Marks writes that haptic
images “resolve into figuration only gradually, if at all … The viewer perceives
textures as much as the objects imaged. While optical perception privileges the
representational power of the image, haptic perception privileges the material
presence of the image.”41 Marks’ description of the way in which haptic images
“resolve into figuration only gradually” is precisely what happens in Decasia,
although the images are constantly resolving only to then dissolve once again
into the marks of the film’s deterioration. Watching Decasia, we can sense – in a
tactile and embodied experience – the physical, material presence and
disintegration of the (original) nitrate filmstrip. There is a feeling that we might
reach out and touch that disintegrating filmstrip, if only to watch it fall apart.
Moreover, when our own bodies die and fall apart, we know that they will
similarly disintegrate, flesh dissolving slowly into earth. Decasia thus produces
an experience of temporal disparity that not only can be sensed intellectually but
also can be felt at the level of the viewer’s body.
Although haptic visuality need not be linked with any particular kind of film,
Marks develops this idea in relation to what she calls “intercultural cinema,” a
cinematic movement developed by filmmakers who lived and worked within and
across multiple cultural contexts, dealing with issues of displacement and hybrid
identity.42 She writes, “Instead of being wrenched from one context to another,
intercultural filmmakers multiply their contexts.”43 Her description of
“intercultural” cinema seems relevant to the archive effect, which is also about
the multiplication of contexts – homeland and diasporic space, the past overlaid
on the present – suggesting that appropriation films, at least those that work in
part through the production of temporal disparity, may be also be conceived of
as a sort of “intertemporal” cinema. Indeed, Marks’ theory of “haptic cinema”
converges with Runia’s idea of the metonym’s production of historical presence
rather than historical meaning. Drawing from Deleuze, Marks writes, “All the
events that prevent the production of images stimulate circuits of memory. These
points across which virtual and actual regard each other function as fossils,
preserving the ‘radioactive’ quality of the original contact rather than explain or
resolve it.”44 This “radioactive” quality may be another name for “presence.”
Thus, it is possible to read Decasia as a convergence of reflective nostalgia and
haptic visuality, both of which gesture toward an experience of the archival
image and the presence of the past that is embodied and affective in its
recognition of time’s passage and the process of decay. Decasia’s insistence on
the material presence of its appropriated images has the potential to make us
aware of the materiality of all things and to remind us that every fragment is a
part of a much larger whole, a past context that we can never fully reconstruct or
know.
Thus, Decasia can be said to tread the line between restorative and reflective
nostalgia, never fully renouncing the desire for a return to an imaginary, original
state; and yet, restorative nostalgia can be undercut by the joke. Indeed,
restorative nostalgia is always a kind of joke, however unintended by the
nostalgic. The joke is that we long for something that never really existed at all.
Decasia is structured like a joke in that it is, oxymoronically, a preservation of
decay, but it does not seem to recognize this irony and therefore cannot laugh at
itself. Moreover, its solemn music discourages laughter in favor of reverence. In
contrast, however, Hollis Frampton’s aptly named (nostalgia) (1971) pokes fun
at restorative nostalgia as it emerges in relation to the indexical photographic
image. “These are recollections of a dozen still photographs I made several years
ago,” the voiceover narrator (experimental filmmaker Michael Snow) says, as
Frampton’s film begins. When the first image appears, we find ourselves looking
at a photograph that seems to be a darkroom full of photographic equipment over
which the narrator tells an anecdote about a photograph. He mentions a man
named Karl Andre, a picture frame, and a metronome, none of which are present
in the image. As we continue to watch, a circular pattern begins to appear within
the image, growing darker and darker until we realize that the photograph has
been placed atop a lighted burner on an electric stove (Figure 4.4). As the
voiceover indifferently continues the anecdote, the photograph curls and burns
until there is nothing left of it but ashes. This is followed by an image of a man
posed with his face inside a picture frame and his hand holding a metronome.
We realize that the photograph described in the narrator’s initial anecdote was a
description of the image we are now looking at. However, as we see this image,
the narrator describes yet a different photograph from the one we are looking at,
and then this image, too, curls and burns to ashes. This structure is repeated a
number of times with different images and stories, but the story being told is
never about the image we are looking at but rather always about the next image
we will see. As the last image turns to black ash, the voiceover says, “What I
believe I see recorded in that speck of film fills me with such fear, such utter
dread and loathing that I think I shall never dare to make another photograph.”
Then, suddenly, the narrator seems to address us directly, saying, “Here it is!
Look at it! Do you see what I see?” The answer to that question, of course, is
“No,” since the voiceover – if it is continuing the pattern established in relation
to the previous images – is describing an image we have not yet seen and, since
the film ends, we will never see. Thus, like The Watermelon Woman and Bontoc
Eulogy, this is a film with a punch line, a joke on the audience that is always
looking at and trying to make sense of the wrong image.
 FIGURE (nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971).
4.4

What interests me here most, however, is the horror and hilarity of watching
appropriated photograph after photograph burn to ashes. As attested to by
audiences who collectively gasp when a film projector gets stuck and a single
frame of film sizzles and melts before our eyes on the screen, there is indeed a
horror to watching an indexical image being destroyed. Despite the fact that we
do not personally know the people or places in the images in (nostalgia), that the
anecdotes told are of no consequence to us and are, in fact, always describing an
image other than the one we are seeing at any given moment, we may
nevertheless cringe at the particular photograph’s onscreen destruction.
Ironically, in filming the disintegration of these images, Frampton is, of course,
preserving a copy of them on film. Nevertheless, there is a feeling that
Frampton, and by extension his audience, are committing sacrilege by burning
these photographs, a feeling that the film both invokes and mocks. The film
poses the question of why we should mourn for a trace of something we never
knew existed before. And yet, we do. In fact, it is precisely at the moment of
their destruction that these appropriated images come to have “presence” and
produce the archive affect. Like Decasia, (nostalgia) can be read as evoking
haptic visuality, but rather than resolving into figuration, these images dissolve,
reducing representation to ashes, while simultaneously laughing at itself and at
us for our “nostalgic” attachment to these images – which are preserved anyway
in the very film we are watching.
Some of the films of Raphael Montañez Ortiz also play on our nostalgic
investment in the found document. In his “Cowboy” and “Indian” Film (1958),
for which he appropriated footage from the fiction film Winchester ’73 (Anthony
Mann, 1950), and his Newsreel (1958), for which he drew on a Castle Films
newsreel of the Pope giving his blessing to a crowd, footage from the
Nuremburg trials, and an atomic bomb blast, Ortiz used a process in which he
chopped up the found film prints with a tomahawk, stuffed the pieces of footage
in a bag, and then assembled his film by randomly pulling pieces out of the bag
and editing them together in exactly the order in which they emerged. Chon
Noriega interprets these films (and Ortiz’s work in general) as standing “against
the archive.” Distinguishing Ortiz’s work from that of Bruce Conner, Noriega
writes that “in contrast [to Conner], Ortiz sought a more thoroughgoing
destruction/redemption of the original text than was available through Conner’s
use of irony and parody, both modes of critique that require a coherent, stable
source.”45 Indeed, Ortiz’s act of using a tomahawk to chop footage apart and
then assembling it according to a “principle” of randomness positions the
intentional disparity not in the moment of editing but rather in Ortiz’s
methodological conception. We perceive that the primary intended purpose of
the appropriated footage has been subverted and that Ortiz’s different intention
is to construct chaos and destruction rather than a carefully thought out set of
juxtapositions. While the very premise of Ortiz’s work is, at least initially, very
funny – a tomahawk? – we once again encounter the serious joke. In physically
destroying his source material, actually chopping apart the original with a
tomahawk, he transgresses the unspoken law of the archive: that every trace that
has entered the archive must be preserved in its “original” state, or as close to
this state as possible. Although every use of an archival document is a “misuse,”
Ortiz pushes appropriation to its destructive limit. Like Frampton, Ortiz rejects
nostalgia for the archival document and the archive affect. He throws his
tomahawk in the face of those who see historiography only as “preservation”
rather than also (and always) destruction and (re)creation. Noriega thus
interprets Ortiz’s work as a process of reshaping the archive to include minority
voices. He writes:
 For Ortiz, this participation [in the Puerto Rican social protest movements of
the 1960s and ’70s] included the destruction – or what he now calls
“deconstruction” – of the archive, and in particular the cinematic archive that
is Hollywood. He understood Hollywood both as a corpus that has been
preserved and made endlessly accessible (through television, DVD, and the
internet, as well as through a broader film culture), but also, in the Foucauldian
sense, as “the law of what can be said.” His work, in contrast, represents an
insistent structuring of what cannot be said, of that which is outside of what
Foucault calls the historical a priori of the archive, and that which achieves
“enunciability” only when it destroys the archive.46

Ortiz destroys both pop cultural and “official” archival documents in order to
make room for other voices, and, therefore, other possible histories. Although it
is perhaps impossible, let alone desirable, for us to eliminate the often nostalgic
pull of the archive affect generated so strongly by films such as Decasia that
aesthetically wallow in the disappearing fragment, Frampton’s and Ortiz’s films
remind us that the archival document should not always be treated as sacred.
Frampton asks us to reconsider our desire to preserve every last piece of
indexical material simply because it exists, and Ortiz’s destructionist films ask
us to imagine the official archive as an obstacle to certain encounters with the
past so that we may turn to other archives and sources and thereby open a space
for other histories.
Indeed, what may be most important about the archive effect and the affect to
which it may give rise is its opening of an “other” space. While restorative
nostalgia is reactionary and misguided, reflective nostalgia offers an embodied
experience of some time, place, context that is “other” than the present. A
fleeting experience of the otherness of the past generated through the encounter
with the appropriated metonymic fragment may also open us up to the potential
otherness of the future, the recognition that the context in which we live and to
which we (at least to some degree) subscribe is transient and that it, too, shall
pass.
I would argue that the stake of all of the appropriation films discussed in this
chapter is the ability of our society in general, and appropriation films in
particular, to engage in this present moment with the past, with the dead, with
the fragmentary traces they have left behind, and with the traces they have not.
All of these films, however obliquely, confront the question of death that haunts
each of the archival fragments – dead languages, dying cultures, victims of
genocide, those whose lives have been historically erased. Some things are lost
to the world, their only traces remaining in archival vaults, and some are lost
forever, having left no traces or traces that have faded and then vanished. At the
same time these appropriation films point to the need for new ways to sort
through the traces that exist, through all that does not go away. Steedman argues
that the logic of “dust” is precisely the logic of the indestructibility of matter.47
Matter may be transformed but it is never completely destroyed.
At this historical juncture, however, material traces of all kinds are being
transformed by digital media. As Derrida has pointed out, new technologies of
memory may alter our conception of the psychic apparatus and, by way of these
new technologies, transform human memory itself.48 Even before digital media
became the current dominant medium of image production and exchange, New
Historicists recognized the threat of excess in the cultural archive once it
expanded to include almost any cultural object. I would contend that
appropriation films that make use of the deconstructive literalizing structure of
the joke offer one way in which to deal with the paradoxical situation of the
overwhelming accumulation and presence of information accompanied by the
irreversible loss of historical lives that have left only a limited field of traces.
Following fragments and “misusing” them as metonyms that offer both an
ironization of meaning and a redemptive “transfer of presence” is thus one
strategy for navigating the excess and impermanence of the information age in
which only what is digitized matters, but in which it is hard to distinguish
between meaningful evidence and meaningless spam. These appropriation films
all use the found fragment as an occasion to obliquely address the larger
questions of how we can deal with textual production that has already far
exceeded any individual’s – and even any state or organization’s – control. If
every appropriation is on some level “inappropriate” and every reuse a “misuse,”
then the joke may be the form most suited to exploring the archive while
recognizing that this exploration and the mobilizations of found fragments that
ensue may always be “misleading” – that is, confronting us less with historical
“truths” than with our own desire for historical knowledge and “presence” that
can never be completely fulfilled.

Notes
1 Sections of this chapter were originally published as Jaimie Baron, “Contemporary Documentary Film
and ‘Archive Fever’: History, the Fragment, the Joke,” The Velvet Light Trap 60 (Fall 2007): 13–24.
2 While I use the term “archival document” throughout the rest of this study, here I use the term “archival
fragment” in certain parts of this chapter to emphasize the partialness of the archival document, which
is always a part of both the past context in which it was produced and the archive in which it has been
stored, whether it be an “official” archive or not.
3 Catherine Gallagher and Stephen Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2000), 6.
4 Gallagher and Greenblatt, 31.
5 Gallagher and Greenblatt, 49.
6 Gallagher and Greenblatt, 14.
7 Throughout her book, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University
Press, 2002), Carolyn Steedman demonstrates the connection between rigorous archival research that
seeks to disrupt grand narratives and the play of language of meaning associated with deconstruction.
8 Steedman, 11.
9 Steedman, 28.
10 Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, trans. Eric Prenowitz (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1996), 2.
11 Mary Ann Doane, The Emergence of Cinematic Time: Modernity, Contingency, the Archive
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002), 65.
12 Gallagher and Greenblatt, 15.
13 Gallagher and Greenblatt, 72.
14 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 8–9.
15 Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, trans. and ed. James Strachey (New
York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1960), 10–11.
16 White, 9.
17 In the interest of full disclosure: Rebecca Baron is both a filmmaker and this writer’s sister.
18 Steedman, 75.
19 For a much longer and more developed discussion of the digital archive, see Chapter 5.
20 The Watermelon Woman is not exactly a fake documentary since it is clearly staged with scripted lines
and continuity editing. However, it initially reads as an autobiographical restaging of the filmmaker’s
own life and, thus, it is unclear if the events in the film are “true” and restaged or simply staged.
21 This reevaluation may also happen with Forgotten Silver, but in Jackson and Botes’ film, the realization
is dependent on reading their “clues” within the text or on extratextual information identifying the film
as a fake documentary. There is no single, unequivocal punch line revelation.
22 Robert Reid-Pharr, “Makes Me Feel Mighty Real: The Watermelon Woman and the Critique of Black
Visuality,” in F Is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, ed. Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse
Lerner (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 131–32.
23 Reid-Pharr, 133.
24 Cheryl Dunye, “Building Subjects.” Movement Research, the Performance Arts Journal 4 (1992): 18.
25 Kathleen McHugh, “The Experimental ‘Dunyementary’: A Cinematic Signature Effect,” in Women’s
Experimental Cinema: Critical Frameworks, ed. Robin Blaetz (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2007), 340.
26 Ann Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings: Trauma, Sexuality, and Lesbian Public Cultures (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 49. Cvetkovich’s book explores the ways in which emotional
experiences, intimacy, and trauma have been and can be archived through the collection of ephemera,
memoirs, oral histories, and other forms of memory. While her concept of the “archive of feelings” is
concerned with how affect can be preserved in archives and texts, my related notion of the archive
affect concerns the viewer’s affective experience of documents derived from archives – or the cultural
archive as a whole – in appropriation films.
27 Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham,
NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 5.
28 Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor (London: Routledge, 2006 [1977]), 71.
29 Ricoeur, 71.
30 Vivian Sobchack, “What My Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh,” in Carnal
Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press,
2004), 81.
31 Paul Arthur, “Transformations in Film as Reality (Part Six): On the Virtues and Limitations of
Collage,” in Documentary Box 11 (January 1998). Available from www.yidff.jp/docbox/11/box11–1-
e.html. Accessed 30 June 2010.
32 Steven Ricci, “Saving, Rebuilding, or Making: Archival (Re) Constructions in Moving Image
Archives,” American Archivist 71, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2008): 433–55.
33 Eelco Runia, “Presence,” History and Theory 45 (February 2006): 17. It is important to note that
Runia’s notion of “presence” is not the same as that of Jacques Derrida. Whereas Derrida critiques what
he calls the “metaphysics of presence” by which a desire for a “transcendental signifier” gives rise to a
(false) sense of transparent access through language and other forms of representation to the referent,
Runia’s definition of presence is based on the idea of an affective experience that supersedes
intellectual – and linguistic – knowledge. In Runia’s argument, presence is in direct opposition to a
transparent sense of access to the past while nevertheless producing the desire for direct contact with
that past. As we shall see, however, in the discussion of nostalgia below, this notion of “presence” can
easily be recuperated as a form of metaphysical access to the past. See Jacques Derrida,
Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press,
1974), 49.
34 Runia, 19.
35 These include, among others, WWII in Color (Vincent Kralyevich, 1998), WWII: The Lost Color
Archives (The History Channel, Alastair Laurence, Lucy Carter, 2000), Japan’s War in Colour (David
Batty, 2003), Hitler in Colour (David Batty, 2005), The Color of War (The History Channel, 2006),
World War II in Color (Timeless Media Group, 2007), The National Archives WWII: In Color (The
National Archives, 2008), and WWII in HD (History.com, 2009).
36 All user comments on World War II in Color found at www.amazon.com/WWII-In-
Color/dp/B00003RQLS/. Accessed 28 April 2009. I have chosen to exclude usernames and, in the
interest of clarity, to correct spelling and certain grammatical errors.
37 User comment found at www.amazon.com/World-War-II-Color-Archives/dp/0767026977/. Accessed
28 April 2009.
38 This is a film, however, that literally “loses its luster” when transferred to DVD.
39 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 23.
40 Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), 49.
41 Marks, 162–63 (emphasis added).
42 Marks, 2.
43 Marks, 21.
44 Marks, 65.
45 Chon Noriega, “Against the Archive: Raphael Montañez Ortiz’s Destructivist Cinema,” Afterall: A
Journal of Art, Context, and Enquiry 23 (Summer 2009): 22.
46 Noriega, 22.
47 Steedman, 164.
48 Derrida, Archive Fever, 16–17.
5
THE DIGITAL ARCHIVE EFFECT
Historiographies and histories for the digital era

Defining the digital archive

In the British miniseries Shooting the Past (Stephen Poliakoff, 1999), a United
States corporation purchases a country house outside of London, which has, until
then, been home to an archive of ten million black-and-white photographs and to
the small staff who takes care of this collection. The archive staff believe they
will continue to tend the collection, but when American developer Christopher
Anderson (Liam Cunningham) arrives, he announces that he intends to sell the
most financially valuable images, destroy the rest, and disband the archive so as
to turn the entire estate into a business school. In response, the rebellious archive
staff attempt to prove to the initially indifferent Anderson how historically –
rather than financially – valuable the archive is as a whole and to persuade him
that the collection must stay together.
At first, the staff attempt to sway him – and the viewer – simply with the
beauty of the photographs (which are, in non-diegetic fact, photographs from the
Getty Hulton Archive), but that fails. Next, archivist Oswald Bates’ (Timothy
Spall) attempts to impress Anderson with his ability to find anything Anderson
can think of within five seconds. “I take it you’re computerized,” Anderson’s
assistant says to Bates. “You think we have computers here?” Bates responds. “It
would take years to get all this lot cataloged and online. Of course we don’t have
computers.” He points to his head, “It’s all in here.” Even after Bates finds a
picture of the Emporia, Virginia street on which Anderson grew up, Anderson is
undeterred. It is only when Bates finds and leaves a narrative trail of images of
Anderson’s grandmother, mother, and, finally, Anderson himself that Anderson
begins to truly rethink the value of the photographs and his plan to destroy them.
The lure of the found document finally ensnares the businessman. Astonished by
the narrative of his grandmother’s life, Anderson cries, “I come to this city, to
these buildings here, to this weird library that oughtn’t to be here anymore and
suddenly, bang, out of nowhere, I have a new history!”
In the end, Anderson modifies his deadlines so that another archival home may
be found for the collection and the photographs kept together. However, despite
the success of Bates’ scheme, after recording his last will and testament, Bates
ends the miniseries by killing himself. His suicide suggests his awareness that
the human archivist who knows a collection by heart will inevitably be
superseded by the efficiency of the computer search engine, which will take over
and dehumanize this process, transforming archives into webs of searchable
information rather than spaces in which stories may be traced through the careful
observation of the human eye and the capacity of human association and
memory.
Made and aired in 1999, even before the emergence of YouTube and other
kinds of digital archives, Shooting the Past is nostalgic for a past archival
moment before computers and search engines had become dominant in the
archival project. It is nostalgic (in the sense of wishing to restore the past), in
particular, for the material trace of the printed photograph and the material body
of the archivist. Moreover, with its emphasis on the miniature narratives that can
be traced through one particular collection, the miniseries poses the question of
where – and whether – we may locate such history or histories in this new
archival context in which documents are transformed into code and only
accessible through a computer with some form of search engine. While archives
such as the Library of Congress continue to endure and function through
documents that exist in material form, many such archives – including the
Library of Congress itself – now have digital counterparts: at least some of their
collections can be accessed online.1 Meanwhile, more recent digital and
unofficial archives such as YouTube, wherein posted documents do not
necessarily have a material substrate, flourish, expanding exponentially every
minute. In this regard, digital archives may contain digitized versions of material
documents or digital documents whose constituent objects never had a
counterpart in the physical world and have only ever existed as code. Viewed
within this altered archival context, Shooting the Past provokes the question of
what has been gained and what lost in the transition from material to digital
archives.
 Indeed, the very notion of a “digital archive” is made problematic by the many
differences between material archives and the collections of digital sounds and
images we now find online and on computer hard drives. Digital archives’ lack
of material traces stored in a physical space “professionally” organized by a
single archivist or group of archivists who actively preserve these traces
destabilizes the notion of an archive as a particular kind of professional
institution with the mandate of maintaining its constituent documents for the
future. Nevertheless, the term “digital archive” has become common parlance.
Nearly every website for any organization that deals with documents of some
kind – newspapers, museums, material archives themselves – has, in addition to
some material manifestation of documents, an archive of digital files that can be
explored remotely through a computer and an internet connection. The New York
Times, for example, offers all of its articles from 1851 to the present in a
searchable database.2 Even more contentious is the use of the term “archive” as
it refers to sites such as YouTube. Within certain limits (copyright laws, rules
established by the site about pornography, and so on), anyone can post anything
to YouTube anytime, so there is no unified oversight by a single organizing
entity or even significant principles of collection. In a sense, if YouTube is an
archive, it is an archive without an archon. Moreover, if YouTube is an archive
in which a huge and unselective number of digital objects are stored and can be
searched and accessed through a search engine, it may follow, then, that the
internet as a whole can be considered an archive. However, to call the internet an
archive may be to extend the term “archive” too far, obscuring important
distinctions and potentially making the term meaningless. If every collection of
data is an archive, then what is not an archive?
A number of theorists have struggled with this problem of when to bestow the
term “archive” on a collection of data. Some see a break between “archive” and
“database” or “document” and “data,” while others see continuity between these
terms. In 1978, long before the digital revolution of the 1990s, Paul Ricoeur,
writing in response to the new “scientific” historiographic reliance on data rather
than documents, distinguished between document and data:

The substitution of the new science of history for our collective memory rests
upon an illusion about documents. … The data in a data bank are suddenly
crowned with a halo of the same authority as the document cleansed by
positivist criticism. The illusion is even more dangerous in this case. As soon
as the idea of a debt to the dead, to people of flesh and blood to whom
something really happened in the past, stops giving documentary research its
highest end, history loses its meaning. In its epistemological naïveté,
 positivism at least preserved the significance of the document, namely, that it
functions as a trace left by the past.3

Ricoeur implies that the shift from material traces to (computer) data moves
away from an empathic human history towards a depersonalized version of the
past that does not do justice to actual people who lived and died. Thus, like
Shooting the Past, he suggests that the rejection of documents in favor of the
database (or, in his earlier term, data bank) may sever the human connection
between the reader and the dead and dehumanize history.
However, Ricoeur’s distinction between “data,” “document,” or “trace,” made
in 1978, does not account for digital images and sound recordings and their
historiographic appropriation. Although such images and sounds are composed
of computer code and are easily manipulated, they nonetheless may provide
historians and filmmakers with indexical traces of people living and dead. That
these images and sounds are, at base, computer data does not necessarily
impinge on their potentially historical value and effects. Thus, in part because
computer code may produce documents that represent something in the material
world, the difference between “data” and “document” becomes increasingly
unclear. One may speak now of “digital traces” and thus the “digital archive”
without being oxymoronic – although the oxymoron does and should persist.
Indeed, in contrast to Ricoeur and much more recently, Christiane Paul
suggests that the difference between a database – or digital archive – and a
material archive is minimal. She writes that, “while a database is now commonly
understood as a computerized record-keeping system, it is essentially a structural
collection of data that stands in the tradition of ‘data containers’ such as a book,
a library, an archive, or Wunderkammer.”4 In this view, anything that draws a
border around a group of objects becomes a “data container” and thus an
archive.5 Paul argues further:

Databases, however, do not consist of only the data container. A database

essentially is a system that comprises the hardware that stores the data: the
software that allows for housing the data in its respective container and for
retrieving, filtering, and changing it, as well as the users who add a further
level in understanding the data as information.6

According to this logic, the difference between the database (or digital archive)
and the material archive is not so much in what form its data takes – numerical,
indexical, or otherwise – but rather the structuring principles that govern how the
data is filtered, accessed and used.
Sven Spieker also emphasizes the similarity between the database and the
(material) archive and, like Paul, sees the distinction between them as based not
on the materiality or virtuality of their contents but on the ways in which they
are organized and, therefore, accessed and used. Thus he writes:

The principal difference between databases and archives lies in the fact that
databases are modular – all their elements can be regrouped in any way –
whereas the [principal of provenance]-based archive promotes the idea of an
original order that the archivist adapts and preserves.7

This loyalty to some preexisting (material) order is precisely what databases – or

digital archives – and the search engines that allow us to use them tend to
undermine. Their constituent documents are data in that they are modular and
can be viewed in a variety of orders, none of which necessarily corresponds to
how they were ordered in their “original context,” whatever that might be.
Ricoeur, Paul, and Spieker all imply that the difference between the digital
archive and the material archive lies not in their contents but rather in the
different relationships (or potential relationships) enabled and established among
these contents by both archons and users and, thereby, between the documents
from which histories are derived and readers of history. Following their lead, I
would suggest that the material archive and the digital archive produce – or have
the potential to produce – different archive effects as their constituent documents
are found and appropriated. From this perspective, the original form of the
archival document is relevant only insofar as it produces a particular kind of
“archivalness” as it moves through a material archive or a digital archive (or
both) and is appropriated into a new work. At stake in the different archive
effects produced through the appropriation of documents from material and
digital archives is their respective effect on how and whether we attribute
authority, historicity, and meaning(fulness) to the archival document as such in
the era of digital media. Furthermore, our recognition of a specifically digital
archive effect may shed light on how we conceive of the massive archive of
digital documents that has become so enmeshed in our everyday existence and
the potential histories that may emerge from within this seemingly infinite trove.

Digital historiographies
Unsurprisingly, in the past decade or so, digital archives have emerged both as
sources from which filmmakers may appropriate documents for their own works
and as venues for distributing and sharing these same works. Simultaneously,
digital processes have expanded the ways in which archival documents may be
repurposed. In their shared identity as code, all digital objects are equivalent in
terms of their usability. As Lev Manovich writes, “the translation of all existing
media into numerical data accessible through computers” has resulted in “new
media – graphics, moving images, sounds, shapes, spaces, and texts that have
become computable; that is, they comprise simply another set of computer
data.”8 Thus, any kind of digital object that can be accessed by a user can be
easily appropriated and combined with other digital objects in a new media
work.
Indeed, if one tendency can be said to characterize media production in the
digital era, it is appropriation.9 Established artists and amateurs alike are drawn
to the endless storehouses of digital documents that can be easily accessed and
reused in infinite ways. However, this tendency toward appropriation has taken a
particular turn. While there are still a large number of historical documentaries
being made using traditional official archival documents, it is difficult to ignore
the fact that the emphasis on temporal disparity and an awareness of the gap in
time that constitutes history seems to have been overtaken by a fascination with
intentional disparity and an awareness of the gap in purpose as well as social and
rhetorical context. Various forms of appropriation film – from “trailer-mashes”
in which footage from two different films is cut together to produce a new
“hybrid” trailer to “machinima,” films made by re-editing sequences of
computer game and video game play – abound on the internet and have become
full-fledged art forms. In all of these, the recognition of intentional disparity
generates the archive effect, often for comic and sometimes critical effect.
Putting aside the complex issues surrounding copyright, the shift to digital
media and digital archiving seems like a major democratizing of both production
and distribution, and especially the production and distribution of appropriation
films. Yet, once again, we confront the problem of archival excess, of how to
sort through all of this digitized and digital material so as to make some kind of
sense of it all. As of May 2013, 72 hours of video footage is uploaded to
YouTube every minute.10 Moreover, the contemporary fascination with
intentional disparity – which has expanded exponentially in the digital era –
tends to focus on the present rather than the past or on the appropriation of past
media works of fiction rather than of nonfiction documents. This is not to say
that no one is making documentary films using traditional archival documents –
in fact, more historical documentaries with “rare archival footage” come out
every day – but simply that the play with intentional disparity has grown to such
a degree to often overwhelm temporal disparity. Amid this excess of accessible
documents and the many unintended or “inappropriate” uses to which such
documents may be put, it might seem that historical awareness is elided. A
crucial question arises: how can we find and extract history from such excess
and overflow? Where is history in all of this? Indeed, one might read this
tendency toward the creation of intentional disparity rather than temporal
disparity as following William Wees, who identifies the “appropriation film” as
a postmodern form of found footage film, which, instead of “quoting history” as
does the “compilation film” or deconstructing the meaning “behind” media
images as does the “collage film,” instead “quotes the media, which have
replaced history and virtually abolished historicity.”11 Like Frederic Jameson,
who sees the postmodern situation as producing a “weakening of historicity,”
and an inability to confront history and gain the insights that may generate a
position of critique,12 Wees sees appropriation films as uncritical and ahistorical
pastiche.
I would argue, however, that certain contemporary appropriation films (as I
have redefined them) are, in fact, engaged in a form of digital historiography and
may be said to generate what I term a “digital archive effect.” These films may
not feel historiographic in that, as we shall see, they produce a stronger
experience of intentional disparity than temporal disparity. Nonetheless, I would
argue that they are not so much avoiding the question of history as theorizing
and enacting the problems we currently encounter as we confront the digital
archive in the pursuit of some form of historical understanding. In the analysis of
a number of digital appropriation films that follows, I explore several major
historiographic concerns that have emerged both in these works and in the
discourses surrounding them about the effects of digital archives on our
relationship with archival documents and with the past. These examples of
digital appropriation films and their potential generation of the digital archive
effect instigate an investigation into the ways in which filmmakers are coping
with the excesses and particularities of the digital archive and its implications for
how we may understand our relationship not only to the present but also to the
past.
One of the arguments made to counter the claim that the internet is itself an
archive is that there is no one organizing, supervising, or actively preserving it,
that there is no archon or even a body of archivists behind the curtain.13 Instead,
the organizing factor governing access to the internet and its constituent
documents are, at least at this moment, the various search engines that operate
on almost every major – and therefore necessarily searchable – website (the most
widely used is currently Google). Indeed, the convergence of the digitization and
production of digital documents with the technology of the search engine
suggests that what does not exist in digital format and is not easily found by a
search engine may cease to be part of the historical record simply because no
one will be able – or, in some cases, willing – to find digitally inaccessible
documents. Conversely, those documents that exist in digital form and are most
readily caught by the search engine may come to dominate the historical record
and be accorded a role that may be out of proportion to their original historical
significance (which we can, of course, only infer).14
Given the pervasive role search engines now play in our daily life, it is
unsurprising that they themselves have emerged as an object of investigation in
the work of many filmmakers working with documents from the digital archive.
Issues of the “letter,” the unintended reader (see Chapter 4), and the endless
digital archive are taken up by Andre Silva’s three-minute film entitled spam
letter + google image search = video entertainment (2005), a film whose title
explains its own production. Silva, like many of us, was the recipient of a
generic spam letter sent to millions of users, this ostensibly from a lawyer in
Nigeria. The spam asserted that, because the addressee bears the same last name
as his deceased client, the addressee is the client’s next of kin, and thus, with the
addressee’s help, the client’s money can repatriated to the United States,
whereupon the lawyer and the addressee can share in the transaction. Silva took
the spam letter and performed a Google image search for each word in the letter.
He then programmed the letter into the computer’s voice generator. In the film,
as each individual word of the letter is spoken by the computer, it is
accompanied by the first Google image that the search engine found for each
word. The result is a bizarre sequence of images that bear heterogeneous and
often incomprehensible relationships to the words they “represent” in the context
of the spam letter. For instance, the word “kin” used on the soundtrack in the
phrase “next of kin” is accompanied by a close-up of a cat’s face, and the word
“children” is accompanied by what looks like a child’s drawing of little green
aliens. Every element of the film is an appropriation drawn from virtual
documents that, like the letter itself, circulate in the vast, constantly shifting
archive of the web. The spam letter acts as the metonymic fragment that opens
onto this greater archive of metonyms (see Chapter 4), which the film then
further appropriates.
Silva’s film would seem – at least at first glance – to align itself with Wees’
definition of the appropriation film, according to which historicity and critique
are eliminated in favor of ahistorical and apolitical pastiche. I would argue,
however, that rather than being eliminated by Silva’s film, historicity, by its
absence, is precisely its topic. While this film is more likely to be classified as an
experimental film than as a documentary, I contend that it is because its use of
the archive is so disturbing to conventional notions of human intentionality and
temporality – of history – that the film is likely to be ousted from the realm of
documentary to be classified and contained in the category of the experimental. I
suggest, however, that it is a documentary precisely because it simulates and
interrogates the relationship between the contemporary reader or researcher and
the digital archive. Indeed, both its form and its content challenge the distinction
between “appropriate” and “inappropriate” uses of the found document as well
as any reified notions of both the intentional and the historical.
In this perverse form of epistolary documentary, the spam letter is intended to
be read – by anyone with a checkbook. The original intended context for the
spam letter to be read would seem to be the email inbox of any gullible mark.
Spam letters and most web pages are epistles sent into cyberspace that can be
read by anyone and interpreted by anyone who happens to receive the message.
However, the images undermine the (inferred) original intended meaning of the
spam letter. Torn from their intended contexts, these images have been
reorganized according to the deceptive intent of the spam letter and the inhuman
logic of the search engine. While the images may have made “sense” in their
original intended cyber contexts, their sources are so heterogeneous that it is
impossible to make any singular “sense” of their semantic value or sequence
when they are appropriated into Silva’s film. The sheer number of intentional
disparities and the speed at which they flash by overwhelms. Although the
internet’s field of messages may seem to present a utopian vision of the active,
agentic reader who has access to all material, in spam letter we once again
encounter an “archive of noise,” of meaninglessness or nonsense, of letters and
images not intended for us in particular, or perhaps for anyone in particular. This
Frankenstein patchwork of words and images reads as the digital archive talking
to itself about everything and nothing.
The letter begins with the phrase, “Dear sir, I’m Barrister John Lawrence, a
solicitor at law.” These words are accompanied by the following images: a
painting of a deer, a portrait of a man in eighteenth-century aristocratic garb, a
rocket, a photo of a barrister with a wig, a painting of St. John with an angel, an
anatomical drawing of a man’s armpit, fractals, the cover of a written report,
George W. Bush and Laura Bush handing out Christmas gifts to a group of
African-American children, and a row of what look like military trainees in
kilts.15 The only thing that can make “sense” of this sequence of images is
reference to its generation by the search engine. Indeed, if there is anything at all
that controls what is meaningful here, it is the search engines, inhuman
technologies of cultural memory (or its navigation) without affect or (human)
intentionality.
The digital archive effect in Silva’s film is based, in part, on the utterly
inhuman “logic” that determines what images will accompany each spoken
word. In other words, one manifestation of the digital archive effect may be
produced when human intentionality is removed from the equation and
supplanted by the intentionality of the computer algorithm. This digital archive
effect emerges insofar as, whatever these images were originally intended for by
their makers, that intent has been superseded by that of the machine. According
to Manovich, this removal of human intentionality is inherent to digital media.
He writes,

The numerical coding of media … and the modular structure of a media object
… allow for the automation of many operations involved in media creation,
manipulation, and access. Thus human intentionality can be removed from the
creative process, at least in part.16

Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin further elaborate, arguing that “computer
programs may ultimately be human products, in the sense that they embody
algorithms devised by human programmers, but once the program is written and
loaded the machine can operate without human intervention.”17 These
arguments raise the specter of all manner of cinematic and televisual computers
and robots that become capable of making their own decisions and turn on their
human creators. However, Bolter and Grusin qualify this dystopian image,
writing that “New digital media are not external agents that come to disrupt an
unsuspecting culture. They emerge from within cultural contexts and they
refashion other media, which are embedded in the same or similar contexts.”18
Thus, the search engine is not yet a robot seeking revenge on or domination of
humankind but, rather, a reformulation of the interfaces we use to access
material archives, which have always been unwieldy, leading us to both the
documents we desire but also to many that we do not. Indeed, while material
archives have systems of classification and retrieval, as we know, these systems
have never been able to fully account for the diversity of their contents. That is
part of the reason that searching through material archives may bring new
objects to light. In this sense, the digital archive refashions the material archive –
its pleasures and its problems. The unintended artifacts of the search engine as
the interface for the digital archive may, therefore, be seen not as something
wholly new but rather as a “remediation” (as Bolter and Grusin call it), an
intensification of the overwhelming and never quite organized systems of
organization used in material archives. At the same time, however, spam letter
foregrounds the fact that the organization of the digital archive results in vast
and incessant amounts of nonsense – of objects whose combination does not add
up to something we consider contextually meaningful. How can one think of a
stable relationship between linguistic and visual meaning – let alone historical
meaning – when every word may produce an image based on any number of
meanings associated with that word, of which the meaning intended in the
“original” context of the Nigerian spam letter is only one?
Yet, precisely because history is so thoroughly devastated by spam letter, the
question of – even the demand for – historicity returns in all of its insistence.
spam letter is terribly funny – literally. The most humorous moments are those
when a word in the letter is used with one meaning but is accompanied by an
image that is associated with another – and often literal – meaning of the same
word. For instance, the word “bears” in the phrase “whosoever bears this name”
conjures the image of a pair of frolicking polar bears. The possessive pronoun
“mine,” used in the voiceover to mean, “belonging to me,” is accompanied by an
image of a miner’s lamp. Other relationships require different kinds of leaps of
(il)logic, for Google image search, of course, is not based on contextual thought.
The resultant humor is thus informed by the threat of the archive (specifically
the digital archive of the internet) – that even uncanny double meaning will be
overwhelmed by meaninglessness, the “terrible” in the terribly funny. At the
same time, however, the film is terribly enjoyable because of its play with
intentional disparity, which suggests that comedy reasserts itself even within this
ostensibly nihilistic satire. Perhaps, the film suggests, in the face of the satire of
the breakdown of both meaning and history, the only possible response is to
laugh and go on seeking the past through its traces, in all of their terrible excess.
In spam letter, we see how the human archivist, the human historian, and
perhaps even the human filmmaker can – and to some degree have – become
irrelevant. Indeed, the credits read, “a video by: everyone else, and downloaded
by andre silva [sic],” suggesting that the filmmaker’s role and intention has been
relegated to the sidelines. While the film is certainly based on Silva’s idea, once
he put his plan in motion, the computer algorithm and the digital archive did the
rest. The search engine became the agent of the organization of digital
information, spewing nonsense – at least nonsense for us, but not for the search
engine whose only “sense” is that of the algorithm on which it is based. Human
intention disappears faced with the deluge of electronic data. Even the human
viewer is beside the point. If there is history here, it is history without human
bias, but also without human logic. This is a form of history – or at least, an
organization of archival documents – that no longer needs us. Thus, the digital
archive effect may provoke the viewer’s awareness of the possibility that human
sense may be bypassed and replaced by that of an agent who no longer takes us
or our desire for a coherent meaning into account. spam letter thus constitutes a
metahistory of the digital era.
Another major attribute of the digital era is the accessibility through the
internet of an infinite number of far-flung sites. Through video-sharing sites such
as YouTube where amateur performers of every stripe post their performances
(or those of their cats and dogs as well as their favorite appropriated videos), we
can look into a million little windows and see a fragment of life inside each one.
We, too, can then appropriate these fragments and use them in any way we see
fit. If spam letter gestures toward the potential for inhuman, nonsensical
production that lies within the digital archive, Natalie Bookchin’s Mass
Ornament (2009), a single-channel split-screen video running on a seven-minute
loop, offers us, by contrast, one model for navigation through the wealth – or
deluge – of accessible materials unique to the digital archive in a way that
produces an emergent kind of specifically digital “sense.”19
Mass Ornament sifts through the brief fragments of lives archived on
YouTube to find both congruities and incongruities in the bedrooms, living
rooms, and basements of hundreds of anonymous young people of different
genders, ethnicities, and (judging from the spaces in which we see them) social
classes, performing for themselves and – via YouTube – for the whole world.
The loop begins with empty rooms and moves on to images of these various
performers peering directly into the camera to make sure it is working before
each individual begins to dance. Then, as we watch these individual amateurs
trying out their moves, with no immediate audience other than the camera, the
number of screens in Bookchin’s image begins to increase, each showing
someone and somewhere different. As more and more dancers appear, each
alone in his or her own little square on the screen, Bookchin weaves their
movements together so that at times they come into synch, making nearly the
exact same movements – presumably imitating the dance moves they have seen
in music videos and popular culture. In unison, they twirl their bodies, shimmy
up and down with their backs against a wall, and perform handstands and
backbends. They look, at least for a few seconds at a time, like they are dancing
together before they again drift apart into their own, individual performances
(Figure 5.1). Bookchin further unifies these disparate clips by removing their
original soundtracks and inserting the soundtracks from two 1935 films, Busby
Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1935 and Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.
The title of the piece is an explicit reference to Siegfried Kracauer’s famous
essay about the mass choreography of the Tiller Girls, a 1920s dance troupe that
created geometric forms with their bodies. Kracauer saw this abstraction of the
human form as a symptom of the capitalist order and argued that the “mass
ornament” embodied the Taylorist logic of the factory, transforming human
beings into a set of moving parts in the service of a larger pattern that none of
the participating performers could ever see.20 Although Kracauer was writing
about group performances choreographed down to each identical step, the mass
ornament in Bookchin’s piece is one that she found, collected, and then
synchronized. While each individual dances on his or her own, records it, and
then posts the recording on YouTube, Bookchin, through her editing,
choreographs these individuals into a mass dance. Bookchin is not, however,
repurposing private documents for public consumption as in films such as
Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003). While each of the YouTube
videos was shot in a home, they are not “home movies” (see my reformulation of
the “home movie” in Chapter 3). Since they have been posted on YouTube,
presumably by the performer him or herself since each is clearly aware of –
indeed, performing specifically for – the camera, they read as having been made
for public consumption. Thus, the intentional disparity – and hence the archive
effect – here does not emerge from a movement of the documents from an
intended private context of reception to an actual public context of reception.
Instead, the intentional disparity derives from the fact that Bookchin has taken
all of these solo performances and turned them into a collective dance,
transforming individual, isolated performers into a dance troupe. When the
dancers suddenly come into synch, much of the pleasure of watching the film
derives from the fact that this synchronicity could not have been anticipated by
the performers themselves, that Bookchin found the pieces and brought them
together as one. Yet, as compelling as the moments of synchronicity are, the
differences between the dancers’ bodies, their individual movements, and the
background images of the private spaces in which they dance are equally
fascinating. We are permitted to look through these little windows to see where
other people – whom we will probably never meet and whose real names we
likely will never know – live: how messy their living rooms are, what kind of
wallpaper they picked out, what odds and ends they keep in their basements. We
also witness the exact way each girl tosses her hair and shakes her hips and how
each boy cocks his head and spins his body. Thus, the pleasure of the piece lies
not only in the patterns of sameness but also in the play of differences.

FIGURE Mass Ornament (Natalie Bookchin, 2009). Courtesy of the artist.

 5.1

Like spam letter, Mass Ornament does not look or sound like historiography
as we usually recognize it. There are documents but no chronological, causal
chain of events or a narrative with beginning, middle, and end. Indeed, since the
piece plays on a loop, it is possible to enter into the flow of sound and images at
any time (even if there seems to be a point where the performances themselves
begin); and given that the image is constantly fragmented into multiple screens,
their relationship is one of simultaneity rather than temporal progression. This
emphasis on the (literally) synchronic rather than the diachronic combined with
the overwhelming number of screens suggests the resistance of each of these
archival documents to narratively sequential comprehension. It points to the fact
that the plurality of documents in the digital archive – like those in the material
archive but, perhaps, more so – resists such causal enchaining.
At the same time, however, Mass Ornament puts forward a different model of
archival comprehension, pointing to congruence and incongruence, convergence
and divergence as a way of mapping a synchronic slice of the – recent but
quickly receding – past rather than its diachronic explication. In this sense, Mass
Ornament bears some similarities to Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht’s In 1926: Living
at the Edge of Time, a primarily nonlinear history book in which each
alphabetically-arranged entry describes in the present tense some thing or
concern of cultural, social, and ultimately historical importance in the year 1926,
the chapters “linked” together by cross-referenced keywords such as “reporters,”
“railroads,” and “gomina” rather than by chronological cause and effect.
Building on phenomenological philosopher Edmund Husserl’s notion of the
“life-world,” Gumbrecht – with irony made explicit in some methodological and
philosophical chapters – aims to recreate what he calls the “everyday-worlds” of
1926.21 Gumbrecht writes of the project in his afterword:

The self-imposed imperative to suspend sequentiality obliges us to minimize

recourse to the subject-centered concept of causality and to the genre of the
historical narrative. Thus, we must ask what discourses and concepts we can
elaborate in order to establish noncausal relations between the texts and
artifacts to which we refer. An answer is all the more difficult to find as we
have to expose ourselves to the unavoidable sequentiality of the text as
medium.22

Although Mass Ornament appropriates what are, or at least were, audiovisual

documents of contemporary “everyday-worlds” at the time of Bookchin’s
making, like In 1926 it attempts to circumvent sequentiality and cause and effect
in order to evoke a milieu. The technique of using split-screen and a loop
(although there remains some sense of sequence and causal relations) brings
Bookchin closer to Gumbrecht’s imagined historiographic ideal than his printed
book ever could. If Mass Ornament is not a history per se, it can nevertheless be
read as a model for an alternative form of audiovisual historiography that
sidelines narrative and sequence for a different effect: the experience of a milieu,
of everyday worlds that we can (almost) inhabit.
Furthermore, Mass Ornament also functions as digital historiography in that
the play between what is the same and what is different in each clip invites us to
think about the presence of both similarity and difference within the archive in
general and the digital archive in particular. There have always been patterns and
deviations to be discovered (and constructed) in the material archive; but the vast
expanse and variety of the materials available in the digital archive, combined
with its accessibility and searchability, offers us new means to trace and discover
such patterns and deviations, not just in the official documents of revered
institutions but in the brief public moments in otherwise anonymous and
disparate private lives. In other words, the digital archive expands the territory
for tracing such patterns, and the search engines allow us to quickly and easily
follow them across this digital territory. At the same time, however, as spam
letter suggests, the structures of the search engines also limit what sort of
patterns we may find. Bookchin says that, in order to find her appropriated
videos, she used search terms such as “me dancing,” “dancing alone,” or
“dancing in my room.” She further notes that as she found videos that were
relevant, she thought of additional search terms in order to find more.23 Her
film, then, is a result of following certain pathways through the YouTube
labyrinth.
I would argue that part of what is at stake in Bookchin’s film is our ability – or
inability – to trace patterns within the digital archive and thereby reestablish
some kind of (human) coherence and sense through these patterns. On the one
hand, Mass Ornament points to the fact that there are millions of amateur videos
in the digital archive from which to choose, no two exactly alike (except for
multiple copies of the same file), each a metonymic fragment for a single human
life and for the vast digital archive itself – a fact that can overwhelm all attempts
to theorize or come to grips with them. Like spam letter, Bookchin’s film
gestures toward the potential for total incoherence that lurks within the digital
archive. At the same time, however, the film also suggests that there are points
of similarity and coherence to discover through a clever deployment of search
terms. In fact, it is the act of tracing the videos’ similarities that gives their
difference a meaning and vice versa. Bookchin’s film emphasizes that only in
tracing pathways through the digital archive can we make both visual and social
sense out of its excess. In contrast to spam letter, however, which derives its
formal structure from a preestablished pattern based on the spam letter and the
computer algorithm that underlies the search engine, Mass Ornament is derived
from the human hand and eye in conversation with the computer search engine
so as to make human sense from the inhuman operations of a machine.
Indeed, Mass Ornament suggests that the digital archive effect may occur
when an appropriation filmmaker uses digital technology (the video-sharing site
and the search engine) to draw together a great number of what the viewer
perceives as previously disconnected archival documents and reveals patterns of
human behavior that emerge from their aggregation – patterns that were never
found or, more precisely, were never findable before. This form of digital
archive effect is similarly obvious in some of Bookchin’s other split-screen
works derived from YouTube, three of which make up a trilogy entitled
Testament (2009). In Laid Off, she synchronizes videos in which speakers
confess to their video cameras that they have lost their jobs; in My Meds she
transforms isolated speakers, who tell their video cameras about the
psychotropic medications they are taking, into a mass pronunciation of
pharmaceutical drug names; and in I’m Not, she orchestrates the confessions and
denials of men and women telling the world that they are or are not gay. At
moments in each of these pieces, several speakers pronounce the exact same
word or phrase at the same time, so that a single voice becomes a chorus. What
is crucial to note is that before digital video cameras and the internet, these
people could not have posted their confessions for others to find, and before
digital archives and their search engines, it would have been difficult, if not
impossible, to gather so many such confessions that participate in the same,
almost word-for-word discourse. While the technologies do not determine how
people will behave, digital technologies have created opportunities that did not
exist before, both for users who record themselves and post their videos and for
filmmakers like Bookchin who may appropriate them. Thus, aggregating
hundreds of those across the (English-speaking) world who are dancing alone in
their rooms, who just got sacked from a job, who started a new mood-altering
medication, or who need to tell the world that they are or are not gay has only
recently become possible. This form of digital archive effect, then, is based on a
movement from the singular to the plural, from disconnected documents to a
chorus – or chorus line – of voices and bodies working together, at least in one
appropriation film.
 Moreover, in tracing these visual and aural patterns across disparate spaces,
Bookchin’s pieces point simultaneously to the utopian promise of connection
and community that emerges in the digital realm and the dystopian specter of
conformity latent in these lonely videos. Indeed, in addition to visual and aural
patterns, Bookchin’s films also reveal the common social patterns inscribed
within each of these individual performances, the fact that each video is not sui
generis but, rather, emerges from a shared social, ideological, and historical
system that encourages certain kinds of bodily movements, speech patterns, and
media practices. The tension between sameness and difference or individuality
and collectivity in Bookchin’s pieces and in the digital archive more broadly is
also that between individuality and conformity. On the one hand, the anonymous
people in Mass Ornament – some of whom seem to have “talent” and others who
do not – are putatively expressing themselves as individuals. On the other hand,
as Mass Ornament reveals, they are also simultaneously doing what everyone
else seems to be doing – the same dance moves combined with the same impulse
to post their videos online.
In the 1930s, Kracauer was quite pessimistic about the mass ornament,
suggesting that the participants themselves were unable to recognize the violent
abstraction done to their own bodies. He writes:

Although the masses give rise to the ornament, they are not involved in
thinking it through. … The more the coherence of the figure is relinquished in
favor of mere linearity, the more distant it becomes from the immanent
consciousness of those constituting it.24

Similarly, the individual performers appropriated for Bookchin’s film will likely
never recognize their place in this new mass ornament as similarities are
transformed into synchronies and individuality is lost within the ornament. Thus,
Mass Ornament begs the question of whether the democratizing force of the
digital archive, where anyone can post anything, is not also a force for
conformity – or at least a reflection of the conformity that mass media attempts
to impose on individuals as it transforms them into consumers. The bodies of
these dancers seem to have been colonized by the same hand – even before
Bookchin’s hand entered the picture.
The collectivity of the mass ornament as it was formulated in the 1930s was
not a collectivity of shared goals but rather the suppression of individuality in
the service of politics and the spectacle of bodies in lock step. In 2009, this
suppression of individuality seems in the service and ideology of the all-
encompassing mass media. As Bookchin notes in an interview:
 In seeming displays of personal expression, the YouTube dancers perform the
same movements over and over, as if scripted, revealing the ways that popular
culture is embodied and reproduced in and through individual bodies. They
often perform utterly conventional gender roles, but the fact that they are
performed – repeated, mimicked, and quoted again and again, undermines any
pretence of their being real, authentic, and immutable.25

Indeed, Bookchin points to the tension between the seemingly infinite variety of
objects in the digital archive and the redundancy and superficiality of these same
objects. We have, as art critic David Pagel notes, a “god’s eye view” in that we
can see so many videos of so many people,26 but at the same time we remain at a
remove, unable to engage with the individuals that make up this chorus line,
who, like the Tiller Girls of the 1930s, become a collection of bodies rather than
people. In this sense, the digital archive may simply heighten the paradox of
access to so much and so little at the same time.
Mass Ornament also raises certain questions of temporality that emerge in
relation to the digital archive and the appropriation of its constituent documents.
The title and the musical references – if one recognizes them – produces a sense
of temporal disparity between image and soundtrack, drawing a comparison
between the mass ornaments of the 1930s and those of today. However, beyond
this reference, there is little that reads as history here. We are given a view that
transcends the limitations of spatial contiguity but all of the performances seem
to be taking place at the same moment, in the present tense; and yet, nonetheless,
the passage of time inscribes itself within the image. Specifically, each video
clip is accompanied by a title indicating the number of times each video had
been viewed at the time Bookchin downloaded it, just like the number we find
next to every YouTube video online. We can see that some videos have been
viewed by thousands while others only by a paltry few (the number reflecting
not only viewer interest but also how long the clip has been online). By
presenting the number of “hits” the video had received, Bookchin inscribes each
clip with the history of its reception. In addition, quite a few of the videos are
accompanied by the subtitle, “This video has been removed by the user.”
Reading this title, we realize that we are watching videos that are no longer
accessible online. An additional form of archival resistance emerges: we are
watching something now forbidden to us, suddenly “trespassing” when our
invitation to enter has been revoked. These performers suddenly read like ghosts
haunting the digital archive, specters we can no longer replay. On the internet,
things appear and disappear all the time. The dancers who once posted and then
removed their images from the internet are lost to us even as their traces are
preserved within Bookchin’s own mass ornament.
Indeed, these seemingly innocuous subtitles point to the fact that millions of
digital documents may, in fact, disappear within the next ten years – not just
removed from circulation by a user, as in Mass Ornament, but disappear without
a trace, forever. Although popular culture encourages the notion that digital
documents are likely to last longer than physical documents – paper documents,
photographs, film prints – this is blatantly untrue. As Paolo Cherchi Usai notes:

Digital technology offers the seductive promise of a real miracle: perfect

vision, eternal moving images that can be reproduced ad infinitum with no loss
of visual information – as blatant a lie as the claim that compact discs and cd-
roms will last a lifetime.27

If digital documents are not constantly updated into new formats (an action aptly
called “future proofing”), they may become inaccessible. Furthermore, digital
documents degrade quickly. It is thus possible that most of the millions – if not
billions – of hours of video uploaded to the web right now may simply cease to
exist. The most-recorded era thus far may become an empty space in the
historical record akin to the Dark Ages, which are dark precisely because there is
so little documentation available to us. Mass Ornament evokes the pathos of this
loss even as it demonstrates the fact that there are more documents than we can
account for within any framework. Whether taken down by the user or the
subject of technological obsolescence, these fragments of personal, everyday
histories will likely be lost to all of us.
Like spam letter, Bookchin’s films can be seen as examples of an emergent
form of historiography, a means of coming to grips with the digital archive as a
source of knowledge about the social present as it quickly becomes past,
generating meaning through particular accumulations, revealing similarities
across vastly different spaces and thereby social tendencies. Rather than
producing a linear and diachronic narrative, Mass Ornament places disparate
spaces in relationship with one another and finds moments of synchronicity that
allow us to think about the multiplicity of individual histories, their congruities,
and their differences. Indeed, other appropriation filmmakers have also begun to
make these kinds of works, producing the digital archive effect in the form of
patterns of appearance and behavior. This form of archive effect makes a certain
kind of “sense” out of the digital archive, creating not the single strand of a story
but a complex tapestry of a particular moment in time.
In this regard, Bookchin’s work gestures towards a larger trend in
contemporary appropriation films: “collecting.” These works include, among
many others, experimental works such as Christian Marclay’s 24-hour loop film
entitled The Clock (2010), where Marclay gathers together many different shots
in which a clock or timepiece of some kind appears. The film is shown so that
the time visible in each shot precisely corresponds to the time of the audience’s
reception throughout the 24 hours that the film runs, meaning that Marclay had
to find and collect images displaying every minute of the day. While Marclay is
still working explicitly with film footage, an increasing number of videos are
being constructed according to a similar logic. Related video works that appear
almost exclusively online include “supercuts,” a form defined by supercut.org as
“a fast-paced montage of short video clips that obsessively isolates a single
element from its source, usually a word, phrase, or cliché from film and TV.”28
Some supercuts involve the paring down of a single source, such as States of the
Union – Bill Clinton (Aaron Valdez, 2009), which takes a 1997 speech by then-
President Bill Clinton and removes all of the words except the numbers so that
Clinton appears to be speaking in a sort of mathematical code.29 Other supercuts
involve compiling a similar phrase or element in multiple sources, such as
Groundless (Jennifer Proctor, 2010), which gathers clips from many different
films in which an airplane crashes, transforming them into a single, massive
five-minute descent.30 This practice of collecting is not unique to digital
appropriation films; indeed, these kinds of compilations of “like” objects have
been done with film (The Clock being the best known) and photography as well
(for instance the work of Bernd and Hilla Becher). However, the impulse has
clearly intensified in the digital era. In contemporary video works, there is
evinced a strong desire to seek out things that are similar but different, to
accumulate samenesses and differences in order to reveal patterns and
deviations, a desire to find and “collect” the contingent synchronicities that
occur across sources previously unrelated to one another.
In addition to its emphasis on patterns, however, this form of collecting also
points to its arbitrary nature. In On Longing, Susan Stewart describes the
difference between the souvenir and the collection, arguing that the souvenir acts
a metonym of an experience and acquires its significance in relation to that
experience, whereas objects in a collection have significance in relation to one
another. As a Marxist scholar, Stewart is critical of the collection as a model of
consumption that has no referent but itself, the quintessential triumph of
exchange value over use value. Moreover, she suggests that the collection denies
any possibility of historical knowledge and also relates it to a difference between
metaphor and metonymy. She writes:
 In contrast to the souvenir, the collection offers example rather than sample,
metaphor rather than metonymy. The collection does not displace attention to
the past; rather, the past is at the service of the collection, for whereas the
souvenir lends authenticity to the past, the past lends authenticity to the
collection. The collection seeks a form of self-enclosure which is possible
because of its ahistoricism. The collection replaces history with classification,
with order beyond the realm of temporality. In the collection, time is not
something to be restored to an origin; rather, all time is made simultaneous or
synchronous within the collection’s world.31

Stewart’s description of the collection, particularly her reference to simultaneity

and synchrony, perfectly suits the impulse toward collection within the
appropriation films described above. I, however, am less pessimistic than
Stewart about the collection as a cultural form. Indeed, Stewart does not account
for the fact that an object can, in certain cases, be both a souvenir and part of a
collection – for instance, a collection of seashells, each one tied to a particular
seaside vacation. The collected items in the films mentioned above are part of a
set of variations on a single theme, a collection of motifs that may accommodate
an infinite number of similar objects, but they are also metonyms of the many
worlds that open up to us through the computer screen. Certainly, the found
fragments in these films acquire their significance in relation to one another, but
they also point to the world – or worlds – beyond each fragment. Moreover,
while the structure of the collection may itself be ahistorical, these found
fragments persist in their historical effects, in their status as traces of “the real”
as it becomes “the past.” I would contend that the films mentioned above can
also be understood as collections of metonyms, collections infinitely open to
new objects that seem to “belong.”
I would also argue that these films’ accumulations of similarities and
differences fascinates, at least in part, because they often foreground elements
that might otherwise go unremarked. In an era when we are often faced with so
much information that it is difficult to cull the important pieces from the noise,
collecting film and video fragments that share one particular feature allows us to
focus on how they are also different, and to notice and appreciate their
variations. Similarity generates a background against which differences are
foregrounded and made “meaningful” in some way. This tension established
between and across so many instances is also a manifestation of the digital
archive effect. Indeed, such distinctions provide the basic condition for
knowledge – historical and otherwise – in the digital era. We need Ariadne’s
string to lead us through the labyrinth of the archive in general and the digital
archive in particular. In short, this impulse toward collecting seems to me to be a
model for a form of historiography in the digital era that may chart – to a degree
impossible and unimaginable before the emergence of the digital archive – the
movements of a particular set of objects or actions in order to reveal all of those
elements that adhere to and circulate around that one consistent set over time.
History is not lost in these collections but, rather, reframed. In sum, digital
archives and digital technologies allow us to trace the countless strands of
experience that make up the rich tapestry of human lives and cultural
productions as time passes by, charting the points at which these strands almost
– but never quite – meet.
The digital archive effects in spam letter, Mass Ornament, and various other
“collection” films are produced mainly at the level of the editing. The
configurations into which archival documents are organized do not impinge on
the unity of the archival image itself. In contrast, Rebecca Baron and Doug
Goodwin’s series of videos collectively titled Lossless (2008) produces the
digital archive effect within the image itself. The series, consisting of a loop and
four short films, explores explicitly the differences between film and digital
images – specifically digital images that derive originally from film but have
since made their way into and through the digital archive – by revealing the
operations underlying digital moving image files. For the project, Baron and
Goodwin downloaded several films that had been necessarily compressed in
order to be uploaded to the internet. In the case of Lossless #2, for example,
derived from Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943), they interrupted the
downloading process. In the case of Lossless #3, derived from The Searchers
(John Ford, 1956), they downloaded the entire file and then manipulated the
code.32 In Lossless #2, the result is a form of digital “bleeding” in which Deren’s
original black and white images begin to melt into one another, generating
strange new superimpositions as different images from the film “mesh” together.
In Lossless #3, images of men on horseback galloping through the landscape of
the American West are transformed from fully resolved representation into
blocky streaks of color moving across the frame (Figure 5.2).
While none of the found documents appropriated in Lossless are documentary,
the series gestures toward some of the historiographic issues that we may
encounter as we attempt to utilize the digital archive and digital documents as
the basis of historical investigation and expression. Indeed, these films reveal the
ways in which digital technologies may have already altered the found document
by the time the historian or appropriation filmmaker comes to appropriate it into
new works. John Hulsey explains the technical issues explored through the
series:

As the Lossless exhibit makes evident, the current variety of media players,
from iPods to high-end projectors, entails a modification in audio-visual
presentation. … A standard-length Hollywood film, for example, is composed
of an average of 144,000 discrete 35mm frames, all of which needs to be
compressed to fit on a DVD containing roughly 7GB of storage capacity. The
best “lossless” compression techniques, which can reduce the amount of
scanned data in a feature film onto about 400 DVDs, must be supplemented by
other methods to further compress the data. Since the DVD format cannot
handle the full, uncompressed imagery of 35mm still frames per second, it has
to make calculated choices about what information is provided and what
information is left out.33

FIGURE Lossless #3 (Rebecca Baron and Douglas Goodwin, 2008). Courtesy of

5.2 the artists.

Unlike the cinematic image, in which all objects in front of the camera are
indexically recorded and are, therefore, equally “present” in the film image, a
compressed digital image is selective. As Hulsey puts it:
 According to the algorithm, only those areas of the image in which there is a
high incidence of temporal edges – the alteration of color contrast over time –
will be resolved in detail, whereas the areas in which slower, steadier, or more
predictable movements predominate (or in which there is no movement at all)
will be rendered with less resolution over time … Areas in which there is a
high degree of statistically unpredictable, quick, or erratic movement … are
calculated to be of highest relevance for the viewer, while other areas are
discarded as informationally impoverished.34

These “informationally impoverished” areas are updated less frequently than

areas with more movement.
One of the things that allows the playback machine on which a digital file is
played to make “correct” calculations about how much information to convey to
the viewer is the presence of “key frames.” Key frames, which normally occur
about every two seconds in a DVD image, are fully resolved frames in which
detailed information is provided for the entire image. In between key frames
(also known as I-frames), the predictive frames (P-frames) and bi-predictive
frames (B-frames) approximate what “should” appear in the image based on the
key frame information. Lossless #2 came into being when Baron and Goodwin
downloaded a (necessarily) compressed version of Meshes of the Afternoon from
an online video-sharing site, but interrupted the download before it was
complete. Because digital files do not download linearly or chronologically – in
other words, partial information about the beginning, middle, and end of the film
is downloaded simultaneously but incompletely – when a download is
interrupted you have a file that spans the length of the entire film but is missing
information throughout. Thus, the partially downloaded file of Meshes was
missing many key frames, forcing the playback device to approximate what
should appear between the key frames that were in fact present. The uncanny
transformations in which one image of Deren overlaps and melts into another is
generated as the playback machine attempts to create continuity between the key
frames. While Lossless #3 similarly appropriates footage from a compressed
download, in the case of The Searchers, Baron and Goodwin completed the
download and then went into the codec of the file and selectively removed
certain key frames, creating a similar effect of pixilated “bleeding” as certain
parts of the screen fail to update in the “correct” manner. The playback machine
continues to attempt to approximate what should appear in each part of the
screen but, without key frames, it is unable to do so “correctly.” Instead, motion
turns into a blur of blocks and streaks of color in which the figures of people on
horseback are still recognizable against the backdrop of the landscape of the
American West but they have been turned into abstractions, transformed from
their identity as indexical traces of light on silver and celluloid to bits of
compressed digital information.
Lossless points to the fact that digitized documents that were originally made
and shown on film, in particular, reveal that something is always lost – or at least
altered – in the move to the digital medium. If this process continues, the
original film version and its later iterations may have less and less in common,
destabilizing the myth that digital technologies can offer a perfect transmission
of past to present to future. Of course, as Usai has pointed out, this myth of what
he calls “the Model Image” that can somehow be “authentically” restored to its
“original” state existed long before the digital era, and he argues that we should
not tie ourselves to this mythically pure original.35 However, digital
technologies make the difference between the cinematic original and the digital
“replica” much greater; or, to put it differently, the digital inscribes itself into the
history of the film image as that image is converted into code. Lossless dwells in
this transformation from film to digital video – although whether the series
appears to mourn this transformation or revels in this manifestation of the digital
archive effect will ultimately, as always, depend on the viewer.
The Lossless series, with its appropriation and “misuse” of non-actuality
documents and its emphasis on intentional disparity over temporal disparity, can
hardly be read as history, but it has profound historiographic implications in the
era of digital media. In some ways, the operation of key framing is a perfect
metaphor for the writing of history. As Hayden White has pointed out, the job of
the historian is always partly an act of creation because he or she must “fill in”
the connections between facts recorded and preserved in the archive and
“missing” information in order to create a coherent historical narrative.36 Now,
digital media, through its machinic “approximations” between keyframes, is
writing its own narratives before the historian or appropriation filmmaker even
arrives on the scene.
Whether the history that may be written or otherwise represented is enriched
or undone by the technological and structural traces of the digital archive, the
search engine, or the online database remains to be seen, but appropriation films
such as spam letter, Mass Ornament, and the Lossless series all point to a digital
historiographic future in which digital technologies and their particular traces are
fully imbricated in the construction of histories. While it is difficult not to feel a
certain longing for the material archive (or the fantasy thereof), there can be no
return to the archivist of Shooting the Past who can find and trace the trail of a
story through a unified, physical space. Nonetheless, in this shift to digital
technologies, although certain kinds of stories may, indeed, be lost, new stories
and other forms of historical articulation may also be enabled. The works of
Silva, Bookchin, Baron, and Goodwin alert us to both the challenges and the
possibilities for history and knowledge as they may emerge from the digital
archive.

Digital histories
While the films discussed previously may be considered examples of digital
historiography, I wish now to examine a few examples of the nascent practice of
digital history. The difference between these two forms is the difference between
the production of a digital archive effect that emphasizes the digital archive as
the source of archival documents and a digital archive effect that emphasizes the
digital structure of a given appropriation film. In other words, one kind of digital
archive effect may be produced when films theorize the encounter with the
digital archive of documents as do spam letter, Mass Ornament, and Lossless. In
contrast, another kind of digital archive effect may be produced when found
documents are appropriated into a work with a specifically digital interface for
explicitly historical purposes. Rather than reflecting on the digital archive itself,
these latter works use digital technologies to create a more interactive
relationship between the viewer, who now becomes the user, and archival
documents – and, hence, between the user and history. The remainder of this
chapter explores two interactive works that may be understood as nascent and
competing models for producing digital histories.37
Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill (Pat
O’Neill, Rosemary Comella, and Kristy H.A. Kang, 2002) is a “database
narrative” made by the Labyrinth Project, a digital media production group
located within the Annenberg Center for Communication at the University of
Southern California, which often incorporates found documents into nonlinear,
interactive, computer-based narratives. In this work, the artists have combined
footage from O’Neill’s experimental but linear film, The Decay of Fiction
(produced simultaneously with Tracing), about the famous Hotel Ambassador in
Los Angeles, with additional contemporary footage of or around the hotel,
footage from old newsreels, twentieth-century photographs, spoken recollections
from people who spent time in the Ambassador, and commentary by
contemporary scholars reflecting on the historical and cultural significance of the
hotel, which was torn down just after Decay and Tracing were made. The user,
who must access Tracing through a CD played on a computer, may navigate
around the hotel, encountering sounds and images as she “moves” through the
rooms and outdoor areas. What makes Tracing a “database narrative,” however,
is not only that the user navigates her own movement through the hotel. Marsha
Kinder, director of the Labyrinth Project, explains database narratives as:

narratives whose structure exposes or thematizes the dual processes of

selection and combination that lie at the heart of all stories and that are crucial
to language: the selection of particular data (characters, objects, settings,
sounds, events) from a series of databases or paradigms, which are then
combined to generate specific tales. Such narratives reveal the possibility of
making other combinations, which would create alternative stories, and they
encourage us to question the choice of categories and of what is included and
omitted.38

Tracing is a database narrative not only because the user must interact with the
text through a computer but also because the user is made constantly aware of
her path through the text as one among many she might take.
Thus, self-conscious interactivity is a crucial aspect of Tracing, of the digital
archive effect produced within the text, and of digital history as an emergent
mode of thinking historically. Indeed, Tracing contains the promise that – like
Oswald Bates in Shooting the Past – users themselves have the potential to
“discover” narratives that emerge in their confrontation with and combination of
found documents so that they may displace the emplotment offered by the
traditional historian. At the same time, however, such digital media works
necessarily place limitations on what the user may find, restricting these
discoveries to what has already been “found” and constructed by the project
designers. This tension between the control of the designers and the agency
allowed the user is perhaps the fundamental epistemological problem raised by
the emergence of digital histories. Kinder notes the problems associated with the
term “interactive.” She writes: “While all narratives are in some sense interactive
… all interactivity is also an illusion because the rules established by the
designers of the text necessarily limit the user’s options.” She suggests, however,
that “one productive way of avoiding these two extremes (of fetishizing or
demonizing interactivity), is to position the user or player as a ‘performer’ of the
narrative.”39 As Kinder suggests, there is always limitation built into even the
most interactive work. In computer-based works such as Tracing, the number of
possible narratives that the user may “perform,” however, is much greater than
those possible in a novel or film, the experience of which – even if different
readers or viewers understand the novel or film in different ways – unfolds
linearly rather than in combinatory fashion. This has implications for our
understanding of the archive effect in the digital era.
First of all, the user’s choices, in combination with the decisions of the
designers, determine the order in which possible archive effects may occur. In
order to engage with Tracing, the user must navigate the space of the hotel either
by clicking on different parts of the floor plan in order to “go” to a particular part
of the hotel or, once she is “in” a particular room, by clicking the up, down, left,
or right arrows in order to either “look” in a different direction within the room
or “go” to an adjacent room. These two forms of navigation allow the user to
choose from many different possible routes around the hotel as well as their
order and, therefore, many possible narratives. As the user moves through the
hotel, she passes through color images of the hotel shot after it was emptied of
all furniture and décor and just before it was torn down. Once she enters one of
these empty rooms, her act of clicking on a particular part of it triggers the
appearance of sounds and images in different rooms in the hotel. In some rooms,
semi-transparent black-and-white images of a person or a group of people
suddenly appear superimposed over the color space of the contemporary empty
room. When the user clicks on the empty lobby space next to the elevator, for
instance, a man in 1940s or 1950s dress walks down the hall with a girl in
similar period dress on each arm. In the room behind the hotel stage, a similarly
semi-transparent juggler practices his act. In another room, a male voice that
seems to belong to a narrator from a film noir speaks while a man and woman
wait in a bedroom, not speaking to one another. None of these ghosts seems to
actually come from the past – the images look too clean, too perfectly fitted to
the spaces in the color footage of the hotel – but, rather, they look like
reenactments of moments that might have transpired in these rooms (Figure 5.3).
These sequences may not generate the archive effect, because these black-and-
white images seem to have been staged for the text; yet they generate an
uncanny and compelling atmosphere in which documentary images of the past
seem as if they might emerge.
Indeed, in parts of the hotel, the archive effect does occur. In some instances,
as the user navigates into a new “room,” an appropriated archival photograph
appears and serves as an interface that allows the user to access more details
about the past. The user can then click on different parts of the photograph in
order to call up more archival images and recorded stories. For instance, when
the user enters The Coconut Grove, the hotel’s famed lounge and restaurant, at
first she may see only a color photograph of an empty room over which we hear
the sounds of an old jazz melody. She can make the “camera” (her first-person
point of view) pan to the right or left to see more of the room, but it is
uninhabited. If she clicks on the image, however, a black-and-white photograph
of the room filled with people in an earlier era appears and acts as a map that
allows her to call up as well as navigate different mini-historical narratives. That
is, when the user clicks on a particular part of the photograph, the image of the
lounge is replaced by another archival image over which someone on the
soundtrack (often unidentified) reminisces about an event that took place there.
For instance, if the user clicks on one part of the photograph of the lounge, an
image of actress Gloria Grahame appears as an unidentified woman’s voice tells
an anecdote about Grahame visiting The Coconut Grove. If the user clicks on
another part of the lounge, a photograph of Frank Sinatra appears as a different
voice relates a story about Sinatra singing in The Coconut Grove. In other parts
of the hotel, the archive effect becomes even more intensified. For instance, in
the ballroom where Robert Kennedy was shot, the user encounters well-known
documentary images of Kennedy giving his last speech as well as voice
recordings and images that were taken just after he was shot. After watching this
footage marking Kennedy’s death, the empty space of the ballroom feels like the
most truly haunted room of the hotel.
 FIGURE Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill
5.3 (Pat O’Neill, Rosemary Comella, and Kristy H.A. Kang, 2002).
Courtesy of the artist.

By moving through the hotel, the user determines the order in which she
encounters such archival documents. Although the designers clearly have a hand
in what images may appear, as well as when and where, the user can nonetheless
put together her own trajectory and sequence of events within the space of the
hotel. One might say that the archival photographs and film footage have already
been appropriated and organized by the designers but, to a large degree, the user
determines, to use Hayden White’s term, the “emplotment” of the story or
history.
Also crucial to the way in which Tracing functions, however, is the element of
chance. The same space can offer a very different experience each time the user
comes back to it. Indeed, while certain archival sequences always appear in the
same room, others appear in different parts of the hotel at different times. Thus,
each time the user visits a room, the “ghosts” whose images and voices haunt it
may change. Kinder refers to these spaces in which different textual events may
be triggered as “hot spots.” She writes, “each time a user returns to one of the
hot spots, they find a different event, for all of our interfaces are built on a
combination of three determinants: our design, the user’s choice, and random
unpredictability.”40 An additional level of unpredictability is added by the fact
that, from time to time, there is an “earthquake” that summons a random jumble
of images that appears wherever in the hotel the user happens to be. This
element of randomness and chance makes Tracing a much more complex work
than it would be if each room always presented the same ghostly “inhabitants”
and found fragments. The many pathways to choose from combined with the
aspect of chance guarantees that no two users will have exactly the same
experience and that no user will have exactly the same experience twice.
Moreover, it attests to the fact that not even the designers control exactly how
the user will experience the work, not only because the user makes her own
choices but also because the algorithms underlying the structure of the work,
once created, operate according to their own logic – much like they do in Silva’s
spam letter. Of course, it might be said that when an author publishes a history
book, she no longer controls how it will be read. In this sense, Tracing simply
emphasizes this fact but also, once programmed to allow for chance, it creates a
work in excess of the makers.
Despite the elements of interactivity and chance, however, the archive effect as
it is produced in Tracing is not entirely different from that produced in
traditional appropriation films. As in Michael Apted’s Up series (see Chapter 1),
the archive effect in Tracing is based mainly on the user’s experience of
temporal disparity. There is a clear temporal break, for instance, between footage
taken the day Kennedy was shot in the ballroom and the color footage of the
empty ballroom just before the Hotel Ambassador was torn down. Yet, by
literally laying archival images and sounds of a past moment over the images
taken for Tracing (and Decay) before the hotel was destroyed, Tracing
crystallizes the experience of temporal disparity within a single space,
suggesting that any space has its own history, or, to put it differently, that
histories need not be based on sequentiality and that each space can be
temporally “deep” – layered with many different histories. Indeed, Kinder
suggests that a number of the Labyrinth Project works can each be viewed as “an
archeological exploration of a specific location through layers of time.”41 In
contrast to a conception of history as a single sequential trajectory from past to
present to future, Tracing works according to the more vertical logic of the
archaeological excavation, emphasizing the fact that histories take place and are
inseparable from the places in which and through which they occur.
This archaeological paradigm of history as layers of time laid over a particular
space working in tandem with the interactive and chance elements of Tracing
points to two of the fundamental aspects of digital history as it is imagined and
enacted through appropriation of found documents. First, it asserts the
multiplicity of stories that inhabit a single space. Second, it insists that our
encounter with traces of the past is unstable, constantly shifting, a matter of
chance and construction as much as a matter of fact. Tracing, as well as other
Labyrinth Project works, insists that the reader of history may become the user
of archival documents, participating in the construction of narratives about the
past through her “performance,” ordering and reordering found documents into a
variety of possible narratives. In short, the reader of history may become, at least
to some small degree, the historian. The possibility of an active user aware of all
of the pressures that come to bear on how we think of the past through its
archival traces is the promise of Tracing and of this historical form of digital
appropriation.
Although the works made by the Labyrinth Project perhaps point the way to a
utopian agentic vision of a participatory historiographic process, it may be
unrealistic, however, to posit their model as the historiographic future. Many
artists and academics have delighted in works like Tracing, but the audience for
such works is still very limited. By contrast, Call of Duty: World at War
(Activision, 2008), a first-person shooter videogame set in World War II,
produces a very different digital archive effect, one that is significantly more
influential in terms of the number of users who have purchased and “played” it.
Indeed, according to the official website for the game, in its first year sales
surpassed 11 million copies.42 Like Tracing, CoD incorporates found footage
into a digital interface, thereby producing the digital archive effect, but it does so
in a very different manner. In contrast to Tracing’s open, reflexive structure of
interactive encounters with archival documents, CoD reasserts a linear, singular,
and teleological conception of history even as it introduces interactivity into
certain spaces within this history.
As a videogame, CoD is necessarily an interactive text. During gameplay, the
user is given a first-person point of view through which her avatar’s arms and
weapons are visible. Moreover, interaction in CoD is not limited, as it is in
Tracing, to shifting the angle at which the user views the image and changing
the particular space available to view. Indeed, the CoD avatar can be made to
run, jump, climb, hide, shoot, and so on. This would seem to suggest that CoD is
more interactive than Tracing and that the user has more agency. However, this
is not entirely the case, at least when it becomes the construction of an historical
narrative.
While Tracing and CoD both incorporate found footage into “cutscenes” –
parts of the game in which the user watches a non-interactive sequence that
requires her to temporarily watch rather than interact – they differ in terms of the
degree to which the encounter with the appropriated footage is structured and
controlled. In Tracing, the user moves around the space, encountering and
instigating cutscenes wherever she “goes.” The meanings of these cutscenes are
often mysterious, even frustrating in their obscurity. Moreover, the order in
which these scenes are encountered is different from user to user and from one
trajectory a user chooses to another – there is no single, “correct” path to follow.
Although the user of Tracing cannot directly interact with the footage in the
cutscenes, her ability to choose where to “go” next, combined with the
operations of chance at play in the spaces and algorithmic design, means that she
must construct her own narrative and make her own interpretations. In contrast,
in CoD, the cutscenes and the appropriation documents within them are
positioned as entirely outside the interactive gameplay. The user encounters
them at the beginning of each new level, but they occur in a strictly linear order,
one historical event represented after the next, level by level. Moreover, the
meanings of the archival footage are tightly circumscribed by the contexts in
which they are placed.
 Indeed, appropriated footage serves a different function in each of these digital
works. In Tracing, encountering indexical archival footage of past events that
contrasts with indexical footage of the hotel from the present (of the making of
Tracing) is the “point.” There is no single narrative course, no particular order
that the user is supposed to follow. Moreover, there is no specific goal, which
means that there is no closure, nor any possibility of closure. The user simply
explores until she grows bored or tired and stops. The effect of the presence of
the appropriated footage is to produce a powerful sense of temporal disparity
between the “then” of different moments in the history of the Hotel Ambassador
and the “now” of the hotel’s impending destruction. This experience of temporal
disparity – and the digital archive effect – is an end in itself, and it can be
experienced in different incarnations throughout the hotel.
In contrast, temporal disparity plays only a small part in the experience of
playing CoD. Most of the imagery in CoD in both cutscenes and gameplay
consists of iconic representations rather than indexical ones. For instance, during
the gameplay, the user’s comrades, enemies, and the space within which the user
fights are all rendered graphically rather than photographically, and in the
cutscenes, most of the images of tanks, guns, soldiers, etc. are also graphically
rendered rather than photographic. The crucial exception is the found footage
from World War II included only in the cutscenes. Although temporal disparity
between the “then” of the World War II footage and the “now” of the 2008
production of the video game is, of course, present, the use of indexical footage
in the cutscenes of CoD results in a powerful sense of intentional disparity, an
awareness that “real” historical footage has been introduced into an “unreal,”
although quite “realistic” videogame. This sudden appearance of indexical
footage within an iconic videogame may be experienced by the user as a
disruption of the “world” of the videogame. Because of this, theorist Will
Brooker has noted, the use of cinematic, live-action footage in videogames has
become a rarity when once it was common. He writes:

Games from the mid-90s onwards attempted to incorporate this “cinematic”

sense in a range of ways. … Ironically, this incorporation of high-quality,
“filmic” visuals tended to disrupt the player’s immersion in the diegesis,
breaking the flow between cut-scene and gameplay. Cut-scenes therefore
improved, paradoxically, by becoming less smooth and polished; bridging
scenes were increasingly created “in-engine,” created on the fly by the
console, with no discrepancy in visual quality.43

Thus, the decision to include indexical footage in CoD was a daring challenge to
the trend away from using photographic images in videogames. Moreover, using
relatively familiar actuality footage of World War II also generates an additional
gap between the historical or “real” world and the fictionalized world of the
videogame – the archive effect. As a result, CoD must cope with the fact that
“live-action” archival footage simultaneously “authenticates” the game’s
historical status through the production of the archive effect yet also undermines
the user’s immersion in the narrative world of the game.
Indeed, the danger of disrupting the user’s involvement in the game is likely
the reason that the appropriated footage in CoD appears only in the cutscenes. At
the same time, however, the cutscenes are the parts of the game in which the
historical narrative is most clearly established, and bolstered by the appropriated
footage. As videogame theorist Daniel Punday points out, cutscenes reveal the
tension between narrative and interactivity in videogames. He writes:

The contrasting appeals of the interactive elements of a text and its individual
lexias [brief narratives] … is [sic] one of the fundamental tensions within
interactive narrative. In particular, textual interactivity – the fact that the
players may do one of several things at particular junctures within the game –
seems naturally at odds with a sense of narrative inevitability or teleology. …
The games that are the most open-ended and allow for the widest range of
possible strategies tend to have the least narrative content.44

While the user of CoD can make choices within the gameplay, the narrative is
closed rather than open-ended. During the gameplay, the user can interact with
and affect what is onscreen, but at no time can she affect the outcome of the
narrative as a whole. In fact, Punday further suggests that moments of
interactivity are, in fact, peripheral to narrative inevitability or teleology. He
writes that the videogame

creates a predetermined story that it pauses at certain moments in order to hail

the player into an active role. What the player does at this point has no effect
on the outcome of the story, but rather functions as an aside in which
emotional involvement is heightened. Essential to enjoying the play in these
games is knowing that eventually the game will return to a predetermined
narrative teleology.45

This structure also applies to CoD. Whereas the user of Tracing may put
together a variety of narratives through her encounter with the rooms of the hotel
and the appropriated footage that appears within the rooms, the user of CoD
must follow a much more limited script. Although the user must make certain
choices within each game level in order to accomplish specific tasks – for
instance, kill the Japanese soldiers or the Nazis, get to the target destination on
time – and can do so in a variety of ways, the narrative of the game is already
solidly in place, and the cutscenes, with their incorporation of indexical archival
footage, serve to reinforce this set narrative within which the user may make her
limited choices. The narrative established in the cutscenes and the structures of
the missions never change. The gameplay is simply a space in which the user
becomes active and may succeed or fail in her mission but cannot actually
change the course of narrative – or historical – events. The narrative is
predetermined and located outside of the gameplay itself. As a result, CoD offers
an historical narrative of inevitability, a teleological version of the events of
World War II.
Crucial to CoD’s teleological version of the past, the appropriated indexical
footage – and its unruly potential for polysemy – is not allowed to interfere with
the game’s version of historical events, which may account for the intense way
in which this footage is presented. Within the cutscenes, the appropriated
footage in CoD is heavily edited and sutured within a sequence of animated
graphics. In contrast to Tracing’s meditative and exploratory mode in which
extended clips of images and sounds may appear in a variety of places and
orders, CoD uses the indexical World War II footage only as brief if intense
signifiers of “reality” whose meaning is limited as much as possible by the
images and sounds around it. Indeed, another major difference between Tracing
and CoD is the pace at which the appropriated footage is offered to the user in
each text. In Tracing, the user may navigate at a leisurely pace, visiting different
rooms, stopping to watch an archival sequence. The user may go back and forth
from one room to the next, checking to see if anything has changed in a
particular room from one visit to the next. When the user “turns” the “camera” to
look around, the tracking or panning shot moves slowly across the space, often
accompanied by the sound of slow jazz. Moreover, since there is no particular
goal in Tracing except to explore and unearth the appropriated sequences
“buried” in the text, the user will most likely continue exploring until she gets
bored. This sense of boredom is the only thing that gives “closure” to the text.
In contrast, the pace of the cutscenes in CoD is relentless, moving inexorably
forward. Rather than simply appearing as a stream of archival images in the
cutscenes, the indexical shots are tightly woven into a complex structure of
iconic elements including animated maps, planes, tanks, and soldiers as well as
onscreen text and voiceover. Indeed, the indexical archival images of explosions,
executions, ruins, etc., sutured into an iconic space, move by so quickly that it is
barely possible to ascribe to them a meaning except in a general form: a sense of
“World War II” or a sudden emotional response – horror, anger, or pride.
For instance, CoD’s opening cutscene begins with an animated and stylized
map of Europe in which Nazism is represented as a swastika and a blood-red
stain spreading across Europe, over which we hear a repeated mass shout of
“Sieg Heil!” Next, the “camera” (in quotation marks because this is all
animated) zooms across Asia on the map to show a red sun labeled “Japan” and
then the words “Territorial Expansion.” Another blood-red stain pours across the
East China Sea and sweeps over coastal China. Next, a group of animated
airplanes zoom through the air. Then, suddenly, an indexical moving image of
Japanese Emperor Hirohito appears, followed by a montage of appropriated
images of Japanese soldiers marching under the Japanese flag, gunboats taking
aim, airplanes flying in formation above the Japanese flag, and then an explosion
labeled “1937 Indochina.” This label remains onscreen as we are confronted
with more indexical images: a close-up of an Asian man shooting a gun, then
two men being executed by gunshots to the backs of their heads, a group of
civilians falling into a mass grave surrounded by soldiers, and finally a low-
angle close-up of an Asian man holding up the Japanese flag and screaming out
a battle cry.
The camera then zooms backwards between two rows of animated trees and
stops in front of a composite indexical image of the White House, the US flag,
and Franklin Delano Roosevelt labeled “US Demands Withdrawal of Japanese
Troops from Indochina”. We then hear an archival sound recording of FDR
saying:

Members of the Senate and the House of Representatives, yesterday,

December 7th, 1941, a date which will live in infamy, the United States of
America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the
empire of Japan.

The camera then whips through rows of animated oil derricks with the label:
“Japan Loses 90% Oil Supply Due to Embargo.” Then animated Japanese
airplanes zoom towards the camera in formation, dropping bombs onto the
indexical moving image of Pearl Harbor being bombed. The camera then moves
out to show that this moving image is part of the front page of a newspaper,
whose headline reads “Pearl Harbor Attacked.” Next, we see indexical images of
Pearl Harbor being bombed from the point of view of a Japanese bomber plane
followed by an indexical explosion, suddenly in color, and we witness American
soldiers running around in the ruin as well as a variety of other explosions. After
this, we see indexical footage of FDR reading the speech that we have been
hearing, his voice reunited with his body. Immediately, indexical images of
people reading newspapers about the US declaration of war appear followed by
the label, “War Production Drive.” We see generic indexical images of women
working in a factory, a label that reads, “Military Manufacturing” followed by a
brief animated sequence of airplanes being assembled labeled “Aviation
Production.” Then animated arrows, airplane parts, and numbers appear over
generic indexical images of war preparation. Animated tanks are assembled step
by step. Next, generic indexical images of Americans marching, signing papers
in order to join the military, raising their hands to swear in as soldiers, and being
given physical examinations whiz by. Finally, an indexical image of a young
man is isolated and transformed into an iconic, animated image labeled, “Private
Miller.” He looks like an action figure and he is outfitted as a soldier through a
series of quick steps just as the airplanes and tanks were assembled. The camera
zooms into his face and the screen goes to white.
This barrage of sounds and images takes place in one minute and 24 seconds.
Each of the found images appears only for the briefest instant before it gives way
to either another found image or an animated image. I would argue that the
speed of editing and the constant shifting back and forth from iconic animated
images to indexical found images serves to limit the potential meanings one
might attribute to the latter, which otherwise might be too unruly. Any
contemplation of the appropriated footage is disallowed by the sheer speed at
which they – as well as all the other digitally created images and sounds – go by.
The overall rhythm of the sequences is that of a machine, of an army marching
inexorably forward, or of a soldier performing military exercises, locking each
piece of his weapon into place. Every element is carefully controlled and
orchestrated. This is an archival montage set to the rhythm of war, but this
approach to montage gives the user – now returned to the position of viewer –
little or no time to think, connect, or question. Indeed, the indexical images of
actual human beings suffering execution at gunpoint or falling into mass graves
serves only to startle before the sequence barrels on.
The relentless speed and progression of the cutscenes along with the overall
structure of the game promote a sense that history is teleological and can happen
– could have happened – only one way. Moreover, the visceral indexical images
of violence in CoD and its highly simplified conception of WWII serve primarily
to legitimate the violence the user herself is meant to commit against the iconic
Nazis and Japanese during gameplay. Not only the content but also the editing
calls for a particular kind of embodied viewer response. Because these images
are so truncated, they ultimately become part of a rhythm that is fundamentally
militaristic. Thus, despite the fact that users may make certain choices within the
gameplay, the background of “history” and “the real” provided in the cutscenes
is coded as predetermined and inevitable, as having a single direction, a single
narrative, and a single meaning.
It is perhaps the lack of such a narrative teleology, however, that makes
Tracing a less popular text than CoD. Paradoxically, by refusing to establish
narrative teleology, the text may undermine the reader or user’s sense of agency.
Discussing an early hypertext novel, Punday might well be describing one
possible experience of Tracing:

The story of loss is echoed in the reader’s own sense of frustration with the
story and its inability to come to a conclusion. … The reader is pulled into the
story emotionally through a very different form of narrative inevitability – the
inevitability of failure. It is clear, after all, that there is no single story to
reconstruct in the course of the novel.46

Thus, although Tracing avoids a determinist construction of history, it may also

fail to generate the level of desire and satisfaction that a game like CoD, with its
preestablished linear narrative and clear goals, seems to do, and it may even
leave the user feeling disempowered, uncertain of what she has accomplished. In
CoD, it is clear what you must do in order to ascend to the next game level and,
thereby, to find out “the rest of the story.” In Tracing, the fragments never seem
to add up to anything in particular except perhaps an atmosphere. Indeed, after
exploring the Hotel Ambassador for a while, encountering the “ghosts” and
various fragments of appropriation footage, uncertain if I have seen everything
or not, my desire to engage with Tracing begins to wane.
It seems to me that, as of yet, interactive digital histories have not found a way
to deal with found footage in a way that opens it up to a variety of possible
meanings and orders, while also stirring the user’s desire in such a way that she
will keep wanting to engage and learn from the text. However, the field of digital
history is very young and there are bound to be many more experiments in this
vein. Nonetheless, there is the rather depressing possibility that digital histories
will use found, indexical documents to simply replicate conservative notions of a
static, determinist historical narrative such as the one promoted by CoD.
Digital historiography, as it is performed by appropriation films, has begun to
theorize the challenges and complexities of culling history from the digital
archive, pointing to the latter’s particular structures, excess, patterns, and
transformation of the very substrate of documents as they are digitized. These
appropriation films refuse to accept digital archival documents as transparent
representations of the “real” or as commensurate with material documents,
suggesting that we must always consider the technologies behind found
documents that influence what they seem to reveal. Ideally, this self-reflexive
mode has the potential to encourage a more critical reading of historical texts in
the digital era. Meanwhile, digital history, as it is performed by appropriation
films, is attempting to create historical texts in uniquely digital formats,
suggesting that despite the archival conundrums indicated by digital
historiography, the link between the indexical found document and historical
“reality” retains its epistemological – and, hence, political – power within digital
formats and contexts. However, as Tracing the Decay of Fiction and Call of
Duty: World at War make clear, digital history may take very different forms
with equally different historiographic implications, suggesting that the contest
for dominance between different models of digital history that appropriate found
documents may determine what will “count” as history in the future. The notion
of the digital archive effect provides a means of thinking through the effects of
found documents both as they are appropriated from digital archives into new
texts and as they are used within digital interfaces. By examining such
appropriation films, we may come to a better understanding of how found
audiovisual documents – as they are appropriated from digital archives or into
digital interfaces and come to be perceived as archival documents – are shaping
and reshaping our conceptions of the past.

Notes
1 Library of Congress Digital Collections and Services. www.loc.gov/library/libarch-digital.html
Accessed 29 May 2012.
2 The New York Times Article Archive. www.nytimes.com/ref/membercenter/nytarchive.html. Accessed
29 May 2012.
3 Paul Ricoeur, “Archives, Documents, Traces,” (1978) in The Archive, ed. Charles Merewether
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006), 68.
4 Christiane Paul, “The Database as System and Cultural Form,” in Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age
of Information Overflow, ed. Victoria Vesna (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2007),
95.
5 I would disagree with her inclusion of books as “data containers” because a book generally implies a
particular trajectory through the data contained within while I regard databases, libraries, and archives
as spaces through which many trajectories may be chosen. A book of lists or tables not meant to be read
from start to finish but rather to be browsed – a dictionary for instance – might, however, fit the
description of a data container.
6 Paul, 96.
7 Sven Spieker, The Big Archive: Art from Bureaucracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2008), 137.
8 Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 20.
9 Of course, collage art and hip-hop music centered on the practice of appropriation long before the
internet and editing programs for home computers and constitute a major precedent for the kinds of
appropriations that have become popular in the digital era. A comparison of these different forms of
appropriation, however, is beyond the scope of this study.
10 YouTube Statistics. www.youtube.com/yt/press/statistics.html. Accessed 21 May 2013.
11 William Wees, Recycled Images: The Art and Politics of Found Footage Films (New York: Anthology
Film Archives, 1993), 45.
12 Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1991), 6.
13 The Wayback Machine, which preserves particular instances of the internet at given intervals, may be
regarded as an archive of different “versions” of the internet. It is run by a non-profit organization
called the Internet Archive and is accessible at www.archive.org/index.php. Accessed 26 May 2013.
14 Search engines, particularly Google, rank the links they offer in response to a given set of search terms.
While Google’s search engine determines the ranking of a given link mainly based on user popularity,
sponsored links (i.e. ones for which Google receives money from the advertiser every time a user clicks
on them) bypass this seemingly more democratic system. Thus, it is not only the technology and users
that determine the ranking of information in search results but also money. Information that is ranked
very low by the search engine may thus rarely or never be accessed.
15 This sequence is reminiscent of the list of types of animals derived from a “Chinese encyclopedia” in a
passage written by Jorge Luis Borges that both delighted and disturbed Michel Foucault, who writes:

That passage from Borges kept me laughing a long time, though not without a certain uneasiness that I
found hard to shake off. Perhaps because there arose in its wake the suspicion that there is a worse kind
of disorder than that of the incongruous, the linking together of things that are inappropriate; I mean the
disorder in which fragments of a large number of possible orders glitter separately in the dimension,
without law or geometry, of the heteroclite”
Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random
House, 1970), xvii.

Indeed, Foucault might have been writing about Silva’s film and its linking together of the
inappropriate.
16 Manovich, 32.
17 Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Understanding New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 1999), 27.
18 Bolter and Grusin, 19.
19 A version of this discussion of Mass Ornament was previously published as Jaimie Baron, “Subverted
Intentions and the Potential for ‘Found’ Collectivity in Natalie Bookchin’s Mass Ornament.” Maska
Performing Arts Journal 26, no. 143–44 (Winter 2011): 303–14.
20 Siegfried Kracauer, “The Mass Ornament,” in The Mass Ornament: Weimar Essays, ed. Thomas Levin,
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995 [1963]), 74–86. Although Kracauer does not mention
them specifically in this essay, Berkeley’s musicals and the Nazi pageantry featured in Triumph, like
the Tiller Girls’ performances, also contain elements of the mass ornament – the synchronization of
bodies subsumed within a larger pattern. Thus, Bookchin’s choice of music is also relevant here.
21 Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997), 418.
22 Gumbrecht, 428.
23 In conversation with the artist, 14 August 2009, Visible Evidence Conference, USC.
24 Kracauer, 77.
25 Carolyn Kane, “Dancing Machines: An Interview with Natalie Bookchin,” Rhizome, 27 May 2009.
 http://rhizome.org/editorial/2653. Accessed 18 August 2012.
26 David Pagel, “Drink Deep at COLA 2009,” The Los Angeles Times, 2 June 2009, D6.
27 Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory and the Digital Dark Age
(London: BFI/Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 113.
28 www.supercut.org. Accessed 13 June 2012.
29 States of the Union – Bill Clinton is available at https://vimeo.com/2717623. Accessed 20 May 2013.
30 Groundless is available at http://cargo.jenniferproctor.com/filter/Video/Groundless. Accessed 20 May
2013.
31 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 151.
32 Lossless #1, derived from The Wizard of Oz (Victor Fleming, 1939); Lossless #4, derived from Serene
Velocity (Ernie Gehr, 1970); and Lossless #5, derived from a Busby Berkeley water ballet, all produce a
form of digital archive effect. However, I limit myself here to exploring two of the films in the series.
33 John Hulsey, “Motion Artifacts: Rebecca Baron and Doug Goodwin’s Lossless Project,” (Manuscript)
(n.d.), 11.
34 Hulsey, 12–13.
35 Usai, 101–5.
36 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 6–7.
37 A version of the following discussion of Tracing the Decay of Fiction Encounters with a Film by Pat
O’Neill and Call of Duty: World at War appears as Jaimie Baron, “Digital Historicism: Archival
Documents, Digital Interface, and Historiographic Effects in Call of Duty: World at War,” Eludamos.
Journal for Computer Game Culture 4, no. 2 (2010).
www.eludamos.org/index.php/eludamos/article/view/vol4no2–12/191. Accessed 20 May 2013.
38 Marsha Kinder, “Honoring the Past and Creating the Future in Cyberspace: New Technologies and
Cultural Specificity,” The Contemporary Pacific 15, no. 1 (Spring 2003): 113.
39 Marsha Kinder, “Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever: Buñuel’s Legacy for New Digital
Media and Interactive Database Narrative,” Film Quarterly 55, no. 4 (Summer 2002): 4–6.
40 Kinder, “Honoring the Past,” 102.
41 Marsha Kinder, “Designing a Database Cinema,” in Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after
Film, ed. Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 347.
42 www.callofduty.com/intel/230?path=intel/230&path=intel/230. Accessed 2 November 2009.
43 Will Brooker, “Camera-Eye, CG-Eye: Videogames and the ‘Cinematic,’” Cinema Journal 48, no. 3
(Spring 2009): 125–26.
44 Daniel Punday, “Involvement, Interruption, and Inevitability: Melancholy as an Aesthetic Principal in
Game Narratives,” SubStance 33, no. 3 (2004): 83.
45 Punday, 87.
46 Punday, 95. He is discussing Michael Joyce’s Afternoon (1987).
CONCLUSION

The audiovisual experience of history – and

beyond

When Hayden White pointed to the constructedness of historical representation

in the 1970s, he fundamentally changed the way in which we think about
history. After his intervention, history as static, knowable fact was replaced by
history as a particular view of the past always mediated by the historian and by
the structures of language necessary to any written representation. While
emphasizing the importance of the historian and of the tropological form
historical narrative takes, White also gestured towards the importance of the
experience of the reader – an experience shaped by the particular historical
narrative at hand.1 After they have been shaped by the historian, historical texts
depend on the reader, who brings her own extratextual knowledge and
experiences with her, to fully constitute them as “history.” Ultimately, history is
not the texts produced about the past. Rather, it is the experience of history that
is generated by the reader’s encounter with those texts, the historical
consciousness that people incorporate into their everyday lives.
At this point, we are not just readers but also viewers of history. Our
experience of history is constituted not only by our encounter with written texts
but also with audiovisual representations of the past. As Robert Rosenstone has
noted, “visual media have become arguably the chief carrier of historical
messages in our culture.”2 We experience the past through film, television, and
the internet as much as – if not more than – we do from academic books and
articles. These audiovisual texts frequently appropriate preexisting recorded
sounds and images to serve as historical “evidence,” and these appropriations
significantly shape the way in which we experience “history.” They produce
what Roland Barthes referred to as a “reality effect,” giving us the sense of
directly experiencing the past itself rather than a mediated representation.3
Referring to written history, Barthes notes that

On the level of discourse, objectivity – or lack of signs of the “speaker” – thus

appears as a particular form of image-repertoire, the product of what we might
call the referential illusion, since here the historian claims to let the referent
speak for itself.4

Indexical audiovisual documents give an even greater sense of the referent

speaking “for itself” than do written words. Thus, if we are to maintain our
awareness of the fact that history is always a construction that inevitably serves
particular ideological frameworks, the referential illusion and seductive reality
effect associated with indexical audiovisual media (as well as written words)
must be actively recognized and interrogated.
It has been the argument of this book that the archive effect is a crucial
element in producing contemporary historical experience. The word
“experience” is defined as, among other things, “an event by which one is
affected.”5 Likewise, the archive effect is an event: it happens; or not –
depending on the text, the particular viewer, and the interaction between the two.
From this perspective, “archival documents” are not objects but they, too, are
events, encounters by which we are “affected” on both an intellectual and
emotional level. Paying attention to these “events” – to the complex play of
temporal and intentional disparities that produce archival documents as such –
allows us to see more clearly the way in which our historical experience is
constructed. The experience of the archive effect is now a daily occurrence
whether we experience it in relation to a film, a television program, or an online
video. Appropriation has become the lingua franca of the digital era,
continuously producing new iterations of the archive effect for fascinated
audiences across the globe. While not all of these texts are concerned with
historical events per se, they all shape our experience of the past. Thus, it is
crucial that we theorize their effects on historical consciousness.
I hope that, by allowing us to think about archival documents as a function of
the experience of a given viewer of a given film, the category of the
“appropriation film” and the concepts of the “archive effect,” “temporal
disparity,” and “intentional disparity” may help us to account for the complex
identity and effects of such documents in audiovisual texts of all kinds. These
concepts permit us to discuss films across different generic categories –
documentary, fake documentary, experimental, fiction – and across media
platforms – film, television, video, digital media – in terms of their related
archive effects. We may point out the differences between these archive effects
but also acknowledge continuities that – without these concepts – might be
obscured. Moreover, the notion of the archive effect may be mobilized as a tool
for the analysis of appropriation films as they have been produced throughout
film history. We can talk about the archive effect as it emerges in Esfir Shub’s
film The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, made in 1927, and Yael Hersonski’s A
Film Unfinished, made in 2010. Furthermore, while the majority of the films
discussed in this study were made by filmmakers based in the United States, the
notion of the archive effect operates across national and linguistic boundaries
and is just as useful for discussing The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle (Péter
Forgács, 1997), a film made by a Hungarian director drawing on documents
from the Netherlands, as for analyzing Forgotten Silver (1995), produced by
Peter Jackson and Costas Botes for New Zealand television. In sum, the archive
effect is a term that can be usefully deployed to analyze any appropriation film, a
category that operates across genre, platform, time, and space.
Yet much remains to be theorized in relation to the archive effect. Indeed, in
the interest of elucidating conceptual terms and historiographic and
epistemological issues, this study has elided questions of historical and local
specificity, treating appropriation films from different historical periods and
national cinemas without explicit regard to these differences. It could, however,
be extremely productive to deploy the concept of the archive effect and its
related terms to examine different subsets of the appropriation film based on
when and where these films were produced. In other words, the archive effect
may be further historicized and localized. Moreover, while this study has
focused on the production of historicity and historical effects, appropriation
films might be examined in relation to issues of gender, race, and sexuality as
well as other categories of critical analysis.
Indeed, many films that produce the archive effect focus our attention less on
history than on other issues even if historical effects are always present in some
way. In addition to producing scholarly work, I am also the founder, director,
and cocurator of the Festival of (In)appropriation, a yearly showcase of short,
experimental appropriation films sponsored by Los Angeles Filmforum.6 Many
of the films selected for the festival have focused on past events. Penny Lane’s
The Voyagers (2010) intertwines her personal history with that of the two
Voyager space probes launched in 1977. Brian Frye’s A Reasonable Man (2011)
concerns a police car chase in Georgia in 2001 in which a police officer
intentionally drove a speeding motorist off the road, rendering the motorist a
paraplegic – an event leading to a case deliberated by the United States Supreme
Court. Raquel Schefer’s Avo (Muidumbe) (2009) uses home movies shot in
Mozambique in 1960 to reflect on how images taken by Portuguese colonizers in
Mozambique may come to have a different meaning for descendants of these
colonizers in contemporary Portugal. All of these films, although certainly
experimental in form, can be easily categorized as documentaries and as
historical because they appropriate actuality footage of past events that have
immediate significance for a wider audience – a NASA space launch, a Supreme
Court case, European colonization of Africa.
However, other appropriation films screened in the festival are less easily
categorized as historical, pointing instead to other social and philosophical
issues. Akosua Adoma Owusu’s Intermittent Delight (2007), for example, pairs
images of contemporary Ghanaian batik textiles and textile workers with
visually similar images from Match Your Mood, a 1960s Westinghouse
promotional film for refrigerator decorations that allow a woman to match her
outfits to her largest kitchen appliance.7 The point of congruity between the two
sets of images is the bright textile patterns, which emphasize a connection
between past and present, the US and Ghana – yet also point to the gap between
the contexts in which they were made and used.
Because of the temporal disparity between the 1960s Westinghouse footage
and the much more recent images of the Ghanaian textile workers, historicity is
present in Intermittent Delight, but the film also raises questions having to do
with labor, class, race, transnationalism, gender, and affect. For instance, the
juxtaposition of images of wealthy white Americans dancing with their kitchen
appliances with images of black African textile workers points to questions of
production and consumption in the global economy. Despite the fact that the
Westinghouse footage is decades old, wealthy white people in developed nations
are still more likely to be consumers while people of color in developing nations
are now even more likely to be the ones producing the commodities. The reuse
of the Match Your Mood footage also points to the complete lack of use value of
this particular commodity that never caught on, emphasizing Western consumer
culture’s obsession with pure exchange value.
At the same time, Owusu’s film also raises questions of gender. We see both
men and women making textiles but only women dressing to match their
refrigerators. This points to the fact that in the US in the 1960s, women were
constructed as the primary consumers – especially of domestic items like kitchen
décor. This is portrayed in the appropriated footage as an aspiration. However,
from the perspective of the 2000s, because the footage and the fashion it
represents are now dated, this aspiration appears humorous and even pathetic.
Simultaneously, the juxtaposition of the archival footage with the contemporary
footage gestures towards the pride the Ghanaian workers seem to take in their
acts of production, and this contrasts with the superficial displays of pleasure by
the dancing Westinghouse women. While there is no straightforward
commentary on gender proffered here, the film suggests that the politics of labor
and gender within a global economy are shifting and yet, in some ways, remain
deeply problematic. Even as these themes emerge, however, Intermittent Delight
is also extremely funny, mainly due to the now-apparent absurdity of the
Westinghouse footage. Watching these women dress up like their refrigerators
makes us laugh, pointing also to the ephemerality of fashion, whose power is so
great but fades so quickly.
Thus, Intermittent Delight points to a range of questions we might pose in
relation to appropriation films that are not primarily about their relation to
history. How do gender, ethnicity, race, and nationality function in appropriation
films? How do appropriation films reinforce and/or disrupt assumptions about
gendered and racialized representation? How are the politics of transnational
labor figured in appropriation films, particularly given the fact that video footage
is now so easily transferred from one part of the globe to another? The
movement of archival images from one geographical and cultural context to
another is a rich vein of study to be mined. In addition to nostalgia (discussed in
Chapter 4), what other affective engagements may appropriation films produce
for us? How does humor – an important factor in many mash-up videos, for
instance – function in the appropriation film?8 Each of the films discussed in this
study might be reexamined in light of these questions.
Yet, because temporal disparity is always at work in the appropriation film, the
question of history – and the archive – will continue to haunt any discussion of
texts that produce the archive effect. At this crucial historical juncture in which
digital media is revolutionizing the production, storage, and circulation of
documents, and digital archives are overtaking material archives as sources of
such documents, the concept of the archive effect allows us to reimagine the
“historical” in this changed media landscape. Mobilizing the concept of the
archive effect and exploring its operations within any appropriation film
provides a means for us to think through how we understand and give credence
to particular documents as “historical evidence,” as – for a moment – evoking
the “touch of the real.” Ultimately, the notion of the archive effect, defined in
terms of our own experience of the archival document within a given text, forces
us to take responsibility for our relationship to historical knowledge and its
production. While the past was real, history is our creation, and it does not exist
outside of us. Rather, it is continually co-constituted in our encounters with the
traces of the past.

Notes
1 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore, MD:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 5.
2 Robert A. Rosenstone, Revisioning History: Film and the Construction of a New Past (Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 3.
3 Roland Barthes, “The Reality Effect,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1989 [1968]), 141–48.
4 Roland Barthes, “The Discourse of History,” in The Rustle of Language, trans. Richard Howard
(Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1989 [1968]), 132.
5 The Oxford English Dictionary. www.oed.com/view/Entry/66520?rskey=c9wLys&result=1#eid
Accessed 7 May 2013.
6 For information on the Festival of (In)appropriation, see http://festivalofinappropriation.org. Accessed
21 May 2013.
7 Match Your Mood can currently be accessed at http://archive.org/details/match_your_mood. Accessed 11
May 2013. The fact that this film is now accessible in a digital archive suggests that the digital archive
effect is at work even though it is not immediately apparent when watching Owusu’s film.
8 I have made an initial move toward addressing this question in “(In)appropriation: Productions of
Laughter in Contemporary Experimental Found Footage Films,” in Sampling Across the Spectrum, ed.
Laurel Westrup and David Laderman (London: Oxford University Press, forthcoming 2013), in which I
discuss Intermittent Delight at greater length.
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INDEX

Note: Citations to footnotes are indicated by an n followed by the note number

Alive Day Memories: Home from Iraq (Jon Alpert, Ellen Goosenberg Kent, 2007) 21–24
amateur films 16, 17, 21, 45n2, 84, 88–90, 94, 97–99, 100, 147, 150; as related to home movies 40, 81–82,
86, 87, 92, 107
Another Worldy (Leslie Thornton, 1999) 41–43
appropriation films: and the archival document 9–11, 18, 25–26, 49, 51–52, 169–70; and the archive effect
11–12, 22, 37–38, 154–55; defined 9, 15n24, 17–18, 27, 49; and the experience of history 12–13, 123,
134–35; and the home mode 82–83
archival documents: the authority of 6–7, 12, 17, 22–23, 51–52, 76–77; as an experience 7, 9, 17, 162–63,
174, 177; as metonymic fragments 13, 126–27, 129–31, 134–35, 144, 150; recontextualization of 4–5, 9,
24–25, 60–62, 82, 91; relationship of to the documentary 32–35; the significance of 10, 87, 107, 135n2,
140
archival footage: as compared to found footage 17; as related to the past 5–8, 22, 40, 43, 124–25, 165;
integration of with staged footage 57–61, 71, 88
archival voyeurism 12, 82, 95, 99–100, 106–7, 130
archive 2–11, 13, 16–17, 81, 113–17
archive affect: 12–13, 21, 43, 53, 87, 121, 123–24, 126, 128–35, 136n26, 137n33
archive effect: basic elements of the 11–12, 17–18, 38, 131, 134, 174–75; based on viewer reception 7,
9–11, 22, 24, 29, 37–38; digital 143–51, 154, 156, 159–65, 170; and gaps in historical knowledge
119–23; of home mode documents 82, 91, 94–95, 97; simulating of the 62–63, 65, 74, 77; see also
intentional disparity; temporal disparity
Atomic Café, The (Kevin Rafferty, Pierce Rafferty, Jayne Loader, 1982) 38–39
Avo (Muidumbe) (Raquel Schefer, 2009) 87–88, 89, 175

Blair Witch Project, The (Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez, 1999) 48–50, 53, 55, 76, 77n1, 78n11
Bontoc Eulogy (Marlon Fuentes, 1995) 56, 118, 120–21
Bowling for Columbine (Michael Moore, 2002) 38, 39, 40–41

Call of Duty: World at War videogame (2008) 164–67, 169–70

Capricorn One (Peter Hyams, 1978) 69–72
Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003) 92–94, 96, 97, 99–100, 106
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941) 52–53, 57
Civil War, The (Ken Burns, 1990) 46n17, 26–27
conspiracy theorists: 50–51, 62–67, 68, 70–73, 76; see also Holocaust deniers; moon hoaxers
Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? (John Moffet, 2001) 66–67, 70

Dark Side of the Moon (William Karel, 2002) 73–76

databases: database narratives 159–60; as sources of audiovisual documents 16, 49, 117; as sources of
 information 7, 139–41, 170n5
Decasia: The State of Decay (Bill Morrison, 2002) 128–31, 133, 134
deconstruction 111–12, 124, 134–35
Derrida, Jacques 2–3, 112, 113, 135, 136–37n33
digital archive: as an alternative form of logic 143–47; power of to expose human patterns 147–52, 154–56;
as a system 7, 139–42, 146–47
digital archive effect 141–42, 145, 159–60
digital historiography: 142–59; defined 143
digital history: 159–70; defined 159
documentaries: and conspiracy theorists 51–52, 63–67, 73–76; epistolary 116–18, 144; as experience: 8–9,
28–29, 161, 174; fake 6, 48–53, 73–76; fictional films as 46n10, 156–57; home movies and amateur films
as 85, 88–91; impact of color footage in 126–27; indexical quality of 4, 10; and intentional disparity 26,
36, 44, 46–47n19, 142–43; interactive 19–21, 160–62; scripted 118–19, 123; and temporal disparity 22,
28, 33–34, 46n6, 123; traditional sources for 16–17, 25; use of irony in 38–41

fake documentaries: appeal to viewers’ desire for found documents 48–49, 76, 78n15, 78n16; Blair Witch
Project, The 53, 55, 78n11; Bontoc Eulogy 56, 118, 120–21; Citizen Kane 52–53, 57; Forgotten Silver
53–55, 76, 77n8, 136n21; Mighty Times: The Children’s March 56; Watermelon Woman, The 118–21,
136n20; Zelig 57
Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, The (Esfir Shub, 1927) 5, 174
Festival of (In)appropriation 175, 177n6
Forgotten Silver (Peter Jackson, Costa Botes, 1995) 50, 53–55, 76, 120, 136n21
Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994) 50, 58–62, 65–66
Foucault, Michel 2, 3, 9, 13, 171n15
found footage: defined 8, 17, 24; faked 50–51, 54–55, 120; integration of with staged footage 59, 61–62,
71, 79n47; uses made of 26–27, 57–61, 74–75, 88–89, 102, 164–65
foundness 6, 17, 49, 63, 76, 128

Geographical Center of North America, The (Adrian Goycoolea, 2004) 88–89

Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005) 99–102, 106

haptic visuality 130–31, 133

historical presence: enhanced by use of color 126–28; human desire for 12–13, 22, 123–24, 128,
136–37n33; and nostalgia 129–35; as a participatory process 159–67, 169
historiography: approaches to 1–2, 10, 39, 82, 134; digital 13, 143, 149–50, 154, 156, 169–70
history: and the archive 2–3, 5, 81–82; and the concept of metahistory 2, 115, 147; as a construction 6–8,
61–65, 77, 173, 177; counterhistory 3, 81–82, 106–7, 114; and the database 140–43, 150–56; human need
to connect to 1, 12–13, 91–92, 123–28, 160–69, 173–74; gaps in knowledge of 109–10, 119–23; and
traces of the past 21–22, 40, 73, 78, 83, 87, 113–14, 120–22, 134–35, 139–40; use of the cinema to
represent 5, 10, 107, 119–23
Holocaust deniers 50–51, 63–67, 76; see also conspiracy theorists
home mode documents: appropriated for use in appropriation films 7, 12, 81–82, 90–91, 96; aura of privacy
of 87, 93, 95, 100–102; authenticating attributes of 54, 81; in Avo 87–88, 89, 175; in Capturing the
Friedmans 93–96; compared to amateur films 82–83, 148–49; confessional videos as 56, 93–95, 99–101,
108n26, 151; as evocative of lost times 40, 86–87; in Geographical Center of North America, The 88–89;
in Grizzly Man 99–102; Home Movie Day 85, 89; in Land of Nothing 90–91; made at Abu Ghraib Prison
102–7; made by the Khmer Rouge 117–18; in Maelstrom, The 40, 86, 88–91; selectivity of subject matter
in 87–89, 92, 175; in Tarnation 96; viewer relationship to 85, 89, 102, 118
Hutcheon, Linda 12, 24, 36–37, 39–40, 76; see also irony

In the Shadow of the Moon (David Sington, 2007) 18, 21, 66

intentional disparity: as an art form 133, 142–43, 145, 149, 158–59; as an element of the archive effect
11–12, 23–28, 30, 36, 174; foundness and 6, 17, 49, 76; the home mode and 82, 89–90, 91, 94–95, 97–98,
 102; importance of viewer knowledge to 27–29, 33–35, 44, 124; integration of found and newly created
footage to produce 46–47n19, 57–59, 62; as related to temporal disparity 17, 23–24, 26–28, 142–43;
defined 23; and satire 26–27, 29, 37–39, 115, 124, 146; and use of audio and visual effects 42, 165; and
use of photographs 24–26, 47n19, 83, 95–97, 102–6, 160–62; as used by conspiracy theorists 64, 65; see
also archive effect; temporal disparity
Interactive Film Comparison: Market Street 1905/2005 (Melinda Stone, 2005) 19–22, 46n7 37
interactivity: in videogames and database narratives 159–60, 163–64, 166, 169
Intermittent Delight (Akosua Adoma Owusu, 2007) 175–76
internet: as an archive 118, 140, 143, 171n13, 173; as a dynamic entity 151, 153; sites for visual documents
16, 63, 84, 104, 145–47; use of by institutions 16, 139
irony 12, 27, 36–45, 47n35, 67, 79n42

JFK (Oliver Stone, 1991) 50, 61–62, 66

JFK: A Time Remembered (Mark Oberhaus, 1988) 34, 47n19
joke: filmic deceptions as a 54, 118–22, 131–32, 135; films structured as a 111–16

Labyrinth Project 159–60, 163–64

Land of Nothing (Péter Forgács, 1996) 89–91
Los Angeles Filmforum 31–33, 44–45, 175
Lossless series (Rebecca Baron, Doug Goodwin, 2008) 156–59, 172n32

Maelstrom, The: A Family Chronicle (Péter Forgács, 1997) 40, 86, 88, 89
Mass Ornament (Natalie Bookchin, 2009) 147–54, 156, 159, 171n20
meta-archival documents: Apollo moon landing images as 66, 68, 69, 73; defined 62–63; Holocaust
imagery as 64–65; as targets of conspiracy theorists 51, 62–68, 70–72, 74, 76; video of the Rodney King
beating as 63; Zapruder footage of assassination of President Kennedy as 63
metaphor 2, 95, 112, 120, 123, 159; as catachresis 122; as compared to metonymy 123–24, 155;
literalization of in appropriation films 113, 115–16, 118, 128
metonymy 2, 126, 127, 129, 130, 135, 144, 150, 155; as compared to metaphor 123–24, 155
Mighty Times: The Children’s March (Robert Houston, 2004) 56, 61
Millhouse: A White Comedy (Emile de Antonio, 1971) 26–27, 46–47n19
moon hoaxers 12, 50–51, 64–76, 79n40, 79n42, 79n44; see also conspiracy theorists

New Historicism 3, 110–12, 114, 115, 127, 135

newsreel footage 5, 39, 52, 57–58, 61, 160
Nichols, Bill 4, 10, 85, 86
Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955) 17–18, 19, 21–22, 46n5
nostalgia: 41, 42, 43, 45, 87–88, 128–31, 134; reflective versus restorative and reactionary 13, 130–31, 134
(nostalgia) (Hollis Frampton, 1971) 131–33

okay bye-bye (Rebecca Baron, 1998) 116–18

Ortiz, Raphael Montañez 133–34

Rize (David LaChapelle, 2005) 27

Renov, Michael 91, 94, 96
Rosen, Philip 10, 34–35, 39

Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1983) 29–30, 47n24

Shooting the Past (Stephen Poliakoff, 1999) 138–40, 159, 160
Sobchack, Vivian 8–9, 28–29, 59, 84, 106, 122
spam letter + google image search = video entertainment (Andre Silva, 2005) 144–47, 150–51, 156, 159
Standard Operating Procedure (Errol Morris, 2008) 102–6
Steedman, Carolyn 25, 111, 112, 117, 135, 135n7
stock footage 9, 52, 57, 74, 123

Tailenders, The (Adele Horne, 2005) 109–16

Tarnation (Jonathan Caouette, 2003) 96–100, 106
Tearoom (William E. Jones, 2007) 11–12, 31–36, 43–45
temporal disparity: and the archive affect 21–22, 40–41, 85–90, 131; and the archive effect 22, 49; and
historical presence 127, 174; and irony 38–39, 42, 43–44, 175; and narrative 52, 55, 57, 163, 165; as
related to intentional disparity 17, 23–24, 26–28, 142–43; sequencing and 34, 35, 46n10, 92–93, 96–98;
and viewer perception 11, 18–22, 30, 35, 37–38; see also archive effect; intentional disparity
Tracing the Decay of Fiction: Encounters with a Film by Pat O’Neill (Pat O’Neill, Rosemary Comella, and
Kristy H.A. Kang, 2002) 159–67, 169–70

Underground (Emir Kusturica, 1995) 50, 61–62, 66

Up series (Michael Apted, 1984 onward) 18–19, 21, 46n6, 52

viewer: conception of the past 5, 7–9, 11; and desire for historical presence 124–27; experience of the
archive effect 7, 9–12, 14n21, 17–18, 22–30, 33–35, 37–38, 42–45, 46n10, 174; as user or participant
160–69

Watermelon Woman, The (Cheryl Dunye, 1996) 56, 78n16, 118–21, 136n20
What Happened on the Moon? (David S. Percy, 2000) 66–73, 79n40, 79n42
White, Hayden 2, 10, 115, 159, 162, 173
World War II: in Call of Duty videogame 164–67, 169–70; color images of 124–28; footage from 6, 41–42,
47n19, 87, 89–90, 123; images of in Underground 61–62

YouTube 76, 98, 139–40, 142, 147–53

Zelig (Woody Allen, 1983) 50, 57–59

Zimmerman, Patricia 81–83