The Archive Effect: Found Footage and the Audiovisual Experience of History by Jaimie Baron (review)

In The Archive Effect, Jaimie Baron brings the study of found-footage films up to date. In addition to extending the boundaries of the field, she gives her closest study to works produced in the last twenty years. Most significantly, she shifts critical attention away from the principal concerns of previous writings on found-footage films, which concentrated, in varying degrees, on their sources, formal strategies, aesthetics, and thier social and political critiques. Instead, she emphasizes "the effects the film produces, namely, the archive effect" (9). Her definition and theorization of "the archive effect" is buttressed by detailed analysis of how that "effect" is produced by an appropriation of archival material in a wide variety of audio-visual works.

"Archival," for Baron, is a flexible term denoting any place pre-existing sounds and images can be found and appropriated for a new work. Consequently, Baron finds conventional distinctions between "archival" and "found" documents of little relevance, and she tends to use the terms interchangeably. While most previous studies (including my own) distinguished between "compilation films" in the documentary tradition and "found-footage films" in the experimental/avant-garde tradition, Baron places them all under the umbrella of what she prefers to call "appropriation films," and she applies the term to works in any audio-visual medium as long as they produce "the archive effect."

For there to be an "archive effect" at all, the viewer must recognize the documents in the work as "archival" rather than "original," as "found" rather made by the filmmaker for a specific film. It is this recognition, in Baron's view, that makes the document "archival." "I would argue," Baron writes, "that the 'found' document becomes 'archival' as it is recontextualized within an appropriation film and is recognized by the viewer as 'found'" (17). In fact, she goes so far as to define "the archival document" as "an experience of reception rather than an indication of official sanction or storage location" (7, original emphasis).

Essential for that "experience of reception" is an awareness of what Baron calls "temporal disparity" and/or "intentional disparity." The former derives from "the perception by the viewer of an appropriation film of a 'then' and a 'now' generated within a single text" (18). "Then" is represented by images (or sounds) the viewer recognizes as having had an existence previous to their appearance in the present work; "now" is whatever has been shot (or recorded) to accompany the archival footage and connotes the "present" of the film's production and reception. When the entire work is composed of archival material, as is commonly the case with conventional compilation films, a "temporal disparity" still exists because the "then" of archival material is perceived in the "now" of the viewing experience (which is usually enhanced by a voice-over perceived as speaking in the "present").

"Intentional disparity" rests on the viewer's recognition of the difference between the (presumed) intentions behind the original use of the archival document and the intentions behind its re-use in an appropriation film. Baron expands the concept of "intentional disparity" by suggesting it might just as suitably be called "social disparity" or "rhetorical disparity." She writes, "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" (23). Recognition of "intentional disparity" requires at least some degree of extra-textual knowledge, otherwise the document will be simply taken at face value, as originally "intended," and there will be no "archive effect."

Always, for Baron, an appropriation film is defined, not by its archival content, but by viewers' recognition of the material as archival and by "the archive effect" created by that recognition. Inevitably, she says, if the documents are recognized as archival they will "generate a sense of multiple contexts and double meanings, even if...