Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film in Visual Culture

5. Pleasing to the Eye

A copy of the Zapruder film is projected, and then large color prints of individual frames are exhibited in the room. Reproductions of Andy Warhol ’s silk print Orange Marilyn (1964) and Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph The Steerage (1907) are then shown, the latter of which is compared with frame 182 of the Zapruder film. “The colors are beautiful,” Steve Johnson observes about the frame. “The ever-familiar hues of the tragedy—the pink of the First Lady’s outfit, the red of the wounds, the green of the grass, the bluish-black of the Presidential limousine—would not have been better if selected by Warhol or Matisse.”1 The setting for this scene is not a gallery, but a courtroom in Washington, D.C., in May 1999. Johnson, an appraiser hired by Zapruder’s heirs—who are, at this point, owners of Abraham Zapruder’s camera-original footage—is arguing that the film is worth thirty million dollars. Johnson’s audience, an arbitration panel consisting of three judges appointed by the U.S. government , have seen numerous affidavits filed and are nearing a decision that will establish a market value for the film. Arguing against Johnson and a team of lawyers is an opposing team appointed by the U.S. government, which is about to purchase the film in accordance with a federal law from 1992 requiring all assassination-related documents to become governmental property The film of Kennedy’s assassination is the Sistine Chapel of our era. // J. G. Ballard F I V E Pleasing to the Eye 9 2 // Z A P R U D E R E D and to be stored in a collection at the National Archives. This legal taking is a case of eminent domain, and the panel’s job is to decide on fair compensation for the film’s owners. In this chapter, I will argue that this governmental taking of the Zapruder film must be considered a definitive expression of its transformed cultural status. In previous chapters, I have addressed how Zapruder’s images can be said to have traveled through a range of different discourses and cultural spheres and thus can be described as traveling images. As we have seen, in spite of their increasing epistemological uncertainty, their dispersion in culture makes them more “durable” as aesthetic and allegorical images.2 This, in turn, affected the evaluation of the original film when it finally became public property in 1999. After Time Inc. denied Geraldo Rivera the right to broadcast Robert Groden’s copy of the Zapruder film in 1975 but ABC nevertheless did so, Time reversed its decision and allowed the broadcast without fee after the fact. A little more than a month later, Time transferred the copyrights and the Zapruder film to Abraham Zapruder’s family (he had died in 1970). Shortly afterward, the National Archives agreed to store it.3 The burden of ownership had become greater than its privileges. However, neither the film nor the copyrights had shifted hands for the last time. After the controversy of Stone’s movie, a bill passed by Congress became the first step toward the appointing of the Assassination Records Review Board to oversee the release of all classified federal records about the assassination and the investigations into it. At the termination of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1979, a number of files remained in closed storage. Stone’s picture, which was seen by sixty million moviegoers in the United States and was followed by an outburst of press articles and television segments, created considerable pressure to open these files.4 In the fall of 1992, the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992, widely referred to as the JFK Act, was enacted. It was “an unprecedented piece of legislation,” Richard Trask writes, since it “mandated the gathering and opening to public access of all records which related to the death of President Kennedy by all government agencies.”5 An independent governmental agency, the Assassination Records Review Board, was established to oversee implementation, work that would take years.6 During the period that the board was at work, a struggle between competing interests ensued. At the heart of the conflict was the Zapruder film’s troubled identity as both assassination record and commercial property. Not long after the act P L E A S I N G T O T H E E Y...