Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film in Visual Culture

Introduction

Fig. I.1 Frame 262 from the Zapruder film. © 1967 (renewed 1995) The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. Used with permission of the Sixth Floor Museum. Fig. I.2 Frame 375 from the Zapruder film. © 1967 (renewed 1995) The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza. Used with permission of the Sixth Floor Museum. Introduction During our negotiations, Zapruder said again and again how worried he was about possible exploitation of his 26 seconds of film. He told me about a dream he’d had the night before: He was walking through Times Square and came upon a barker urging tourists to step inside a sleazy theater to watch the President die on the big screen. The scene was so vivid it made Zapruder heartsick. Later, while testifying before the Warren Commission, which was investigating the assassination, he wept as the film was shown. “The thing would come every night,” he said of the dream. “I wake up and see this.” // Richard B. Stolley, “Zapruder Rewound” The motorcade turns onto Houston Street, and in the backseat of one of the cars sits President John F. Kennedy, smiling and waving to the crowds that have gathered along the road, his wife next to him. The car disappears behind a road sign, then appears again, and the president seems to be fumbling with his collar, clutching his throat, while Jackie Kennedy is watching with increasing attention (Fig. I.1). He glides slowly to the left, and then his upper body is jolted violently, his head exploding in a spurt of blood, and his wife crawls across the back of the car as a Secret Service man climbs up on it (Fig. I.2). She turns back and looks for a moment in the direction of the now slumped, partly invisible body, then the view is obstructed again by bushes and another road sign before we see the car speeding up, disappearing under the overpass. When I awoke in my West End hotel room in Dallas, Texas, on the morning of November 22, 2003, and turned on the television set before getting out of bed, only a minute or two passed before I saw these images on the screen. I cannot recall precisely which channel I happened to be watching, but I remember switching for a few minutes and observing without surprise that the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination had made the headlines on a number of Saturday-morning shows, all running similar footage from 2 // Z A P R U D E R E D the Kennedy years and the day of the assassination. It felt strange to see the motorcade turn again and again on Houston Street, knowing it had all happened only blocks from where I was staying. On that day, forty years had passed since Kennedy was murdered in the city I had been visiting for half a week. In the course of those few days in Dallas , I found that what had at first been a strange and unfamiliar sensation— that of being in a city where all the major networks were present to cover an event—gradually came to feel routine. When I eventually saw a friend and myself on the screen, I observed it without any of the enthusiasm or excitement one usually feels at suddenly being caught on tape at the periphery of some television report. By that time, it had come to seem inevitable that our faces would end up being broadcast during that weekend. With cameras everywhere around us, I would have been surprised if we had not ended up being photographed or filmed at some point. The first morning I arrived in Dealey Plaza, where Kennedy was shot, the area was almost empty. A few people were walking around and pointing up at the sixth-floor window of the former schoolbook depository building from which Lee Harvey Oswald had allegedly fired the rifle shots that killed the president. They took photographs of the building, of the giant X painted in the street at what is believed to be the exact spot where Kennedy was shot in the head, and of the picket fence from behind which one or more shots had been fired, according to numerous so-called conspiracy theorists. Two or three of the more dedicated of these had silently placed themselves in the area, offering videotapes and homemade publications for sale. To them, it was just another working...