In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The camera zooms in quickly on a bronze bust of Kennedy, and we hear a man declaring solemnly with a distinct British accent: “Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States has been the victim of an assassination .” Then there is a deep, collective sigh of disbelief as a rather poor black-and-white copy of the Zapruder film dated “November 22, 1963” fills the screen. Even if what we are seeing is clearly video, the sound of a projector can be heard vaguely in the background, and the dating lends a strange archival or even archeological feel to the scene, a sense that what we are watching could have been taken off a dusty shelf or dug out of the ground sometime in the future, very much like the bronze piece. Associations with an earlier era in the history of recorded film, a time when gesture was everything and no sound was to be heard, seem inevitable as the shadowy black-and-white images flash by. Or perhaps this is what a newsreel will look like to a viewer in the distant future? Finally and somewhat more prosaically, the sequence exposes the act of transmission and thus illustrates that the Zapruder film is much more than a reel of 8 mm film. The images have been transferred onto a spool of magnetic tape. What we see both is and is not the Zapruder film. This is a short description of the opening moments of The Eternal Frame, a video by Ant Farm, a collective of architects who also worked as video, performance , and installation artists in the Bay Area in the late sixties and early Because I must function only as an image, I have chosen in my career to begin with the end, and to be born, in a sense, again, even as I was dying. // The Artist-President, The Eternal Frame T W O Eternally Framed E T E R N A L L Y F R A M E D // 4 7 seventies. Doug Michels and Chip Lord founded the group in 1968, and were joined by Curtis Schreier, Hudson Marquez, Douglas Hurr, and other shorttime members who came and went (the group split up in 1978). The video was recorded in 1975 in cooperation with T. R. Uthco, another performance group in the area, which consisted of Doug Hall, Diane Andrews Hall, and Jody Procter.1 Performed, recorded, and produced not long after Geraldo Rivera’s latenight broadcast of Robert Groden’s copy of the Zapruder film, and undoubtedly in part as a response to that screening, The Eternal Frame is nevertheless much more than a commentary on Rivera’s sudden exposure of Zapruder’s images to a nationwide audience. A Chinese box of sorts, the video revels in its own conundrums and never quite allows the spectator to figure out whether it is a performance about a film, a film about a performance, a film about a film about a performance, and so on. “What it is,” Doug Michels says in a scene, “is figuring out what it is.” In its climactic moment, a reenactment of the assassination in Dealey Plaza toward the end of the video, Ant Farm performs not so much Kennedy’s death as Zapruder’s recording of it, as Marita Sturken observes.2 Leading up to this, staged appearances resemble televised presidential press conferences, and several scenes describe Ant Farm’s studio preparations for its upcoming on-location reenactment. Finally, toward the end, the video includes audience commentary after a San Francisco screening of the reenactment. What happens when Zapruder’s images travel into art, when they appear in a video such as The Eternal Frame? Indeed, if all our encounters with Zapruder’s images take place through remediations, we can in a sense only see them quoted—Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin remind us that no medium “can now function independently and establish its own separate and purified space of cultural meaning.”3 “The meanings of the Zapruder film continue to shift each time it is reenacted,” Sturken points out.4 But in stressing this point, The Eternal Frame confronts us with a reuse of the images that differs markedly from that of Life’s imagetext or Rivera’s late-night show. Here, Zapruder’s images are profoundly transformed, and in a way that suggests that the artist wants to reveal and focus on the very act of quoting. As expository discourse, then, the kind of artistic...

Share