Dangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film

Part One

When I came to print the negative, an odd thing struck my eye. Somathing standing in the cross street and invisible to me was reDected in a factory window and then reDected once more in the rear view mirror attached to the truck door. It was only a tiny detail. Since then I have enlarged this small section of my negative enormously. The grain of the fUm all but obliterates the features of the image. It is obscured. By any possible reckoning it is hopelessly ambiguous. Jl'evertheless, what I believe I see recorded in that speck of fUm fills me with such fear, such utter dread, and loathing, that I think Ishall never dareto make anotherphotograph. Here it is. Look at it. Do you see what I see?l Over the course of three decades, the visual representations produced around the JFK assassination have proven fundamentally unstable. Indeed, to theorize the epistemological status of such imagery is not just to insist on its instability but to register its shiftingmovement, its negotiation between legibility and ambiguity. Traced through the assassination case is both a faith and a crisis in representation. On the one hand was a belief in the powers of photographic evidence to legibly transcribe events, primarily the logistics of the Dealey Plaza shooting . This faith held that sufficiently close scrutiny of images could tell patient investigators how the crime was committed, that the photographic apparatus could yield knowledge as a result of a precise and expanded vision . On the other hand, the steady construction of assassination countertheories and the slow accumulation ofvarying interpretations ofthe photographicevidence , although producedindependently byindividual theorists' attempting to put forth a single, coherent account, resulted in a general crisis of representation, a heterogeneity of interpretations that frustrated any confidence in the visual evidence. Faith in the powers ofcamera vision, initially located in the investigative efforts of the government and its supporters , ultimately came to characterize both sides ofthe debate. Both Warren Commission advocates and critics have spoken in definitive terms when analyzing the film and photographic evidence. However, as the debate expanded and multiple interpretations were generated, these definitive readings of the image became increasingly challenged by an epistemological anxiety which frequently undermined interpretive coherence. 31 This crisis of representation affected the narrative as well as the photographic . The state's version ofhistoric truth relied heavily on the revelatory powers of the image- but not wholly. For the state reinforced the visual evidence with a faith in the strucruring power of narrative. If a coherent account was possible, closure could be genuine because the disparate details ofthe case were manageable within a traditional form. Part One of this book focuses primarily on three sets of representation: the Zapruder film, the JFK autopsy materials, and images of Lee Harvey Oswald. The epistemological status ofeach is situatedwithin the forms that framed its public exposure and interpretation- primarilygovernment publications and the books and articles authored by Warren Report critics. AB noted in the Introduction, my elaboration of the inquests into Kennedy's death does intend to uncover new leads or contribute to the still-growing literature probing for solutions. I am interested foremost in establishing a context for the various art practices discussed in Parts Two and Three, in laying out atextual terrain so that I can later map its contours onto the films, silkscreens, assemblages, and videos produced during this same thirty-year period. My discussion opens, then, with the journalistic forms produced around the investigation rather than with the visual arts that took the assassination as their central subject matter. Ofcourse, it would be wrong to characterize this network of representations as a one-way channel leading from mainstream and marginal journalistic inquiries to experimental representations and then to the commercial cinema. The activities of institutions or individuals involved with the case obviously cannot be separated from the historical and social context in which they operated, a context that includes the cinema and is constructed by its conventions of narrative and imaging. One certainly can argue that the assassination inquiries of the late sixties and seventies were influenced in various ways by the commercial and perhaps noncommercial exploitation ofthe assassination. Hollywood's mediation of the issues-through genre conventions, star identities, narrative tropes - while reaching an audience far greater than other assassination texts, also served to marginalize or compartmentalize the investigators' efforts. The movies suggested that anti-Warren Report speculations were the stuff of...