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Chapter 1 The Zapruder Film The flucmating stams of photographic imagery in the assassination debates is bestillustrated bythe history ofthe Zapruder film. Itis a history puncmated by faith in the film's revelatory power and by a crisis of interpretation, by movement between epistemological certainty and anxiety over not only readings of the film but also the narratives constructed to accompany its social exposure. So central is Zapruder's film footage that it loops continuously over this entire project. Even where not explicitly discussed, the film retains a privileged position, just as it did throughout the three decades following the assassination: a central yet marginalized piece of film, scandalous and long sequestered for its content, prized as verite, dissected for its narrative, a thinly veiled subject for the commercial movie industry (Brian De Palma's Blow Out after Antonioni's Blow-Up), and a strucmring absence for the film avant-garde (Bruce Conner 's Report). Its points of contact with an array of social and political instimtions and its subjection to a variety offormal analyses endow it with a richlytelling history, for the Zapruder film registers, perhaps berter than any other single film text, the shifting stams offilm representation over the last thirty years. The Zapruder Story Assassination critics are fond of telling how the Zapruder film was something of a near accident, a last-minute idea. Abraham Zapruder, a dress manufacmrer whose downtown Dallas office was adjacent to Dealey Plaza, left his 8mm Bell and Howell at home on the morning of November 22 because the skies were overcast. The story has it that, as midday approached and the sun broke through, Zapruder, at his secretary's prompting, remrned home to retrieve the camera, then took up a position on a concrete pedestal on the north side ofElm Streetto film the presidential motorcade as itdrove byen route to the Dallas Trade Mart.1 As the leadingwedge ofpolice motorcycles mrned off Houston Street and onto Elm, Zapruder began shooting and for the next twenty-six seconds recorded the most famous amateur footage in the history ofcinema. The complex public and private circulation of Zapruder's film began immediately after the assassination, and the ambiguity ofthe narrative within 35 the film came to be mirrored bynarratives about the film. Stories varied as to the path the film traveled the afternoon of the 22nd. Early accounts had it that Zapruder was approached by a police reporter for the DallasMorning News who, after unsuccessfully trying to confiscate the film, found a Secret Service agent to accompany both men to the Kodak film lab.2 Subsequent accounts trace the film from Zapruder to the Kodak lab to the Jamison Film Company, although it remains unclear exactly where the first-generation copies were made. Three such copies were produced the day of the assassination , two ofwhich were handed over to the Secret Service. One ofthese Secret Service copies was then sent on to Washington so that the FBI could produce its own copies. Whether the CIA also received a copy has been a matter ofquestion, because records made public through Freedom ofInformation Act suits suggest that a copy ofthe film was at the agency's National Photo Interpretation Center within days ofthe assassination.3 Meanwhile, it appears that Zapruder wound up retaining the third of the first-generation copies after relinquishing the original film in a deal with Richard Stolley ofLife magazine. Stolley learned of the film from a stringer correspondent , reached Zapruder by phone aroUnd midnight, and had him sign a handwritten contract the next day. Some confusion also surrounded Zapruder 's deal with the magazine: $40,000 was the purchase price as reported the week ofthe assassination; Zapruder told Warren Commission counsel that he was paid $25,000; his contract with Life revealed that $25,000 was only the first installment on a total of$I50,000.4 It was ofprofound importance that Zapruder's images first found public exposure in Henry Luce's picture magazine. Here it was implied that images nearly spoke for themselves, that knowledge, perhaps truth, was ensured by the camera's expanded vision. The defining concept for the magazine, its own enabling fiction, asserted that the photograph, not the word, was the privileged signifier.5 In the introduction to his history of Life, long-time editorLoudon Wainright articulates this faith in the magazine's deployment ofcamera vision: For those who shaped it, Life's treatment of an event somehow transcended the event itself. In along and curiousJump ofthlnldng...

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