Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film in Visual Culture

Notes

Introduction 1. Steve Blow, “A City in the Spotlight,” Dallas Morning News, Friday, November 21, 2003. 2. This account is drawn from Trask, National Nightmare on Six Feet of Film; Motyl, Image of an Assassination; and Wrone, The Zapruder Film, a well-researched and meticulously detailed version. 3. Black, The Reality Effect, 30. 4. Wrone, The Zapruder Film, 35. Wrone gives a detailed account of how Zapruder struggled to get his film processed. He tried to get it done at the offices of the Dallas Morning News as well as at the newspaper’s television station, WFAA-TV, an ABC affiliate; finally, the film was processed at the Eastman Kodak Processing Laboratory. To get the film duplicated, Zapruder had to visit a laboratory in a different part of town. Of the three copies, two were given to the federal government —to the Secret Service offices in Dallas and in Washington, D.C. The third copy and the original went into the possession of Time Inc. 5. In his immensely influential essay “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit,” Walter Benjamin argues that reproduced artworks suffered a loss of “aura” after the advent of photography. “In photography,” Benjamin wrote, “exhibition value begins to drive back cult value on all fronts” (“The Work of Art in the Age of Reproducibility (Third Version),” 257). N O T E S 1 5 4 // N O T E S T O P A G E S 6 – 1 2 6. According to Bolter and Grusin: “Each act of mediation depends on other acts of mediation. Media are continually commenting on, reproducing, and replacing each other, and this process is integral to media”(Remediation, 55). 7. Richard Stolley, “Zapruder Rewound,” Life, September 1998, 43. 8. Both the Dallas Times Herald and the Dallas Morning News soon approached Zapruder to obtain publication rights; he was offered a major figure by the president of the Times Herald over the phone, but insisted that he would hand over the film only to the Secret Service or the FBI, both of which ended up receiving copies the next morning (see Wrone, The Zapruder Film, 16–17). 9. Iconology, 10. Mitchell describes graphic, optical, perceptual, mental, and verbal images as branches of a family tree. 10. Belting, “Image, Medium, Body,” 302, 304. What Mitchell calls “graphic images,” Belting refers to as “physical images” (304). The essay is a condensed Englishlanguage version of the central arguments of his book Bild-Anthropologie, in which the distinction is between Bild (“picture”), Medium, and Körper (“body”). 11. Mitchell, Iconology, 33. 12. Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others, 86. 13. Sturken, Tangled Memories, 3. According to Wulf Kansteiner, the sociologically informed attempts to define collective memory that are heavily informed by the theories of Halbwachs worry historians because of his “determined antiindividualism ” (“Finding Meaning in Memory,” 181). Cultural memory, on the other hand, “consists of objectified culture, that is, the texts, rites, images, buildings , and monuments which are designed to recall fateful events in the history of the collective” (182). See also Zelizer, “Reading the Past Against the Grain.” 14. Antze and Lambek, Tense Past. 15. Huyssen, Twilight Memories, 2–3. 16. Sturken, Tangled Memories, 3; Bal, Crewe, and Spitzer, Acts of Memory, vii. 17. Mayhew, World’s Tribute to John F. Kennedy in Medallic Art, xv. 18. Mitchell, What Do Pictures Want? 318. 19. Sturken, Tangled Memories, 29. 20. Hirsch, Family Frames, 22. 21. Sturken observes how several Vietnam veterans say they forget where their memories come from and confuse whether the source of their memory is their own experiences or photographs or movies (Tangled Memories, 20). 22. Sturken, Tangled Memories, 33. Indeed, my own first encounter with the images occurred in a movie theater in Norway, where I saw JFK the year that I was twenty , in 1992. 23. Lubin, Shooting Kennedy, 4. The imagery in the extensive photographic record of Kennedy is so resonant because it echoes canonized images from the history of art, Lubin argues in his book. Thus, pictures of Kennedy are not famous “because they show famous events,” but because they “look like or call to mind or somehow otherwise invoke and engage a wide range of previous pictures (and N O T E S T O P A G E S 1 2 – 1 6 // 1 5 5 literatures and historical actors and events) that have already staked a claim on the cultural imagination” (xi). 24...