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Epilogue f his project really began when I saw Bruce Conner's Report for the first tlme. For years I had been reading about the assassination of JFK, casually studying its imagery and keeping pace with emerging developments. With this book coming to a close, what is so striking to me now IS the way a particular text made it possible for me to see and construct a tropology for a body ofliterature with which I had worked for years but had never recognized. With a sudden, startling comprehension , I saw in Conner's use of repetition and his strategy ofappropriation a pattern m the JFK inquiries that refigured my understanding ofthe assassInation discourse. When I decided to write about R£port, it was in conjunction with the Warhol silkscreens, which developed into the core ofPartTwo. I began, in other words, by moving from text to text, a method that consIstently resulted in surprises about a given work and its articulatlon of the assassination debates. Indeed, throughout my writing, the structure of a particular film or art work prevented me from easily imposmg a conceptual model on any individual text, forcing me to rethink If not always to adequately refigure my frames ofintelligibility. Yet this project was motivated by and remains a call for context, a call for hiStory. For at the same time I began writing about Conner and Warhol, the mainstream merna were marking yet another armlversary of the assassmation , and the airwaves were cluttered with fragments of assassination footage . I wanted to offer some resistance to the idea that these Images were free-floating sigmfiers by establishing and arguing for a discursive context that could situate them within a history of representation. It was clear that assassination imagery had been made to appear in a wide variety of SOCial locales - the mainstream and marginal press, soft-core pornography, pop art, the underground, and commodity cinema- but questIOns remained about the intertextual relations, both ideological and formal, among these various practices. These varied locatlons suggest the diversity ofthe audience working with and making sense of assassination imagery, an audience splintered among disciplines: assassination critics, art historians, film scholars, collectors of camp. My purpose has been not so much to address each ofthese audiences separately as to attempt to construct an audience for whom conceptual and textual connections did not previously exist. I hope that readers in this au221 dience will now understand the assassination debates as a historiographic struggle and an aspect ofsocial history thoroughly bound up with film and the arts during the sixties and after. As a call for context, I have tried to maintain that concept in alllts compleXity , for the assassmation debates, understood as encompassing the arts, not simply reflected through them, are far from monolithic. Indeed, the debates are not only complex but ongoing, and as this study concludes, one carmot help but take note of the leads still worth pursuing. Undoubtedly, an analysis of the literary fiction produced around the assassination would add a crucial piece to the structure suggested here. As Warren Commission critics and contemporary artists continue to explore the offerings of video and as current avant-garde filmmakers continue to experiment with found footage strategies, their work will also contribute to the ever-expanding collage ofassassination documents. 222 Epilogue ...

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