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ix Preface to the New Paperback Edition S ince Dangerous Knowledge was first published, scholars of film and cultural studies have found the jfk assassination and its representation an ongoing source of fascination. Outstanding books have been written about conspiracy thinking in American political discourse and about the role that jfk-assassination imagery has played in helping us rethink the contours of visual culture. But in 1996, when my doctoral dissertation was revised into this book, the field, if it can even be called that, barely existed. Of course, a small library of books and articles was devoted to solving the assassination mystery, reviewing the investigations conducted by the government, and countering official claims. But no books were devoted to theorizing the photographic and moving image as each had operated within the assassination inquiries since 1963, nor did any books survey the artwork that had engaged in a dialogue with it. My place on the margins of what Peter Knight has referred to as “assassinology” was made clear to me when, on the basis of Dangerous Knowledge, I was asked to testify before the Assassination Records Review Board (aarb) in the spring of 1997. The aarb was an independent government board assigned to oversee the implementation of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, a measure passed in 1992. The aarb’s Final Report stated its mission rather bluntly: “The problem was that thirty years of government secrecy relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy led the American public to believe that the government had something to hide. The solution was legislation that required the government to disclose whatever information it had concerning the assassination.”1 On the day I testified, the board was, in the words of Chairman John Tunheim, “seeking public comment and advice” as it addressed how Abraham Zapruder’s family should be compensated for the government’s taking the original film that had traveled through his camera. After a prolonged negotiation, in 1999, the government paid $16 million to the family. Perhaps I should have known it would be a less than satisfying day when I saw my name at the bottom of the testimony list. The film professor goes last, I thought, not so much hitting clean-up but bringing x Preface to the New Paperback Edition up the rear behind Robert Brandeis, a George Washington University law professor; Richard Trask, who had written a comprehensive account of the Zapruder film’s circulation through government and commercial locations; Moses Weitzman, a photography expert who had worked with the film at life magazine; and Josiah Thompson, author of Six Seconds in Dallas and one of the assassination critics who had always seemed among the most level-headed and intelligent in a field that contains both reasonable investigators and crackpots. The members of the aarb struck me as thoughtful and serious people, prepared to examine some of the larger cultural, even philosophical, questions at stake in the discussion. But I was surprised by the remarks of several of my fellow speakers, particularly by the time they devoted to going over what had been repeated so many times over the years—the details about Zapruder’s experience making the film and the importance of the film as a record of the assassination. Surely the board knew all this already—no one needed to hear two hours of testimony about how the Zapruder film was the most important piece of historical footage ever shot. By 1997, such observations almost went without saying, I thought, or could at least be quickly summarized. This opportunity to testify seemed a good time to address other issues raised by three decades of looking at the Zapruder footage. I suggested that the film’s evidentiary value had largely run its course, that now it functioned as exhibit one not in the murder investigation but in the recurring struggle between the idea that film was an unimpeachable witness to history, on the one hand, and the source of multiple and sometimes contradictory conclusions on the other. In other words, it seemed appropriate to see the Zapruder film from the perspective of more than thirty years, in which it now appeared as the inaugural text of a new era of image making and interpretation, or what some would call the postmodern era. I told the aarb what I had claimed in the book: that the Zapruder film had become a thoroughly fetishized object and that its repeated scrutiny masked the lack of...

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