A new book analyses how amateur cameraman Abraham Zapruder's bare half-minute of film became a seminal piece of visual culture as record, commodity, snuff movie and art, writes JOHN BYRNE
FORTY-EIGHT YEARS ago next Tuesday, shortly after noon local time, a 58-year-old Ukraine-born dress manufacturer named Abraham Zapruder stood atop a concrete abutment in Dealey Plaza, Dallas. Behind him, holding him steady, was Marilyn Sitzman, a receptionist from his office.
He hadn’t planned to be there. The morning had been rainy and unpromising, and it was only after the sky had cleared that several of Zapruder’s colleagues persuaded him to return home to fetch his Bell Howell Zoomatic 8mm camera. At 12.30pm he was waiting in a prime position to see President John Fitzgerald Kennedy’s motorcade turn on to Elm Street and make its way slowly towards him.
For 26 seconds Zapruder trained his camera, unflinchingly, on the presidential limousine. Watching it approach. Watching, through the camera’s zoom lens, as the president slumped forwards in his seat. Watching, horrified, as Kennedy’s head exploded. Watching as the car raced off to Parkland Memorial Hospital. Soon he would find himself wandering, dazed, through the pandemonium of the plaza, screaming, “They killed him, they killed him.” Inside the camera he clutched were 486 frames of film that would, many years later, become the most valuable photographic artefact in the world: in 1999, having earlier passed a law that gave it rights over the footage, the US government bought it from the Zapruder family for $16 million.
Though the infamous short film shot by Abraham Zapruder in Texas that day has been endlessly dissected, analysed and enhanced by those hoping to unravel what it reveals, or doesn’t reveal, about a ferociously contested event, its status as a seminal piece of visual culture has received far less attention.
In a newly published book, Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film in Visual Culture, the Norwegian scholar Øyvind Vågnes attempts to trace the tangled history of the film and the ways in which it has travelled through popular culture, imprinting itself on our collective memory of the assassination.
Although his accidental witnessing and recording of a gruesome murder would leave a lasting mark on Zapruder, with the memory of it keeping him “awake many nights in the years to come”, he quickly realised he had been left with a highly desirable object. “Traumatised by what he had seen,” Vågnes says, “he nevertheless knew that he had to begin to deal with what to do with his recording.”
Within days he had sold the original film and all rights to Lifemagazine for $150,000, plus royalties. The exclusive contract he negotiated with its aggressive and determined regional editor Richard Stolley put the magazine, Vågnes suggests, in "a unique position to define the cultural memory of the assassination". This was particularly the case because the media had failed to capture the event. Those still images and films that existed were the products of amateurs such as Zapruder, who, although not the sole "accidental documentarian" at Dealey Plaza that day, was unquestionably the one who had produced the clearest and most disturbingly detailed record.
In the three years after the assassination, Life would go on to reprint select frames from the film in four issues. Initially, as was its practice with photographs, it did not credit Zapruder for them – a move that effectively constituted what Vågnes calls a “transfer of witnessing”, allowing the magazine to “present the images as if they had produced and not bought them”. It was the first of many attempts to seize control and take ownership not just of Zapruder’s footage but of the assassination itself.
Life's tight control of its purchase meant that, apart from a few high-profile and restricted screenings (for the Warren Commission, for example), the film went largely unseen until its first national television broadcast, on Geraldo Rivera's Good Night America, 12 years after the assassination.
“I think a lot of people these days would find it strange that it took such a long time before it was broadly viewed,” says Vågnes. “Today it’s just a matter of hours, or minutes, or even seconds before something is online.”
The fact that Lifehad managed to suppress "official" public exposure to the film for so long helped create what Vågnes calls "a sort of subculture of viewing", with bootleg copies receiving unsanctioned and illicit screenings at college campuses and other "underground" spaces. One of the more memorable, fictional articulations of the film's status as an underground object can be found in Don DeLillo's novel Underworld, where the New York apartment of a video artist plays host to a covert screening in 1974. What DeLilllo captures is the sense of how the film functioned as both a thrillingly forbidden object, sought out and secretly consumed by "avant-garde" audiences, and as a shockingly violent "snuff movie" ripe for exploitation.
Concerns about the exploitative potential of the film had, Vågnes argues, been part of its story from the beginning. After seeking assurances from Life's Richard Stolley that his film would not be used for exploitative or sensationalist purposes, Zapruder related a nightmare he'd had the night after the assassination. In his dream, Zapruder said, he found himself wandering through Times Square, where he "came upon a barker urging tourists to step inside a sleazy theatre to watch the president die on the big screen" – a remarkable, subconscious recognition of the ways in which such imagery could, and would, prove perversely attractive as forbidden fruit.
It’s tempting to speculate how aghast Zapruder might have been had he lived to see his film given new life on video-sharing sites such as YouTube, where it now competes for hits against ghoulish footage of beheadings, executions and the final bloody moments of deposed leaders. Though Vågnes acknowledges that the film continues to find new settings in which it can appeal to “the guilty voyeur”, he largely limits his focus to tracing its journey through visual culture’s offline worlds.
That is something of a pity, given how profoundly the internet has affected how such material is viewed, shared and understood.
While addressing obvious, mainstream appropriations of Zapruder's film, such as Oliver Stone's JFK, Wolfgang Petersen's In the Line of Fireand, most memorably, Seinfeld(see panel, right), much of Vågnes's book is dedicated to discussions of less well-known video-art articulations and critiques of methods of display in "commemorative" museum exhibitions. In the process it illustrates how, having been variously interpreted as a precious historical document, a formative moment in depictions of on-screen violence and even an early example of citizen journalism, the film ended up being unexpectedly "canonised as an aesthetic object".
When a federal arbitration panel set about trying to place a monetary value on the film in 1998, the legal team representing the Zapruders – their father’s original had been returned to them in 1975 – hired appraisers who described the film in aesthetic terms, praising it as “haunting”, “sublime” and “beautiful”, with “rich and vibrant” colours and frames that were “pleasing on the eye”. On its way to its final resting place, in the US National Archives, the film had, it seemed, transcended its status as mere documentary, passing, like Kennedy, into the realms of art, myth and memory.
Zaprudered: The Kennedy Assassination Film in Visual Cultureis published by University of Texas Press, $55
JFKOliver Stone's 1991 film not only generated new interest in the assassination but also helped popularise the notion of the Zapruder film as evidence that helped prove a conspiracy. "Back and to the left", the mantra Kevin Costner used to describe Kennedy's head movements, became a much-parodied part of assassination lore.
SeinfeldThe 1992 episode The Boyfriend, Part 1 is a brilliant parody of the po-faced earnestness of Stone's JFK. In a typically unsentimental Seinfeldian move, the life-altering moment that changed Newman and Kramer "in a deep and profound way" is the experience of getting spat on by a baseball player. The recreation of grainy 8mm footage and theories about a "second spitter" were the icing on the cake.
Coma WhiteMarilyn Manson's 1999 music video, a Zapruder-inspired re-creation of the Kennedy assassination, with Manson in the Kennedy role, was, he claimed, "a tribute to men like Jesus Christ and JFK who have died at the hands of mankind's unquenchable thirst for violence". That or tedious button-pushing by an incorrigible attention-seeker. You decide.
