Associated Press
Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy in a televised debate.
Before Nov. 22, 1963, Abraham Zapruder was an ordinary citizen of Dallas: a 58-year-old prosperous manufacturer of women’s clothing who had arrived in the city from Russia by way of Brooklyn. If that day had unfolded differently, that is most likely what he would have remained. But like a small but growing number of Americans at the time, he was also a home-movie hobbyist. With his receptionist, Marilyn Sitzman, as location scout and technical support, Zapruder took his 414PD Director Series Bell and Howell 8-millimeter camera to a spot on Elm Street, not far from his office, hoping to film the presidential motorcade as it drove past.
Bob Jackson/Dallas Times-Herald, via Associated Press
The assassination of Lee Harvey Oswald.
The 26.6 seconds of footage he captured — 486 frames, without sound — inscribed Zapruder’s name in the official history and popular folklore of the John F. Kennedy assassination. Its images, blurry yet vivid, in color when almost all television and a great many movies were still in black and white, form part of what we know or think we know about what happened at Dealey Plaza. On the Web, you can find seemingly infinite versions: in slow motion, with musical accompaniment, with or without Kevin Costner’s explanation and Oliver Stone’s enhancements in “JFK.” And you can encounter an equal number of arguments about what those silent, shaky frames mean: that Oswald acted alone; that other shooters were present; that a conspiracy came to fruition in plain sight; that the truth will never be known.
The distance between 1963 and now can be measured by the fact that so few cameras were on the scene then. In retrospect, Zapruder can be seen — and is frequently cited — as a pioneer of citizen journalism, a resourceful amateur who caught something crucial that the professional news media somehow missed. Now, everyone with a smartphone is a potential Zapruder.
But while the Zapruder film holds an important place in the evolution of media — perceptively examined by Alex Pasternack in an article on Vice’s Motherboard site this year — it also belongs to the story of cinema. What Zapruder made, after all, was not a Vine or a YouTube post, but a film. This is partly a technical distinction, a matter of photochemical processes and separable frames as opposed to bits of digital information. For a dozen years after it was shot, the film was unseen by the public, an almost unthinkable fate now. But these material, technological facts are inseparable from the film’s meaning, which remains a singularly potent topic of argument.
In a 1993 interview in The Paris Review, Don DeLillo, our leading literary investigator of the epistemological shadowlands of American politics and technology, made a distinction between Kennedy’s assassination, which was captured on film, and the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald, which happened in front of television cameras. As a result, “Oswald’s death became instantly repeatable,” he said. “It belonged to everyone. The Zapruder film, the film of Kennedy’s death, was sold and hoarded and doled out very selectively. It was exclusive footage.”
The near-simultaneity of these two events, and the different ways that the moving pictures were made and distributed, reveal late November 1963 as one of those moments when the coordinates of history become visible. The televised shooting of Oswald by Jack Ruby was a harbinger of the future — a future that would include the moon landing, the Rodney King beating, the explosion of the Challenger space shuttle and the second plane striking the World Trade Center. Television, as Mr. DeLillo understood it, was a medium of instantaneous transmission and endless reiteration, a template (though this was not clear at the time) for the digital world we now inhabit.
Kennedy was a youthful agent and symbol of the emerging video future, telegenic before that word was widely used. His televised debates with Richard M. Nixon showed his mastery of a medium not yet central to the politician’s repertory, and he nimbly used it during his presidency to address the nation in times of crisis. But he also belonged, less obviously but perhaps more decisively, to the world of film. In 1963, film was both more established, and more prestigious; it was an ascendant cultural force. To Mr. DeLillo, there was “something inevitable about the Zapruder film. It had to happen this way. The moment belongs to the 20th century, which means it had to be captured on film.”
The Undamaged Zapruder Film
Cross Cuts: Abraham Zapruder and the Evolution of Film
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