foo foc /dailyglobe/globehtml/207/Forever_linked__Zapruder_and_____hi.htm EMPTY Last week, the 26-seconds of film shot by Abraham Zapruder of the assassination of President Kennedy entered the public domain at $19.98 - not in the legal sense (the Zapruder family is still demanding that the federal government pay it $18 million for the original film) but in the cultural sense; it appeared at your local video store. 02 Images of violence past are, for better or worse, part of our national record CULTURE D Forever linked: Zapruder and ... history 07/26/98 By Thomas Doherty By Thomas Doherty --> Boston Globe Online / Sunday | Focus / Forever linked: Zapruder and ... history 1) { if (navigator.appName=='Netscape') {top.location = document.URL;} else {top.location = 'http://www.boston.com';} } } // Called onSubmit() or onBlur() within a form // with a text value and an errstring function insureAllDigits(checkString, errstring) { var allDigits = 1; for (var ind=0; ind= 0 1 checkbox for (var j=0; j document.embeds[name].play(false); status = ""; return(true); } status = name + " not found"; return(true); } // finish hiding script --> Boston Sunday Globe --> --> NEW: City Weekly Low-graphics version Search the Globe: Today Yesterday Martian chronicles: Questions answered about Red Planet Electronic issues and culture, every Thursday Stump the surfer, Internet scavenger hunts, online concerts and more. A visual collage from The Boston Globe's photo department. Latest scores, statistics and standings it appeared at your local video store. The video version - computer enhanced at a reported cost of $500,000 by MPI Home Video - features 40 minutes of commentary and razzle-dazzle graphics as prelude to the main event: the fleeting record of the shooting of a president. ``A collector's item for all Americans!'' proclaims the blurb on the video jacket. ``Just when you think US culture cannot be degraded any further, something like this comes along,'' lamented former Kennedy speechwriter Frank Mankiewicz. To the contrary. The long-awaited release of the Zapruder film symbolizes freedom of information, not the degradation of culture or the desecration of a beloved president that Mankiewicz and others decry. The Zapruder film is interwoven with the history it documents, as are other grim but historically essential images: J. T. Zealy's daguerreotypes of American slaves, the Army Signal Corps' footage of the Nazi concentration camps, South Vietnamese Brigadier General Nguyen Ngoc Loan shooting a Viet Cong prisoner in the head. To keep the Kennedy assassination locked out of sight is to avert our eyes from our past. For media historians, moreover, the Zapruder film offers evidence of another kind. Perhaps more than any other single strip of celluloid, it testifies to the privileged status of the photograph as a record of reality. As critic and author Susan Sontag could write in ``On Photography'' in 1977 but would probably never write today, ``The picture distorts but there is always the presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what's in the picture.'' The moving photos that make up film are seen as an even more vivid and accurate reflection of our world. ``Truth at 24 frames per second'' is how French new wave director Jean-Luc Godard defined the motion picture medium. In the case of the 8mm Zapruder film, that's 18.3 frames per second. Best of all, the film by Zapruder - an amateur photographer who wanted to capture images of a smiling Kennedy during his visit to Dallas on tape for his grandchildren - reminds us that photography is democratic. A vivid picture of life can be rendered by anyone with luck and the proper equipment. Standing on a concrete divider on top of the grassy knoll in Dealey Plaza, the unsteady hand of a clothier holding a wind-up Bell and Howell captured what have become the most intensely scrutinized images in American history. Nonetheless, in terms of public availability, the cinematic-historical milestone has until now been a closely guarded property. Learning that an amateur cameraman had filmed the assassination, a young CBS-TV reporter named Dan Rather tried desperately to obtain the footage. His network, though, was outbid by Life magazine, which paid $150,000 for exclusive rights. (These days, it would be unlikely that the print press would scoop television on a moving image story.) In its Nov. 29, 1963, issue, Life splashed a four-page sequence of black-and-white frame enlargements across its outsized pages. Color reproductions followed in the next issue. Though the magazine spared readers blowups of the most graphic images, it invited them to play homicide detective and historian, to peer into the pictures to make sense of an incomprehensible event. For most of the 1960s and 1970s, access to the Zapruder film and reproduction of its images remained strictly controlled by Life and, after 1975, by the Zapruder family. It circulated only in grainy bootleg copies on film and 3/4-inch videotape, an underground market that incited rumors and half-baked analysis. Tellingly, though, even the most paranoid conspiracy buffs took the Zapruder film as an authentic document of the Kennedy assassination: The Warren Commission might lie but the camera didn't. Not until March 1975, however, when Geraldo Rivera defied copyright law and ran it on ABC-TV's ``Goodnight America,'' was the Zapruder film broadcast to the public. By then, many Americans had already come to replay every frame in their heads when they recalled the events of Nov. 22, 1963, editing the 8mm film onto the private reels of memory ex post facto. No wonder the Zapruder film became not just a historical but an aesthetic frame of reference. Imprinted in the minds of a generation, the images served as visual backdrop for some of the signature films of that decade. The most famous echo is the centerpiece montage from Michelangelo Antonioni's ``Blowup'' (1966), an eerie sequence where the swinging London photographer develops, crops, and enlarges his footage to see in film what he missed in reality. Director Arthur Penn choreographed the danse macabre that climaxes ``Bonnie and Clyde'' (1967) as a scene of Zapruder-inspired jump-cuts. ``There's even a bit of Warren Beatty's head, which jumps, like Kennedy's in that famous photograph of his death,'' Penn pointed out. Likewise, in the final scene in ``Gimme Shelter'' (1970), the Maysles brothers freeze and rewind their film of the knifing at Altamont for a stone-faced Mick Jagger, oblivious to the murder that took place at his feet. Beyond the 1960s, too, flashbacks to the Zapruder film have been a recurring visual motif in ways both serious (the images blown up and frozen on computer screens in ``Blade Runner'') and sacrilegious (the demolition of the JFK float in the explosive parade that concludes National Lampoon's ``Animal House.'') Most notoriously, Oliver Stone went on location in Dealey Plaza to restage the assassination for ``JFK'' (1991), deftly blending his own version of the film with the real item, 8mm giving birth to widescreen 35mm, the home movie now a major motion picture. In French, homage. So this week the Zapruder film reemerges as a well-remembered classic of American cinema. It is, in fact, a selection of the National Film Registry, right up there with ``The Great Train Robbery'' and ``Citizen Kane.'' As a historical document, it will forever retain its special aura, its numbered frames still scrutinized for layer upon layer of meaning. Yet ironically the computer technology that makes the motion picture image more open to critical inspection also makes it more suspect as evidence. Today film can as easily be a computer graphic fabrication as a faithful record of reality. At the end of the century of the moving image, the Zapruder film may be the last vestige of the privileged metaphysical status of the photograph, the faith that the celluloid image will reveal, finally, the truth of history. Thomas Doherty is chairman of the film studies program at Brandeis University. This story ran on page D02 of the Boston Globe on 07/26/98.