Catch a plane crash on video; a vicious police beating; a car wreck; an avalanche; a bridge toppling; capture any of these accidental, these unplanned events on film and you will have a unique historical record—as well as a document you can profit from fabulously. For even in an age awash in video cameras, and in a culture afloat in television programs dedicated to videotaped mishaps, recording such events doesn¹t happen all that often and when it does it makes for something of a grim serendipity.

But imagine yourself standing at ground zero of arguably the most significant American event of the 20th century. With an 8mm camera in your hand.

That¹s what happened to Abraham Zapruder on Friday, November 22, 1963, when he stood in Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, waiting for President John F Kennedy¹s motorcade to pass by. The 26 second episode he filmed was only one of many photographic records of the events of that day, but because of his unusual angle on the action and the color stock he used Zapruder¹s film was not only the most complete, but has become over the years iconic, its 500-some frames a holy grail for both assassination buffs and debunkers investigating what Louisiana DA Jim Garrison called the "murder at the heart of the American dream."

But since 1963, when the original roll of film was purchased by Life magazine, few people have been allowed to see it.

Until now.

On the 13th of July, 1998, a company called MPI Home Video, of Orland Park, Illinois, released Image of an Assassination : A New Look at the Zapruder Film (45 minutes, $19.95). The company released the videotape under the aegis of the Zapruder family itself, which through a company the family created called LMH, bought back the rights to the film from Life magazine for a dollar in 1975. Zapruder died in 1970. His son Henry G Zapruder made the decision to release the video. The actual print itself is kept in the National Archives in a storage vault maintained at 25 degrees fahrenheit, all according to a story by reporter Mary F. Feeney of the Hartford Courant, reprinted in the Portland Oregonian of Sunday, July 12, 1998.

Yes, naturally, the Zapruder film has been inevitably "digitally enhanced," whatever that may mean specifically, but most important the video tape includes what amounts to new footage. Because of where the sprockets holes that allow the strip to be pulled through the projector are located, the format of 8mm is such that when projected a portion of each image remains invisible. In essence, there are portions of images of the assassination that few have ever seen. Now we all can, thanks to the transfer-to-tape process and the image enhancement.

The story of the Zapruder film is as complicated and ambiguous as the assassination itself. How Zapruder came to make the film, how Life came to acquire it, and what happened to it thereafter, not only raise questions about the manner in which authorities handled the JFK assassination, but also of the role played by the media in suppressing key information about an historic event.

How the film came to be made

Both Crossfire : The Plot that Killed Kennedy (Carroll & Graf, 632 pages, 0.88184.648.1), by Jim Marrs, and Art Simon¹s Dangerous Knowledge : The JFK Assassination in Art and Film (Temple University Press, 266 pages, 1.56639.379.5) go into extensive detail about the genesis of the Zapruder film. Also, MPI provides the press with a detailed chronology.

Abraham Zapruder owned a dress manufacturing company called Jennifer Juniors, located at 5010 Elm street in Dallas, off Dealey Plaza and across the street from the School Book Depository (and for that matter not far from Jack Ruby¹s Carousel nightclub). Zapruder had decided not to bring his new camera, a Bell and Howell 8mm with a telephoto lens, to work that day because the morning had been overcast and rainy. But later, the sun broke out, and around 10 am, his secretary, Lillian Rogers, urged him to make the 7-minute trip back home to fetch the camera. When he returned, at 12:25 pm, Dealey Plaza was already thick with people.

Zapruder had trouble finding a place to position himself. Finally, he settled on the pergola at the top of the knoll across from the triangular plaza trisected by merging streets. He stood on a four-foot high concrete block on the right hand side of the steps leading to the top of the pergola. The President¹s motorcade was set to approach from Main street, turning left briefly onto Houston street, before turning right onto the curving, dipping Elm street. From his position, Zapruder looked up Elm, toward the intersection of Elm and Houston—below the Dallas School Book Depository. This position was a little unstable—while shooting a few seconds of his employees lolling on the grass he almost fell off. He invited his receptionist, Marilyn Sitzman to stand behind him and steady his body for the shoot. At 12:35, when they saw the motorcade turn the corner off Main and toward the Elm-Houston intersection, he set the Bell and Howell on "run" and tele-photoed onto the President¹s car. He was about 400 feet from the President's limo as it turned onto Elm.

What the film shows

Marrs summarizes the contents of the 26-second shot that was to follow:

"The motorcade curves onto Elm and begins moving slowly toward the camera. President Kennedy and his wife are smiling and waving to opposite sides of the street. Then the presidential limousine disappears for a brief second behind a freeway sign and when it emerges, Kennedy is already reacting to a shot. He clenches his fists and brings both up to his throat. He does not appear to say anything, but only remains stiff and upright [Kennedy wore a back brace, which held him up and in position for subsequent shots], sagging slightly to his left. Connally turns to his right, apparently trying to see behind him, then begins to turn back to his left when he freezes. His hair flies up and his mouth opens. His is obviously struck by a bullet. Mrs Kennedy meanwhile has placed her hand on her husband¹s arm and is looking at him horrified as he continues to sag toward her. Seconds go by, and now, Kennedy is bent slightly forward. Suddenly, after an almost imperceptible forward motion of his head, the entire right side of his skull explodes in a halo of blood and brain matter. Kennedy is slammed violently backward to the left rear where he rebounds off the back of the sear and falls toward the car¹s floor. Mrs Kennedy climbs onto the trunk of the limousine in an effort to grab something while a Secret Service agent leaps onto the rear of the car, which finally begins to accelerate."

And thus the car drives off screen and Zapruder remains behind to make history.

Discussion of the Zapruder film always comes down to frames. Going by a chart in Edward J Epstein¹s Inquest, Kennedy, was obscured by a potential assassin in the Book Depository by an oak tree around frames 166. At frame 207, Kennedy is at the earliest possible position that he could have been hit. Kennedy is obscured from the lens¹s view by the Stemmons Freeway sign from frames 210 to 225, possibly blocking our view of a first shot. Frame 240 is the last moment at which Connally could have been struck. The fatal head exploding shot occurs at frame 313.

What happened to the Zapruder film next

The film and three copies were processed the same day as the assassination. Two of them went to the Secret Service. One may have gone to the CIA¹s National Photo Interpretation Center. Zapruder kept one of the copies and the original. For a while.

Apparently, Abraham Zapruder at first wanted to tell no one of what he had. One version of the story has a Dallas Morning News reporter, attempting to confiscate the film, then escorting Zapruder and a Secret Service agent to a Kodak developer, then to the Jamison Film Company, where "dupes" were made.

The chronology provided by MPI attempts to clear up a lot of confusion. It says that Harry McCormack, of the New arrived at Zapruder¹s office with Secret Service agent Forest Sorrels at 1:30 pm—an hour after the shooting. With Zapruder¹s business partner, the four of them went to New¹ s office to process the film. By 2 pm, Zapruder was already being interviewed on local television. At 6 pm, Zapruder and his partner went to Jamison¹s to have their dupes made.

By this time, late in the day of the 22nd, Richard Stolley, a regional editor of Life magazine, arrived in town and learned of the film through a stringer for Life. He called Zapruder every 15 minutes from around 6 pm on in an effort to buy the original film. Meanwhile, Zapruder and his partner were at a Kodak outlet having dupes made from the original film. At 9 pm, with the three dupes in hand, Zapruder gives two to the Secret Service. One is sent back to Washington, DC, the other forwarded to the Dallas FBI, then they went home. At 11 pm, Stolley finally reached Zapruder.

The next morning, Stolley arrived at Zapruder¹s office, and found Secret Service agents there already. When Zapruder arrived, he showed the film to the group, and throughout the day, screened the film for other reporters who showed up. But by noon, he had sold the film to Life, handing over the original and his own dupe. Stolley sent the film to Life¹ s Chicago printing plant, where black and white reproductions were made. Zapruder was paid $50, 000 at the time for the physical film (ultimately, he was paid $150, 000 for the reproduction rights of his home movie, the print itself staying in the possession of Life).

Meanwhile, late in the afternoon, the FBI sent its print to Washington, where three second generation prints were made.

On Sunday, not long after Lee Harvey Oswald was shot, Life magazine¹s publisher, C D Jackson, finally saw the film he had paid so much for. Reputedly he was so shaken by the experience that he decided never to release it for public viewing (Stolley soon after returned to Zapruder and bought all rights to the film).

Nevertheless, the next week¹s issue contained 31 black and white frame reproductions of the film, without their frame numbers and not in chronological order, and without credit to Zapruder for taking them. In a December issue, Life printed more images from the film.

At this time the history of the Zapruder film and who saw it grows complicated. The Warren Commission had been watching a second generation (one of the three made from the original) print, and demanded to see the master, which they did in February of 1964, and from which they made color slides. In May, Zapruder¹s Bell and Howell was used to shoot a reënactment in Dealey Plaza. (Zapruder eventually donated the camera to a museum.)

Bits of the movie made it to the public. In November of 1964, frames from the film were reproduced in Volume 18 of the complete Warren Report. Then in October, 1964, Life published an account of the just released Warren Report, written by Gerald Ford, with eight color frame enlargements as illustration, including the notorious frame number 313, which shows the top of Kennedy¹s head exploding. But the editors were so "uncertain" about what they were doing that they went back to press no less then two times after the initial printing in order to revise captions, replace frame number 313 and make other changes. Some of the early versions of the first printing actually made it to subscribers. In the Report itself, which reprinted most of the images as exhibit 885, many of the frames were left out (numbers 208-211), and two of the frames, numbers 314 and 315, were transposed, for which then FBI director J Edgar Hoover apologized. While he was apologizing, he was also writing a memo to the Commission requesting that a copy of the Zapruder film be loaned to the CIA "for training purposes."

In 1966, for an article called "A Matter of Reasonable Doubt," Life printed a few more images of the film, in the right sequence and properly numbered (222-244), along with an interview with Texas governor John Connally, another victim of the ambush, who maintained his disagreement with the Warren Report¹s finding that there was one assassin and that one bullet struck both him and Kennedy. The magazine called for a new investigation. In January of 1967, Life revealed that certain key frames, 207 through 212, had been accidentally destroyed in the lab while making slides (though the original Zapruder film lacks these frames, they sill exist in the various dupes).

But then, in 1967, a philosophy professor named Josiah Thompson sought to use frame enlargements of the Zapruder film to illustrate his groundbreaking book Six Seconds in Dallas. Life wouldn¹t let him. He used charcoal copies instead. Life sued, claiming that he had committed "deliberate appropriation." A U S District Court ruled in Thompson¹s favor, maintaining that Thompson¹s use was fair (a later edition of the book dropped the charcoal reproductions for actual frame enlargements).

The first time that the Zapruder was seen by the public was in 1969 when New Orleans DA Garrison prosecuted a local businessman named Clay Shaw for conspiring to kill Kennedy, the case that serves as the premise for Oliver Stone¹s JFK. Garrison suppoened the film and showed it several times during the trial, the first time on February 13th, after Zapruder himself testified. MPI credits Garrison for allowing over a hundred bootleg copies to be produced. Bootleg copies of the Zapruder film floated around for many years after that (for example, it was shown to McGovern supporters at private parties the night he won the Democrats nomination for president in 1972).

The mass public only had a chance to see the full film in 1975. ABC aired an edition of Geraldo Rivera¹s Good Night America about the assassination, and he screened a bootleg copy of the film that had been re-worked by assassination buff and photography expert Robert Groden. Bits of the footage were later seen in two films about the Kennedy assassination, Executive Action in the Œ70s, and Oliver Stone¹s JFK. In March of 1997 LMH paid the National Archive to restore the film, and MPI recorded the process as part of the contents of the tape just released.

Why the film is so important

Even though Life didn¹t see fit to even credit Zapruder with shooting the film the magazine both hoarded yet reproduced so often, it proved to be crucial in many respects. It is one of the best records of actual assassination. There are others, but none so complete. And the film has been used by many people to claim many things about the assassination. As Simon says in Dangerous Knowledge, the history of the Zapruder film is "punctuated by faith in the film¹s revelatory power and by a crisis of interpretation, by movement between epistemological certainty and anxiety over not only readings of the film but also the narrative construction to accompany its social exposure." Lots of people were worrying over the Zapruder film, those on the Warren Commission who claimed that it proved a lone assassin shot Kennedy from the read and above, and Report critics who maintained that the Zapruder film showed the opposite, that the kill shot came from the front. The Warren Commission pinpointed the shots fired by cross-referencing the Zapruder film with with the so-called Nix and Muchmore footage taken from different angles. But the Commission merely noted when the body was hit ; it didn¹t pay much attention to what the body did after the bullets left.

26 Seconds in Dallas : Watching the Zapruder Film

Is it morbid to say that watching the Zapruder film is fun?

It¹s taken a while to get to us, but now it¹s here in Image of an Assassination : A New Look at the Zapruder Film (ISBN 0.7886.0022.2), thanks to the estate of Abraham Zapruder, and MPI Media Group (the company that brought us Henry : Portrait of a Serial Killer). The question is, is it worth the wait?

The tape is about 45 minutes long and naturally, theatrically, saves the refurbished Zapruder film for the end. Before that, there is an exhausted and detailed account of how the film came to be made, with interviews with survivors, including Zapruder¹s partner Irving Schwarzt (in some places his name is spelled Erving). There are clips of Zapruder on local Dallas television, segments of a speech by the representative of Life who bought it, and a summary of its exposure to the outside world. Then there is an account of how this enhanced tape was fashioned by various photographic experts, information interesting in and of itself, and probably shown in such detail to assure conspiracy nuts that nothing untoward happed to it during the process. Finally the tape ends with six different new versions of the complete Zapruder film, the last duo with Kennedy and Connally, and then just Kennedy centered in the frame, first at regular speed, and then in SloMo.

And you know what? In the famous shot that shows his head exploding it looks as if Kennedy could have been hit from behind. Depending on the angle of the car and the road to the Dallas School Book Depository, it looks possible that Kennedy could by jerking to the side and back because the bullet, though coming from behind, strikes his skull at such a cross angle that it knocks him to that side of the seat. But I¹m not expert. We will let the buffs, such as Groden and Livingstone, descend on the film and distribute their analyses. The tape does indicate that the limo Kennedy was in does come to almost a complete stop as the driver turns to look around, a moment that critics say witnesses observed but that they say the Zapruder film doesn¹t reveal.

The Zapruder shocks. Its simple camera work and innocently perfect angle reveal a disturbing moment in history. And without the distastefulness of surface exploitation, the tape provides a much needed service to scholars and all those conspiracy buffs out there.

Revisionist conspiracy theories about the film

But this being a conspiracy theory-prone country, even the Zapruder film is not free from suspicion. In 1966, Life magazine called the film the only "unimpeachable witness" to the killing. But is that still true?

As far as I can tell, the first writer to call into question the authenticity of the Zapruder film is David S Lifton, in Best Evidence : Disguise and Deception in the Assassination of John F Kennedy (Macmillan, 1980). Lifton is a "controversial" writer, as are practically all the conspiratologists, but for two rather unique reasons. First, he claims that Kennedy¹s corpse was mutilated in transit in order to disguise the trajectory of the bullet, and thus to throw suspicion off the real killers. But this thesis had as its surprising conclusion that the Warren Report was correct, or at least was acting honorably, in so far as they were drawing the correct conclusions with the evidence they had at hand, tainted though that evidence might later prove to be. Lifton does acknowledge, by the way, that the Commission researchers were at the very least less than thorough. In any case, in his book, which Time magazine, in keeping with the mass media¹s efforts to ridicule dissent on the Warren Report, took a whole two pages to try and dismantle (Newsweek, ABC, NBC, and especially CBS are the other major Warren supporters), Lifton introduces the idea that the Zapruder film was doctored by the CIA as early as Friday night. Lifton found documentation that the film somehow found its way to the National Photo Interpretation Center. In 1971 Lifton viewed a 35mm print of the Zapruder film in the Los Angeles offices of Time-Life. The much-discussed head wounds in the back of Kennedy¹s head seemed to him to be blacked out, though Lifton allows that the blackness may have been a shadow or some other photographic anomaly. He also noticed splices that had never been publicly acknowledged (see Lifton, pages 555-557).

Another writer with many suspicions is Harrison Edward Livingstone. In three books, culminating, after High Treason 2 and Killing the Truth, in Killing Kennedy and the Hoax of the Century (Carroll and Graf, 1995), and in a flurry of facts and suppositions, Livingstone maintains that the Zapruder film is a fake. He suggests that there was an alternative film attributed to Zapruder, who he says "couldn¹t even get his lines right" during his testimony before the Warren Commission, and / or that the real film was doctored in the lab to give off confusing signals. Livingstone¹s main villain in the piece is billionaire H L Hunt, whom Livingstone claims had not only VP Lyndon Johnson, but Hoover, the Secrete Service, and the Dallas Police in his pocket, and the author suggests that, once the CIA got their hands on a copy of the film, they masked evidence by blotting out key images or re-framed the film to hide events on the periphery of the frame that could serve as a guideline. Livingstone throws out a lot of info all at once, and it requires concentration to sort it all out, but he does remind us of several key things, such as that Zapruder¹s camera was a wind-up, which means that it could have wound down by the time the motorcade was passing him, thus upsetting the time frame. Livingstone also chronicles in exhausting if sometimes confusing detail what happened to the film the day it was shot, the differences between the multitude of Zapruder films in circulation over the years, and also the background of Zapruder¹s business partner, Ervin Schwarzt, who he claims was a friend of some Dallas mafia figures and a frequenter of Jack Ruby¹s Carousel Club. Schwartz and Ruby had the same rabbi. Most important, Livingstone goes into detail about just what constitutes image enhancing, a key section when confronting the new tape from MPI. He reminds us that rotoscoping, the technique bandied about as the one used to improve the Zapruder film over the years. in essence means animation— it¹s the techniques that, say, Disney uses to blend live action and animation. And he notes that "enhancement" often means removing the jiggles, which requires that the film be continuously reframed frame-by-frame. But the jiggles are a key guide to when the shots were fired in the time line.

The most recent book, in defiance of a rash of many new volumes that support the Warren report, to challenge the Zapruder film is James H Fetzer¹s anthology Assassination Science : Experts Speak Out on the Death of JFK (Catfeet Press, 480 pages, $18.95, ISBN 0.8126.9366.3). Roughly a fourth of the book is dedicated to the Z film. In a lengthy essay, Zapruder specialist Jack White enumerates some of the key discrepancies among the host of Zapruder films he has seen. Among them are the fact that in the film the limo doesn¹t stop, as many witnesses said it did, that Connally is not shown turning to his left to look at Kennedy as he said he did and witnesses also confirmed, that spectators in the background move around with great speed, suggesting frame removal, and that the pink spray from Kennedy¹s head wound seems to move forward rather than backward, among a host of other anomalies.

By the way, this book is ridiculed on several websites, most prominently at Clint Bradford's page. There, you will find an extensive article by Thompson.

In all this blizzard of details, one question remains:

Why did Zapruder keep filming?

The man is standing there looking quite obviously at another man being shot. All around him people are hitting the ground. Bullets may very well be whizzing over his head or in front of his face. And yet the man kept going. We are all, of course, quite grateful that he did. But where did he find the strength to keep the camera rolling, while loud reports sounded and echoed around him, and as bluish acrid rifle smoke drifted through the air.

Was this modest dress manufacturer so stolid that nothing would make him take his eyes off history? Was the crossfire that killed Kennedy so fast that he didn¹t even have time to react? Or was Zapruder an agent of some higher powers, egged on to go home and get his camera, positioned by agents who were within his employ, manipulated by people in league with mobsters or oil millionaires or government agents?

There is a great deal of sentimentality around the Kennedy assassination. It has to do with the outrage of the researchers, who deplore a country that conspires against democracy, against the voters and their elected officials. That tone has been changing, what with books such as Noam Chomsky¹s Rethinking Camelot, and others that question the alleged softening that Kennedy was supposedly feeling toward Vietnam and the Cold War. This change from sentimentality about Kennedy to hard edged, perhaps even objective attitudes toward the conspiracy itself may accelerate thanks to Seymour Hersh¹s The Dark Side of Camelot. Though the book ultimately endorses the Warren Report, it does so at the end of a chronicle of presidential recklessness and, harsh though it may be to say, it¹s arguable that the best thing to happen to this country at that time was the death of John F Kennedy. Perhaps if we continue to look dispassionately at the JFK assassination as a crime rather than as an outrage, a wound to the nation, or a romantic story about a fallen prince, we can dis-entangle fact from fancy in both the killing itself and its photographic record.

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