Accidental' Documentary: Abraham Zapruder's Home Essay

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The poor quality of 1960s home video and the amateurish jerkiness of the Zapruder film add to the humbleness of the work and the humbling nature of death, but "Report" consciously makes the appearance of the film grainy and flickering to elicit an emotional response in the viewer. The viewer feels off-balanced, destabilized, by both the techniques and the events.

Connor's highly crafted use of amateurish, grainy appearances of shots, in contrast to Zapruder's accidental work suggests that the viewer is trying to imperfectly apprehend the past, of a simpler and more innocent time though its intentional distortion of what seems unalterable, namely television coverage. Memory, Connor implies, is imperfect, even though footage like the Zapruder film suggests that encapsulating the past is possible.

In contrast to Conner's "Report," Zapruder's film has no intentional bias -- Zapruder's only bias, if it can be called that, is due to his vantage on the grass relative to President Kennedy's motorcade. If another person had been assassinated that day, his camera would have captured the event as well, and the contrast between the brilliant beauty of the day and the joy of the President and his wife is not intentionally ironic. There are no visual metaphors to tell us as viewers what we should think. Also, the narrative of the Zapruder film is linear, while Conner takes the existing footage and transposes it into a different sequence. "Report" begins with the assassination, then loops back to what seems very ironic, a news announcer talking about the President's welcome to Dallas, his route of through the city, and how willing he is to shake hands with people along the way. Of course, linear or 'in media res,' while watching both films, there is an inevitable nostalgia, given that what is 'before' seems so different from what will happen afterwards.

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With the Zapruder film, what will happen is already known, unlike the experience of actually making the film for Abraham Zapruder himself. Conner knew what he wanted to 'do' with his film, but the passage of time since his authorship of the 1967 "Report" has also changed the viewer, making some viewers more nostalgic, others more inclined to look for conspiracies, while others simply cool to what is to them their parents' or grandparent's history.

Both the Zapruder and the Connor films never change, but the audience is changed, every time the images are seen. The Connor film's transposition of early 1960s naivete about Camelot with images of the funeral creates a kind of conscious memorial to a lost time in American history, while there is no depicted return, no sense of memorial in the Zapruder. Zapruder was innocent, after all, when he made his film. The memorialization in Zapruder solely exists in the individual's mind, as a witness to the artifact of history. Zapruder captures a public death and through the lens of his "personal viewing experience" and what the viewer sees is dependant upon his or her own personal view of the 1960s and Kennedy, or simply the death of a man, while Connor demands that the viewer accompany a filmmaker on his personal vision of what the death of Kennedy means (Bruzzi 16). But although one film is seemingly objective and accidental, the other subjective and deliberate, in trying to discover what the assassination, even what 'death' means, they are perhaps best viewed together, both highlighting the potential as well as the limits of visual culture to render the end of human life and the end of an era in our history.….....

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