Accidental' Documentary: Abraham Zapruder's Home

¶ … Accidental' Documentary: Abraham Zapruder's home video of the assassination of John F. Kennedy and Bruce Connor's 1967 documentary "Report" Why is this combination of the accidental, the amateur, the historically significant so engaging" asks film historian Stella Bruzzi in her work New Documentary, upon gazing at Abraham Zapruder's famous impromptu chronicle of President John F. Kennedy's assassination in Dallas (Bruzzi 14). However, the Zapruder film of the "Assassination of John F. Kennedy" hardly seems like a documentary at all.

It is very much an 'accidental' piece of film, created by a man who was filming the visit of the president to his own home city for his pleasure, not with the intention of creating anything for posterity. Zapruder, given the tone of frames previous to the ones where the shots rang out, seemed to expect to create a happy film of the president's motorcade on a sunny day. Instead he created one of the most indelible images of horror for the American public.

The Zapruder film elicits a visceral emotional response because of its jerky photography, its sloppy panning and shots that recalls ordinary family films of barbeques and birthdays. It renders President Kennedy and perhaps, even more so, the First Lady, as 'real life' figures by locating them in this very private film vocabulary and makes the viewer more of a voyeur than a horrified citizen, watching the death of a president. One moment, before our eyes, a man is alive, then dead. One moment John F.

Kennedy is the happy, smiling man of newscasts, another moment a bloody body. Likewise, the very genteel Jacqueline Kennedy is beautiful one frame, the next minute in cinematic time her girlish pink suit is stained with her husband's blood and gore. "The home movie is, virtually by definition, the documentation of the trivial, the personal and the inconsequential, events only of interest to the family involved" (Bruzzi 14).

Historical accident and the brutal intervention of history elevate the Zapruder family film and a very 'family' and folksy depiction of the Kennedys into a historical artifact -- although not, it could be argued, art. "What makes Zapruder's home film exceptional is that it happens to capture an even that is not private and trivial but public and of huge importance" (Bruzzi 14). Zapruder did not mean to make a comment on history.

Interestingly, the Warren Commission said that "the camera of Abraham Zapruder," not the man himself was a witness to history, almost as if his intelligence had no role in the process in the version of events presented by the film (Bruzzi 15). To some extent, this could be seen as a bit of ingenious artistic commentary on the part of the Warren Commission, as a contrast between the Zapruder and the filmmaker Bruce Conner.

Bruce Conner's 1967 documentary film, simply called "Report," shows how a true documentary, crafted with the art and intelligence of a filmmaker, yields a distinct perspective of events, as opposed to the slice of life of a home movie. Conner has the filmmaker's advantage of a wide cinematic toolbox, unlike the amateur Zapruder. For example, rather than dwelling on the blood of the assassination, "Report" instead uses a poetic image of a bullet passing through a light bulb.

The image is beautiful, unlike the harsh, impersonal ugliness of the actual assassination, where the unique light and life of Kennedy is reduced to gore. This show of respect to Kennedy elevates the assassination to the mythical and the transcendent, in contrast to the Zapruder film where the personal film of the amateur chronicles a death as if it were an ordinary event.

Report" also gestures at the assassination rather than depicts it graphically by cutting clips of news footage from a variety of sources together, and intentionally distorts the minute-to-minute 'real time' coverage of a radio newscaster's voice over the footage, in contrast to the silence of the Zapruder film.

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. 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.