Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  CBS was the first network to take advantage of the film’s new ownership to request permission to air it on national television. It was to be used in a CBS Reports Inquiry titled “The American Assassins,” to air in November 1975. For this purpose, CBS planned to carry out its own exhaustive investigation and contracted with Itek, a Massachusetts photo-optics lab, to study not only the original Zapruder film but also other visual evidence from the assassination. My father gave CBS permission to air the film for a fee, and he must also have allowed Itek to examine the original film, though there is nothing in our family’s records about this. It marked the first time that the original film was studied in such depth; even the Warren Commission, which had screened the original, conducted their investigation from high-quality 35mm prints made from it for fear of damaging the original. CBS wanted Itek to seek answers to the most pressing questions being posed by the conspiracy theorists: When was the first shot fired; when was Governor Connally hit; were President Kennedy and Governor Connally hit by the same bullet; and what information could be gathered about the final shot that delivered the mortal blow to the president’s head?

  In his book National Nightmare, Richard Trask explains that “some dozen technical specialists at Itek examined the film in various high quality black-and-white, false-color, and color formats, as well as motion picture copies.” He goes on to list a dizzying blur of technical methods they used, including stereophotogrammetry, precision photographic processing, spectral enhancement, coherent spatial filtering, mensuration, and digital plotting. Itek ultimately produced a ninety-four-page report analyzing the Zapruder film and other films from the assassination. Their findings essentially conformed to those of the Warren Report: The president was hit for the first time when he was behind the Stemmons Freeway sign (somewhere between frames 212 and 223) and can be seen reacting to a wound in frame 225, which is also when Governor Connally suddenly reacted to a stimulus (presumably a shot) by raising his arm and flipping his hat. Given how closely their reactions occurred, as well as their positions in the car and the location of their wounds, Itek concluded that they were likely hit by the same bullet. Finally, and probably most important, Itek studied in depth the visual confusion of frame 313, wherein the president appears to be thrown violently backward—and which the conspiracy theorists had emphasized as evidence that the president must have been shot from the front or from the grassy knoll, meaning a second shooter had to have been on the scene.

  The Itek report says that the president was moving in a slightly forward direction at the moment of impact and that the brain matter radiated upward and forward in frames 313–314. This suggests, of course, a shot from the rear, or the Texas School Book Depository Building (i.e., Lee Harvey Oswald). This part of the report is consistent with Alvarez’s 1969 study, in which he noted that a shot from the rear could cause the explosive forward movement of the president’s brain matter which, he argued, could drive the president’s head backward. However, the authors of the Itek report presented a different explanation, speculating that Mrs. Kennedy was moving forward at the time of the last shot, leaning in to assist President Kennedy, and that upon the bullet’s impact, she recoiled from the “exploding matter from the wound,” simultaneously ducking and shoving backward instinctively. The Itek report suggested that her motions at this critical moment “strongly influenced or caused JFK’s backward motions.” Few found this explanation convincing. In a footnote to the report, there was an attempt to qualify this statement and a nod to Alvarez’s jet effect. The authors wrote: “The statement that Mrs. Kennedy caused the President’s backward motion is not intended to mean that she was the sole cause. In fact, calculations made from the theory of jet reaction suggest that this phenomenon could explain some of the movement. Although it is beyond the scope of this report to deal with neurological reaction in a quantitative fashion, it appears plausible that this effect too could have influenced the backward motion. The data presented here does not suggest that she was a strong or the dominant causal factor of the backward motion.”

  The first part of The American Assassins aired in November 1975. Dan Rather hosted the program, in which the film was shown a number of times and the Itek analysis was used heavily to interpret the film. With regard to the fatal shot to the president’s head, John Wolf, president of Itek’s optical systems division, explained that when the president was hit, his head traveled forward with tremendous speed for a fraction of a second and then took twice as long to return to its original position. In other words, the forward motion of his head was so fast, and the returning rear motion so much slower, that the viewer essentially registers only the backward motion of his head. Rather responded by saying what many people thought: “No matter how many times you look at it, that’s not the impression one gets just sitting in a room and looking at the film. The very clear impression is that his head tilts backward faster than it went forward.” To which Wolf replies, “That of course is the whole point… It’s to get away from the subjective impressions that are developed by looking at a blurred motion picture. My answer to your implied question is: I don’t know what I see. I know what I measure.”

  Needless to say, the Warren Commission critics, assassination researchers, and conspiracy theorists were not impressed. Many disagreed with the conclusions drawn by the report. Others, according to Richard Trask, dismissed CBS News out of hand as being “at the beck and call” of the CIA and complicit with the federal government in covering up the truth. Itek was no less suspect. In the words of one critic, it “still faces the problem of being permanently tied to the CIA, the Pentagon, and the rest of the Invisible Government through a variety of important contracts.”

  In reading about the Kennedy assassination, I’ve come to see that there are more nuances among the conspiracy community than might at first appear. The group was not a monolithic block marching in lockstep to a certain set of views. Far from it. Just as individual opinions on the assassination existed along a spectrum, with the Warren Commission at one end and full-scale governmental implication in the murder of the president at the other, the conspiracy community incorporated differing views and levels of fanaticism. For the most fervid critics, the debate was not academic or intellectual, it was deeply political and even personal. Thus, when presented with an interpretation of evidence that contradicted their views (as in the Itek report), they could swiftly shift the conversation away from the material in question to the authenticity and integrity of the person or people doing the examining. As such, the criticisms above do not address what we see on the film or the physical trajectories of the president’s head. Instead, they focus on unsubstantiated accusations about Itek and CBS, questioning their motives and their ability to carry out an objective analysis. This is the maddening result of a certain kind of very rigid conspiracy thinking. It’s not that people disagree. It’s that you cannot disagree. To disagree is to be looped into a meta-view of the whole situation that makes your disagreement one more piece of evidence in the conspiracists’ argument. If this divide was extreme in 1975, it grew to rather outlandish proportions by the 1990s, when extreme conspiracy theorists contended that the Zapruder film itself was either altered or, inevitably, a hoax. But all that was still many years away.

  If 1975 was a watershed year for the Zapruder film in that its twelve-year embargo was lifted, it also marked another important moment in the establishment of the film as a cultural touchstone. It came about through the collaborative work of two San Francisco–based avant-garde artists’ groups. Architects Chip Lord and Doug Michels had created Ant Farm in the late 1960s, its name inspired by the way that ants collectively create elaborate structures under the earth. Doug Hall, Jody Proctor, and Diane Andrews had their own collaborative endeavor, called T.R. Uthco, also based in San Francisco, which staged performances and other creative works on various political and aesthetic themes. These young artists were as different in style and temperament as they could be from the media executives handling the Zapruder
film, the conspiracy theorists agitating about it, and my own family. They occupied the fringes of the art world, creating transgressive and sometimes shocking performances designed not only to provoke reactions in audiences but also to grapple with that time period’s most pressing questions in a creative way. They were not interested in interpreting the content of the film but in critiquing the pervasive media use of it and the social consequences of its repeated representations in print and on television.

  Their film, The Eternal Frame, went far beyond Antonioni’s Blow-Up (1966) or any of the previous cultural references to the film. This was no suggestive nod to the film or the interpretive problems it raised. Instead, the artists went straight for the iconic imagery itself. They saw in the repetitive use of stills from the film and then repeated showings of it on television a media manipulation from which no viewer could escape. Each time, the film begins with handsome Jack and beautiful Jackie in pink waving to the crowd on a sunny day, and each time it ends with the man’s gruesome murder and his wife’s shocking fall from grace as she crawls on the back of the limousine. As they saw it, each showing reinforced the Kennedys’ mythic status and drew the viewer into participating in their hideous, devastating demise.

  Doug Hall and Chip Lord were interviewed in 2007 in connection with an installation of The Eternal Frame that opened at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles in 2008. Hall said, “It was a moment where everyone was kind of locked in step for a short amount of time. There have been other events since that have had similar galvanizing affects, but this was the first of the great televisual spectaculars. The event—the tragic assassination of an American president and the aftermath—became convoluted as it unfolded over time, its original meaning mutating as it was filtered through the media. As the event became popularized, it lost its relationship to its source.”

  They sought to use artistic collaboration to tackle that fixed, iconic imagery—the Zapruder film itself—that so dominated the public imagination. But as avant-garde artists critiquing accepted norms, they could not operate within traditional structures. They had to do something wildly inappropriate, radical, even taboo. In correspondence with me, Doug Hall explained it this way: “Our need was to break down that wall, to cause fissures to appear in its facade with the belief that these cracks would widen and other hidden ‘truths’ would reveal themselves. I won’t presume that we succeeded but I will stand by our intent.”

  To that end, they staged an “authentic reenactment” of the Zapruder film in Dealey Plaza in Dallas in August 1975. The cast included Doug Hall as the Artist-President (a mock Kennedy figure with a pronounced Boston accent who appears in other parts of the movie giving speeches and being interviewed), Doug Michels in drag as Jackie in the famous pink Chanel suit, and Stanley Marsh as Governor Connally. Chip Lord was mostly offscreen as the “director,” while Skip Blumberg and Bart Friedman were filming. Jody Proctor also played the important role of Secret Service agent Clint Hill, who rode on the rear bumper of the presidential limousine. They planned the event for several months, scrutinizing their own bootlegged 16mm copy of the film to choreograph the movements of the inhabitants of the car, rehearsing, creating full costumes and makeup, and preparing multiple movie and still cameras to shoot in color and black and white from various positions, including from the vantage points of Orville Nix and my grandfather. They bought a Lincoln Continental convertible for $300 and towed it from San Francisco to Amarillo, Texas.

  The guerrilla event—the “shooting of the shooting”—took place on August 10, 1975. They got up early, dressed in costume, and went to downtown Dallas, where they got into position and drove through Dealey Plaza. There they reenacted the murder of the president, including his sudden movements after the first shot, the slumping to the side, Jackie leaning in, the jolt of the fatal bullet, and Jackie recoiling and then climbing on the back of the car, only to be pushed back inside by the Secret Service agent as the car disappeared under the triple underpass. Needless to say, they did not have permits, permission, or any sanction to carry out this act, and they fully expected to be able to do it only once or twice before being shut down. “We were nervous,” Doug Hall said in the 2007 Getty Museum interview. “We knew we were treading on something that was dangerous; it’s an iconic image that we seem to be offhandedly playing around with, and that’s why we imagined that we would go there very early in the morning, go through there once, and that would probably be it because everything would close in on us.”

  If the members of Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco hoped to find hidden truths in the course of their performance, they got their wish, though surely not in the form they expected. What bubbled up among the spectators in Dealey Plaza remains puzzling to this day. Many who saw the reenactment responded not with outrage or anger, nor with a shared sense of irony or any understanding at all of the parody that was taking place. In fact, the intentional bad taste of the performance seemed entirely lost on them. Instead, many believed the event was staged by the city of Dallas or the Department of Commerce for the benefit of tourists who came to visit the site. Some of the artists who were filming the reenactment recorded audio of the spectators and carried out “man on the street” interviews while the motorcade went around and around Dealey Plaza.

  At one point, we see the rear of the limousine and hear voices speaking in a foreign tongue; as the car passes by, a man switches to English, saying, with what might be an Asian accent, “Ohh, Mr. President gone,” and then, as the actors in the car pantomime the shooting, he says, in what sounds like true dismay, “Oh, they killed the president, ohhh God! They killed… oh, Mr. President!” while behind him we can hear the groans of others with him. Two men, perhaps the speakers, run after the car. The image shifts back to the actors in the car, starting once more at the beginning, ready to go around again, and we hear a lady speaking in the background, saying, “It really is surprising… uh…” What sounds like another voice cuts in: “They probably have it, just more or less so for tourists, like, don’t they, for demonstrations or something?”

  The scene shifts again to a man filming the proceedings with a movie camera and then pans to a lady with a blond bouffant hairdo and sunglasses, wearing a ruffled sundress and carrying a basket-weave purse, who says, in a flat Midwestern accent, “It does look like her, my God, my—oh, look! Reenacting it.” She winces slightly and, realizing what is going to happen, says, “Oh, no.” The camera watches her watching until it’s over and then she wipes away her tears. “I got it all,” a man says in the background, presumably the one with the movie camera. She seems half-embarrassed, laughing, saying, “It feels like the real thing… It’s terrible. I cried when I watched it on television. It’s terrible.” Her companion begins to reminisce about how they heard the news. “How could it happen to somebody so wonderful?” she says, wiping away more tears. “I got all worked up.” Then she pulls herself together, saying, “I’m glad we were here. I really am. We just made it in time. To see this. I feel bad and yet I feel good… beautiful reenactment. I wish I’d had our still camera so I would have caught it on—to show it. That was too beautiful.”

  What could be less beautiful than the assassination of President Kennedy or the Zapruder film? Did she not see that Jackie was a man in drag? What could she possibly mean? Perhaps she meant that it was cathartic. Or that she got what she came for. For the tourists making a pilgrimage to Dealey Plaza, a reenactment of the assassination seemed a natural way to memorialize a place that was famous for only that reason and to provide a meaningful experience for visitors. They even filmed the fake assassination and brought those films home to show their families. There is something especially confusing and troubling about the fact that the spectators didn’t object to the reenactment on the grounds of bad taste, in part because it means that they didn’t recognize it as such and in part because it means that the irony of the exercise totally escaped them. On the other hand, the tourists came to the place in earnest, and so they read the events they witnessed i
n that same spirit. In a way, their reactions entirely proved the point that the artists were making. The imagery was so entirely intertwined with the event itself that even an exaggerated reenactment gained its own authentic meaning and was worthy of being filmed and preserved.

  Whatever they thought or felt, it certainly had nothing to do with what the artists intended. The members of Ant Farm and T.R. Uthco were not trying to teach the bystanders anything or convey a fixed message to the rest of the world. They were in search of answers to questions that haunted them in the aftermath of the assassination. Doug Hall wrote: “We approached the subject through a veil of irony. But don’t be fooled by this attitude. Looking back on it, I think our need was to critique the ‘spectacularization’ of the event or at least through our outrageousness to delve deeper into it perhaps as a way to loosen its grip on us. Really, The Eternal Frame is a kind of exaggerated appropriation that allowed us to inhabit images that insisted on remaining distant, strangely impersonal, and iconic.”

  Even in the film itself, the artists acknowledged that they weren’t entirely sure what they were after. In my favorite moment of the movie, the Artist-President is sitting at a desk being interviewed by a reporter. Doug Hall explained to me that he had just finished a scene giving a speech as the Artist-President, and Skip Blumberg caught him off guard in between takes, giving the interview a not-quite-staged quality that perfectly suits the piece.

  REPORTER: Do you consider yourself a martyr for art?

  ARTIST-PRESIDENT: No, I don’t.

  REPORTER: How would you characterize this act of yours?

  ARTIST-PRESIDENT: It’s difficult to characterize. It’s crazy, yes. It is crazy. I understand that part of it.

  REPORTER: Is this a freedom-of-speech statement?

  ARTIST-PRESIDENT: No, it isn’t. Ask me what it is, and perhaps we’ll together be able to figure it out.