Itâ??s been called the most important 26 seconds of film in history: The 486 frames of 8-millimeter Bell + Howell home movie footage shot in the midday sun of Dallas on November 22, 1963, by a dressmaker named Abraham Zapruder. Twenty-six seconds that included a historic, horrific, all-too-clear vision of a presidential assassination.
Most people vaguely know about the Zapruder film, but it will soon become omnipresent as the 50th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy approaches. What is not well known, however, is that a single frame of it was kept largely secret from public view for 12 years after the assassination.
Frame 313. The frame that gave Abraham Zapruder nightmares, the frame he insisted be withheld from the publicâ??a single frame of film that can be said to have changed American history and culture.
â??We like to feel that the world is safe,â? Errol Morris tells me. â??Safe at least in the sense that we can know about it. The Kennedy assassination is very much an essay on the unsafety of the world. If a man that powerful, that young, that rich, that successful, can just be wiped off the face of the earth in an instant, what does it say about the rest of us?â?
Read Full Article »
