Missing Links
When Time-Life bought the
Zapruder film rights the day after JFK's murder, a company executive said the
footage was so horrific that the 22 second film would be locked away forever.
As of a few weeks ago, however, you could pick up a digitally enhanced, more
horrific than ever version for 20 bucks at the corner video store. (Time
surrendered its rights in 1975, the year Geraldo Rivera first broadcast the
film on television.)
Most
people already know the imagery--after all, Oliver Stone presented it in
Panavision--and probably regard it as a valuable "clock" of the assassination,
one that created problems for the Warren Commission. Among other things, the
film led to a "magic bullet" thesis to account for a lot of wounds from three
rapid shots and, later, to the "neurospasm" and "jet effect" theories to
account for JFK's "head snap" reaction to the final shot. Assassinologists have
argued for years that the Zapruder film alone confounded any lone gunman
thesis.
Many still think so, but in recent years a late-stage hard
core of Z-film specialists has developed a different view. Watching dupes year
after year, measuring prints with calipers, subjecting the movie to "vector
analysis" and performing their own stopwatch experiments, these critics
(including several academics) have discovered the film is not merely evidence
of conspiracy but is also a part of the plot. That is, it's a fake--or, as one
contemptuous critic describes it, "a cartoon."
How did
the Zapruder film become, in one professor's phrase, "itself an instrument of
conspiracy"? The film is known to have been copied at Washington, D.C.'s
National Photographic Interpretative Center, though nobody knows when. In one
conspiracist scenario, it was rushed to NPIC from the Dallas lab where Zapruder
had left it. In five feverish hours, CIA experts edited and optically
manipulated the film to mask what had really happened. Faked prints were rushed
back to Dallas just in time to be given to Zapruder. When other Dealey Plaza
home movies surfaced, they too were "collected" and altered to match. The
result is "the hoax of the century."
But it hasn't fooled everyone. In their haste,
the purported hoaxers left behind evidence of tampering. Back in 1975, Robert
Groden, a conspiracist specializing in image trickery, argued in Rolling
Stone that frames were missing. (The same Groden testified in the O.J.
Simpson civil trial that the Bruno Magli photos were fake.) Groden thought 10
frames were gone, but the stakes on "missing frames" have since risen: One pair
of critics now theorizes that three times as many frames were exposed as we see
today, that two-thirds of the "original" film has been removed.
How can anyone tell? Among
the many clues offered in Assassination Science , a 1998 anthology that
devotes 200 pages to proof that the film is a fraud: People make supposedly
implausible moves between frames, the "blink" pattern on the presidential
limo's front lights is said to be uneven, the awful results of the head shot
can't possibly have lasted only one frame (the horrible Frame 313). David
Lifton, famous for his theory that JFK's body was surgically altered before the
autopsy, has written elsewhere that portions of the head shot sequence look
suspiciously dark to him and that some of JFK's "movements" may be special
effects.
But other
Z-film critics argue the film is almost entirely special effects: that the
grassy background one sees is surely a repeated matte shot, because nobody in
it moves; that the head shot sequence features an optical zoom to eliminate
foreground figures and make it easier to manipulate; that the head shot itself
is an optically collapsed version of two more widely separated hits. Oddly,
there is even a claim that JFK's shocking head snap, among the biggest
challenges to the lone gunman thesis, didn't happen and is a CIA special
effect.
So what did the real Zapruder film reveal? To these
researchers, it contained incontrovertible proof of conspiracy (more shots,
say), but just what that proof was depends on which conspiracy each believes
in. A few theorists believe the lost footage showed an assassin actually
shooting JFK. No, not Black Dog Man, who looms indistinctly over the grassy
knoll in other Dealey Plaza imagery and who may or may not be seen on the
Z-film at Frame 413. The assassin these theorists have in mind is William
Greer, the driver of JFK's own car, who purportedly braked, drew his gun, and
delivered the coup de grâce in the middle of the motorcade.
Perhaps the original Zapruder
film still exists. Texas' Hunt family may have a copy, according to a man who
claims he picked it up for them; or maybe there's a copy at NBC, where one
woman says she watched it. But the real question about the film--in this
context, the inevitable question--was raised by longtime conspiracist Harrison
Edward Livingstone in his 1995 book, Killing Kennedy .
"Is it possible," asks
Livingstone, "that Zapruder was a plant?" Livingstone's theory is that "the
masterminds" behind the murder wanted a film they could alter. Otherwise, he
writes, the whole sequence of events is just "too convenient."
Thus, on close scrutiny, the
Zapruder film's ultimate revelation is that Abraham Zapruder was himself a
conspirator. At least it gives the film a surprise ending.
