Twenty-Six Seconds

by Alexandra Zapruder

  It was, the writer reflected, the gap between accident and intent that made $16 million seem like a lot of money to pay for the original Zapruder film. Usually, collectors pay for works of art made with “sober artistic intent.” The fact that the price paid for the film was, at the time, the highest amount ever paid for an American historical artifact just added to the vague sense of unease. In the end, its value lay in what the film meant to a generation and to an era. “There is no question that what Abraham Zapruder filmed that day is of surpassing historical interest. But it is hard to escape the feeling that what has raised the price of this film so high is its generational interest, the sense that this is history that defined our lifetime, history caught in a medium that has defined our age.”

  EPILOGUE

  PUBLIC AND PRIVATE LEGACY

  In late January 2000, about six months after the arbitration decision was reached, our family donated the copyright in the Zapruder film to the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, the Dallas museum that educates the public about President Kennedy’s assassination and memorializes him on the site where he was killed. At the same time, we also donated a 1,900-item collection that included documents, copies of the film in the form of slides, transparencies, and stills, and the third first-day copy of the film. Though the film is and will always remain linked to us through history and our singular name, that gesture marked the end of our family’s long guardianship over one of the most controversial and contested objects of the twentieth century.

  For a long time, I thought that the end of our family’s relationship with the film was also the end of the story. What more was there to say? There was no more contention, no more argument, no more controversy. Moreover, in the years that followed, the technological changes brought about by the Internet made moot the question of access to the Zapruder film that had dominated the decades before. Hundreds of versions of the Zapruder film are instantly available in every format—enhanced, slowed down, sped up, zoomed in, narrated—and accompanied by discussion threads in which writers continue to argue the same points that have dogged the film for decades. Although the Sixth Floor Museum still licenses the images for publication, the Zapruder film will never be under embargo again.

  But as I came to the end of writing this book, I could see that the end of the story for our family was not the end of the film’s story at all. Since 2000, interest in the film has not dimmed. Scholarship—and in some cases, speculation—on what actually happened on Dealey Plaza continues, and the Zapruder film is still at the center of the debate.

  Back in 2003, James Fetzer published a collection of essays on the alteration of the film, clownishly titled The Great Zapruder Film Hoax; also in 2003, David Wrone—who will remain forever in my mind as the professor who tried to make a moral argument against copyright protection for the Zapruder film by comparing it to the crucifixion of Jesus—published The Zapruder Film, in which he makes his case for conspiracy.

  On the other end of the spectrum, in 2015 I met Max Holland, who had published an op-ed in the New York Times in 2007 putting forth the compelling and quite radical idea that the Zapruder film does not show all three shots fired at the president, which has long been an article of faith among researchers and the public. Instead, he makes the case that Oswald fired the first shot from the Book Depository (and missed) during the brief interval when Abe had turned off his camera after having filmed the lead motorcycles and before he turned it back on when he saw the president’s limousine. While this does not fundamentally alter the Warren Commission conclusion that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone (since it still means a single bullet struck President Kennedy and Governor Connally, and the third bullet hit the president in the head from the rear), it does drastically lengthen the time clock of the assassination and leaves ample time for Oswald to have gotten off three shots. Holland has challenged the long-standing thought conventions around the Zapruder film and gathered extensive additional evidence in support of his theory. He published a lengthy article in Newsweek on the subject in 2014, and his political and cultural history of the Kennedy assassination, titled A Need to Know, is forthcoming.

  The film’s life as evidence has always coexisted with its life as a cultural object. In the decades after the assassination, the film inspired some of the most influential artists and filmmakers of the latter half of the twentieth century; now, in the twenty-first, scholars and academics are tracing those reverberating connections, trying to make sense of how the film changed the artistic and cultural landscape of its time. The questions have been taken up by film and cultural historians like Art Simon who published a new edition of his 1996 book Dangerous Knowledge: The JFK Assassination in Art and Film in 2013; art historians like David Lubin in Shooting Kennedy (2003); and scholars in media studies such as Norwegian academic Øyvind Vågnes in Zaprudered (2013).

  There are nearly too many articles to count about the Zapruder film, though each takes its own particular angle on the film’s place in American culture, including “Livin’ and Dyin’ in Zapruderville,” “Zapruder, Warhol and the Accident of Images,” and “Climbing the Zapruder Curve,” to name just a few. The film’s life as a contested object and a commodity remains of interest, and I found articles and scholarly volumes that analyzed the question of the Zapruder film’s valuation and the methods used in the appraisals for the arbitration hearing. Artists such as Christopher Brown have painted frames from the film in haunting abstractions, and in 2009, Jamey Hecht published Limousine: Midnight Blue, a series of fifty poems, each inspired by a different frame of the film. In 2008, The Eternal Frame was installed anew at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that our name would earn its place as—and simultaneously be reduced to—an item of trivia, the answer to questions in Trivial Pursuit, Jeopardy!, and the New York Times crossword. Likewise, the film’s name has become a catchphrase, turning up in TV shows like The X-Files and The Simpsons and movies like Independence Day, parodied on Mad TV and in the Onion. When it crops up, it is a sort of stand-in for the idea of “conspiracy” or “tongue-in-cheek conspiracy” or “coincidence” or “paranoia” or “unimpeachable truth” or “unreliable evidence” or “accidental bystander” or, as it turns out, whatever the writer wants it to mean.

  Likewise, our name has been appropriated in any number of ways, used as the title of an Italian magazine and in the names of several bands—the French band Zapruder, the Zapruders (now defunct, apparently), and Zapruder Point. And it would be nearly impossible to catalog the number of times the term “Zapruder,” including the more recent use of our name as a verb, has appeared on Twitter or in social media in connection with a snippet about an event that, whether controversial, unusual, or accidental, has been captured on tape, replayed endlessly, and scrutinized for information or insight. As in, “Check out the Zapruder film of Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction,” or “They’ve Zaprudered that play a hundred times to see if the ball was in bounds,” or my favorite: “You don’t get to Zapruder her truth away!”

  Each November 22, people still grapple with what the Zapruder film means and why it matters. In fact, it was on the fortieth anniversary of the assassination, in 2003, that arts critic Richard B. Woodward wrote an article for the New York Times that is surely among the most intelligent and thoughtful ones about the film ever published. Perhaps the vantage point of four decades partly accounts for it, but he was able to capture many of the film’s firsts, including its status for its generation, the way its images have become “fused” with the assassination itself, LIFE’s purchase of it as an early example of “checkbook journalism,” the film’s challenge to the idea of the camera as witness, and how it dovetailed with the “crumbling of censorship rules” that had kept violence at the margins of society. “Above all,” he wrote, “the Zapruder film is a home movie, its images suffused with nostalgia for an unredeemable past.”

  Ten years later, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination, there was a
spate of renewed interest about the “man behind the camera” and the enduring meaning of the film. Parkland, written and directed by Peter Landesman and produced by Playtone (the production company owned by Gary Goetzman and Tom Hanks) dramatized Abe Zapruder’s story in feature film for the first time, with Paul Giamatti playing the role of our grandfather. The filmmaker Errol Morris made a short film about the “Umbrella Man,” whose appearance in the film has given rise to its own conspiracy theories. In the film, Josiah Thompson reflects on the fact that fifty years after the event, there is still no conclusive answer as to what happened to President Kennedy on Dealey Plaza. George Packer wrote a beautiful short piece about the Zapruder film for the New Yorker. And the great Don DeLillo joined journalist and writer Mark Danner and Errol Morris on a panel at the Telluride Film Festival to screen the Zapruder film and talk at length about its meaning in American life and in his novels.

  As I came close to finishing this book, I found myself revisiting some of my early questions about the place of the film in my personal life. Why didn’t we ever talk about the film when I was growing up? Was there something that I needed to understand in order to make sense of the film’s place in our family’s life? Was there a personal legacy of the Zapruder film and, if so, what was it?

  My grandfather had once described the assassination as “a wound”—one that leaves residual pain even after it heals. It wasn’t until I wrote this book that I saw how well his words reflected the experience of the rest of the family who were alive at the time and how perfectly they summed up our family’s relationship to the film. For my grandparents, my aunt and uncle, and for my parents, this wound was composed of many parts: the crushing of the Kennedy dream; the association with the grotesque visual record of his murder; the moral dilemmas that the film raised; the unease that came with financial gain and the public criticism that followed. At its core, however, was the unavoidable reminder of that other family, the Kennedys, whose shattering tragedy our family’s home movie records.

  What I did not fully grasp until writing this book was that the ongoing life and intrusions of the film made it a living wound inside our family that could never fully heal. Over time, most of the American public moved on, deciding when and where—or even if—they wanted to revisit the JFK assassination. This was not so for my grandfather first of all, and then for my father, who hardly experienced a week over the course of twenty-five years during which he did not have to deal with something related to the film. Seen from this vantage point, I can understand why the Zapruder film didn’t come up at our family dinner table. More to the point, I can see why there was no family story that we inherited the way we absorbed the memories of our grandfather. For our parents’ generation—permanently, irrevocably tethered to the JFK assassination by virtue of the Zapruder film—there was never enough time or distance to see the story and its implications clearly enough to even fully realize that there was a legacy to pass on, let alone to shape and tell it.

  As in all families, time passes, new generations appear, and we take what we have inherited and form our own stories. Even if what we have inherited is ambivalence, confusion, or silence. As much as I feel the pathos of that time, Kennedy’s death was not my personal loss and the Zapruder film was not my wound. I wrote this book for myself and for the historical record, to document the film’s history as fully, honestly, and forthrightly as I could. But I also wrote it for our family, especially for the next generation of Zapruders and Hausers, to whom I wanted to bequeath something more than silence, questions, and doubts about this part of our history. For me, the messy, complicated, tangled story of the Zapruder film is our family’s legacy. Now, all that remains is for us to claim it.

  If that is the last word, for the moment, on the private dimension of the Zapruder film, there is still a bigger and more important question. What is its public legacy? What is the compelling lure that makes the assassination researchers, the film, art, and cultural historians, the writers and journalists, the academics and students and hobbyists and Kennedy buffs return to it as a touchstone time and again? I have come to think it is because the Zapruder film is in every way a conundrum. It contains its own irreconcilable contradictions: It is visual evidence that refuses to solve the mystery of who murdered the president, why, and how. It is a single strip of film in which we all see different things. It shows the entire course of history changing under the influence of a single bullet. It is quite possibly the most important historical film ever made and yet it is an amateur home movie. It is six feet of 8mm film on a plastic reel that turned out to be worth sixteen million dollars. It is the most private and the most public of records. It is gruesome and terrible but we cannot stop looking at it.

  But more than that, the deepest, most compelling conundrum of the film is an existential one. It lies in the arc of the film itself, the fall from grace, the unforgiving inevitability of it. It is a sunny day, a handsome husband and his beautiful wife are riding down the street, smiling and waving, with their lives stretched out before them, and within less than half a minute, his head explodes and he is dead and she is covered in his brains and blood, trying to recover his skull from the trunk of the limousine. He is alive and then he is dead. She is a wife and then she is a widow. She is grace itself and then she is sprawled across the back of the car. How can it be that our protections and illusions can be stripped from us so quickly?

  Most of us are able to live our days exactly because we are not confronted with this vulnerability, the inexplicable capriciousness of fate, the permanence of death. And yet, there is the Zapruder film. It exists and we cannot turn away even though we fear it and we avert our eyes and we wish desperately that it would end differently every time. Maybe it is the same impulse that causes us to watch the Challenger explode in the bright blue Florida sky or the Twin Towers crash down into Lower Manhattan on a crisp fall morning. It is because we resist the knowledge that hope sometimes turns to despair in an instant, and that tragedy comes out of nowhere on a beautiful day. And, paradoxically, because sometimes we need to confront that very truth, simply to see the thing that we feel cannot happen in order to touch for a moment the very limits of what we know about life and to remind ourselves of the fragility of it all.

  In the end, we are perhaps like Don DeLillo’s characters in Underworld, who eventually drifted away from the all-too-real confrontations of the Zapruder film playing on hundreds of TV sets in an apartment in Manhattan and “got something to eat and went to the loft, where they played cards for a couple of hours and did not talk about Zapruder.” The Zapruder film is not a reality that we can live with every minute of every day. But it holds in its terrible twenty-six seconds a painful, fundamental human truth that will never grow old and that every generation must grapple with for itself.

  FAMILY PHOTOS & EPHEMERA

  Chana Zapruder and her children in a family portrait taken in Kovel, Russia. She is standing with her arm around her young son Abraham; in front of her, from left, are Fannie, Morris, and Sarah Ida. c. 1906–7.

  Chana Zapruder’s identification photo from her emergency US passport application, Warsaw, Poland, 1920.

  Abraham Zapruder with his violin, New York, c. late 1920s.

  Lillian Schapovnik standing in front of the tenement building at 84 Beaver Street in Brooklyn where her family lived and where the Zapruder family had arrived and settled in 1920. This photograph was taken before her marriage to Abraham Zapruder in 1933.

  Abraham Zapruder and Lillian Schapovnik in the Catskills, c. 1930–33.

  Abraham and Lillian Zapruder on their honeymoon in Niagara Falls, June 1933.

  Abraham and Lillian Zapruder with their children, Myrna and Henry, at Fair Park in Dallas, Texas, 1942.

  Abraham and Lillian Zapruder, Dallas, Texas, c. 1940s.

  Abraham Zapruder with Marilyn Sitzman at Jennifer Juniors, early 1960s.

  Henry Zapruder in Dallas, c. 1963.

  Back row from left: Henry Zapruder holding his son Matthew and
Myron Hauser holding his son Aaron. Front row from left: Marjorie Zapruder, Adam, Jeffrey, Myrna, and David Hauser, c. 1968.

  Abraham Zapruder in his office at Jennifer Juniors, late 1960s.

  First contract between LIFE magazine and Abraham Zapruder for the sale of print rights to the Zapruder film, drafted by Richard Stolley in the office of Jennifer Juniors, Saturday, November 23, 1963. (Courtesy of Time Inc. Archives)

  “Amateur Filmed Bullets’ Impact; Sequence Is Sold to Magazine,” New York Times, November 24, 1963.(From The New York Times, November 24, 1963, © 2016 The New York Times. All rights reserved.)

  Correspondence sent to Abraham Zapruder after his donation to the Tippit family.