T A B L E+T A L K What do you think of the Southern Baptists' mandate that wives should submit to their husbands? Sing "hallelujah" or damn them all to hell in the Social Issues area of Table Talk D A I L Y+Q U O T E Gloria Steinem, meet Bridget Jones R E C E N T L Y Author asks: When did Jones and Clinton meet? By Lori Leibovich Mystery at the Excelsior Hotel (08/03/98) A new kind of strike By David Bacon The first auto strike over GM's global investment strategy (07/31/98) The strange case of Kenneth S. By Dr. Justin Frank A Washington psychoanalyst analyzes "Kenneth S." and his odd fixation on the president's sex life (07/30/98) Starr's final act? By David Corn Kenneth Starr has sprung into action, but where is he headed? (07/29/98) Why Clinton caved in to Israel By Jonathan Broder The Lewinsky scandal's first big victim: The Middle East peace process (07/28/98) - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Browse the Newsreal Archives - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
		N E W . J F K . D E A T H . F I L M The digital version of the Zapruder home movie is still inconclusive. - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - BY SCOTT McLEMEE When "JFK" was released in 1991, Oliver Stone talked excitedly about the great speed of the film -- the enormous number of cuts, yanking the viewer back and forth between Technicolor and grainy black-and-white, between clips of actual news footage and purely imaginary scenes (with only the most fragile roots in reality). "It is like splinters to the brain," the director enthused. "We were assaulting the senses in a kind of new-wave technology. We wanted to get to the subconscious." Stone's vision of himself as tribal shaman (blowing the public mind with stroboscopelike editing, rewriting history with lightning flashes of imagery) sounds quite a bit like the poems Jim Morrison wrote while in film school, before joining the Doors: Cinema is the most totalitarian of the arts. All energy and sensation are sucked up into the skull, a cerebral erection, skull bloated with blood ... -- and so forth. These very '60s-ish notions found their ideal expression in Stone's telling of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. For if you assume that film reaches down into primitive and concealed layers of the psyche, you can't find a better subject than the most archetypal of rituals, the killing of the king. That event is shown repeatedly (minus the trippy overtones) in a newly released videotape, "Image of an Assassination." Of all the evidence concerning the Kennedy assassination -- running to more than 17,000 printed pages of the Warren Commission hearings -- the Zapruder film exerts the greatest fascination. With a hand-held camera, Abraham Zapruder recorded the presidential motorcade during the crucial moments before, during and after the sniper fire. Those 26 seconds of film have been searched endlessly for clues. They offer the promise of almost direct access to the moment of truth. In an analysis of the film published by the American Journal of Physics in 1976, Nobel Prize-winning scientist Luis Alvarez gave the most concise statement of what researchers have always believed about the testimony of Zapruder's camera: "It doesn't have the normal human failings." The images themselves -- the waving president and first lady, Kennedy's grab at his throat, the cloud of blood hanging in the air, Jackie's lunge across the back of the limousine just before it speeds away -- have burned the film into the collective memory in a way no auteur could imagine. And Stone, for one, acknowledged that fact, indirectly. The Zapruder footage, as he told an interviewer, formed the "core" of his docudrama. He interrupted the movie's speed-freak pacing long enough to show the Zapruder record "frame by frame, detail by detail, again and again. To see the president's head blown off in this way hits you in the gut, at the subconscious level. It is the moment in every movie theater where there is a collective gasp by the audience." The new video presents a digitally processed edition of the original, now held at the National Archives. Most of the scratches and dust have been cleaned up using computer techniques. And the transfer incorporates a strip of film (now filling the left quarter of the screen) never visible during previous showings of the footage. A documentary, running a little more than a half hour, traces the history of the Zapruder footage and the details of the digitization process. Then follows six showings of the film itself, at various speeds, with different kinds of focus. N E X T+P A G E+| It's a whole new Zapruder film