The Zapruder Footage: an Investigation of Consensual Hallucination

The Zapruder Footage: an Investigation of Consensual Hallucination
The Zapruder Footage: an Investigation of Consensual Hallucination

1999, USA, Beta SP on mini-DV, colour, sound, 20 min.

Various permutations and combinations of the Zapruder footage of the assassination of JFK. Intended as an investigation of the footage as visual, experiential, and cultural document. In the USA this footage is both notorious and invisible; seldom actually seen, it is very well known; when seen, it remains opaque. This work is intended to add a level of "transparency" to original. It is set to Jajouka music in order to bring to the foreground the ritual aspects of this visual, mechanical; and media historical event. For some reason I had a memory of that footage being black and white. So my first reaction was surprise that it was in color. But my second reaction was, the more we try to read into this the less we get out of it; it completely obfuscates itself. Then as the piece goes on you're blocking out areas with black squares, and superimposing various run-throughs of the footage, back and forth, and upside-down, and sideways, and it seemed to me that these are the overlapping layers of meaning that we put on Kennedy's assassination. It's not only Kennedy that has become an icon. The assassination event itself is now an icon. And it seems to me that maybe we don't want the mystery solved, because it serves a philosophical role in our cultural life.

Keith Sanborn, in Peggy Nelson Interview with Keith Sanborn.