Shots Heard Around the World
by Eric Rudolph
Shortly after high noon on November 22, 1963, a sixtysomething Dallas dress manufacturer stepped into the history books when he shot a startling 8mm motion picture depicting the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Abraham Zapruder's short strip of narrow-gauge film went on to become one of the most scrutinized visual documents ever, and has stirred up a seemingly unending stream of debate for 35 years. The Zapruder film has been so controversial that a group of assassination researchers — known casually as the Alterationists — believe that the film itself is a fraud produced and/or greatly doctored by government agents.
Poor-quality copies of the Zapruder film have been available through various sources since the late Sixties, but up until recently this astonishing document has never been commercially available to the general public. That situation changed this summer when Chicago-based MPI Home Video released Image of an Assassination: A New Look at the Zapruder Film on videocassette and DVD. This new digital version of the film was struck directly from Zapruder's camera original and contains the controversial visual information recorded between the film's sprocket holes. The lack of availability of this additional information in high-quality form has spawned a host of theories about the film's veracity.
In actuality, the Zapruder film has quite prosaic origins. In November of 1962, Abraham Zapruder purchased a Bell & Howell model 414 PD Zoomatic Director's Series 8mm movie camera, fitted with a Varimat 9-27mm f1.8 zoom lens, at Peacock Jewelry on Elm Street in Dallas. Zapruder's dress company — Jennifer Juniors — was also located on Elm Street, directly across the road from the Texas School Book Depository and Dealey Plaza.
On the fateful day of JFK's slaying, Zapruder did not bring his movie camera to the office. He went home and retrieved it only after an assistant convinced the amateur cameraman that he would want to show his grandchildren a film of the Presidential procession.
As Kennedy's motorcade approached Dealey Plaza, Zapruder found an elevated filming position atop a concrete abutment close to the famous grassy knoll (near the spot where most denouncers of the Warren Commission Report claim that several of the shots, including the fatal one, originated).
According to Martin Shackelford's paper A History of the Zapruder Film, Zapruder was standing 185' from the southwest corner of the Depository building (from where the Warren Commission said lone assassin Oswald fired upon the President) and 65' from the center of Elm Street, the spot where Kennedy was killed.
Marilyn Sitzman, the same assistant who urged her boss to go home for his camera, stood behind Zapruder on the concrete pedestal, and held onto him to allay his fears of losing balance if he happened to become dizzy. With the lens of his high-end home movie camera set at maximum telephoto range and loaded with a partially used roll of Kodachrome II film, Zapruder set about capturing one of the most wrenching incidents in American history.
The Image of an Assassination project began when Zapruder's heirs decided that an archival copy of the film should be made. (The family regained control of the film from Life magazine in April of 1975, one month after a poor-quality copy was first aired on national television.) A decision was made that the copy should take advantage of advances in digital imaging, which would include eliminating the need for the 35-year-old film to be subjected to potentially damaging runs through a mechanical film gate.
After it had been determined that the best approach would be to shoot large-format still transparencies of each frame to be scanned and re-animated digitally, the Zapruders' attorney contacted Joe Barabe of McKrone Associates, an Illinois firm wihich specializes in photo microscopy.
Barabe packed up his gear and shipped it to the National Archive II in College Park, Maryland, where the camera original of the Zapruder film is kept under temperature and humidity-controlled archival conditions as a courtesy to the Zapruders.
Barabe devised a simple polyester film-holding system that doubled as a frame-numbering mechanism, as well as an easel made of microscope slides which held the film as flat as possible under the camera. Barabe hastens to note that no glass existed between the 8mm original and the copying camera's lens; the special easel was designed with a half-inch hole in the center.
Using a 4 x 5 format copy camera fitted with a Zeiss Luminar 40mm f4.5 lens which magnified each frame 12 times, Barabe made six-second time exposures of each of the approximately 480 frames of the film itself, which was illuminated by a light box fitted with a transparency copying bulb.
The stills of each frame were made onto Kodak 6121 color transparency sheet film taken from the same emulsion batch. The 8mm film was photographed from edge to edge in order to include the area between the sprocket holes.
The five-day photographic process did present several problems. "Shooting stills at high magnification makes the choice of the f-stop important for matters of depth of field and resolution," says Barabe. "We wanted the greatest depth of field to compensate for the fact that film curls. However, to stop down too much at this high magnification would have lowered the resolution because of defraction effects. We had to find the ideal balance, which we determined was to stop down from f4.5 to f6.3. We tested the resolution and depth of field at this setting and found it to be quite good."
A .60 neutral-density filter was included in each of Barabe's stills. "The .60 ND, with the light from our source coming through, photographed as a middle gray. Since each transparency was later checked with a densitometer and by eye, this gave us a solid density reference point," he explains.
After the processed still film was reviewed and reshoots were done, the transparencies were sent to a company which scanned each 4 x 5 transparency at 1,500 DPI resolution. The frames were then sequenced and registered on a computer, using the images of the sprocket holes and frame edges as guides. Scratches and dirt were removed and dark areas opened up via Photoshop; some camera shake was also eliminated digitally.
The still frames were then animated back to the camera's running speed of 18 frames per second, creating a new digital motion picture version of the 480 still frames. (The home video also includes several slow-motion and tightly cropped versions of the Zapruder film, as well as versions showing the area between the sprocket holes.)
One of the Zapruder film's most important features 35 years later is the fact that it was shot on a standard home movie stock of the time — Kodachrome II. This emulsion has long been proven to possess excellent sharpness, color saturation and image stability. What is immediately striking about the revamped Zapruder film is the appearance of its sharp, bright, saturated colors.
The home video version of the film is reportedly the first copy fashioned from the camera original since Kodak struck three copies of it in Dallas on the day of the assassination. Now, the general public can view a pivotal moment in history with a clarity close to that seen by those handful of people present at the initial Kodak screening.
The video release of the Zapruder film facilitates close scrutiny of its images, allowing one to easily absorb the event's truly heartbreaking aspects.
As the Presidential limousine emerges from behind a street sign, Kennedy has both hands at his throat after being shot for the first time. Noticing that something is amiss, Jacqueline Kennedy turns toward her husband with concern. At the same time, Texas Governor John Connally turns in his seat and speaks to the President. An instant later, Connally himself is shot and slumps over.
The vehicle proceeds for a moment, then clearly slows and appears to nearly stop. At the exact instant that the car comes to a halt, the left side of Kennedy's head is blown open in an explosion of blood and gray matter. At the moment of the fatal shot, Mrs. Kennedy had been leaning her head quite close to that of her husband. At first, she gently places an elegantly white-gloved hand around the back of her husband's neck just below his obliterated head. Then, after absorbing what has happened, the First Lady responds in horror and climbs onto the back of the car.
Another astonishing aspect about the film is the fact that Zapruder (who nearly loses the President from the bottom of his frame just prior to the fatal shot) had positioned himself in what appears to be a direct line with the President at the moment of the deadly shot. This instant is also the point at which Kennedy and Zapruder are closest in terms of physical space.
The MPI video also clearly displays the visual information between the sprocket holes, where ghostlike images of the scene are occasionally present. Alterationist researchers state that these images are proof that the entire Zapruder film is a cleverly fabricated fraud. Supposedly, this discrepancy results from a hastily planned overnight alternation of the film by the government, which used ultra-sophisticated filmmaking techniques completely unknown to the motion picture business in late 1963 and for many years to follow. But according to MPI staff member and Image of an Assassination writer/producer H.D. Motyl, "There is nothing in the sprocket area that proves or disproves a [theory] that the film was altered."
Researcher Anthony Marsh maintains that the ghost images are the result of a design anomaly in the aperture plate of Zapruder's camera. A groove next to the actual aperture area permitted the pull-down claw to access the sprocket holes instead of the more conventional notch at the top of the aperture plate: this design, Marsh insists, is responsible for those sprocket area images.
Others theorize that crucial evidence in the scene's imagery was actually recorded between the sprocket holes. However, the video release seems to refute those arguments as well, since no nefarious activity is apparent in this area.
Anyone wishing to see the actual Bell & Howell movie camera with which Abraham Zapruder made his famous film need only visit the Sixth Floor Museum located in the former Texas School Book Depository building. The humble camera, on loan from the National Archive, sits under a museum case in subdued archival lighting, along with 12 other movie and still cameras also in use in Dealey Plaza on November 22, 1963.