The ontology of replay: The Zapruder video and American conspiracy films

Abstract

The Zapruder video is a visual sampling of a traumatic event that needs to be repeated, retold, and reframed in an endless hermeneutic process. The raw document revealed to US filmmakers that the replay offers the possibility of a different cinematic time, and thus a different way of re-constructing actual events. Several conspiracy films of the 1970s organize their narrative through the replay, rather than the more traditional figure of the flashback. This study explores how the communicational experience of Kennedy's assassination created an epistemological break, an unprecedented interrogation about the ability of the image to reveal the deep nature of events.