The Accidental Documentary

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the concept of the 'accidental' documentary. It examines Abraham Zapruder's home video of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, entitled "Assassination of John F. Kennedy." The paper then compares the images and the style of the accidental documentary with Bruce Connor's 1967 documentary "Report," which also focuses on the assassination of John F. Kennedy.

From the Paper:

"Both the Zapruder and the Connor films never change, but the audience is changed, every time the images are seen. The Connor film's transposition of early 1960s naivete about Camelot with images of the funeral creates a kind of conscious memorial to a lost time in American history, while there is no depicted return, no sense of memorial in the Zapruder. Zapruder was innocent, after all, when he made his film. The memorialization in Zapruder solely exists in the individual's mind, as a witness to the artifact of history. Zapruder captures a public death and through the lens of his "personal viewing experience" and what the viewer sees is dependant upon his or her own personal view of the 1960s and Kennedy, or simply the death of a man, while Connor demands that the viewer accompany a filmmaker on his personal vision of what the death of Kennedy means (Bruzzi 16). But although one film is seemingly objective and accidental, the other subjective and deliberate, in trying to discover what the assassination, even what 'death' means, they are perhaps best viewed together, both highlighting the potential as well as the limits of visual culture to render the end of human life and the end of an era in our history."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentaries. New York: Routledge, 2000.

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