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14 And next, our final witness today is Mr. Art
15 Simon. He is an assistant professor in the Department
16 of English at Montclair State University in New Jersey
17 and he is the author of the book, "Dangerous Knowledge:
18 The JFK Assassination in Art and Film," published in
19 1995.
20 Professor Simon?
21 STATEMENT OF ART SIMON
22 MR. SIMON: Thank you for the opportunity to
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1 address the board today.
2 I want to begin by underscoring a theoretical
3 point, one that Mr. Hall has already just discussed,
4 and that is the footage showed by Abraham Zapruder is
5 not a window onto the past. It is not a reproduction.
6 It is a representation. While it is commonplace to say
7 that film offers us a slice of reality, a window on the
8 world, in fact what Zapruder did was produce a
9 perspective, a perspective on the assassination, one
10 that has become the dominant visual point of view of
11 the event.
12 As a product, and not a window, Zapruder's
13 choices and his reactions, his decision to film in
14 color, to stand in a certain position, to use 8
15 millimeter, to move the camera as he did, these give us
16 a mediated form of vision. These do not give us the
17 truth about what took place 33 years ago. I believe
18 there is really limited evidentiary value left in the
19 Zapruder film. Indeed, although I have not looked at
20 the original in its present form, it may be that if
21 first-generation copies exist in good condition, they
22 may be more useful to those who wish to continue the
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1 investigation, or as Mr. Weitzman has suggested, some
2 kind of combination of the original and first-
3 generation copies.
4 Now I understand that one of the arguments
5 for preserving the original print holds on to the
6 possibility that some future optical technology might
7 be employed that allows the original to yield new
8 information. As much as I would like to believe this,
9 and with all due respect to what Mr. Weitzman said, I
10 think this may well be an enabling fiction, a fantasy,
11 a fantasy that motivates further study and fuels a
12 faith that some day historical ambiguities will
13 ultimately be made clear.
14 The film has become a fetishized object,
15 invested with the potential to cover up our lack of
16 reliable answers to many questions. In fact, this
17 faith in future enhancements of the film has been a
18 recurring trope over the last 30 years. And of course,
19 a variety of such processes have been applied to the
20 film. The Zapruder footage has repeatedly been cast in
21 the role of ultimate witness, and investigators on both
22 sides of the debate have invested -- have insisted that
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1 with the proper scrutiny its images can render a
2 legible view of the event.
3 Now, while three decades of analysis has
4 produced a significant challenge to initial readings of
5 the film offered by both the government and the
6 mainstream press, it has also produced a mulitiplicity
7 of interpretations, a crisis of knowledge, a serious
8 critique of film's capacity to offer a unified vision
9 and discernible truth. In other words, the application
10 of new technologies has not and probably would not
11 guarantee a unanimity of interpretation.
12 What then is the status of the original film?
13 I would suggest to you that it is a secular relic, a
14 material piece of the past, and for reasons that are
15 either psychological or, for some, perhaps spiritual,
16 individuals and the nation hold on to such relics. I
17 might add parenthetically that we live in a culture
18 which privileges origins, which endows with
19 significance first things, first editions of books,
20 first words spoken by a baby. We have a ceremony for
21 the first pitch of a ball game. We have manufactured
22 that significance through social convention and ritual.
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1 In a sense, the government does much the
2 same. Why does the government preserve the original
3 Constitution. We have plenty of copies. We know the
4 contents of the Constitution. Now, while the
5 Constitution was a public document from the beginning,
6 the Zapruder film was not, but still, the nation
7 expends resources to preserve significant objects from
8 the past which have had private origins. People's
9 homes, perhaps Lindberg's plane, the list is very long.
10 Perhaps these objects are maintained for
11 aesthetic reasons because the textures and faded colors
12 bear traces of time and change. Moreover, perhaps
13 preserving such objects functions symbolically as the
14 government's way of saying historical consciousness is
15 important, and that although the past cannot be
16 preserved, some index of it can be located in tangible
17 artifacts which have been kept or rediscovered.
18 The film, then, is some -- is part of some
19 ongoing and perpetual archeology project. Although on
20 the other hand, we might say that old things are just
21 kind of cool, and we hold on to old things for reasons
22 that we really can't explain. I am not sure there is
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1 anything wrong with that. And I am not sure there is
2 anything wrong with the government acknowledging that
3 we hold on to objects and artifacts for that reason.
4 I would only add to what has been said
5 already, and that is, if federal funds are going to be
6 spent to keep the original film out of private or
7 corporate hands, as I believe it should, then some
8 mechanism for access needs to be maintained. The
9 criticism that has been directed at the government for
10 the last 30 some years over its handling of the
11 investigation of the assassination must be taken
12 seriously. And so I would just propose that the board
13 consider whether or not the government is the right
14 institution to hold onto the film and consider at least
15 the options of entrusting the film to a museum, a
16 research institution or a university.
17 JUDGE TUNHEIM: Thank you very much,
18 Professor Simon. Are there questions.
19 MS. NELSON: Actually, Mr. Simon, I don't
20 know that -- it belonged to the Zapruder family and so
21 obviously it belongs in the National Archives if it is
22 sitting in the Archives, rather than a museum or
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1 private institution. I don't think we could do that
2 under our statute. But, of course, your point that it
3 should be kept is an interesting one. If I understand
4 what you are saying, it is okay to keep secular relics?
5 MR. SIMON: Yes.
6 MS. NELSON: That it might be useful to keep
7 it for that reason?
8 MR. SIMON: For reasons that we might not
9 explain in the course of law so much as it raises
10 questions about psychology of the nation, if such a
11 thing exists.
12 MS. NELSON: You also in your book talk a
13 good bit about its cultural meaning to the society. Is
14 this also something you are intimating when you say
15 that it should be in the public sector because of the
16 failure to put it there for so many years? Is it
17 culturally important?
18 MR. SIMON: I don't know from the standpoint
19 of culture for artists who want to borrow the images
20 and to recontextualize them, to comment on the event,
21 on the last 33 years. I don't know that it is
22 necessary for the government to have the original.
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1 Artists can use those images, and have used them and
2 exploited them in various ways. So the original film
3 that ran through Zapruder's camera, I don't know that
4 it is necessary for it to have cultural use in the
5 future.
6 MR. JOYCE: You have quite a turn of phrase,
7 "enabling fiction," and "fetishized objects" and
8 "secularized relic" among them, all of which speak to a
9 certain kind of, in my view, marginalization of the
10 film in the sense of the film as a record, and I am
11 wondering, I certainly agree with you that it is
12 important for government to assist us, the population,
13 in terms of our historical consciousness, but I am
14 wondering if you see in addition to that if we don't in
15 fact have a record here, and if you have any comment to
16 make about the film in its recordness.
17 MR. SIMON: My first comment would be I am
18 not sure that fetishes are marginal. But second, there
19 is no question that it is an important record of the
20 event, and I think those issues have already been
21 addressed. I don't mean to claim that the film has no
22 evidentiary value. It has tremendous evidentiary
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1 value. I am not sure that it has much value left, in
2 the sense that I think the conflict over
3 interpretations will continue.
4 We have learned important things about what
5 took place on that day thanks to Zapruder's film. So I
6 don't mean to marginalize it as a piece of evidence or
7 a historical record of the event at all, but only to
8 suggest that even though we have the film text, that
9 doesn't guarantee in any way that we will all agree
10 about what we see in the text, and so as Mr. Hall
11 mentioned earlier, ambiguities will persist, such as
12 the nature of writing history and dealing with evidence
13 from the past.
14 MR. HALL: I can't help reflecting on that.
15 I think of the Rodney King videotape, and there three
16 different juries were able to reach somewhat competing
17 understandings of what that film actually told them.
18 The question, I guess of, some moment in my
19 mind is the extent to which we have an obligation, that
20 is, this generation, has an obligation to make sure
21 that generations that come are put in at least as good
22 a position as we are with regard to coming to terms
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1 with whatever evidence is there. And one of the
2 problems I have in this regard is that admitting that
3 there are theories that explain the assassination in
4 terms of the Federal Government as self-participating
5 and, therefore, the last person you would want to give
6 the emulsion fluid to is the wolf. Recognizing that
7 particular line of argument, it does seem to me that
8 the playing field for those who will subsequently come
9 ought to be in such order that those who come to play
10 with this will be in at least as good a position as we
11 are today, which would seem to indicate to me that
12 there ought to be some response that would make sure
13 that as a physical artifact -- and I know you are using
14 the word "relic" in a different way -- but the
15 preservation of that is not just a matter of symbol but
16 also therefore a matter of substance.
17 MR. SIMON: I would agree. I would just
18 reiterate that I am not sure that those future
19 generations will be free of the same kind of
20 interpretive struggle.
21 MR. HALL: If we know anything at all about
22 the writing of history it is that it is hard to find a
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1 punctuation mark and that what we may in fact owe
2 future generations is their opportunity to interpret
3 what they will out of the material. If they do not
4 have the material it is hard to interpret it.
5 MR. GRAFF: Professor, I assume you think
6 that rituals and the keeping of artifacts, while they
7 may be fetishistic, some are more fetishistic -- all
8 fetishes are equal but some are more equal than others.
9 And I think that is what we are talking about, and I
10 think that seems to be an element in the response you
11 just gave to Dr. Hall.
12 MS. NELSON: You can see we have been reading
13 too many documents.
14 MR. GRAFF: We have been reading you, too.
15 JUDGE TUNHEIM: Any further questions?
16 MR. SIMON: The question you need to decide
17 then is how much the government pays for a fetish and
18 what that might be worth.
19 JUDGE TUNHEIM: Thank you very much,
20 Professor Simon. Let me just, on behalf of the board,
21 thank all of our witnesses here today who provided
22 testimony and opinion and thoughts and good advice to
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1 us.
2 The Review Board will be keeping the public
3 record open on this hearing for several weeks, until
4 April 18, so if anyone wishes to address the subject
5 further we would be very happy to receive public
6 comment. It can be sent to the Reviews Board's office
7 at 600 E Street Northwest, Washington, D.C.. The ZIP
8 is 20530. It is the Assassination Records Review
9 Board. I will also note for the record that the board
10 has received thoughtful comments from David Lifton who
11 is an author who is concerned about this issue as well
12 and we have also received a letter which will be part
13 of the public record from an attorney for the Zapruder
14 family.
15 Let me again thank the witnesses today for
16 their testimony. I thought it was very helpful and
17 useful for the board as it debates and considers what
18 the position of the United States should be relative to
19 the camera-original version of this historic Zapruder
20 film. The board is going to take a ten-minute recess
21 and then return for some brief additional testimony and
22 a relatively brief public meeting as well.
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1 We will be in recess.
2 (3:20 p.m.)