Another AI assisted section of a longer work. This tech is great fun, as much as anything else. The Zapruder film is not cinema. It is liturgy. A 26-second Stations of the Cross, shot in Kodachrome, where the American century bleeds out in Dealey Plaza. Hughes might have called it a fresco of violence—brutal, unflinching, and framed by the architectural banality of Dallas, that city of glass and asphalt, where the myth of Camelot met the geometry of a sniper’s perch. The motorcade glides like a reliquary—Kennedy radiant, Jackie sculpted in pink. Then rupture. Frame 313: the head snaps, the crown splits, and the republic loses its sacrament. Zapruder’s lens, perched like a minor prophet on the grassy knoll, captures not just the death of a man but the implosion of a national narrative. The film is grainy, yes, but myth is always grainy. It resists clarity. It demands interpretation. Roy Foster might have seen in Jackie’s scramble across the trunk a gesture of tragic fide...
This is a collection of personal and largely unedited observations covering the years from 2006 to now; I assert my copyright but am fine with links and footnotes. Some posts are obviously much more researched than others, and any errors are wholly mine except where I have innocently disseminated or linked to other bloggers or commentators.