Feral House's video: Case Not Closed: The Zapruder Film - Alex Cox on the JFK Assassination

Let's take a look at the Zapruder film. Is it real, or is it something else? http://feralhouse.com/the-president-and-the-provocateur/ President John F. Kennedy was said to have been murdered by a lone crazed gunman in a Dallas motorcade a half-century ago. The accused killer, Lee Harvey Oswald, was also murdered under mysterious circumstances just a couple days later. Alex Cox, like most of the American and British public, does not buy into the moth-eaten establishment tale about the regicide. The President and the Provocateur is not the usual conspiracy volume, and is structured almost like the film Rashomon, including varying views of the story with different fonts and sizes. The Kennedy assassination saga has obsessed filmmaker Alex Cox (Repo Man, Sid & Nancy) for most of his life. The President and The Provocateur is Cox's informed meditation on the conspiratorial tale, and as such is an imaginative rendering of the parallel structures of the lives of John F. Kennedy and Lee Harvey Oswald. From Alex: "I've posted another Case Not Closed short -- this one about the Zapruder film. There's a fair bit of information about the mysterious adventures of Mr. Zapruder's home movie: two 8mm films on one 16mm roll, supposedly split and copied onto standard 8mm at the Jamieson Film Lab in Dallas. When I wrote THE PRESIDENT AND THE PROVOCATEUR the history of the film was twisted enough: how many copies were made? why was there a gap in the numerical sequence? was it true that the right wing oiligarch H.L. Hunt had his own personal copy on the evening of the assassination? Since then the chain of possession has become still murkier. Not one but two CIA photographic experts have come forward, to reveal that the Zapruder film was screened at CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) in Washington DC the weekend after the assassination. Incredibly, the two men -- Homer McMahon (then Head of the NPIC Color Lab) and Dino Brugioni (Chief Information Officer at NPIC) saw different films. One film was on an 8mm reel. The other was on an un-split 16mm reel. According to McMahon and Brugioni, the content of the films was different. Each man, unaware at the time of the other's work, prepared briefing boards for CIA and Secret Service study. This strange tale -- which indicates multiple "Zapruder" films and multiple 16mm reels very early on -- is told by Douglas P. Horne, Senior Analyst on the ARRB's Military Records Team, here. Horne's story is the tip of the iceberg. The Great Zapruder Film Hoax, edited by Jim Fetzer, goes into much detail, pointing out anomalies in the existing version of the film. John Costella discusses possible alterations and special visual effects -- in particular, the possible insertion of a fake Stemmons Freeway sign, here. Monte Evans' long piece about Dan Rather, who was given exclusive access to the Zapruder film and misrepresented it (at least based on the film we've seen) was published in Issue 6, Vol 6, of The Third Decade (Nov 1990) -- available at the Mary Ferrell site. In this article, Jim Fetzer claims that both the Zapruder and the Nix films are fakes. Now, Fetzer is a multiple conspiracy theorist: he also believes the Americans never landed on the Moon, suspects Stanley Kubrick faked the footage, and considers the WTC7 collapse and Pentagon attack on 2001/9/11 deeply suspicious. But there is no harm in reading what he writes. He is quite literate. And this is about the Zapruder film. So let's end with a little meditation on how and why, when we the taxpayers purchased the "original" film from the Zapruder estate as a national archival treasure, the copyright passed not to us ninety-nine percenters, but to a private corporation, based in the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. How much did we spend to acquire this asset, for a private company? A cool sixteen million dollars."