Zaprudered

The term ‘Zaprudered’, taken from William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition, is a term applied to, as Vågnes explains, ‘mysterious segments of footage, posted on a website, [which] continue to haunt its characters’ (p. 138), footage that becomes ‘Zaprudered’ as it becomes more surreal, more speculative and takes on ‘shadowy but determined lives of its own’ (Gibson, quoted p. 138). Abraham Zapruder, a Dallas dressmaker, went to Dealey Plaza on 22 November 1963 with his 8mm Bell and Howell camera to record for posterity President John F. Kennedy's visit to Texas. As it transpired, his camera witnessed the president's assassination and ‘the Zapruder film’ became the most notorious home movie ever made, at least until the digital cameras of Pavel Hlava and others chanced upon the two hijacked planes careering into the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. For many cultural commentators, Zapruder's 26.6 seconds of Kodachrome and the horrific event they depict are both familiar and enduringly fascinating. For Fredric Jameson, the Kennedy assassination was ‘the inaugural event’, a ‘unique collective ... experience’ which represented ‘the coming of age of the whole media culture that had been set in place in the late 1940s and 1950s’,1 and Zapruder's film is that event's definitive text

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