TWENTY-SIX SECONDS
A Personal History of the Zapruder Film
ALEXANDRA ZAPRUDER

MY RATING ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️▫️
PUBLISHER Twelve/Hachette Audio
PUBLISHED November 16, 2016

SUMMARY
"They killed him. They killed him." Abraham Zapruder, cried. He was the first to know of John F. Kennedy's death. He saw it through the zoom lens of his double 8mm video camera on that bright, sunny day at Dealey Plaza. The motorcade passed right in front of him, then he heard the gunfire. It was the most horrific thing he had ever seen. Everyone around him was stunned. The news reports said that Kennedy was taken to Parkland Hospital. But Abe knew he was already dead.

Abe immediately determined that he had to get a copy of his film to the Secret Service. News reporters were hounding him for a copy. The afternoon of the assassination, Zapruder along with the Secret Service went to the Eastman Kodak processing facility near Love Field to develop the double 8mm color film. Later that day he and others took the developed film and had three copies made at the Jamieson Film Company. He delivered two of the three duplicate copies to the Secret Service that night. Abe kept the original film and the third copy of the duplicate. And the long story of the film begins.

Alexandra Zapruder, Abe's grandaughter, tells us her grandfather's story of that horrendous day that he filmed President Kennedy's motorcade in Dallas, Texas on November 22, 1963. This book is the untold family story behind what happened to the twenty-six seconds of original film footage of Kennedy's assassination. Alexandra uses personal family records, records from Life magazine who possessed the film for twelve years, other previously sealed archival sources, and interviews with family members and others who had contact with the film. She traces the films complex journey through history and most importantly, details the many controversies the family had to endure, with the media, the Federal government and the arts community.

This book is part biography, part family history, and part historical record. It shows how this historic film changed a family and raised some of the most important social, cultural, and moral questions of our time. The film was notably the most graphically violent of it's time. Add to that, it was the death of a beloved president. It fueled debates about privacy, copyrights, access, and ownership.

REVIEW
Sometimes you read a book that makes your heart pound in your chest. A book that you can't stop thinking about or talking about. This is one of those books. Of course it's encompasses an monumental event in US history. But the book is not about the assassination. It's only about the twenty-six second film of the assassination. The book was very educational, enlightening, and informative. I thought I knew all I needed to know about the Kennedy assassination. But I didn't know this story.

I am ever so thankful to Alexandra Zapruder for meticulously pouring over pages and pages of documentation, conducting interviews and bringing the history of the film to light. The result is a comprehensive narrative that has shaped much of today's thinking about access to such things in the future. The family faced a tremendous amount of controversy over the film. Owning such a thing, as shown in this book carries a tremendous amount of responsibility. Alexandra Zupruder clearly testifies to how her grandfather and her father carried out this responsibility.

Alexandra portrays her grandfather as an honorable man, whose only hope, in this horrific situation was to not cause any additional emotional harm to the Kennedy family by the exploitation of this film.

It is a well-written and thought-provoking book. But the book is long. Twenty-six Seconds is 480 pages and the audio is over 14 hours. So it's quite a commitment. I would have enjoyed it more had it been somewhat more concise, but cannot imagine what she could have possibly cut. ( )

HISTORY/BIOGRAPHY
Alexandra Zapruder
Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film
Twelve Books
Hardcover, 978-1-4555-7481-0 (also available as an ebook, an audio book, and on Audible), 480 pgs., $27.00
November 15, 2016

Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film is a labor of loving curiosity for historian Alexandra Zapruder, who was ten months old when her grandfather Abraham Zapruder died. She feels as if she had always known, through a sort of osmosis, that he had taken a home movie of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, but their family never talked about it. “[The film] was almost completely compartmentalized from our family identity, our stories, and our sense of ourselves,” Zapruder writes. She wanted to understand what effects association with the film had wrought on her family.

The death of Zapruder’s father was the additional impetus she needed, so she began the research. Zapruder collected files from her father’s attic, letters and photos from her aunt’s home in Dallas, documents from the family’s attorneys and the National Archives. She interviewed key players and conspiracy theorists alike, and was the first to be granted access to Life’s archival materials. Zapruder decided that her “family’s insistence on dignity and restraint when it came to talking publicly about the film had left a vacuum in the public story.”

Zapruder’s narrative is often highly technical, packed with minute detail. The film is twenty-six seconds long, consisting of 486 frames, each frame one-eighteenth of a second long. Zapruder addresses head-on the oppressive avalanche of press coverage and some of the claims made about her family: they were greedy, selfish, immoral, profiteers. Some of the insults came embellished with anti-Semitism. Zapruder is passionately protective of her loved ones, often to the point of defensiveness, but also quite funny: “[T]he film felt a bit like having an unsightly birthmark … something we were born with, but it didn’t define us. I was used to it and no longer particularly noticed. But I didn’t expect people to point it out, either.”

Zapruder includes rich detail of family history in Czarist Russia and Jewish Brooklyn. Small details are affecting. On the film, before the footage in Dealey Plaza, are images of Abe’s grandchildren and employees at his dress manufacturing plant. “The screen flickers again and they are in bright sunshine, outside on Dealey Plaza.” Zapruder evokes the tension and horror of the assassination. Scrupulous facts are woven into an intensely personal, sometimes painful, family history.

The family struggled through the years to “strike the right balance between personal legacy and public responsibility.” Thorny legal, ethical, and moral issues — sometimes mutually exclusive — are well and thoroughly discussed, such as “whether an individual’s interest in historically significant images should supersede a corporation’s right to control the content that it owned,” the “takings” clause of the fifth amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and copyright law, among many others.

Perhaps most fascinating, and most difficult to assess, is Zapruder’s exploration of the psychology of the film: we must “imagine a time before people were routinely bombarded with moving footage of violence multiple times a day.”

Twenty-Six Seconds is an important contribution to our understanding of history on a grand scale, and to the personal history of a private family reluctantly thrust into history’s spotlight. In the end, people wanted the film to do what it could not — provide the answers to what happened to JFK.

Originally published in Lone Star Literary Life. ( )