Zapruder

Description

All movies are too long. Let's go back and reduce all movies to just the good parts.
-John Waters
Zapruder is derived from Waters’ 1967 film Eat Your Makeup. Waters’ first quasi-narrative cinematic effort—shot on Waters’ parents’ front lawn with a newly purchased 16mm silent camera—Eat Your Makeup tells the story of a disturbed couple who kidnap three models and force them to eat makeup and “model themselves to death.” In what has become the film’s most infamous sequence, Waters regular Divine imagines herself as Jackie Kennedy, riding in the motorcade through Dealey Plaza. Produced only a few years after the event, Waters’ gender-bending reenactment of the Kennedy assassination was at the time considered especially tasteless and the film was screened only once at a local Baltimore church.
Zapruder’s twenty-four frames (the same number of frames in a single second of sound film). By extracting still images from a longer film, Waters both alludes to the process of editing that structures most films and, at the same time, encourages us to consider how each of us creates our own personal narratives as we perceive, isolate, and interpret the plethora of images that constantly bombard us.
Jacob Proctor, Associate Curator of Modern & Contemporary Art
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6/28/10
John Waters (United States, born 1946)
Zapruder
1995
24 chromogenic prints, in artist’s frame
Gift of Stephen and Sandra Abramson
"All movies are too long. Let's go back and reduce all movies to just the good parts."
John Waters
(Tish can you check the format of our quotations in the designed Mod Con labels ?)
Zapruder is derived from Waters’ 1967 film Eat Your Makeup, his first quasi-narrative cinematic effort. Shot on Waters’ parents’ front lawn with a newly purchased 16mm silent camera, Eat Your Makeup tells the story of a disturbed couple who kidnap three models and force them to eat makeup and “model themselves to death.” In what has become the film’s most infamous sequence, Waters regular Divine imagines herself as Jackie Kennedy, riding in the motorcade through Dealey Plaza. Produced only a few years after the event, Waters’ gender-bending reenactment of the Kennedy assassination was at the time considered especially tasteless and the film was screened only once at a local Baltimore church.
Zapruder’s twenty-four frames is the same number of frames in a single second of sound film. By extracting still images from a longer film, Waters both alludes to the process of editing that structures most films and, at the same time, encourages us to consider how each of us creates our own personal narratives as we perceive, isolate, and interpret the plethora of images that constantly bombard us.