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Zapruder Movie Meaning

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This essay aims to further extend Pasolini’s argument on the long take through a textual analysis of the Zapruder film and comparing it to a two minute extract of The Eternal Frame.
Pasolini’s essay on the observation on the long shot compares the long take to life. The long take as we know is a single point of view that lacks narrative and meaning; it is the single point of view that makes it a reality, reality is always in the present tense. A montage creates meaning and coherence to a film, but by doing so it transforms the present into the past. Much like our lives, we live in the present time; we see and hear reality from a single point of view. Like the long take, our lives have no real narrative or meaning as long as we live. Death does to a life what montage does to a film, it creates the meaning to a life but it also transforms the present into the past.
The Zapruder film is one long take, an accidental piece of footage that happened to be one of the most important in the history of film. The 26 seconds piece of footage aimed to document Kennedy’s motorcade as it drove by, instead Zapruder captured the only piece of film that records Presidents Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 in Dallas, Texas.
The film is one long take that lacks any editing; in other words the film is arguably rushes that have not been given its final form, it is an unfinished piece. Yet, its incompleteness is what makes the film the truest form of footage, it has not been meddled with and it is

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