The home movie footage that caught the assassination of the American President, John F. Kennedy.I had assumed that I had seen this film a dozen times, maybe one hundred times. But I guess I was seeing lower grade copies, and probably just clips, Seeing the complete film, with its 2012 remastering... wow. I had no idea the film was so nasty and gory. It may be one of the more disturbing things you will ever see, and definitely the most disturbing to be considered worth preserving by the Library of Congress.The version I saw also had commentary, which seemed a bit questionable, such as the crowd chasing the assassin up the grassy knoll. Was that Zapruder talking or added later? I presume the latter.

This is certainly one of the most significant video documents of the 21st century. As much as the title of the review may apply to president Kennedy, it's the complete opposite for Abraham Zapruder. As intense and heartbreaking as the document is, it would, most likely, even been a lot more haunting if we could hear his reaction to what he just saw.There were no television cameras filming the incident and we wouldn't have the actual moment on tape if it hadn't been for this amateur filmer. Would it have been better that way? I don't know. It's truly disturbing and what followed afterward concerning legal consequences and Jack Ruby is utterly frustrating. What saddens me even more than looking at Kennedy in this tape is looking at his wife.

This is a strange piece of film to "rate." It's only 26 seconds of some of the most historic (and gruesome) film ever captured -- by chance as much as anything. One wonders what the results would be these days when every third person on the parade route would be wielding a cam-corder.

...and it has yet to receive 5 votes. Granted it's only 26 seconds long, a little more than half the length of Bambi Meets Godzilla, and that darned road sign gets in the way of the camera at such a crucial time.It's amazing that Zapruder kept shooting as the real shooting started. We might otherwise have been left with images of running feet and chaos. The film, dissected later in Image of an Assassination - A New Look at the Zapruder Film (1998), clearly shows that the president and John Connolly were hit at different times and from different directions than was concluded by the Warren Commission.Or that was one magic loogie.