An example of 8mm film being examined in minute detail is the filming by Abraham Zapruder of John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. Zapruder’s film, with its shot of the motorcade inscribed onto the tiny Standard 8 frames, is an unbroken stream of vérité. The Standard 8 camera film is 16mm wide so when it was processed, split and re-joined into the 50ft reel, was any vital evidence lost? US Secret Service Investigators found his clockwork camera ran at 18.3 fps. allowing them to create a timeline of events. They then compared the footage to Zapruder’s previous home movies to identify anomalies such as first frame flashes that would show when the camera had stopped and started. This forensic scrutiny of his 8mm footage also highlighted the camera’s propensity to create visual information outside of the film frame as defined by the camera’s gate that, given the immensity of the event recorded, received scrutiny perhaps never before applied to photographic artefacts outside the picture area of a film, in tandem with the photographic evidence held within the frame. The Warren Commission report on the shooting claimed, “Of all the witnesses to the tragedy, the only unimpeachable one is the camera of Abraham Zapruder” (Bruzzi, 2006, p.20). However, Sean Cubitt observes:
Perhaps the most famous of all news footage, the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, shown on North American television for the first time only in 1973, is exemplary. No longer news, it had already become talismanic. Slowed down, blown up, and most of all repeated, the Zapruder film stands head and shoulders above similar moments, like the footage of the Rodney King beating, not because the event was more spectacular or significant, but because its meanings remain so profoundly uncertain. The film is evidence, but despite its forensic standing, it is inconclusive. (Cubitt, 2004, p.210)
Zapruder’s camera could not record sound so there were no auditory gunshots, and the cameraman was facing the motorcade, rather than inadvertently filming the shooter/s to his rear.