Marita Sturken is associate professor in the Annenberg School of Communication at the University of Southern California and the author of Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture.

Only images of the World Trade Center toppling can rival the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy's assassination for all-American trauma. The unintentional outcome of the Zapruder footage, originally released as still images, was the notion that history can lurk within the murky emulsion. Films and tapes by artists have emerged in the decades since that seek their own singular truth of that infamous act, looking at how tragedy is transformed, and cultural memory condensed, through image. In tribute to Ant Farm's retrospective in the BAM galleries, we delve into a dark day remembered through light.

In David White's Elm Street (1975, 7:30 mins, B&W, 16mm) repetition of the Zapruder footage becomes an uncanny exorcism of grief until the image is blurred like the limits of sadness. At the heart of Zoran Naskovski's Death in Dallas (Serbia, 2001, 14 mins, B&W/Color, Mini DV) is a sixties Serbian folk lament, wafting above a course of images clinically gruesome and cautiously recalled. In Keith Sanborn's The Zapruder footage: an investigation of consensual hallucination (1999, 18:23 mins, B&W, DVD) understated visual strategies force fresh visibility on this most disturbing of films, with music from Morocco providing underpinnings of ritual. By scrambling the sequence of found images, Bruce Conner's Report (1963–67, 13 mins, 16mm, PFA Collection, permission Canyon Cinema) rightfully makes the assassination even more impervious to understanding; a voiceover repeats, “The President of the United States is dead,” as if that's all we can know. Finally, Ant Farm, in collaboration with T.R. Uthco, daringly traveled to Dallas to restage the Zapruder footage at its primal site. Dangerously astute, The Eternal Frame (1976/restored 2002, 23:50 mins, B&W/Color, DVD, PFA Collection) tracks J.F.K.'s trajectory from tragic death to image immortality.