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The technology of photofabrication, in videotape and cinema as well as in the still picture, has outpaced the ability of the spectator to detect it. The film, JFK, highlighted both the impact of history through film and the power of technology to fabricate a motion-picture past.

That presumption no longer holds. Today the technology of photofabrication, in videotape and cinema as well as in the still picture, has outpaced the ability of the spectator to detect it. The telltale indicators of tampering by which a discerning eye could always perceive alterations in the photographic image - the differences in film grain, the visible lines in airbrushing, the mismatch of lighting and background - have been wiped clean by imaging technologies. In the age of seamless matching, "morphing," computer graphics, and digital-editing techniques, the integrity and veracity of any moving image, perhaps the whole notion of documentary cinema, has been called into question.,

Whether as cause or consequence, a shift in philosophical outlook has abetted the technology revolution. Beginning in the late 1960s and blossoming full-blown by the mid-1970s, post-structuralism, reader-response theory, and the sundry Continental theories that came to dominate critical thought in the American university system set a relativist tone in which man (or method) became the measure of all things. In Visions of the Past: The Challenge of Film to Our Idea of the Past (1995), historian Robert A. Rosenstone expressed something of an academic consensus when he declared that "film changes the rules of the historical game, insisting on its own sort of truths, truths which arise from a visual and aural realm that is difficult to capture in words." Without slogging through either side of the neoconservatism versus deconstructionism culture wars, two observations seem pertinent: first, in some quarters the pursuit of objective historical truth came to seem a fool's errand; second, a powerful rear-guard action has lately reasserted the validity of "the rules of the historical game" and the integrity of the old boundaries between fact and fiction, documentary and drama.

JFK AND THE MANIPULATION OF HISTORY

Within the orbit of both of these developments the technological revolution in photofabrication and the philosophical culture wars over truth and history - spins Oliver Stone's JFK (1991), to date the most technically accomplished, culturally significant, and historically duplicitous blend of documentary, docudrama, and speculation. Stone's seamless matching of archival footage and concocted material literally rewrote - or rather refilmed - the motion picture record of the Kennedy assassination. As a piece of pure filmmaking, it was a state-of-the-art example of the boundary-blurring docudrama; as an inquiry into the American past, it was an extreme case of personal perspective recasting the images of history. Yet, the backlash against the film suggests the persistence of venerable historical standards even in, or perhaps especially in, the age of computergraphic imaging and seamless matching.

A Nexis search of JFK-related commentary calls up hundreds of reviews, news stories, and television sightings. Any summary of the critical opinion is bound to be selective, but most reviewers expressed some variant of Julie Salamon's remark in the Wall Street Journal: "It may be dubious history, but it's powerful filmmaking." Journalists and political commentators were more mixed, with reaction running predictably along ideological fault lines. The left-wing film magazine Cineaste devoted a special issue to JFK and ran an effusive lead editorial praising it as "arguably the most important political film made in the United States." On the other end of the spectrum, syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer, once a practicing psychiatrist, suggested that anyone who took JFK seriously should see one.

Throughout the media barrage, director Oliver Stone was his own best publicity agent. In addition to hitting the well-trod media circuit of Entertainment Tonight, Nightline, Prime Time Live, and local news stations in major metropolitan markets, he addressed prestigious forums such as the National Press Club and the Kennedy School. In arguing his case and hyping his project, the director was alternately dogmatic ("the underlying facts that are quoted in the film I believe are correct," Stone asserted in the JFK press kit, "so the footnoters can come out all they want") and disingenuous ("I've never said it was the truth," he told the National Press Club. "I said it was a combination of facts plus speculation"). Stone wanted it both ways: to be given credence as a truth-teller but also to have creative freedom as an entertainer.

Aesthetically and thematically, JFK took the same tack. Throughout the film, extended sequences, rendered in persuasive verisimilitude, segue abruptly into dream-like depictions of what may or may not be reality. Although the bait-andswitch approach recalls the style of "reality" television, in JFK television is looked upon with a skeptical eye. Shot in widescreen Panavision, the theatrical motion picture looms authoritatively over the smaller, low-definition television medium, whose video grain and tighter aspect ratio comprise the memory bank of Kennedy- assassination era imagery. That imagery, once beheld as true history on the television screen, is now exposed as patently deceptive and chimerical by a widescreen, megabuck, highconcept Hollywood production. Throughout JFK, whether bumped up to 35mm register and filling the film screen, or as visible backscreen on TV monitors in the mise en scene, the assassination as depicted on television is a false vision. Network videotape lies; Stonedirected cinema tells the truth.

The truth is rendered in JFK through a new kind of docudramatic technique that might be dubbed the "speculative reenactment." The speculative reenactment actually renders a historical event that might have happened, but in the experience of someone watching the film, it can only be perceived as a historical event that did happen. In the terms of verbal grammar, the subjunctive state is experienced on film as the emphatic state. Throughout JFK, the movement from dramatic reenactment of a real event, to archival footage recording a real event, to speculative reenactment of an event that might or might not have happened is imperceptible and unlabeled. Thus, no matter how wild and fantastic the speculations, they are anchored to the more solid ground of documentary and docu-drama. On screen, the hallucination looks real.

The centerpiece sequence from JFK well illustrates Stone's strategy. Crusading District Attorney Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) journeys to Washington, D.C., for a secret rendezvous with a high-level CIA operative, a man identified only as "X" (Donald Sutherland). In hushed, urgent tones, X recalls the events leading up to November 22, 1963, his voiceover narrating not so much an extended flashback but a flash-back-and-forth between the black-and-white past (comprised of authentic newsreel footage and speculative reenactment) and the full-color present (Oliver Stone's JFK). X's screen memory comprises a full catalogue of moving imagery: authentic archival footage in newsreel, videotape, and super 8mm formats "bumped up" to 35mm Panavision and hence washed out and grainy; dramatic reenactment in archival style; and forthright Hollywood dramatizations of X's flashback, in the black and white style of Cold War conspiracy films (specifically, John Frankenheimer's paranoid twinpic The Manchurian Candidate [1962] and Seven Days in May [1964]). The visual legerdemain and jump-cut transitions between a full-color present on the Washington Mall and a motion picture past that is part archival, part doctored archival, and part docudramatization is a tour de force of parallel editing and voice-over narration. The televisually trained eye has no trouble in apprehending the fluid transitions from past to present and (within the past) the variations in film grain and film style -- though it may not be able to detect the difference between Oliver Stone's "archival footage" (filmed "on location" in Dealy Plaza in 1991) and Abraham Zapruder's home movie footage.

REACTIONS TO JFK

Yet as Stone's duplicitous docudrama worked its way to iconic status and Academy Award nominations, it also inspired a determined rear-guard action designed to keep the "docu" and "drama" on their own sides of the hyphen. However hazy were recollections of the rest of the 1960s, baby boomers remember November 22, 1963, quite vividly. Many experienced JFK as a wild, 189-minute excursion into a parallel universe: it looked like the past, but everything was off-kilter, truly "through the looking glass, people." In not so much blurring the line between history and hallucination as denying it, Stone's epic revisionism in JFK brought the boundary dispute between film as historical truth and film as fiction into stark relief. Assisted not a little by the temper of his own media appearances, Stone the crusader came to look more and more like a crackpot, his name a byword for paranoid persecution. The New York Times of December 23, 1991, sardonically referred to Stone's thesis in JFK as the "Grand Unified Conspiracy Theory," a stew of all of the conspiracy-buff speculations involving the Mob, anti-Castro Cubans, the FBI, the CIA, the Pentagon, the Dallas Police Department, the American Medical Association, and the media. Soon Saturday Night Live was satirizing Stone in a loony skit about George Bush's mealtime mishap involving Japanese Prime Minister Mihazawa. Brandishing a videotape of the event, Stone (impersonated by Phil Hartman) detects a cover-up involving the trajectory of the presidential vomit ("back and to the left"). The Ben Stiller Show led viewers through a Disneyland-like fantasy park called Oliver Stone Land, where animatronic robots of Kevin Costner and Joe Pesci recite dialogue from JFK on an endless loop. Attempting some damage control, the director made a self-mocking cameo appearance in Ivan Reitman's Dave (1993), a political satire in which a good-natured double for the president of the United States takes over the job when the original falls into a coma. Stone appears on Larry King Live to make the paranoid claim to his disbelieving host that the current president is in fact an imposter. Of course the joke is double-edged: this time the paranoid is right.

The most concerted and potent counterattack on the movie's historical validity came with the publication in 1993 of investigative journalist Gerald Posner's Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, a scrupulously researched study that makes good on its title. Posner clears up thirtyyears' worth of misinformation, disinformation, and invincible ignorance the old-fashioned way: cold logic and hard evidence. It is a breathtaking demonstration of the way facts can nail down an argument. "The only thing Oliver Stone got right in JFK," Posner told PBS interviewer Charlie Rose in a show airing September 20, 1993, "was the date John Kennedy died." As with a lot of good history, some of the best action is in the footnotes where, almost in passing, Posner relates a germane bit of video history. In 1991, NBC's Today Show broadcast a version of the Zapruder film with a sound track of a dictabelt allegedly recording the assassination. "Four shots are clearly audible," writes Posner, but only because the sounds were dubbed onto the track by studio technicians, a point of information Today did not broadcast.

The very public debate over poetic license and documentary truth inspired by JFK soon influenced the way at least some motion pictures juggled history, drama, and motion-picture imagery. In fact, almost in a kind of compulsion to repeat the controversy for all concerned, the release of Oliver Stone's Nixon in November 1995 replayed many elements of the JFK controversy. A tale of conspiracy, not personality, the three-hour biopic purported to delve deeply into the checkered psychology of our most perversely fascinating president. Stone sought to go beyond the caricature of Herblock cartoons and Dan Aykroyd mimicry to explore the human being lurking behind the five-o'clock shadow. Significantly, though, in the publicity package for Nixon, the director hedged his bets and assumed the appearance of having undertaken scrupulous research. In a curious circumlocution, the Nixon press kit asserts that "the writers of Nixon have gone to great pains to insure the film's veracity to the fullest extent possible." Likewise, a precredit disclaimer positions the film as a work of imagination, not history: "Nixon is an attempt to understand the life of America's 37th President. It is neither hagiography nor horror show, but an effort to explore, with integrity and compassion, a most remarkable and disturbing man of our time."

Inadvertently and ironically, JFK highlighted both the impact of history through film and the power of technology to fabricate a motion-picture past. "Oliver Stone's vision has changed the way we saw our past," bragged the tagline from yet another Oliver Stone film, Natural Born Killers (1994). True enough, perhaps but it also served to sharpen skepticism about a vision of history that exists in motion pictures but nowhere else.