Documentaries Done Right: A Look at the JFK Specials That Aired Recently

With the anniversary of the JFK assassination having recently passed, two documentaries on the event were aired on ABC and SBS. While both being on the same subject, and sharing some similarities, they are two examples on how a documentary can be done right.


The Lost JFK Tapes: The Assassination

This is a fine example of how to create a documentary on such emotional subject matter. This hour long film has no voice overs. It simply contains raw footage, audio, some title cards, and some original background music. All it does is present how the events were covered in the media or captured on film, starting from the president landing in Dallas and finishing with Jack Ruby's arrest of murdering Lee Harvey Oswald.

And yet despite being just an hour long compilation of footage, it does a remarkably good job of getting the information across and presenting a narrative. The events themselves are powerful enough to carry the documentary, so why have explanatory voice overs when archival footage of television or radio coverage will do it for you? By experiencing the events as they unfolded and watching helpessly as people struggle for information (we even see 30 seconds of a program that was airing at the time of the assassination before it is interrupted by a breathless TV host) we experience the same emotions that everyone else experienced as it happened.

Interestingly, the famous Zapruder film is not shown.... but Zapruder himself is. Far more effective is another angle, since hours after the shots were fired someone had managed to interview people who are visible in that angle and other still photographs.


JFK: Three Shots That Changed The World

Think of this as an extended edition of the other documentary. This two parter runs for about 3 hours or so when put together. Again, there are no voice overs or contemporary interviews, just edited footage of the events as it happened. However, what sets this apart from the first documentary is a few minor differences that add up to an entirely different experience.

The extra length allows for more time to be spent exploring each event, people's reactions to it, and so forth. Instead of seeing one program get interrupted, we see just about every program airing at the time get interrupted (including As The World Turns). We see how the news was broken just about everywhere in the country, from people being asked on the streets where they heard the news, to audio from a performance of the Boston Symphony Orchestra where the conductor (or someone I presume was the conductor) announces the news to the audience, who become audibly shocked.

There's also much more film footage than still photographs (in fact, there are hardly any photographs at all), and most of the film is made up from archive news footage. This makes us feel as though we're watching the events unfold on TV as they happened, rather than feel as though we are experiencing the events somewhat firsthand like the first documentary.

This is amplified by the decision to not show footage of the assassination at the point in the documentary when the assassination occurs. Instead, we see news reels of the motorcade before the event.... and then a CBS news bulletin. There were no news cameras at the point of the assassination, and so it makes sense that at the time, no one would have seen footage. Yes, Mr Zapruder does show up a couple of hours later, but his footage doesn't. That's because, as revealed in the second part of this documentary, his film wasn't shown publicly for the first time until the 1970's.

Where the first documentary stopped, this one keeps going, with the second part taking us from Oswald's death all the way to the present day. It gives us the theories that arose the moments the shots were fired right, and follows the theories as they evolve, bringing us up to the present day (reminding us of just how bad 1980's fashion was along the way). We also explore briefly how the events have entered popular culture, and the second part ends rather poetically with the discovery of new footage of the events in the days and hours before and after the assassination.

Documentaries, and in a similar fashion things like biopics, commonly suffer from a failure to properly resolve the tension and provide closure. These documentaries do not fall into that trap. There are several logical ending points where a documentary on this subject could stop, and both have chosen different points. But they've both chosen sensible points that leave us feeling as though we've experienced a whole story, even though we know we haven't.