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Newberry Library | Documenting Our Lives: A Conversation about Film, Memory, and Preservation
May 25, 2021 @ 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
**You can watch this program on either Facebook Live or Zoom. If you’d like to watch on Zoom, please register for free in advance here: https://www.eventbrite.com/…/documenting-our-lives-a…
On November 22, 1963, Abraham Zapruder left his office hoping for a glimpse of President John F. Kennedy’s motorcade as it passed by Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas. He ended up taking the most famous “home movie” in American history. Zapruder’s footage depicting the JFK assassination is now iconic, forever embedded in American culture and identity.
In this installment of “Conversations at the Newberry,” Abraham Zapruder’s granddaughter Alexandra Zapruder will be joined by Jacqueline Stewart, a professor at the University of Chicago and the host of the Turner Classic Movies program “Silent Sunday Nights.” Together, the two will explore the connections between home movies, family history, and difficult memories, as well as the emergence of citizen journalism in the United States.
About the speakers:
Alexandra Zapruder began her career as a member of the founding staff of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. Her first book, Salvaged Pages: Young Writers’ Diaries of the Holocaust, won the National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category. Her recent book, Twenty-Six Seconds: A Personal History of the Zapruder Film, tells the story of her grandfather’s home movie of President Kennedy’s assassination in 1963.
Jacqueline Stewart is a professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Chicago and director of the South Side Home Movie Project. She’s the author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity. Stewart’s research and teaching explore African American film cultures from the origins of the medium to the present, as well as the archiving and preservation of moving images. Her work also addresses “orphan” media histories, including non-theatrical, amateur, and activist film and video. In addition to directing the South Side Home Movie Project, she is co-curator of the L.A. Rebellion Preservation Project at the UCLA Film and Television Archive.
“Conversations at the Newberry” is generously sponsored by Sue and Melvin Gray.
