Dealey Plaza · November 22, 1963 · 12:30 p.m. CST
Twenty-six point six seconds of 8mm film.
Abraham Zapruder's home movie of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is the most-analyzed piece of amateur footage in American history. This site explains what is documented, what is disputed, and what remains genuinely open — with every claim tied to a primary source.
486
Frames of exposed film (Kodachrome II, 8mm)
18.3
Frames per second (measured by FBI, 1964)
$16M
1999 arbitration value paid by the U.S. government to the Zapruder family
What this site covers
01
Provenance
Who Abraham Zapruder was, what camera he used, and how a 26.6-second home movie became the most-studied piece of amateur film in the 20th century.
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02
Chain of Custody
From the Kodak lab in Dallas the same afternoon, to Life magazine, to the National Archives, to the 1999 Justice Department valuation — every documented hand the film passed through.
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03
Investigations
What the Warren Commission (1964), the House Select Committee on Assassinations (1979), and the Assassination Records Review Board (1998) actually concluded about the film.
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04
Analyses
Mainstream forensic work by Itek, the FBI, and the HSCA photographic panel — alongside credible dissenting scholarship from Josiah Thompson, David Wrone, and others.
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Editorial standard
This is analysis, not advocacy. Where the historical record is settled — the film's authenticity, its frame rate, its provenance — we say so. Where credentialed researchers disagree — the direction of the fatal shot, the interpretation of individual frames, the completeness of the Secret Service's copies — we present the competing positions and cite the underlying evidence.
The film is held today by the Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza, which acquired the original camera-original from the National Archives in 2000 through the terms of the ARRB's 1997 seizure and the 1999 arbitration award (National Archives). Nothing on this site alleges concealment by that institution; it preserves the artifact and makes it publicly viewable.