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JFK courtroom scene
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- from JFK (1991)
- Created by Oliver Stone
- Distributed by Warner Brothers
- Posted byCritical Commons Manager
The climactic scene of Oliver Stone's JFK
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JFK courtroom scene
by Critical Commons ManagerThe climactic scene from Oliver Stone's JFK
Oliver Stone's feature film JFK has been widely criticized for its selective presentation of "facts" in support of Stone's own revisionist canonization of the JFK presidency. But JFK the movie is redeemed precisely by the impossibility of mistaking Stone's kinetic and idiosyncratic mode of historiography for a definitive treatment of the past. In this climactic scene from the film, Stone makes use of the full range of expressive and rhetorical tools available to practitioners of the moving image, mixing archival footage with reenactment; citing historical sources and testimonies, interweaving complex narratives, characters and motivations along with numbered frames and "scientific" evidence and drawing it all together with a dense and evocative sound design and narrative framing via the trope of courtroom drama. As excessive and hyperbolic as this sequence appears, it reflects the state of contemporary media-based historiography in its layering and polyphony of voices, images, ideologies and narratives.