The Report

In class on Monday we watched a film called "The Report", an experimental film showing clips from moments before John F. Kennedy was shot. Most of the time I was sitting and watching this I felt very tense- upset. I can't put a finger on it exactly, but I thought that morally it was disrespectful to try and make art out of this. I don't know if maybe this felt safe for the artist to do because the incident of Kennedy's assassination was so long ago, but this got me to think how our class' audience would have reacted if we replaced the images of JFK with images of a plane coming within split moments away from driving into the World Trade Center over and over and over again. To me that effect felt like a daunting tease - "Where not going to show IT, but we're going to show THIS- over. and over. and over." Is something like that really an appropriate hook? I also think that just the idea that someone can take footage like that and decide to make it their own is a question of morality as well. Though it is available, does that mean it is appropriate to take footage that holds so much weight in it's own right and make it into something else?