Filmmaker, lecturer and author Dr. Mark de Valk will be giving a talk on the events and evidence surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, and launching Screening the Tortured Body: The Cinema as Scaffold, the new book he has edited.

The Kennedy Assassination: Oliver Stone, The Camera & The Establishment
On the occasion of the 53rd anniversary of JFK’s fateful day in Dallas, Texas on November 22nd 1963, Dr de Valk will present and outline:

• the core parameters of the case and Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991)
• the conflicting facts as propagated by Chief Justice Earl Warren’s Presidential Commission
• the central tenets underpinning the tectonic struggle of the two key opposing establishment ideological tracts, which further galvanized subsequent to Kennedy’s election in 1960.

The presentation will be inter-active and includes a demonstration of the original Zapruder Bell & Howell 8mm camera that captured the assassination. Audience members are invited to share and discuss their knowledge of the case. Questions on the nature and complexity of the assassination and the JFK film will be addressed.

Screening the Tortured Body: The Cinema as Scaffold
Inspired by Michel Foucault’s examination of state subjugation and control, this book considers post-structuralist notions of the ‘political technology of the body’ and ‘the spectacle of the scaffold’ as a means to analyse cinematic representations of politically-motivated persecution and bodily repression. Through a critique of sovereign power and its application of punishment ‘for transgressions against the state’, the collected works, herein, assess the politicised-body via a range of cinematic perspectives. Imagery, character construction and narrative devices are examined in their account of hegemonic-sanctioned torture and suppression as a means to a political outcome. Screening The Tortured Body: The Cinema as Scaffold elicits philosophical and cultural accounts of the ‘retrained’ body to deliberate on a range of politicised films and filmmakers whose narratives and mise-en-scène techniques critique corporeal subjugation by authoritarian factions.

The book is published by Palgrave Macmillan Publishers.

Doors open at 18.00, for a 19.00 start.

Refreshments will be available in our licensed cafe/bar.

TICKETS & PRICING

Tickets £5. Tickets may be purchased from Billetto, or direct from the Museum by calling 020 7840 2200 in office hours.