After watching Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, I am in complete awe of how fascinating this movie was. Aside from all the A-list actors that did a great job in their roles, the editing of the movie presented an incredible amount of facts about the assassination of President Kennedy in a way that was true genius. In a way, the editing helped to simplify a great deal of information to the audience with the constant overlapping of past and present footage in what was being discussed at that moment in the film.

Having read the recent reading in Stephen Apkon’s Age of Image, Stone’s film goes hand in hand when Apkon talks about this “new age of literacy.” Apkon talks about how visual media is transforming most professions in this world and he is 100 percent correct! Still-life images are not enough anymore to prove a story and convince people of the truth. When an event is actually seen  by someone, it brings on a whole new meaning to them. JFK is the perfect example of this, in the movie and the movie itself. At the end of the movie, in the courtroom, DA Garrison exhibits many pictures to the jury and audience, but once he presents to them the actual video of President Kennedy being shot, the courtroom is in complete silence. The event had become real to everyone because it wasn’t something they were reading about, it was something they were actually witnessing. Personally, the movie itself made this historical event feel more realistic to me because for the first time I wasn’t reading in a history textbook about the conspiracy theories of JFK’s death, I was seeing a movie picture that was expressing to me actual facts and providing an image to go along with them. For me, words became a reality.