The director again dismantles the official version of the Kennedy assassination based on declassified documents in the documentary ‘JFK: Case Revisited’
Oliver Stone (New York, 1946) believes that the United States lost its innocence on November 22, 1963. The country lost faith in its institutions after President Kennedy’s assassination and nothing was ever the same. In 1991, the director dismantled the official premise of the assassination in “JFK,” a jaw-dropping, extraordinary film, in which he combined real documentary material and fiction to try to show how Lee Harvey Oswald was a scapegoat: the CIA and the secrets behind a ‘coup d’état’ that changed the world forever. More than a hundred actors, including Jack Lemmon, Ed Asner, Joe Pesci, Walter Matthau, Donald Sutherland and Gary Oldman, starred in a film that took the gaze of New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison, played by Kevin Costner. . Two Oscars, for his prodigious editing and photography, confirm that this is one of Stone’s best films.
Thirty-one years later, the director of ‘Platoon’ re-enlists the great cinematographer Robert Richardson (‘Casino’, ‘Kill Bill’, ‘Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood’) for ‘JFK: Case Revisited’, another magnificent , exhaustive documentary made from the released documents since 2017. John Williams is of course no longer behind the music and the stars have been replaced by Stone himself, who wanders through Dallas’ Dealey Plaza, “still the scene crime”, in search of the elusive truth . The director has presented a film at the Barcelona Film Fest that debunks the ‘magic bullet’ theory and shows that Oswald wasn’t even in the library from which he allegedly shot. The CIA and FBI have manipulated all the evidence, and the Warren Commission report is a hoax that dismantles the author of “Natural Born Assassins” one step at a time.
“I’ve waited thirty years for this documentary, I could have done it sooner. I made a film that was a dramatic interpretation of the murder, which lasted three hours and eight minutes. A very complicated film that was doomed to fail,” he recalls. “I was prepared for it, but I was surprised that it worked so well. I think part of the reason was that there was love for President Kennedy in 1991. people remembered him It was like the beginning of a new appreciation for Kennedy, more books came out and the phenomenon took the whole world by surprise, not just in the US.
“JFK: Case Review” begins and ends with two speeches from the president. In the first, he expresses his hope that the world will live in peace, but not “a pax imposed by the United States, but one that makes life worth living.” Within minutes, Stone’s talent as a storyteller emerges as he describes the murder from documentary footage. Dejected journalist Walter Cronkite takes off his glasses as events unfold: Jackie Kennedy tries to escape the car with a piece of her husband’s brain in her hand, footage of the state funeral, Jack Ruby shooting Oswald while being carried. The pantomime of the Warren Commission, including CIA Director Allen Dulles, whom Stone points to as the mastermind of the conspiracy, determined that Oswald was the sole perpetrator. The images of Abraham Zapruder, a Dallas tailor who filmed the parade, cast doubt on that official version, as did the two million documents Trump released five years ago that are available to everyone in the Maryland Archives.
“Some have accused me of distorting history, branding me as a conspirator, but I’m not doing that,” Stone clarifies. “This case fascinates me. We have Oswald, the killer, who has many connections to intelligence agents, especially the CIA. It’s used by the CIA in Russia, New Orleans, Dallas… I’ve followed his path and it’s a mystery. I always doubted it was on the sixth floor. Edgar Hoover and the FBI quickly closed the case: It was Oswald, three bullets from the sixth floor. Last point. Other than that, there wasn’t much research, except by private individuals who disagreed with that explanation. A mobster named Jack Ruby killed the killer and the case is closed.”
According to the director, the process would have been “a joke”. “There was no chain of custody of the evidence: the gun, the bullets, the fingerprints… In this murder, everything is gone. No judge in the United States could have judged this case. We have a president, the most important figure in the United States, and he hasn’t had a proper autopsy. There were more than three or four shots, Oswald was never on the sixth floor, he was on the second because he was told to be there. The shots came from a other building and out of the hedge. Kennedy was caught in the crossfire. This is not a closed case, it is very open, because the American public has been misinformed.”
The witnesses and evidence are devastating. The ‘magic bullet’ that went through two bodies, the weapon without a trace, the autopsy… The accumulation of irregularities tried at all costs to incriminate Oswald, a former Marine who had lived in the Soviet Union for a while and is under suspicion being a double agent. The CIA monitored him so closely that even his mother’s phone was tapped. The documentary, which includes a few clips from the first “JFK” and the voices of Whoopi Goldberg and Donald Sutherland as narrators, claims Kennedy’s open foreign policy condemned him. The CIA misinformed the president about the Bay of Pigs disaster, carried out Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, who had promised JFK protection, to his enemies, and even lied to him about an alleged coup d’état in France to overthrow de Gaulle. Wanting to stop sending troops to Vietnam, Kennedy advocated rapprochement with the USSR, where he considered proposing a joint space mission. The film’s most horrifying testimony comes from Robert F. Kennedy Jr, who recalls that as soon as the assassination became known, his father called CIA headquarters in Langley, “Did you commit this atrocity?”
“Why was Kennedy assassinated?” asks Stone, who earned a Purple Heart fight in Vietnam. “We know he wouldn’t be re-elected in 1964, he wouldn’t win in the South. He wanted to end segregation, the southerners hated him. And in Texas, also because of the ending of privileges, they saw him as a dangerous person, just like another Roosevelt. Kennedy had two brothers, they saw that dynasty as a danger. Kennedy once said he wasn’t sure if he was in charge of the government. That’s scary, isn’t it? JFK: Case Revisited concludes with Kennedy’s memorable civil rights speech: “Those who do nothing foster shame and violence. Those who act bravely admit what is right, as does reality,” said the last US president, who, according to Oliver Stone, was trying to change things.
“In America, we make the most expensive weapons and sell them to regimes we work with. We must continue to create this game of tension that allows us to sell more weapons,” he illustrates. “At the CIA they know very well how to devise coups, we did that successfully in 2014 in Ukraine. They are setting up a president against Russia. And this has brought us to the current situation. Anyone who knows history knows that it is a matter of cause and effect. When you think of America, you have to think like a Doberman, it is a cruel and murderous animal. We have too much money, we have nothing else to do. We cause problems.” For Stone, control over the media is crucial in today’s world. “The war in Ukraine is a good example. All media in Europe and America are aligned: the Russians are the bad guys and the US is the bad guy. good guys It’s sad to see Joe Biden in the hands of conservatives in Washington He’s an Irish Catholic just like Kennedy, although it would be nice if he was more like him I’m sorry to say he’s too old for this job, but I don’t see a solution with Trump either… I’m sorry I voted for Biden, but I couldn’t vote for Trump.”
Stone knows Vladimir Putin well and has interviewed him dozens of times for documentary series over a number of years, as he has with leaders such as Oliver Stone and Hugo Chavez. “I’m not separating Putin from the state, he’s the president of Russia,” he notes. “I last saw him three years ago. The press calls him crazy, irresponsible, calls Hitler, Stalin… All this has nothing to do with the man I knew. A very rational person, calm, thoughtful, like a chess game In my opinion he has always acted in the interest of Russia He is a son of Russia as he always says it is a very important distinction to understand It implies patriotism but not nationalism It implies love for Russia .”
Source: La Verdad
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