Go ghost-hunting with History TV -- Lee Harvey Oswald's ghost
How could someone as inconsequential as Lee Harvey Oswald have killed someone as consequential as John F. Kennedy?
That thought-provoking question lies at the heart of Oswald's Ghost, documentary filmmaker Robert Stone's remarkable, painstakingly detailed account of that fateful day -- 45 years ago to this day -- when U.S. history changed forever and a new, more dangerous era was ushered in.
"People are comforted by the idea, I think, that human affairs are not the product of random events," a witness to history posits early in the film. "There's some larger forces at work here."
The late novelist Norman Mailer then adds a sobering thought about how the Kennedy assassination shook Americans' belief in their rightful ascendancy to the top of the community of post-war world nations, then draws a line between Nov. 22, 1963, and Sept. 11, 2001. America, Mailer suggests, was shaken by the Kennedy assassination, and 9/11 was the other shoe dropping in the natural decline of the American empire.
Those may sound like highfalutin words, but the truth is that Oswald's Ghost is a gripping, almost hypnotic documentary -- confident, fast-paced, thoughtful, and as entertaining as it is informative. A dizzying parade of journalists, historians and eyewitnesses weigh in on the events of that day, but the filmmakers never allow Oswald's Ghost to feel like a dry history lecture.
Read entire article at Canwest
That thought-provoking question lies at the heart of Oswald's Ghost, documentary filmmaker Robert Stone's remarkable, painstakingly detailed account of that fateful day -- 45 years ago to this day -- when U.S. history changed forever and a new, more dangerous era was ushered in.
"People are comforted by the idea, I think, that human affairs are not the product of random events," a witness to history posits early in the film. "There's some larger forces at work here."
The late novelist Norman Mailer then adds a sobering thought about how the Kennedy assassination shook Americans' belief in their rightful ascendancy to the top of the community of post-war world nations, then draws a line between Nov. 22, 1963, and Sept. 11, 2001. America, Mailer suggests, was shaken by the Kennedy assassination, and 9/11 was the other shoe dropping in the natural decline of the American empire.
Those may sound like highfalutin words, but the truth is that Oswald's Ghost is a gripping, almost hypnotic documentary -- confident, fast-paced, thoughtful, and as entertaining as it is informative. A dizzying parade of journalists, historians and eyewitnesses weigh in on the events of that day, but the filmmakers never allow Oswald's Ghost to feel like a dry history lecture.