Sinister interpretations of otherwise normally explainable events: The Umbrella Man [View all]

[Poll_Blind]

I just stumbled on this infinitely useful 6-minute mini-doc by Errol Morris and I thought I'd share it.

This documentary is, I suppose, well, you could say it was about The Umbrella Man. The Umbrella Man was a "mysterious" figure holding an open black umbrella, captured in the Zapbruder film of Kennedy's assassination.

But this beautiful little bit of documentary film-making isn't about the Kennedy assassination, The Umbrella Man or conspiracy theories at all: It's about how we research history and how, as we turn up the magnification of the lense (as is so often is possible in the digital age), the stranger and more distorted the picture may become.

PB