While REPORT utilized montage and a strongly articulated structure to analyze the forces at work in the killing of a President (including our own complicity), TELEVISION ASSASSINATION is a complex, synthesizing work that weaves together fragments from the flux and flow of that history as it was in the process of being constructed and displayed daily to a nation of spectators. A monument to the enduring potency of the Kennedy myth and to the marketers who created it, the installation brings Conner's critique full-circle into the very medium that formalized it. In so doing, the work seems to suggest that the final resting place for the slain President was neither Brookline nor Arlington National Cemetery, but rather in the box, on the tube, held suspended forever on the television screen.

The 8mm film loop begins with the same title card ("REPORT") its predecessor used. But it then proceeds to use exclusively videographic imagery filmed by Conner directly off of the television screen. The formal doubling of the installation - film footage of television imagery projected back onto a television screen - finds a broad range of analogues in the film itself: from the doubled assassinations (President Kennedy, followed days later by his assassin Oswald's murder) to the frequent pairing of the two major media events in Kennedy's career (his inauguration and assassination). Since the installation is silent (even the 16mm sound version released in 1995 employs a minimalist electronic score), the effects achieved through the vertical montage of sound and image and through complex intercutting in REPORT are here produced through repetition and superimposition. Given the reduced scale of the projection as well as the shallow depth of the original television material, the 8mm image appears small and, as the filmmaker Stan Brakhage has aptly described it, "expendable, in every sense of the word." Brakhage draws a comparison between the two works based in part on their differing gauges, with the 16mm REPORT emerging in his analysis as "an oil painting" and the 8mm TELEVISION ASSASSINATION as "a sketch."

In contrast to REPORT then, TELEVISION ASSASSINATION focuses on the reception of the assassination and its impact on the home front rather than on its mythic construction. A less iconic work than REPORT, it chronicles, as Brakhage has suggested, Conner's "immediate capturing of his immediate feelings." This immediacy emanates not only from the present-tense mode of live television, but also, as Conner seems to be claiming, from the medium's lack of historical grounding. Time seems reversible, distances vanish, hierarchies are reduced, and as in the realm of cartoon animation, the world of causes and effects, of actions and consequences, seems to have become unhinged. At one moment Oswald, in custody and surrounded by lawmen, is gunned down by a waiting Jack Ruby; a moment later in Conner's film, he reappears to face Ruby again. An eternal flame burns over Kennedy's grave and funeral flowers are strewn across Dealey Plaza in Dallas, and yet here is President Kennedy in top hat on the reviewing stand on a chilly afternoon in Washington, D.C., with the First Lady and Vice-President Johnson at his side to watch over the inaugural procession.

In TELEVISION ASSASSINATION, Conner heightens the trance-like, narcotic pull of the electronic medium by slowing the projection and endlessly repeating the already repetitive imagery. This constrained set of key images emerges as much from the marketers and myth-makers of the media as from the events themselves. In miming their activity, Conner literalizes one of the fundamental principles of the modern political process, namely that political figures and issues be merchandised "by the same methods that business has developed to sell goods." The result is the creation of a society of political spectator-consumers and a media in which politicians meld with the merchandise. Conner gives vivid examples throughout the film of this debased form of public discourse in sequences in which the two realms reside in uneasy balance. Thus late in the work, President Kennedy is seen in a medium closeup standing at an outdoor podium ready to deliver a speech when a selection of fashionable, high-heeled shoes intrudes upon the scene. He had shared the screen earlier with a commercial for Salem cigarettes in this new alliance between politics and merchandising, and will soon join an assembly of such world leaders as Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Fidel Castro, and Nikita Khruschev, who meet like André Breton's proverbial umbrella and sewing machine on the operating table of 1960s television.

- Bruce Jenkins, December 1998