16mm film, silent
Continuous loop
Courtesy of Murray Guy, New York
With The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Ezawa investigates how film contributes to American mythologies of celebrity and violence. The work depicts the assassinations of U.S. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Ezawa recreated two film segments: the fictional account of Lincoln's assassination in Fords Theater, as portrayed in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), and Abraham Zapruder's amateur 8mm reel of the Kennedy assassination. Both films have had a controversial history as contested accounts: one as a racist fictional reenactment, the other an evidentiary document.
These videos are being made available for noncommercial and educational use only. All rights to this recorded material belong to Kota Ezawa.