Anatomy of a murder : Sirhan Sirhan and Robert Kennedy. This filmic output uses the practice-research methodology of the
audiovisual essay to explore cinematic treatments of amnesia and posthypnotic suggestion, in the context of the American criminal justice
system and the case of Sirhan, the convicted assassin of Robert F.
Kennedy
- Submitting institution
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Kingston University
- Unit of assessment
- 33 - Music, Drama, Dance, Performing Arts, Film and Screen Studies
- Output identifier
- 33-33-1810
- Type
- Q - Digital or visual media
- Publisher
- E2 Films
- Month
- -
- Year
- 2016
- URL
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- Supplementary information
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- Request cross-referral to
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- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
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- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
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- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- Sirhan Sirhan, the convicted assassin of Robert F. Kennedy, has never been able to remember the shooting, and defence psychiatrists concluded he was in a hypnotic state at the time, a real-life Manchurian candidate. Legal and popular acceptance of the Manchurian candidate theory in Sirhan’s case is constrained by the notion that it’s the stuff of movie fiction. Joseph Jonghyun Jeon notes that Oh Dae-su’s secrets in the film Oldboy (2003) ‘are snuffed out by the kind of hypnosis that works only in movies’ (Jeon, 2009); while Greil Marcus tells us that the source novel for his reconstruction of The Manchurian Candidate (1962) is ‘a cheaply paranoid fantasy’ (Marcus, 2002). In fact, Richard Condon’s book and John Frankenheimer’s original film were unwittingly rooted in real Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) experiments to create an amnesiac assassin using drugs and post-hypnotic suggestion. This audio-visual essay remixes elements from Shane O’Sullivan’s film RFK Must Die (2008) with previously unseen footage of Sirhan’s 2011 parole hearing and echoes of his case found in movies on amnesia and post-hypnotic suggestion. The essay flows from the crime of the accused to his foggy recollection, his legal defence, the conspiracy theory and his parole hearing. It plays with the nature of memory – amnesia induced by trauma or coercion, and its status as evidence–exposing Hollywood myths about the parole system in The Shawshank Redemption (1994).The film was made as part of a research project reframing the popular understanding of Sirhan’s case before his 2016 parole hearing (archived at: www.whokilledbobby.net) and shortlisted for Best Research Film of the Year in the AHRC Research in Film Awards 2016. In Jeon’s Freudian reading of Oldboy’s (2003) conclusion, Oh Dae-su undergoes failed ‘traumatic reenactments’ in search of his ‘unrecoverable past,’ a process of memory recovery that Sirhan must undergo while incarcerated.
- Author contribution statement
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- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
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