The Kennedy era through the looking glass
Fourth floor –The mirror of cinema
The importance of cinema in all the events of the Kennedy era has already been pointed out in the other areas of this exhibition. Without fear of finding ourselves surrounded by too many mirrors, we believe that if the show can assist us in seeing who we are under the reflection of those events, these same events are in turn constantly placed in front of another mirror, cinema itself. We, too, looking at ourselves through that period, are finding in cinema a truthful mirror.
The exhibition in this floor, in addition to its video and the objects on display, is intended also as a feast for the eyes: the posters, lobby cards and photo albums selected here from the collection of the Cineteca del Friuli (in particular those from the Gianni Da Campo Collection) are able to convey at a single glance the fascination of that cinema represented by the retrospective organized at the Cinema Sociale, which includes some works of fundamental importance. Some of them were never released in Italy, and have been subtitled for the occasion; others are shown also in their Italian release versions: this is because these editions, distributed until the 1960s – that is, during the golden age of dubbing – are in themselves an important source of knowledge. Coherently to what is being discussed in the exhibition (the reception of JFK’s books in Italy), these screenings deal the “re-writing” of sound in the Italian versions of the films, sometimes with variants due to censorship or to the need to shorten their running time, something that can now be achieved by the modern video editions through the inclusion of the excised sequences in original language, with subtitles. It goes without saying that, while it is useful to appreciate the sound component of these Italian versions, it is best to compare them with the original versions.
What is on display in this floor, therefore, is not the cinematic corpus itself, but the publicity material designed to encourage its viewing: this inevitably involved some arbitrary re-editing of the films’ images and their graphic reinvention. This should not be regarded, however, as an act of violence against the works, but a multiplication of their possible ways of experiencing them.
We have selected here – also on the basis of their visual appeal – a group of materials pertaining to some thematic groups of films included in the exhibition’s overall itinerary. We won’t describe each of them here, because this will be a prerogative of the presentations to each film screening. We will mention instead a few aspects of these thematic groups, with the addition of some details about films not included for the occasion, but deemed worthy of inclusion in the selection of what is being exhibited here.
As with the exhibition as a whole, particular attention is devoted in this floor to the period of the JFK presidency, albeit with many flashbacks and flash-forwards. The late period, up to the end of the 1960s, is of course of particular importance.
The early 1960s, coinciding with the inception of the Kennedy presidency, are indeed a very fertile period for American cinema, as it witnessed the convergence of the energy of the past with the new tendencies. This coexistence will take a conflictual turn after 1968; at the beginning of the decade, however, these tendencies are part of the same organic body, interesting in itself as a whole.
The so-called “fanta-politics” theme is represented in greater detail among those presented in this show, because today it reveals, in a particularly effective manner, the spirit of the period.
Also well represented are the geo-political locations referred to in the exhibition (one could, of course, add others, including Greece and its coup d’état), with the inclusion of minor but interesting films. Vietnam is, of course, especially relevant here.
American films are complemented by others of different national origin; as a result, there is special emphasis on the creative fertility of Italian cinema, including the first fiction film where Kennedy’s assassination is treated within the narrative format of the western genre, Il prezzo del potere by Tonino Valeri. Also included here are films indirectly linked to the theme, such as Il caso Mattei by Francesco Rosi, partly because the death of Enrico Mattei is another unresolved mystery (on the other hand, one could have added another film starring Volonté, Indagine su un cittadino al di sopra di ogni sospetto by Elio Petri, with its evident allusions to Luigi Calabresi and the death of Giuseppe Pinelli); on the other hand, in Rosi’s film, JFK is cited by the protagonist as someone who obstructs Italy’s presence through Mattei in Libya – by all means, an observation that was consistent with Kennedy’s attitude towards the US presence in Africa as hostile to the previous colonialist regimes.
As much as the exhibition endeavors to include the broadest possible selection of films linked to the Kennedy era, these interconnections are so broad as to make it necessary to forego other meaningful examples of the international cinematic echo of Kennedy’s personality, for instance in the documentary triptych of the great Yugoslavian (or Serbian-Voyvodinese) director Żelimir Żilnik, with a young gypsy as a protagonist, whose first name was Kenedi (transliterated as such).
This Side of Paradise: Fragments of an Unfinished Biography
(Jonas Mekas, US 1999) 35′
Shot on 16mm between the 1960s and the 1970s, the film was belatedly edited by Mekas and then included by Re:voir Video, with three films by other directors, in The Sixties Quartet.
This is one of the most fascinating documents of how art and cinema had penetrated the life of the Kennedy family. There can be no better introduction than Mekas’ own words, written on the occasion of the 1999 edition:
Unpredictably, as most of my life’s key events have been, for a period of several years of late sixties and early seventies, I had the fortune to spend some time, mostly during the summers, with Jackie Kennedy’s and her sister Lee Radziwill’s families and children. Cinema was an integral, inseparable, as a matter of fact, a key part of our friendship. The time was still very close to the untimely, tragic death of John F. Kennedy. Jackie wanted to give something to her children to do, to help to ease the transition, life without a father. One of her thoughts was that a movie camera would be fun for children. Peter Beard, who was at that time tutoring John Jr. and Caroline in art history, suggested to Jackie that I was the man to introduce the children to cinema. Jackie said yes. And that’s how it all began.
The images in this film, with a few exceptions, all come from the summers Caroline and John Jr. spent in Montauk, with their cousins Anthony and Tina Radziwill, in an old house Lee had rented from Andy Warhol, for a few summers. Andy himself spent many of his weekends there, in one of the cottages, as did Peter Beard, whom the children had adopted almost like their older brother or a father they missed. These were summers of happiness, joy and continuous celebrations of life and friendships. These were days of Little Fragments of Paradise. – Jonas Mekas
Three Great Critics at the Mirror of the Kennedy Era
Tino Ranieri
Born in Trieste as Costantino Krainer on June 23, 1920, died in Milan on June 24, 1978, Ranieri represents the archetype of a critic who is first and foremost a spectator who perceives the pulsating life of film at every screening in a theatre. He met his vocation at the end of World War II, through radio broadcasts and newspapers, after a routine life as an employee for the city administration of Trieste. A compulsive reader, he plunged – also as a spectator – in the history the United States and the Far West, a passion he shared with a younger critic from Trieste, Tullio Kezich, who discovered with admiration (together with his contemporaries Callisto Cosulich and Franco Giraldi) this shy personality, soon to reveal himself as a treasure trove of encyclopedic knowledge. Film criticism in Trieste, alongside its Genoese counterpart, has distinguished itself for being free from the critical orthodoxy of the period in its ability to give priority to the pleasure of discovering cinema rather than presenting itself as an arbiter of taste. Tino Ranieri was also interested in Italian films (he was the first to write a book about Alberto Sordi), but his true love was American cinema: he was among the few in Italy who were able to go beyond the ideological schemes of the period. As a left wing intellectual, he befriended Ugo Casiraghi (who invited him to write for Communist periodicals such as L’Unità and Il calendario del popolo) and was always guided by the joy to discover something authentic in the films he saw, also indulging in genre films (crime movies, science fiction, and western in particular).
The western genre also became for him the subject of his activity as a writer and translator of children’s books, also upon Kezich’s suggestion. The Milan-based publishing house AMZ became specialized in this field; Ranieri collaborated with its western book series, as well as others. Many of his books rewrite the profiles of important personalities of the American West, but also – in the fatal year 1968 – a surprising book titled La casa dei Kennedy, shown here. The volume could still be a recommended reading – not just for young readers – as the best synthesis of a family chronicle. Here, and in his other books for children – in a humanist and progressive reinterpretation of the American history that had been turned by cinema into a legend – Ranieri managed to understand how the Kennedy saga belongs to the very same legend, in which he sought both truth and humanity.
Angelo Raja Humouda
Born in Haifa on September 3, 1937, died in Genoa on April 26, 1994, Humouda had reached Italy as a Palestinian refugee who settled in Genoa in the 1970s. Essentially a citizen of the world, with a 360-degrees openness to all cultures and a great passion for cinema, he became one of the most generous and fertile cultural activists in Italy. He was able to look at the entire history of the 20th century with a spirit of intellectual freedom: he rediscovered – before many others – the anti-Nazi White Rose movement, and looked with remarkable sensibility at the films portraying stories of Jewish persecution. His approach to the history of American cinema has been a model for all scholars and art house or festival organizers. The Cineteca Griffith, which he established in Genoa, introduced Italian audiences to Griffith’s Biograph period, as well as his later creative output. As a publisher of books and journals (including the periodical Griffithiana), Humouda also studied how Griffith, and silent cinema in general, perceived African-Americans and the indigenous populations of the US. His book series “I cerchi del mondo” (“The Circles of the World”), shown here together with his first volume on Griffith, was in fact dedicated to native Americans.
Many young critics of the time owe him a great debt of gratitude. The same can be said of the Liguria region, but also Friuli Venezia Giulia, where he inspired the birth of the Cineteca del Friuli: the donation of his library to the Gemona institution became the starting point of the much larger library that is titled after him, an essential source of documentation for this exhibition, with the only regret of not being able to ask Angelo how he regarded, for instance, the revival of the native Americans’ theme in the Kennedy era.
Roger Tailleur
Born in Perpignan on November 18, 1927, and passed away in Villejuif on September 9, 1985, one of the greatest French film critics was also the most sensitive towards what was going on in the cinema of the Kennedy era. The great French film criticism of the 1950s and 1960s is, quite literally, the time of a Copernican revolution in the approach to cinema itself: indeed, there had been great film critics before, in France and elsewhere; now, however, it was possible to achieve a full immersion in cinema, grasping its pulsating vitality, and finding in it a truly organic form of expression. If the Cahiers du Cinéma were able to recognize the true greatness among filmmakers, thus inaugurating a politique des auteurs, the heretic journal born as its offspring, Présence du cinema, was its more adventurous variation, able as it was to identify other talents of equal stature. The idiosyncrasies of both magazines now appear secondary to their most profound and shared passions; we can actually integrate them to what was discovered by other, more pragmatic tendencies and journals, most of all Positif. Its most brilliant critic here is Tailleur, with his look at the American cinema of the time, typical of a true diviner (the volume in which his friends Louis Seguin and Michel Ciment – with a preface by Frédéric Vitoux and the collaboration of Paul Louis Thirard – collected his writings is exhibited here: there is also another expanded edition in two volumes, edited by Gianni Volpi; the French essayists, however, and therefore also the French film critics, are always more fascinating to read in their own language).
Tailleur’s work as a critic, discontinued in 1968 by his own decision to devote himself to the study of the Italian fine arts, with a gesture worth of a brilliant eternal amateur in the Rossellinian sense of the term, reveals underrated treasures among the American films of the period, beyond the mere constellations of the great authors. He also indulges to his passion for genres such as the crime movie, the musical, and especially the western, but independently from any sanitized cinephile variations, utterly incapable of making critical choices dictated by true love. For Tailleur, “love” also means love for womanhood, and for the presence of actresses in cinema.
Tailleur welcomed JFK’s ascent to the US presidency with affectionate admiration. As with many others, in the 1960, he was bound to develop a more radically left-wing political stance; for Tailleur, this shift would be part of a romantic liaison with Michèle Firk, born in Paris in 1937 from a Jewish family that survived the pogroms. Firk, too, wrote for Positif, following Cuban cinema in particular, before becoming involved in the anti-colonialist struggle of the Algerians and later in the Guatemala guerrilla of the FAR movement. She committed suicide on September 7, 1968 in order to avoid a police arrest following the investigation for the kidnapping and murder of the US ambassador in Guatemala.