In the Mirror of the Kennedy Era

"In the Mirror of the Kennedy Era" is the title of the exhibition organized by the City of Gemona, Department of Culture, in collaboration with Cineteca del Friuli, curated by film historian Sergio M. Grmek Germani and set up at Gemona Castle from Nov. 22, 2023 to June 6, 2024, two symbolic dates that coincide with the 60th anniversary of the assassination of John Fitzgerald Kennedy and the 56th anniversary of the assassination of his brother, Robert F. Kennedy.

The exhibition will be open to the public
every Friday (2:30-6 pm),
every Saturday and Sunday (10 am-12:30 pm / 2:30-6 pm).
In addition, during the holiday season the exhibition will be extraordinarily open: - Tuesday, December 26 from 2:30 p.m. to 6 p.m. - Monday, January 1 from 2:30 p.m. to 6 p.m.

"In the Mirror of the Kennedy Era" considers not only the period of JFK's presidency but ranges from the era in which it shaped the world it inherited - from Lincoln and the Civil War to the twentieth - century presidencies of Wilson, F.D. Roosevelt, Truman, and Eisenhower - to the one that would follow with the Johnson and Nixon presidencies inheriting its themes. The Kennedy era is thus seen as the focal point of the events we have lived and we are living through. In particular, the crucial decade of the 1960s, its vitality, extreme and contradictory, finds in JFK's presidency and in the figures whose subsequent events marked its tragic end (notably Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy) a capacity to ask questions that it is right to recover today.

Why an exhibition on Kennedy in Gemona? 

The reason why an exhibition of such magnitude on Kennedy is being held in Gemona is the existence of the Cineteca del Friuli's Kennedy Fund, the core of the exhibition itself, whose origins go back to the boyhood of its two founders, Livio Jacob and Piera Patat, who in the 1960s began a collection of materials that became a collection later established as the Cineteca's Fund, a fund that has continued, continues and will continue to grow. Gemona itself therefore qualifies as a place of particular sensitivity to the Kennedian affair. Added to this is the visit to Trieste and Gorizia made by JFK in 1952, when he was still in the House of Representatives and would shortly thereafter become a senator, and the beginning of a correspondence with the then mayor of Trieste, Udinese by birth, Mario Franzil. 

 "In the Mirror of the Kennedy Era" inaugurates a three-year project supported by the Friuli Venezia Giulia Region to create three major exhibitions by the City of Gemona in collaboration with Cineteca del Friuli.

Four floors full of history

The exhibition is divided into four main themes - family chronicle, the United States in the world, arts and costume, and the mirror of cinema-divided over the four floors of the exhibition space in the former castle prisons. 

 Floor 1 - "Family Chronicle" it follows the story of the Kennedys embedded in American history from the 1930s to the late 1960s with photographs, posters, documents as well as various volumes and magazines from the Film Library's Kennedy Fund. 

 Floor 2 - The section "The United States in the World" covers American foreign policy in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America (Congo, Chile, Cuba, USSR, Vietnam...). Among the materials on display, along with photographs, posters and books from the Kennedy Fund, are some Limes maps, drawn by cartographer Laura Canali, who in 2024 will produce one of her famous "geopoems" dedicating it to this project.

Floor 3 - This section is about "Arts and Costume," literature, theater, visual arts and music in the era of the JFK presidency; costumes of the time, the aesthetic image of the Kennedys, with the important role of Jacqueline's action. 

 Floor 4 - The itinerary concludes with "The Mirror of Cinema," which, through a selection of materials (posters, books, magazines, videos), it traces the story of JFK and his family as it has been represented in American and Italian cinema.

An unprecedented Kennedian film festival

In more than six months of the exhibition's duration, the Cineteca will offer a film event every week at the Social Cinema in Gemona, for a total of 27 appointments. The program selected by curator Germani includes in some cases the presence of critics, actors, historians, and directors. The exhibition and screenings are free admission. The entire exhibition, and in particular the section on cinema, finds a temporal realization in the exhibition of the same name at the Social Cinema, which includes several films that have never been released in Italy, subtitled for the occasion and that will be proposed for a regional and national circuitation.

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