An afterthought / a refill

(for the short films go to Driving Mr. Kennedy)

On November 22, 2013, the 50th anniversary of JFK assassination, we drove in a chauffeured limousine around the streets of Vienna to commemorate the death of John F. Kennedy.

We follow the timeline of Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas (which took place at 12.30) seven hours ahead, Vienna time. We took the same route Kennedy took when he visited Vienna in June, 1961. The visit became known as the Vienna Summit. It was essentially a Cold War meeting between Nikita Khrushchev, the leader of the then Soviet Union, and JFK in his self-appointed role as the leader of the free world. Kennedy later said of Khrushchev “He beat the hell out of me” and that the Vienna visit was the “worst thing in my life. He savaged me.”

Little did he know. Kennedy, obviously, didn’t anticipate November 22, 1963.

‚Driving Mr Kennedy’ is essentially a coda to our project ‘The Big Event’. While driving around the city, we discuss the project, talk about the relevance of JFK’s assassination to today’s world, and how the life and death of Kennedy remains all but impossible to pin down. During our drive we  picked up experts and guests at different meeting points around the city. They joined us for a joy ride and talked about the Kennedy era (memories, opinions, observations…) and its reverberations.

The drive was documented on video and will be presented as a four part web series in a format called ‘Home Theatre’. With this format we want to add on the discussion we started on stage before live audience, now set on an (auto-)mobile stage.