JONAS MEKAS FILM SCREENING & CONVERSATION
Ampersand Festival Screening
Sunday, March 22, 4:30 pm
Kimball Theatre
Williamsburg, Virginia
As part of the Ampersand Festival, three films by Jonas Mekas will be screened on Sunday, March 22 at 4:30 pm at the Kimball Theatre in Williamsburg. A Q and A panel discussion will follow the screening.
Presented in conjunction with ongoing regional engagement around Mekas’s work, this program revisits three films from what he referred to as his “Sixties Quartet.” Together, they document intimate moments within the New York avant-garde while revealing Mekas’s distinctive approach to memory, friendship, and lived cinema. These works move fluidly between personal archive and cultural history, offering a portrait of a generation through the lens of lived experience.
Learn more at the Ampersand Festival or at MatneyGallery.com.
Program (94 minutes total running time):
Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol — 35’
Happy Birthday to John — 24’
This Side of Paradise — 35’
SCENES FROM THE LIFE OF ANDY WARHOL — 35’
As usual, Mekas cuts in title cards, poetic evocations, or reflections on the film we are watching. The film becomes—so often for Mekas—both a document of the events he has experienced and a nostalgic quest for a past forever lost, though this past is not necessarily the one we are seeing. The film allows us to reconnect with memories, thus with emotions, and perhaps also with a fresh look at people and the world. This look can only be nostalgic.
“So long, Andy…”
— Yann Beauvais
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO JOHN — 24’
On October 9, 1972, an exhibition of John Lennon and Yoko Ono’s art—designed by the master of the Fluxus movement, George Maciunas—opened at the Syracuse Museum of Art, curated by David Ross. That same day, an unusual group of John and Yoko’s friends, including Ringo, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Krassner, and many others, gathered to celebrate John’s birthday.
This film is a visual and audio record of that event. We hear improvised songs sung by Ringo, John, Yoko, and their friends—not as clean studio recordings, but as birthday-party singing: free and happy. There are other images included as well, and the film develops like a kind of “music video”: the John and Yoko party at Klein’s (their agent) on June 12, 1971; the August 1972 John and Yoko concert at Madison Square Garden; the Central Park vigil after John was shot; and other footage I took on different occasions of John and Yoko.
— Jonas Mekas
THIS SIDE OF PARADISE — 35’
Unpredictably, as most of my life’s key events have been, for a period of several years in the late sixties and early seventies I had the fortune to spend some time—mostly during the summers—with the families and children of Jackie Kennedy and her sister Lee Radziwill. Cinema was an integral, inseparable—indeed, 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 help ease the transition, life without a father. One of her thoughts was that a movie camera would be fun for the children. Peter Beard, who at that time was 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 as an 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