This project is presented in conjunction with Outpost NYC DCG
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
The exhibition is open March 6 – April 5.
If you would like to learn more about the exhibition or arrange a time to view the works, please contact Lee Matney at curator@LindaMatneyGallery.com.
JONAS MEKAS: STILL BEAUTIFUL IN MY MEMORY
The Andrews Gallery at the College of William & Mary presents Still Beautiful in My Memory, an exhibition of works by pioneering avant-garde filmmaker Jonas Mekas (1922–2019). Organized in collaboration with The Jonas Mekas Estate, Deborah Colton Gallery, OUTPOST NYC DCG, and Lee Matney Gallery, the exhibition brings together Mekas’s rarely exhibited framed still images – known as the “Frozen Frames” – with a continuous screening of his five-hour epic, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000). Together, these works explore fragmentation, memory, displacement, and the poetic construction of a life through cinema.
Born in Lithuania in 1922, Mekas was forced to flee his homeland during World War II amid the successive occupations of Eastern Europe. After being detained by Nazi authorities and later living in displaced persons camps in Germany, he emigrated to the United States in 1949 as a refugee. His arrival in America marked not only the beginning of a prolific artistic life, but also the continuation of a journey shaped by exile and survival. His story underscores how refuge can foster extraordinary artistic innovation and enrich the cultural fabric of a nation.
The “Frozen Frames” are individual images physically cut from 16mm film strips during Mekas’s editing process. These interstitial fragments – moments once removed in the shaping of a sequence – are scanned and presented as archival prints. What was excised becomes the work itself. Suspended between motion and stillness, these images preserve fleeting gestures, flashes of light, partial figures, and transitional instants that would otherwise remain unseen. As conceptual anchors for the exhibition, the Frozen Frames reflect Mekas’s lifelong commitment to cinema as a diary form – an art built from fragments, impressions, and lived experience.
At the heart of the exhibition is As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty (2000), presented on an infinite loop. Intended to be entered at any moment, the film invites viewers to experience it non-linearly. Visitors may encounter it mid-scene or mid-thought, returning again to find a different rhythm, image, or memory. This open structure mirrors Mekas’s own editing process for the film: drawing intuitively from decades of personal 16mm footage – his archive of daily life – he assembled reels without strict chronology, allowing association and recollection to guide the composition.
The resulting five-hour work is an expansive meditation on family, friendship, artistic community, exile, and the fragile radiance of ordinary moments. Described by The New York Times as “a first—the home movie as epic,” the film transforms personal documentation into a universal reflection on time and presence.
Together, the Frozen Frames and As I Was Moving Ahead create a dynamic dialogue between stillness and movement, absence and continuity, fragment and accumulation. The cut frame and the continuous reel operate as parallel forms of memory – one isolated and fixed, the other unfolding and immersive. Through this interplay, the exhibition considers how lives are edited, how histories are assembled, and how beauty persists in fragments, relationships, and recollection.
The presentation of these works at William & Mary reflects ongoing research and curatorial stewardship by Lee Matney, situating Mekas’s images and films within broader conversations about archival practice, exile, and the relationship between moving image and photographic form. Presented within an academic setting, the exhibition extends that dialogue and underscores the continued relevance of Mekas’s diaristic cinema for contemporary museum and university audiences.
Jonas Mekas: Still Beautiful in My Memory offers a focused exploration of Mekas’s enduring influence and invites audiences to inhabit his cinematic language: intimate, diaristic, and profoundly human.
Andrews Gallery
William and Mary
421 Jamestown Road
Williamsburg, Virginia 23185
Exhibition Dates
March 6 through April 5
Gallery Hours
Monday through Friday 10 am to 4 pm
Admission
Free and open to the public
For updated program information, screenings, and related events, visit MatneyGallery.com to read more in real time.
Presented in conjunction with Outpost NYC DCG