This side of paradise: fragments of an unfinished biography

Lithuanian born curator, writer and avant garde filmmaker, Jonas Mekas has created this piece of artwork on film through images captured during his stay over several summers in a rented beach house (belonging to Andy Warhol) at Montauk in the late 60s early 70s with Jackie Kennedy and her sister, Lee Radziwill, and their children. Jackie co-opted Mekas into introducing Caroline and John Jr to home movies as a way of distracting them from the tragic loss of their father. This is the result of those wonderfully innocent, somewhat fragile, summer days - an eclectic mixture of old photographs and movie camera images of the Kennedy family and their cousins, brought together in fragmented, sometimes distorted or over-exposed, flashing images accompanied by a combined soundtrack of music, percussion, natural sounds of wind and surf, and the voices of the children often muffled and intermittent. Mekas has also woven some evocative images of a very young Jackie Bouvier Kennedy into this fascinating visual glimpse of one of America’s most famous families.