Unpredictably, as most of my life’s key events have been, for a period of several years of late sixties and early seventies, I had the fortune to spend some time, mostly during the summers, with Jackie Kennedy’s and her sister Lee Radziwill’s families and children. Cinema was an integral, inseparable, as a matter of fact, 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 do, to help to ease the transition, life without a father. One of her thoughts was that a movie camera would be fun for children. Peter Beard, who was at that time 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. I bought them a very easily operable 16mm movie camera, and even wrote a mini-“textbook” suggesting some simple movie exercises. Here is an excerpt from a letter Jackie sent me a few weeks later:

“You can’t know the happiness you have brought to my children - and to me - a whole new world opening - It would have been more than enough just to see your films, but you giving us (I include myself because I am equally or more thrilled by it than they - if that is possible) that magical camera - I never knew cameras could do things like that - zoom in and out - fast and slow - all so easy to hold in one’s hand - we used 2 reels following your directions.”

As time went, Jackie found time to see my own, and some other avant-garde films. She especially loved Walden: Diaries, Notes and Sketches, and she chose Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania to show to all her relatives on one of the Mother day’s.

The images in this exposition, with a few exceptions, they all come from the summers Caroline and John Jr. spent in Montauk, with their cousins Anthony and Tina Radziwills, in an old house Lee had rented from Andy Warhol, for a few summers. Andy himself spent many of his weekends there, in one the cottages, as did Peter Beard, whom children had adopted almost like their 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

... Jacques-Henri Lartigue began photographing his life at the age of nine when his father gave him his first camera after he became ill - ill from seeing time passing by, he ended up telling his father.

Jonas Mekas, very early on as well, set down his own life on film, permanently armed with his cherished Bolex.

Lyrical, loving, passionate, euphoric, it is with the lightness of an elf that he places himself in the very heart of the scene, in which he is both actor and witness, and the images of his films, these essential stills in the literal sense, appear to me similar to those memories which become mental films as in the dreams of us all - “this side of paradise”. MEMORY - is it not the word that Jonas pronounces the most, in a joyful tone, rolling the R with pleasure?

we are alive
agnès

A catalog will be published.f r e n c h