kagablog

Thursday 7th June

17:30: PETER WHITEHEAD: POP FILMS (1966 – 69: 120mins)
20:00: THE FALL (1969: 120mins)

goethe institute, jan smuts avenue, johannesburg

The Fall

Peter Whitehead’s first films were two experimental shorts made while at the Slade School of Art. Only one, The Perception of Life, had a public screening. Inspired by this confirmation that ‘maybe he was a film-maker after all’, Whitehead borrowed equipment and rushed off to film the now-famous 1965 Albert Hall Poetry Reading. Without his previous experience as a news cameraman for Italian television, Wholly Communion would have been impossible - his ability to work in cramped conditions and to catch the essentials with the maximum economy on footage produced a film both spontaneous and expressive. And his concern with the spectator as well as the performer generates a sense of his being a ‘happening’ within the overall ‘happening’. His next film, Charlie is My Darling, was a sad, lyrical documentary about the Rolling Stones, which has been stock piled since the Stones transferred to their present manager. Benefit of the Doubt first appeared at last year’s London Film Festival together with Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London. Despite its enthusiastic reception in France and Germany, it hasn’t been screened subsequently in Britain. Perhaps its contents - scenes from Peter Brook’s Royal Shakespeare Company London production of US intercut with interviews with its producer, actors, and audience - may explain its unpopularity with British distributors. Whitehead is perhaps unfortunate in being best known for Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London. The film as seen had neither a narrative guideline nor any explicit comment on the myth of ‘Swinging London.’ Its disjointed impressionism was the result of Whitehead’s having to complete the film in three weeks at the insistence of his financial backers.

Whitehead safeguards as far as possible against such compromises by operating as a one-man team. On all but one of his films since Wholly Communion, he has not only directed but also written his own scripts, photographed, edited, and produced. Limited distribution is the price he has to pay for maintaining his cinema verite approach to filming and his concern with immediate social and political realities. But he has established himself over the last three years as the leading innovatory film director in this country.

Whitehead regards The Fall, now in the final stages of being edited, as the summation of all his previous films. The questions from the following interview on the film have been edited out to give the replies the fluency of a film-maker’s statement.

I never make a film from a script, for one important reason. I don’t believe in imposing myself, or an idea, on a situation and adapting reality to this idea. For me, filming must be a process of discovery and a document of change. I went to New York last fall for the New York Film Festival, was invited to make a film, and stayed there until June of this year.

I set out to make a film about protest and violence. That was all I had to guide me - the compulsion to film a city, a people, a culture, a society that was falling apart.

I filmed mostly the people connected with protest - the students, the hippies, the artists, poets, writers, off-off Broadway plays and so on - and of course filmed the meetings and protest marches.

By the time the Pentagon March was over and 250,000 people had protested against the Vietnam war, it dawned on me that it was all tragically and helplessly irrelevant. Protest had become worse than ineffective; it had become fashionable. A newspaper published a full page of Hippie fashions after the Pentagon March, and Peace Dresses could be bought at the big stores for 25 dollars. Meanwhile everything got rapidly worse. If I was to make an honest film it would have to be about the humiliation and impotence of the protest movement, and as I was on their side, this was obviously a betrayal.

It occurred to me that if legal protest was being successfully ignored by the power structures, illegal protest, resistance, violence was the only possible next step. This would have to be my film, a plea for violence. But how to document an act of violence without doing it? The whole purpose of my making a film was being threatened. In this situation, was a film going to achieve anything except be “too late”? I wrote a script to incorporate all my documentary film on violence and protest as background for the “story” of an artist who gives up art and acts politically - in this case chooses an act of political assassination as the only effective act of protest left. “Young film-maker turns assassin…” I returned to the States with more money to film the fiction. Martin Luther King was shot dead. The cities were being burnt down. I could not film the real violence when it happened. To film something is to witness it, to judge it; and to stand by and not do anything is to exploit the sensationalism of the situation.

Reality, yet again, had far exceeded my worst expectations. The idea in my film had been to assassinate just an average spectator at a political rally, the person who is just as responsible as the President. Didn’t he elect him? Burning flags and disfiguring images of LBJ did nothing, except make LBJ look better in the flesh by comparison. If a few people got shot when the eyes of the world were on a political rally, then the act of protest might be effective again. That had been my idea, but the fact of an assassination, to see how hideous was its reality, and how quickly people forget, reminded me that assassins are usually acting only to bring attention to their own predicament. In this sense, such an act was a symbolic suicide.

I had to admit to myself that it had been a mistake to make a film about protest. What I really wanted to do was to make a film that proposed what ought to be done; not a film which merely observed. To stand and observe is to be alienated. This is when I decided that the film had to be about me, because I felt this was what everybody who cared for the world was going through, this was the identical situation for anyone who looks and sees what is happening and says, “What the hell am I going to do?” I was prepared to make a film to invite people to commit acts of violence as protest. It wasn’t easy. I had to admit to myself I was prepared to take the risk myself. I didn’t have the courage.

By now I had lost the purpose in filming a documentary about non-violence and a fiction film about a premeditated act of violence. I was myself very screwed up at the time. I went and filmed Bobby Kennedy to see if there really was a political solution.

A month after Martin Luther King was assassinated, the students at Columbia took over their University, occupied and liberated five buildings, one of them entirely occupied by Negroes, making the situation very difficult for the authorities. I joined the students and stayed with them behind the barricades for a week until the police bust finally got us all out. Over 200 students and teachers were injured in the worst, documented act of collective police brutality in New York’s history - and that’s saying something. The revolution began with Columbia and has many years to go.

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