kagablog

John Preston

Mystic, pioneering film-maker, falconer and father of eight, peter whitehead has led a full life. John Preston tracks one of the counter-culture’s most intriguing figures down to a modern housing estate in the midlands - and finds his address is not the only surprise in store

The car park at Kettering station is not the sort of place you expect to meet a mystic. But here is Peter Whitehead with long white hair and dark glasses emerging through the gloom of a January afternoon in a beaten-up, red Vauxhall Astra.

There can be no doubt that Whitehead is a mystic - apart from anything else, he claims to be 4,000 years old and to have been reborn early one morning in August 1996.

But he is, mercifully, a lot of other things besides: pioneer documentary-maker, novelist, falconer and the man who may have invented the pop video - an idea he finds abhorrent.

For 10 years,Whitehead ran a falcon-breeding programme in Saudi Arabia founded by King Faisal’s son, Prince Khalid Al-Faisal.

Once he showed Prince Charles around his falconry centre, a visit that went very well despite the fact that one of the falcons ejaculated over Whitehead’s hat. ‘Charles wrote to me afterwards and said it was the most extraordinary thing he’d ever seen,’ he says.

Having fallen into deepest obscurity, Whitehead is now making a comeback. Next month, the National Film Theatre is showing a season of his work, and there’s a new three-hour documentary by Paul Cronin, In the Beginning was the Image: Conversations with Peter Whitehead, to go with it.

The season will include Charlie is My Darling, the first documentary ever made about the Rolling Stones, as well as The Fall, the film that devotees consider to be his masterpiece, which has never received a commercial release.

Another 30 film festivals around the world are also in the process of mounting Whitehead festivals. All this belated recognition has had a dramatic effect on him.

Having sworn more than 30 years ago that he would never make another film, Whitehead, now aged 70, is planning to take up his camera again for one final time.

Recently, he’s been limbering up by shooting some footage of Pete Doherty in the recording studio, at Doherty’s request.

I’m not sure where I expected a mystic falconer to live - a cave, possibly - but certainly not in the spruce red-brick house on a modern estate that his car pulls up outside.

‘I’m selling this place,’ he declares, before he’s even opened the door. ‘In fact, I’m moving out tomorrow and going to live in Vienna.’

The money raised from the sale of his house will, he hopes, be sufficient to finance his new film. Lest anyone should think that Whitehead might be about to turn soft or commercial in his old age, it’s worth pointing out that this film, provisionally entitled Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts, will be light years removed from your standard multiplex fare.

‘I’m planning to totally deconstruct linear narrative,’ he says eagerly. ‘Actually, I’m basing the whole structure on the two circular tram routes that go around Vienna.’

Most self-proclaimed independent film-makers aren’t really independent at all; they’re happy to work for anyone who backs them.

Whitehead, though, is the genuine article, and has the debts to prove it. As he says, somewhat wearily: ‘The definition of a real independent film-maker is that you never have any money.’

Until he was 45, Whitehead insists, he never owned a thing. He had, however, shown an uncommon knack for landing in the thick of the action.

Raised in conditions of great poverty in the Lake District and London, he was 13 when he was plucked out of his grammar school and sent off to a public school in Harrogate - the beneficiary of a post-war Labour scheme to give bright, disadvantaged children a leg-up.

The result of this, he says, was that ‘I realised I could get by anywhere. And I’ve exploited that all my life. But, at the same time, I’ve never belonged anywhere.’

In mid-1960s London, Whitehead was unaware of the social revolution stirring around him - he was set on becoming a classical musician. But then he got a job for an Italian television company making short documentaries.

While he had no particular interest in the work - at least not at first - it taught him ‘to look for essentials. I developed this great facility to film in any situation and to capture the essence of it’.

Since his bosses seemed to have no idea what they wanted, Whitehead began to experiment, often shooting everything in a single take so that no one could edit what he’d done.

With bewildering speed, one thing led to another. To his astonishment, Whitehead, who had never listened to a pop record in his life, was asked by Top of the Pops to film Jimi Hendrix - the first time Hendrix had been captured on camera.

Next came a request to shoot some footage of the recently formed Pink Floyd. Despite finding their music ‘ghastly’, Whitehead agreed.

He’d already met Syd Barrett because he shared a house with some friends of Barrett’s in Cambridge. ‘And then I met him again in London because I had an affair with his girlfriend.’

How did Barrett feel about that? ‘Oh, I don’t think he knew. He was far too out of it to notice.’

Whitehead paid £90 of his own money and persuaded the band to make its inaugural visit to a recording studio.

‘I recorded 11 minutes of them playing. And do you know?’ he says with an uncharacteristic note of wistfulness in his voice, ‘I made more money out of those 11 minutes than from anything else I’ve ever done.”

Soon he was shooting the Stones in Dublin, Allen Ginsberg at the Royal Albert Hall and Led Zeppelin at the Roundhouse.

In 1967, he shot Benefit of the Doubt, about the VietnamWar. Given Whitehead’s approach - and the spirit of the times - one might assume that his films would be unwieldy monuments to self-indulgence.

In fact, they’re very sharply observed, often extremely funny and surprisingly cohesive. After making a documentary about Swinging London, called Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London - typically, Whitehead claims to have been bored to tears by Swinging London - in 1968 he went off to New York intending to make a similar film there.

But once in America he became swept up in the civil-rights movement. After a day spent filming Bobby Kennedy, Whitehead wished him good luck in his bid to become President.

‘Kennedy gave me this odd look and said, “There are lots of things standing between me and the White House”.’ Three weeks later, Kennedy was assassinated.

Whitehead’s response to all this upheaval was to make The Fall, a film that was in part about a student sit-in at New York’s Columbia University and in part an exploration of what it means to be a documentary-maker.

In a move that anticipated the work of Nick Broomfield by many years, he put himself in the frame - the director trying to make sense of what he’s recording while simultaneously examining his role in shaping it.

But, by this point, Whitehead had become so obsessed with film-making that he could scarcely tell the difference between reality and his filmed version of it.

‘I’d reached a stage where I couldn’t do anything without relating it to the possibility or necessity of filming it. I would walk down the street and imagine I was filming the whole time. In my head, I’d be zooming and editing away.

‘Then at night I used to dream that I was in a film and that when the film came to an end I’d be dead. I felt that by filming things I was connecting with them, but in fact it was quite the opposite. The camera was essentially separating me from life.’

As soon as he’d finished The Fall, he had a nervous breakdown. ‘I didn’t know who I was any more. I seemed to have this public existence, but it felt like a completely false self to me.’

Soon afterwards came one of his epiphanies. On a visit to the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1969, Whitehead ran out of the cinema and sat on a park bench, wondering what to do with his life.

‘While I was sitting there, a little old man came by with some bread and started literally calling the birds out of the air. One of the birds would land on his shoulder, and he’d say, “Not you Charlie; it’s Rose’s turn first.” I realised that he recognised each bird and it struck me that here was an example of someone who was completely in touch with the natural world.’

At that moment, Whitehead decided to stop making films. ‘As soon as I’d done so, I had this incredible feeling of relief and ecstasy.’ In future, he resolved, he too would become a birdman - more specifically a breeder of falcons, this despite knowing nothing about them.

He bought his first falcon for £8 after seeing an advertisement in Exchange & Mart. ‘When I saw it, I felt this enormous sense of identification. It was if I had re-connected with my myth.

‘You see, I had to go through my symbolic dismemberment and fragmentation to find myself again - just like Osiris in Ancient Egypt, whose body was broken up into 13 pieces. He had to be put back together again, although his penis, of course, was never found.’

This is vintage Whitehead. As he talks, his conversation snakes about, shoots off at tangents and is punctuated by occasional cries of, ‘Oh no, I’ve lost my thread again!’

Yet, somehow, it always manages to come back to the original subject. Perhaps because this, invariably, is Whitehead himself.

He is, quite possibly, the most self-absorbed person I have ever met, someone whose life has been spent immersed in a rich soup of symbolism, allusion and introversion.

As he admits, ‘I’ve never been remotely interested in the real world - although you could argue that I’m trying to become a little more interested in it at the moment.’

But however preoccupied he may have been with his myth, there was never any danger of Whitehead’s own penis getting lost. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he clocked up a considerable number of affairs, with -among others - Nico, the artist Niki de St Phalle, Sharon Tate, Bianca Jagger and Nathalie Delon.

Having made up his mind to become a falconer, though, he left all these fleshly concerns behind and set off into the Moroccan desert, determined to be ‘restored into the bosom of nature’.

For the next few years, he smuggled falcon eggs back to England, hatching the birds at his home in Kettering and then training them. At this point, he was approached by Prince Khalid Al-Faisal, who invited him to set up a falcon-breeding programme.

Given a lavish budget and a purpose-built falconry on top of the highest mountain in Saudi Arabia, Whitehead suddenly found himself surrounded by princes, Rolls-Royces and private jets.

‘I ran this very successful artificial insemination programme. The birds for breeding were usually brought up without contact with other birds. As a result, they became “imprinted” on me and weren’t sure if I was a bird or they were human. The males would copulate on my head and then ejaculate into this specially made hat I wore to collect their semen.’

But when the first Gulf War broke out in 1991, Whitehead had to escape with his falcons in the middle of the night and flee to Spain.

In the end, he sold his birds for a knock-down price and returned to England in much the same state as he had left it - almost empty-handed.

Settling back in Kettering, he wrote novels at the rate of two a year, which he published himself in the absence of any commercial interest. ‘I was quite happy writing away and assumed that that was how I’d spend the rest of my life. But then last year all these film festivals came calling’

At this point in our conversation I am beginning to think that Whitehead has no more surprises left to spring on me. But here, as it transpires, I am quite wrong. A propos of nothing, he suddenly announces, ‘At this moment I have three months to live.’

Is he sure? He nods. ‘I’ve been under a death sentence for the past five years - ever since I had my heart attack. Now I’m living on half a bypass, I’ve got two leaky valves, atrial fibrillation and I’m inoperable.

‘That’s why I want to get this film made as soon as possible. I’ll be really angry if I suddenly have a week to live. Not that I have any fear of death, because I know it’s not the end - but because I have so much left to do.’

And there is one further surprise in store. I knew already that Whitehead is a much-married man - one of his wives was Dido Goldsmith, niece of the late Sir James - and that he has fathered several children. In both cases, though, I have badly underestimated the numbers.

‘I have eight children,’ he says. ‘Seven daughters and a son.’

And how many times has he been married? ‘Let me see. Four, I think. Something like that.’

There might be more? ‘It’s possible. I can never quite remember.’

His latest wife turns out to be just 24 years old. ‘She’s Polish, a lovely girl. She’s not very happy about my moving to Vienna, but you know’ He lifts a hand then lets it fall, ‘What can you do?’

Despite his leaky valves and his limited life-expectancy, Whitehead insists he’s in a very optimistic state at the moment.

‘On the whole, I feel great, although I do have bad days. The weather affects me a lot. Apparently, one third of people who die from a second heart attack do so on a day when the atmospheric pressure drops or rises by more than 10 millibars. One third die within two hours of waking on a Monday morning and one third dies within two hours of having sex.

‘So you see,’ he says, offering what seems a peculiarly practical piece of advice from a mystic, ‘if you want to live forever, remember not to have sex just after waking up on a Monday morning if it looks like it’s going to rain.’

this interview first publlished in the telegraph

Reading “Terrorism Considered As One Of The Fine Arts”, the first part of the “Nohzone Trilogy”, by Peter Whitehead, is like slipping on a cosy pair of slippers, or climbing into a hot bath. Its hero, Michael Schlieman, an academic drafted into MI5 whilst at Cambridge, loves the Lakeland poets, malt whisky, pretty young girls and a bit of noir. He has a helpless everyman quality which is endearing, but only to the point where familiar references hold sway. But this is Peter Whitehead, and familiar references are the first things up against the wall.

Schlieman has gone AWOL in the Lakes, and his story is pieced together by a narrator who searches for him at first in the Lake District itself, then in carefully annotated second hand books, then in laboriously decoded web addresses and finally in the reaches of his own psyche. A tale of intrigue involving eco terrorism and the sale of nuclear material ensues. We learn about him through his associations with a pair of Femmes Fatale (who may or may not be aspects of his own anima), through his painstaking self-immolation in myriad concealed hypertexts and from rumours divulged by his estranged MI5 handlers. The cosy hot chocolate-ness rapidly takes on a wormwood bitterness.

Widescreen atmospheric inserts give us heady glimpses of Egyptian brothels, homely snapshots of the slightly depressing provincial lecture circuit, and nouvelle vague memories from Paris in the late sixties, all cranked up with a dose of laboratory strength laudanum.

Whitehead makes use of copious literary quotations, from De Quincey to Kawabata to Kotzwinkle to Coleridge. These serve ostensibly as a frame of reference, but become inevitably a springboard into the void, a void into which all his characters, and indeed ourselves, seem to be headed.

A central theme is that of the palimpsest, a text written over other erased texts, and here Whitehead has not only written over the erased remains of all his other novels, but also succeeds in interweaving the events in his characters’ lives to such an extent that the reader experiences a vertiginous feeling of déjà vu, a warp in consensus reality.
The novel’s most significant achievement, however, is to present a cogent narrative that emerges from the chaos of its shattered compositional style.

Each thread is a link in a vast interconnected labyrinth of allusions, a Qabbalistic raft of elision, a glittering panoply of synaptic flashes multiplying and self fertilizing, rather like neural pathways in the human brain, out of which emerges a new mindset. One cannot divorce oneself from complicity in this process, and in fact the fourth novel in the trilogy, “ And Death Shall Have No Domain Name” may or may not manifest solely in the mind of the reader.

Michael Schlieman straddles this web like Adam Kadmon, the archetypal man, the great within the small, He represents an opium- drenched messiah who not only drags Eros and Thanatos in his slipstream, but heralds the new google consciousness beloved of information technology evangelists.

In Nature’s Child, part two of Peter Whitehead’s Nohzone trilogy, we find ourselves becalmed in a pastoral lacuna. From the opening quote by Coleridge and references to the climactic anomalies of El Nino, to the conclusion with its clear parallels in shamanic transformation, we have Nature as transcendent force, mystical and physical in equal measure.
Whitehead gives us Nature besieged, in the overt story of eco-terrorism, which serves as the exoskeleton of the tale. Beautiful and idealistic young people bent on the assassination of corrupt and double-dealing French businessmen coupled with revenge on murdered activists (think Rainbow Warrior). The possibility of eco-disaster as an anarchistic lesson in political chicanery.

Central to the novel, and indeed to the entire trilogy, is Maria, and Nature’s child is specifically Maria’s story. Like Nature, however, nothing here is straightforward, and while Maria would seem to be a chimera, in that she is a shattered glass reflecting myriad different elements, she is also, like Nature, a quantum polymorph whose life encapsulates millions of alternate potentials which happen to be crystallised into one particular narrative by Michael Schlieman.

Those of us who are easily distracted should take comfort, however, in the gripping style of Schlieman and Maria’s encounter. We are quickly enmeshed in a quagmire of spy thriller thrust and counter thrust, whereby everything we think we know is rapidly eroded, and gradually the artifice of surety is deconstructed until nothing is true (and probably everything is permitted).
Reassuringly we are soon in familiar Whitehead territory, as the protagonists engage loins and the real action begins. An intense psychodrama ensues, in which the struggle for dominion over mind is engrossing and deeply erotic.

In Girl On A Train, Peter Whitehead resolves some of the thematic strands which have entwined, in ophidian fashion, around the central pillar of the caduceus that is Nohzone.
Taking as a template Kawabata’s “Snow Country” and the notion of plagiarism; of novels, of lives, of the curlicues of existence; he revisits his old stomping grounds- academia, spies, sex, the esoteric. Milton Schlieman travels to Japan for a Kawabata conference, encounters a mixed race courtesan on a train, then becomes involved with a pretty translator, who turns out to be more than just a cunning linguist.

The novel pivots on a sex-magickal ritual in which the ghost of Kawabata is evoked. As with all of Whitehead’s novels the occult perpetually hovers at the periphery of the narrative, waiting to warp events whenever the parameters of reality are weakened. Whether it be ghostly occurrences, discreet espionage or unspoken emotional agendas, the hidden constantly strives to be revealed. Here, revelation is held up to us like a trophy head, then snatched back, leaving perhaps a greater awareness of just how precarious the truth is.

At the culmination of Girl On A Train we discover the Girl’s (Yoko’s), letter to Schlieman, where a story of two sisters’ lives unfolds. In it we have a tale of sibling devotion and a hitherto unexpectedly frank expurgation of events. This narrative, coming as the denouement of so many twists, turns, false alleys and blurred memories, is shocking in its candour, as well as profoundly moving. One cannot help striving for explanations, tying up loose ends, correlating the miasma of half lives, chimeras, ghosts.

The final nail in this sarcophagus is both disorienting and hugely audacious, as our presumptions are turned on their heads yet again. The facts themselves are too pivotal to expose here, suffice to say we question novelistic logic and simultaneously our own precarious foothold on reality. To simply recount the events of a Peter Whitehead novel is always to reduce it’s epic nature to the level of the prosaic. His writing is literature as total immersion, and his world is one where writing and magic are co-conspirators.

Peter Whitehead has always stood at the brink of cultural change, documenting and shaping significant resonances long before their delineations have been absorbed into the mainstream. With the Nohzone Trilogy, he anticipates a truly interactive new breed of novel.

Prepare to have your mind messed with.

this review first appeared here

Kaganof, the enfant terrible of the SA film scene and one of the country’s most original and audacious artistic voices, is back – this time in front of the camera – in By Any Old Light.

This doccie, directed by Ca Ca Ca (yes, really) and Dionysos Andronis is a montage of film clips, interview snippets, performance excerpts and conversations between Peter Whitehead, “the father of independent filmmaking”, and Kaganof.

British director Whitehead is best remembered for his revolutionary 1969 indie film The Fall, but has also filmed the likes of Mick Jagger, Syd Barrett and Allen Ginsberg.

Switching styles
The style of avant-garde, postmodern “guerrilla” filmmaking evident in By Any Old Light will not be to everyone’s tastes but there are certainly some interesting propositions to chew on, such as the controversial notion of terrorism as “one of the fine arts”, when protest is nudged beyond anarchy to be an effective method to fight violation and abuse.

this review first appeared on cue, july 2009

Glenda Kemp (South Africa 2008)
Director: Genevieve Louw
Courtesy of Michaelis School of Fine Art (UCT)

A brief and erotic excursion into the past and present of seventies exotic dance sensation and devout Christian Glenda Kemp. Echoing the conflict between Christ and the Devil, split-screen images merge the world of the flesh and the spirit.

Orgie (South Africa 2009)
Director: Hein de Vos
Cast: Jan Ellis, Vicky Davis
Courtesy of Made in Africa

The first glimpse of a proposed feature based on the novel by Andre P. Brink, inspired by his obsessive and erotically charged relationship with the poet Ingrid Jonker. Unflinching in its examination of the damage lovers can inflict, the book can take its place beside The Story of O and Venus in Furs.

BY ANY OLD LIGHT (France 2008)
Director: Dionysos Andronis
Featuring: Peter Whitehead, Aryan Kaganof, Dionysos Andronis

The meeting between South Africa’s controversial filmmaker/writer/poet Aryan Kaganof and Britain’s elder statesman of cinematic subversion Peter Whitehead - filmmaker, writer, occultist, musician, lover, joker - is beautifully observed. Whitehead proposes that terrorism is the last creative act - a work of art, in fact.
Age restrictions: 13 (N)
Duration: 67

Tuesday 7 July 10:00 am @ Olive Schreiner

dying is an art, just as art is a permanent, untiring, relentless adversary, whose hidden agenda is always a continuous practice at dying, continuous fraught initiations into the mysteries of the Angel of Death. She is the muse.

Peter Whitehead

Namida King

Rothko: “If I choose to commit suicide, everyone will be sure of it. There will be no doubts”.

In London’s Tate Modern gallery, is a room devoted to the work of the Russian born artist Mark Rothko. A room without windows, without a view, no portal to signs of outer space or the passage of outer time. On the walls are six large paintings, related in colour (mostly dark maroon, with red overlays and black … spilt wine, dried blood) each one the size of a domestic room’s wall. In such a smaller room, the experience of surrender to them would be interlaced with a deeper, darker foreboding, apprehension of entrapment, enforced containment. Framed spaces large enough to engulf you, an enforced embrace, yet at the same time seeming to en-courage (en-power) you to float out of time and space completely. Capitulate to the infinite. Le gout de l’infini. A tension between absence and presence that threatens, offering an aching insight into the anguish and pain of Rothko’s all-too tangibly bedevilled vision of the world within. Within these seductive spaces, the imagination is at its outer limits, soft-edged, floating, formless. shimmering. Some might say: colour and texture reduced to pure spirit.

This large room with its six paintings is probably the closest example of a Rothko chapel in Houston. A more than half-decent equivalent for we Londoners, in which to garner some faith in the face of a world of commodities, and dying hope. Sit in the room within the room, half close the eyes and the paintings become carpets, magic carpets, sacred spaces, images shored up against Osirian fragmentation, delineated by mere brush stokes, mostly rendered invisible in the sombre, imperturbable light. Spaces in which, on which, through which, the mind attempts to focus on infinity and yet, not unwillingly, accepts defeat; accepts the pleasure of the pure aesthetic, the subtle and tantalising beauty that reminds us of feeling, rekindles emotion, a sense of the flesh we only temporarily, vicariously inhabit; beyond sensations, the inner dream webs of Being, dying, cassation, the mind fading at the edges, losing memories, fearing dreams; dissolving the hard-edged frames that are the load-bearing structure of the prison house of reason. Each rectangular painting, a grave.

London has these six paintings, not by mere chance but by good fortune.

The paintings were originally commissioned in the late 50’s for the walls of the very fashionable Four Seasons Restaurant in the magnificent architectural masterpiece, the Seagram building on New York’s Park Avenue. Rothko built huge scaffold structures in his studio, from which he could paint the images, creating the exact dimensions of the restaurant, the whole project inspired, he said, by Michelangelo’s murals for the Laurentian Library in Florence, where the window spaces are deliberately blinded; the interior suffused with uneasy melancholy. Rothko said Michelangelo had achieved exactly the feeling he was looking for, which he hoped to recreate, making the viewers feel they were “trapped in a room where all the doors and windows are bricked up, so that all they can do is butt their heads forever against the wall”. The word “forever” is more than ominous …

But something was calling Rothko from within, and rather than the bright and more colourful images of his earlier work, despite himself, the paintings demanded their own life and spirit, and came out darker than anything he had painted before. Reluctantly, he recognised the images were completely unsuitable for a classy, chic restaurant - people eating caviar and chatting stock market prices and worldly nonsense - and withdrew from the commission.

Rothko had always considered J M Turner to be a profound inspiration, especially in his own earlier work. He had almost certainly seen single, large gallery rooms devoted entirely to this one artist, to the later almost abstract Turner seascapes, as if they too had been painted as murals in a single inter-connected vision; so he presented the set of paintings to the Tate Gallery, to show his affection for England and its artists, and the first time they were hung together in the Tate, Rothko was there to supervise. The space was compact, the light reduced, so that the subtle layered surfaces, each relating to the other, presented a brooding ambience, demanding contemplation. Stillness. Uncertainty. Doubt …

The murals, painted with oil on canvas in 1958 or 1959, each with either black or red on maroon, bestow a variety of invitations to escape from the self. The largest painting seems to have a floating door in its centre, like an Egyptian temple door (always fake, painted to resemble a real door). The shape floating on the darkest of the taller paintings curiously seems to suggest the stone pillars of Stonehenge. Another has an inner shape that conjures up a double window, opening upon nothing … the faint hint of preternatural light, in wash of colour floating down. Each painting is an implied orifice, a call to the womb, to a highly seductive and yet threatening inner contained space and night … death and imminent birth in a terrible embrace.

The words of Tim Buckley’s Song to the Sirens … “Death my bride, I’m as puzzled as the new born babe … ” would seem an ideal caption. As the murals would also be an appropriate setting for Mozart’s The Magic Flute … the Temple devoted to Isis and her dismembered lover, Osiris. Or the grottos in which Gerard de Nerval imagined he too had soared and fallen with the sirens: “J’ai revé les grottes ou nagent les sirènes … “

How could a man, a once poor man now rich and clebrated around the world, who could create such sublime minimalist beauty, die such a savage bloody death at his own hand? But as Sylvia Plath foresaw and foretold - a warning no artist can ignore - that dying is an art, just as art is a permanent, untiring, relentless adversary, whose hidden agenda is always a continuous practice at dying, continuous fraught initiations into the mysteries of the Angel of Death. She is the muse … Rothko dared to warn us of such enigmas, the conflict between sensuality and spirit, in all his work, but then gave us the revelation of its deepest anguish, the proof beyond any denial, in his death, at his own hand. As a solace, he offered us moments of peace on the Way. Go to the Tate Rothko temple and dare to imagine your own death, as you recall Rothko’s final ritual in the sensual arms of his imagined siren bride.

Take a train south from St. Petersburg and you arrive in Dvinsk. It is now called Daugavpils. Once, its people were largely Jews. Its heart was devoted to commerce. And Les Fleurs du Mal. Many of the poorer pretty young Jewish girls were forced to choose prostitution to survive. It was not difficult to perceive many valid reasons, under savage Russian military oppression, for families of the better-off Jews to dream of immigration. Rothko’s mother was sixteen when she married. Her son, Marcus Rothkowitz was a late child, the youngest of four, enveloped from birth in the seductive dream of ultimate, if not infinite, freedom; by means of the escape to England: or America.

Rothko was eleven when his father died. Freud would write that the death of the father inflicts a terrible psychic burden on a son - the most dangerous age for the death to occur is around the age of eleven. At the age of nine, though, Rothko had (vicariously as it would turnout) denounced his father’s traditional ways, announced that he would no longer attend the family’s local Jewish temple; with the family. You might say he had killed his father a couple of years before his father really died; ultimately assuming within himself a supreme sense of power, albeit forever undermined by guilt. The youngest son (eight years younger than his brother), the sensitive and hypochondriac favourite of his mother, he had been blessed (and cursed) by achieving his unconscious incestuous goal … through the death of the father, full possession of her. Thus his doomed passion for the oceanic, le mer, la mère, had begun …

Rotho’s paintings are screens in which liquid (oil colour) floats, temporarily arrested in time, restless, moon- and tide-driven seascapes; crystalline structures (and non-structures) trapped on the verge of lattice formulation or dissolution, poised at the tantalising threshold of melting or crystallising as witnessed on a translucent glass microscope slide; ideally, under polarising light.

Hard at the edges (he had killed his father) and soft at the centre (he had won his mother), this Oedipal son would live all his life with the sphinx’s smile taunting his dreams, a tortured painter who wanted most of all to escape the pain of light, the father’s domain, light as power, sexual power, the permanent predicament of seeing, or being seen; omnipotence or dismemberment; the project of becoming blind, but gifted with clairvoyance and insight, like Tiresias: always the adversary and yet redeemer of Oedipus. In his work, Rothko seems to be desperately trying to deny the very existence of that real, sun-lit father’s world; he would see nothing of that real world but everything in a lunar mindscape reminiscent of a fellow Russians vision, Tarkovsky - as in Solaris, or Stalker. It would not have been a surprise if Rothko had painted all his work as variations on the theme of the colour violet …

And so it was that Rothko, despite every success and all the recognition he might have imagined he needed, after creating temples in which his murdered father’s spirit might be deemed to promise him forgiveness, he was finally forced to give up the struggle to maintain harmony over his inner chaos (denied in his harmonious musical paintings). At the violet hour he murdered himself - murdered the father in himself (at a late age he had fathered a child with a much younger wife, much to his own and everyone’s surprise) - as brutally as he was capable.

His paintings are an evolving, meandering record of his perpetual confrontation with a death desired, at the arterial heart’s crossroads. Murder of his other, guilty self; the self that had could only see, eventually, as false, fake, inauthentic. There was no going back to innocence; there never is, after the father is murdered at the crossroads.

It seems almost churlish to mention it: mere names resonating oddly, but Borges would surely celebrate the parallels. In Edgar Allen Poe’s most prestigious short story(many say his most profound expression of the inward windings and secret aspects of his own creative process). The writer of fictions which are nevertheless true; and yet are also not true? In the story entitled “The Purloined Letter” the principle character is the Detective Dupin. It is Dupin who toils at the mystery and finally, with weird Tiresian insight, reveals the esoteric truth behind a somewhat symbolic theft of a letter, a theft which enables the commitment of a number of more serious crimes, summed up in the phrase: “The ascendency depended on the robber’s knowledge of the loser’s knowledge of the robber.”

The detective brought in to investigate the death and apparent paradoxes of Rothko’s suicide, was a certain Detective Lappin.

Rothko killed himself in the early morning of February 25th, 1970; alone in his 69th street studio. His assistant found him and ran to a neighbour to say: “I think Mr. Rothko is very sick.” A terrible understatement, as the artist was lying spread-eagled on his back as if crucified in a huge pool of dried blood. Another assistant, Frank Ventgen was called and saw immediately that Rothko was dead. Two policeman assumed a suicide, but called on Detective Lappin to verify the facts. At the time, the fabled detective was being accompanied in his work by a newspaper reporter, Paul Wilkes, writing a story with the odd working title: “Why so many Real-Life Detective Stories End with a Rubber Stamp”. Lappin at the time was reading Puzo’s The Godfather.

The first description of Rothko’s suicide, taken from the detective’s brash account, turned out to be wrong in important details. He described the body lying in a pool of blood, the water in the sink still running. To save the people who found the body the trouble of cleaning up! Lappin sees the razor blade with kleenex tissue attached to it and comments, somewhat laconically, that suicides invariably try not to cut their fingers when cutting their wrists. Rothko’s trousers were neatly folded over the back of a chair. Lappin decides he didn’t want to get blood on them: cutting his wrists at the sink, he fell back to the floor when the blood levels got too low. Lappin seemed full of certainty, even noticing a number of small “hesitant cuts” on the forearm, declaring them as trials of the sharpness of the blade.

Lappin calls the artist’s doctor who confirms he was depressed after a recent operation, his health generally bad. Lappin declares with the certainty of one who was there at the time: ”An open-and-shut suicide”.

But the story of Rothko’s death was already metamorphosing into fiction. He had not had a recent operation and there was only one hesitation cut. The journalistic account (Wilkes wasn’t there when the body was found) became more than current gossip but the gospel truth, so much so that the artist Robert Motherwell pronounced he was surprised, on hearing the story, that the suicide had been so ritualistic. The story people heard and later read, was purloined by an opportunist journalist from the Detective Lappin’s fanciful pulp-fiction version of the events, mostly speculations of his own invention; especially as he had never heard of Rothko, and must have surveyed the huge abstract paintings around the studio as proof of the poor man’s unbalanced mind.

The police examiners decided that Rothko had taken a huge dose of barbiturates before killing himself. Later official autopsy found that Rothko had a “marked senile emphysema” and advanced heart disease, and did not have long to live. There were two cuts that caused the death, one 2½and a half inches long and a half inch deep on the left arm, and one 2″ long and 1″ deep on his right arm, deep enough to almost sever the brachial artery. The report misspelt his name as Rothknow; and the corpse was numbered #1867. Official police versions, taped and never transcribed, depended mostly on Lappin’s street-cred assumptions.

Rothko had taken a large dose of a drug, Sinequan, prescribed to him by his psychiatrist Dr. Klein, presumably to numb some of the pain, but mostly, his perceptions of his actions. He took off his shoes and suit, laying his trousers over the back of the chair. He made the cut in his left arm first, and the deeper one in the right. He was lying on his back, when found, in a pool of blood six foot by eight foot; with his “arms outstretched”.

Rothko had often talked of suicide and written about it. He’d told his assistant Ahearn, “If I choose to commit suicide, everyone will be sure of it. There will be no doubts … “ He often referred to the “accidental deaths” of Jackson Pollock and David Smith, both drunk and killed by crashing their cars. Clearly forms of suicide. And despite the severity of his own illnesses, he continued to smoke and drink, aware that he was hastening his own death.

Recent separation from his wife and very young son, together with the knowledge of the imminence of a natural death from his failing health, Rothko chose the death that he could be utterly sure of, a theft of what time remained of his life. He wanted a death framed in his own space and time, his own hands, determined to make it conscious, utterly tangible and known, every detail under his control, robbed it of its uncertainty. Made it his own creation. He defeated God as he had defeated his own father. A solitary death, a singular vision, unseen, which now can only be imagined by us.

One of Rothko’s friends wanted to take a photograph of the body lying in its pool of congealed blood, but he was persuaded not to, and so we are fortunately spared the theft of this painfully real image, which would surely have always clouded our perceptions of his paintings … would we not see his body, crucified, hovering on the surface of every canvas? Unsullied by the pagan facts of his self-murder, we are left with blameless images of his paintings, striving towards transcendence of the real, the body, the flesh, the

callous impersonality and decay of the material world: each painting a tentative, barely perceptible step towards the final blood-letting, in which his congealed blood, bone-dry on the concrete harsh floor, would surely have suggested the surfaces and colourings of the red and black on maroon canvasses hanging, forever, for us, in the Tate Modern.

this article first appeared on peter whitehead’s website

Anarchy is, it has always been, a romance. It is clearly the best way (or the ugliest way) to rule the world, that everybody should be the master of its own destiny, everybody should be the own leader. This is something I can still believe, I think even a cursory look. Around the world and Denmark (???) in particular. It is a 0,000 point per cent of the world’s population that causes 99,9999 per cent of the world’s problems. And that point per cent is not the jewish banks’ conspiracy, it’s not the secret homosexuals’ conspiracy, it’s not even the scientologists. It is the leaders. What we need is an administration of ourselves.

From an on line interview, transcribed by Dionysos Andronis

This contemporary documentary on the life and opinions of Peter Whitehead is made in the independent spirit of the great British director’s work – a ‘challenge to rationality’. What this means is that By Any Old Light proceeds as a collage of interviews, walks, lectures, interactions, poetic rants, erotic glimpses, performances and archive footage.

Whitehead reflects on his work past and present and discusses the conception of his occult mytho-world view. The film records a meeting between Whitehead and filmmaker/poet Aryan Kaganof in London in 2008. The film is styled in accordance with Kaganof’s ‘guerrilla’ aesthetic of filmmaking, using cheap equipment (mobile phone cameras for example) to achieve experimental results, mixing (audio) soundscapes, the spoken word, with postmodern imagescapes.

It’s fascinating to note how contemporary Whitehead’s ideas about politics, media, conspiracy, violence and protest, the role – after Debord – of the spectacle, developed in his 1968 film The Fall, appear. The film gives him space to think aloud and explain the concept behind his latest film, based on his books ‘Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts’, ‘Girl on the Train’ and ‘Nature’s Child’ and developed and expanded via the internet.

Yet in some ways By Any Old Light illustrates the shortcomings of digital cinema, especially when placed alongside Whitehead’s own startling cinematic works. Whitehead’s utilisation of the hand-held camera emerged during a golden age of auteur filmmaking and his beautiful celluloid colours and astonishing compositions are strikingly at odds with the ugliness of modern DV. Whitehead always placed great emphasis on the ‘word’ and will perhaps be disappointed with the need for subtitles.

By Any Old Light is a good update on Whitehead’s work and influence. But ultimately, the film illustrates how the young avant-garde can still learn a lot from an old master, acknowledged in this film as “the father of independent filmmaking”.

Mark Goodall

this review first appeared here

Radical ’60s filmmaker Peter Whitehead is typically left out of most narratives of underground film history, but the Bradford International Film Festival, which runs this year March 13-28 in the U.K., is set to give the director his due. In addition to a retrospective of Whitehead’s films, BIFF will also be screening the documentary By Any Old Light which records the historic first meeting between Whitehead and South African experimental filmmaker Aryan Kaganof. By Any Old Light is co-directed by Dionysos Andronis and Ca Ca Ca and screens on Tues. March 17.

keep reading here

This 9-minute film from Aryan Kaganof was shot on April 4th 2008 in London at the University of Westminster, a few hours before the world premiere of “SMS Sugar Man”. Peter Whitehead was there and had been following the showing with great interest. Kaganof took the opportunity to film this historic encounter, which is also the subject of our latest film “By Any Old Light”.

The film opens with scenes from a TV report being shot in which demonstrators hold placards with the words “Lack of Evidence”, obviously alluding to the unenigmatic title of Kaganof’s film. The “unresolved” murder is, of course, suggested by “mises en abymes” such as the report being re-filmed (filming of filming) and visual and audio metaphors (the noise of a drill which sounds like a shotgun). But why would Kaganof want to kill Whitehead, as the blasphemous title suggests?

The image is split in two at times, having shown Whitehead reading extracts from one of Thomas de Quincey’s novels, “Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts”. The novel was Whitehead’s starting point for his latest film and the title was changed intentionally. “Murder” is the key word. Whitehead reads extracts in an odd position, looking uncomfortable. Afterwards, he wanders alone along the university’s corridors. Kaganof’s film is presented as he takes photos in the lecture hall.

We then see Whitehead sitting alone outside a café on a busy street. A spy comes up to him and hands him a document in a brown envelope. He looks at it with both indifference and complicity. He secretly leaves on a London bus. The closing credits say “He dreamed, therefore he was. He doubted, therefore he was filmed”. This is the famous, slightly altered quotation from an earlier interview with Whitehead. The title, “I destroy, therefore I am” has been used, once again, by the new generation of alternative film directors as an opening statement or starting point. Kaganof has hijacked the title, using it to mean that all the great directors’ films are the dreams or private hallucinations which haunt their personal worlds. The moment a great director stops dreaming or having nightmares, he is no longer active himself, but filmed by others. The fact that Kaganof has taken up Whitehead’s work and developed his dreams in a more contemporary context is really positive. The coverage of the protestors at the beginning is another key to understanding that this “lack of evidence” is not about Whitehead’s “murder” by Kaganof. No such murder took place – only a very positive collaboration between two different generations of alternative directors, in which each has tried to reconstitute his generation’s spirit of confrontation on film.

This “lack of evidence” refers to artists’ recognition – young artists gaining recognition from older artists. Established artists are comfortable in their universal recognition, while young artists have to fight hard to “overthrow” all the lack of evidence from reviews, whether it’s on a high or low level. Kaganof never wanted to “murder” Whitehead; he wanted to take a new artistic path in the footsteps of Thomas de Quincey; a new way in which “Murder is Considered as One of the Fine Arts”.

Written by Dionysos ANDRONIS, Translated by Lucy Lyall Grant

Cert:(adv PG)
Dir. Ca Ca Ca, Dionysos Andronis
France , 52 mins, 2008
Cast: Documentary with: Peter Whitehead, Aryan Kaganof

This documentary on the life and opinions of Peter Whitehead is made in the independent spirit of his work: a collage of interviews, walks, lectures, performances and archive footage. Based on a recent meeting between Whitehead and filmmaker/poet Aryan Kaganof, it is styled in accordance with ‘guerrilla’ aesthetics of filmmaking, using cheap equipment to achieve experimental results.

for more information click here

dear Aryan

JUNG tells the story of his dream of death while having his heart attack. He went high above the earth, flying, and looked down.
throughout my film (it too is killing me) there are references to the Blue Screen of Death and a myriad of blue screens and images around Vienna.
Plato in his cave … “Plato thought nature but a spume that plays upon a ghostly paradigm of things!” …
I spend all my time editing and throwing pots … and … and … well you can guess. making sure I don’t throw her off the bed …
Keep me informed.

peter

Head of Princess Meritaten
Egypt, 1353-1335 BC
The Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
E.GA.4524.1943

I arrived in Cambridge in the early Sixties to study Chemistry, Physics and Mathematics at Peterhouse College. After three years of studying science - including crystallography, working in the Cavendish laboratory assisting Dr Francis Crick (DNA), Dr John Kendrew (Myoglobin) and Dr Max Perutz (Haemoglobin) - and winning the Sohal La Bhatia prize, my science degree and experience finally paled into irrelevance. I had meanwhile won a scholarship to the prestigious Slade School of Art to study painting, but where I took up film-making instead; and for the rest of my life I made films, later I built the largest private falcon breeding project in the world in Saudi Arabia, and published seven novels.

What had caused such a dramatic volte face?

The beautiful face of a small limestone sculpture in the Egyptian galleries of the Fitzwilliam Museum. I had casually drifted into the museum on my way back to my rooms in St Peter’s Terrace. And my life was changed forever. I wrote my first novel about this experience: The Risen, a comparison between the ideologies of modern physics and ancient Egyptian physics and cosmology; a comparison of the scientific and the mystical.

Image of Head of Princess Meritaten

My confrontation with the small sculpted head of Princess Meritaten, daughter of Pharaoh Akhenaten (the first monotheist / rationalist in history), was not merely an act of perception. I did not merely watch it, I ’saw’ it - voir pour voir, mais pas pour regarder (Luch Dietrich). I felt it to be an act of possession, and its influence has prevailed ever since: here and now, more than forty years later, I am still dealing with the power of this intuitive experience. All my novels have been directly and indirectly, dealing with the nature of this kind of experience; outside of reason, and yet utterly real. Both Shelly and the poet Francis Thomson had similar experiences with female sculptures in museums!

Years later I worked with a very distinguished shaman in Pakistan (he advised President Zia ul Haq three days a week on how to run Pakistan!), who knew everything about my experience in the museum in the first few minutes of meeting him – despite being illiterate and not speaking English!

I went on to study Egyptology and spent much of my holidays while at Cambridge in the Fitzwilliam, coming to terms with the weird wider implications of this kind of ‘mystical’ experience, as rationalists call it - still classified as a mystery and not be to taken seriously! I am now studying the later work of physicist David Bohm and his work on holographic time and space, and more recent theories of the existence of a fifth dimension (only to be perceived holographically, the technology soon to be worked out) in the space-time continuum.

These are revolutionary new ideas that I personally find easier now to work with in writing so-called ‘fictions’, which are nevertheless (or even nonetheless!) research experiments into the true nature of consciousness; about which we still know so very little. Science deals with the materials. Mysticism (for me) attempts to evaluate the true nature and working of consciousness … so much we are on the verge of discovering, which may never be explained in a predictable way.

As Meritaten explained to me at our first meeting. ‘Hey you! What are you doing trapped ‘in the prison house of reason?’’ It seems she had learnt Wordsworth off by heart! As well as Rilke … as well as … etc. etc.

© Peter Whitehead, 2008 [text]

first published here

I am deep deep deep in the madness and despair of editing my film. It will be three hours - three separate parts. 7, 9, and 14!!!! But I start to understand what it is about at last - not what it “should be about”. It has its own life … and is now forcing ME to live ITS life! It knows what it wants to be - itself. The bastard!

Aryan Kaganof : J’aimerais seulement remercier Max qui a organisé cette séance. Puis, j’aimerais remercier mes collègues de l’Université de Malmo : Gunnell, Lotta et Lajos pour être ici. Et des remerciements spéciaux à mon ami de Paris Dionysos Andronis qui est ici ce soir avec un homme extraordinaire, le père du cinéma indépendant anglais, européen et mondial : Peter Whitehead.

Peter Whitehead : « Je détruis donc je suis ». C’est le renouveau, c’est l’anarchie.
Dionysos Andronis : La destruction amènera à la reconstruction.
PW : Absolument. Quand j’ai dit et écrit ça, c’était scandaleux. Les gens n’étaient pas prêts à l’accepter. Il y avait les auteurs – destructeurs en Angleterre et puis il y avait les destructeurs américains que j’ai utilisé dans mon film «La Chute ». Mais le choix du titre était très en rapport avec le français «Je détruis donc je suis », comme «Je pense donc je suis ». L’essence de «La Chute » est un défi à la rationalité et à l’objectivité mais elle était liée avec le sujet principal de «La Chute » qui est la faillite de la protestation. La protestation légale, dont vous pouvez voir et parler, est rationnelle puisqu’elle est dans l’espace légal. Elle est manipulée et acceptée. Le point serait comment la protestation a commencé à être illégale et hors les limites, comment elle a basculé vers l’anarchie et le terrorisme. Parce que les gens de «La Chute » qui étaient dans l’Université Columbia et sur les rues, au bout de 4 mois sont devenus les Weathermen qui étaient des terroristes, même pas des anarchistes.
DA : Mark Rudd ?
PW : Mark Rudd, Rap H.Brown, Tom Hayden. Tous ces gens là étaient associés avec ce qui a suivi mai 68. Et tout ça grâce à Columbia. Ce n’était pas seulement l’université de Columbia qui était occupée par les étudiants. Certains d’entre eux étaient des étudiants mais ils ont entraîné avec eux d’autres radicaux qui disaient : «Écoutez, la protestation légale ne va pas marcher. Ils nous ont manipulés. La protestation est devenue affaire de mode, vous pouvez lire ça dans les magazines et vous habiller à la mode et vous sentir bien dans la marche Aldermarston. Mais cela n’est pas de la politique, ce sont des relations publiques. C’est de la consommation ».

PW : Un point s’est éclairci pour moi. Ce point qui disait qu’il faudra faire des confrontations violentes puisque nous étions rejetés violemment. Tu parles de «politiquement correct ». Ce terme désignait la privation de la liberté des individus, pas seulement des femmes. C’est pour ça que si vous avez agi violemment ou si vous avez été victimes de violences, vous n’avez pas selon la loi le droit de militer. Mais vous en avez sûrement si vous pouvez élaborer une stratégie.
DA : Ahh…Aryan est là !
AK : Mes excuses pour être en retard. Il y avait un problème parce qu’il n’y avait pas de machine pour passer le DVD.
PW : Nous avons failli nous rencontrer avec la lumière de la lune, finalement on se rencontre avec la lumière du soleil ou par n’importe quelle lumière.
AK : C’est un honneur de vous rencontrer.
PW : Pour moi aussi. J’ai déjà vu vos films et lu vos poèmes. Venez vous asseoir maintenant.
AK : Vous savez, «La Chute » est un des documents du 20e siècle qui définit tout ce qui était fou pendant les 30 dernières années.
PW : Je n’ai pas vu «La Chute » depuis 40 ans. En étant obligé de le faire maintenant dans tous ces festivals et rétrospectives et en étant obligé d’écouter les commentaires des gens comme les tiens, je le regarde encore et je me dis : « Oui, j’ai vraiment capté quelque chose à ce moment. C’était fait à la hâte mas je l’ai capté».
AK : Tout dans ce film est si !…. Vous regardez la manière dont les médias vont se développer après vous et vous agissez en dehors de vous-même.
PW : Tout le monde dit que ce film aurait pu être filmé l’année dernière, ce qui est vrai, j’assume ce commentaire. Je le vois aujourd’hui et je me pose la question : « d’où ça vient ? » C’était un moment fascinant, c’était la transe. Tout le film serait une longue hallucination. Maintenant j’aime «La Chute ». J’essaie de faire une suite à ce film maintenant. Le film que je prépare maintenant (je n’en ai fait aucun depuis 40 ans) est d’une certaine façon sa suite. J’espère recevoir la reconnaissance avec celui là.

PW : « La Chute » commence avec le moniteur de la télé, ses points blancs, et ça se termine avec la même chose. Ce serait comme si quelqu’un était léché. J’ai piqué cette idée et maintenant je l’achève. C’est ainsi que j’aime ce que Dionysos nous a amené avec lui. Ca me rappelle Yves Klein et ses bleus que j’ai utilisé dans «La Chute ». Dans «La Chute » il y avait le camescope portable Sony léché par l’image, au début et à la fin. C’est autour de la transformation. C’est du Debord pur.
AK : Avant Debord.
PW : Avant Debord. C’est le spectacle du point de vue d’une seule personne, qui perd ses liens avec l’expérience authentique. J’essaie d’avancer d’un pas en avant et d’aborder la question de la mort, de la mort psychique et de cette mort de soi profonde. Si vous voulez vous en expliquer.

PW : Regardez !
AK : Il paraît que les anglais parlent beaucoup.
PW : Sur toi !
AK : Non, ils parlent du futur.
PW : Tu es le futur ! Je commence à marcher maintenant. Ca va me prendre le double que normalement. Je dois commencer maintenant.

PW : Je n’ai pas obtenu la reconnaissance méritée à l’époque. Je me suis dit que ce n’est pas grave. Il y a des choses que je préfère vraiment et ainsi j’ai décidé de tout abandonner. Et c’était chose faite. Mais maintenant j’ai encore envie de recommencer. J’ai été très introverti pendant 30 ans ou plus. En habitant dans le désert, c’est très introverti. En utilisant les montagnes comme décor, c’est bien mais je suis seul. C’est un peu menaçant de vouloir communiquer. Si vous écrivez des romans et vous faites comme moi pendant 30 ans, c’est le même genre de solitude. Il me semble que c’était Kawabata qui disait : « J’écris des romans parce qu’ainsi j’apprends comment écrire des romans » ou quelque chose de semblable. « J’ai mes rasons, ce n’est pas un grand problème. Les avantages donnent la primauté à mon geste ». Je ne sais pas si je l’ai déjà dit aux autres. Le défi pour mon nouveau film serait de dire : « Je voulais faire le lien avec mes romans. Ainsi, je fais ce film d’après mon dernier roman ». Le langage de mes films anciens des années 60, surtout dans «La Chute » puisque après j’ai quitté la direction, je l’ai développé dans mes romans, pas dans mes films. Donc maintenant je suis amené à la constatation que j’ai écrit des romans français depuis 15 ans sans reconnaissance. Au moins les gens regardent mes films anciens et ils disent «ce sont des films français ». Et je pourrais ajouter «c’est la mentalité française, c’est du Debord et du Derrida ». Ce n’est pas de l’écriture anglaise. Ni canadienne. Et cela me donne une certaine confiance. Ce que j’essaie de faire dans mon nouveau film c’est d’utiliser ouvertement mes
techniques anciennes, celles découvertes et développées dans mes écrits.

PW : Ceci est le nouveau film.
AK : Ce serait une bonne idée de passer à travers les chapitres différents.
PW : C’est ainsi que ça va se passer. Ceci était au départ un roman ou trois romans électroniques, dans mon site. Le premier s’appelle «Le terrorisme considéré comme un art majeur » et vient de Thomas De Quincey et de sa pièce «Le meurtre considéré comme un art majeur ». Le deuxième roman s’appelle «L’enfant de la nature » et c’est sur le terrorisme écologique et le meurtre. Il fait le lien entre les deux. Le troisième roman s’appelle «La fille dans le train » et serait un pastiche du roman de Kawabata «La Province enneigée ». Tu le connais ? Tu dois le savoir. Il a fait également un film d’après ce roman au Japon. Mon film est une version, si vous voulez, du roman original qui était sur internet comme un roman interactif. Tous les thèmes du roman sont développés sur le site. Vous pouvez cliquez sur un de ces thèmes vous pouvez accéder dans tous les autres. En vérité celui là est proche du théatre japonais No. Si vous voulez apprendre un peu plus sur le théâtre No, vous cliquez sur «no » et vous accédez au chapitre «Assassinat ». Si vous cliquez sur «assassinat », le chapitre «L’homme vieux des montagnes et les Hashishin » s’ouvre. Vous pouvez développer le mythe, vous pouvez lire sur la mythologie des hashishin. Il y a aussi un autre site qui s’appelle «Le père absent ». Je le relate au mythe de l’assassinat. Si vous voulez quelques-uns des thèmes dans les trois romans, vous pouvez le faire. Il y a que des mots. Maintenant c’est le film qui sera réalisé.

PW : Les romans tournent majoritairement autour d’un personnage féminin qui s’appelle Maria Lenoir. C’est elle qui va commettre l’assassinat. C’est comme un acte de terrorisme écologique et elle fait partie d’un groupe révolutionnaire qui s’appelle «Les Guerriers de l’arc-en-ciel ». La personne qu’elle doit assassiner est quelqu’un qui travaille pour l’industrie nucléaire française, la «Echelon Network ». Il est finalement celui qui a commandité la destruction du bateau de cette organisation «Les guerriers de l’arc-en-ciel » en Nouvelle Zélande trente ans auparavant. Je prends cette idée de ce terrorisme original d’état et je l’adapte à une fille intelligente. C’est elle qui va commettre cet assassinat. Elle a la victime idéale. Parce qu’en tuant la «Femme en Satin », elle trouve la solution. Le roman original se déroulait à Cumbria et se basait sur un complot nucléaire. Il aborde le thème de la vente du faux plutonium au Japon, comme tous les trois autres. Il commence à Cumbria et il passe après au chapitre «L’enfant de la nature ». L’un parmi eux traite du meurtre. Celui qui implique Michael Schlieman. C’est très proche de «Daddy ». C’est un roman en fait sur le sadomasochisme, le sexuel. Celui qui entraîne ce personnage. C’est le sujet du roman en quelque sorte. Comment une femme particulière a été manipulée ! Elle est capturée. Elle est prête à se sacrifier. Le mot «sacrifice » vient du latin «sacrefacere » qui s’apparente à ce que les musulmans font avec leurs bombes suicidaires. Ce n’est pas spécifiquement mon sujet
mais on l’y trouve.

PW : Chacun de nous comme un individu, comme un corps, surtout les femmes, est différent et extraordinaire. Nous abordons tous une attitude particulière vis à vis du monde matériel. Mon sentiment est que tout cela tourne autour de la transformation. C’est autour de la transformation totale en virtualité, en séparation. « Différence comme séparation» ou presque. C’est comment nous détruisons l’environnement. Ceci est notre environnement, notre nourriture, l’air que nous respirons. C’est le vide qui s’ouvre maintenant en vitesse entre l’individu, qui ne se voit plus comme une partie authentique de la nature.

PW : Ton prochain film est sur quoi ?
AK : Il me semble que nous devons faire un documentaire sur ton film ! C’est si extraordinaire ! Les points informatiques sont unis pour nous parce que j’ai trouvé ce livre ce matin à la Tate Modern. C’est un essai qui s’appelle «L’homme malade », sur la pollution. « La pollution est devenue à la mode aujourd’hui comme la révolution. Elle domine la vie entière de la société et elle est représentée dans une forme illusoire dans le spectacle ».
PW : Les deux mots clés sont là : «mode» et «spectacle ». Quand tout devient une affaire de mode, nous sommes ratés. C’est pour ça que nous voyons dans «La Chute » Alberta habillée comme à la mode et Gloria Steinem qui dit : « la protestation est à la mode ». C’est devenu facile à protester. Ils vous ont manipulé. Ce n’est plus le spectacle de la révolution violente mais celui de l’état et de son truc, le consumérisme.
AK : C’était en 2000 que j’ai découvert le téléphone portable et j’ai fait après ce film en 2005 (ndlr. Il s’agit de «SMS Sugar Man »). Depuis, il est devenu à la mode et un exemple serait cette conférence. J’ai compris que pendant ce moment le téléphone portable était subversif, c’était un véhicule. Le film n’est pas sorti encore. Je n’ai pas de portable. Je suis venu à cette conférence avec le film mais je refuse de faire partie de cette banalisation d’un ancien moment subversif.
PW : C’est ici exactement la différence entre l’ordinaire et l’anarchique. Entre le fait d’être subversif et d’être soumis. Je traite ça maintenant. Les gens oublient que pour ce téléphone pas cher et portable les Américains bombardent maintenant Irak. Parce qu’ils ont besoin de l’économie et de l’énergie qui leur donne l’avance technologique. Afin de la «sentir » littéralement. Oui, afin de la «sentir » ! Je l’ai dit dans mes romans.

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PW : Vous voyez Schlieman, qui écrit des romans sur MI6, est envoyé en mission à Vienne afin d’infiltrer Les Guerriers de l’Arc-en-ciel et de trouver qui est Maria Lenoir. Son front est celui de la culture subversive à Vienne. Ainsi, ils sont en train de le filmer. Il y a deux films. Le premier se termine par la mort de Michael Schlieman et par son interrogatoire. C’est un interrogatoire imaginaire qui dure 90 minutes dans le film et qui nous donne l’angoisse. C’est le moment de la vérité. Tout est dans ses mémoires. Il se souvient du temps réel. Il est filmé ou pas ? Donc, tout le film est un interrogatoire. Il commence ainsi. Il est dès le début en train d’être examiné par ces deux individus, l’homme et la femme qu’il ne verra plus jamais. Parce que le gars, quand finalement Daumal est assassiné avec son pistolet (ce sont les balles de Schlieman qui commettent le crime), est tombé probablement amoureux de Maria Lenoir. C’est lui qui a conduit son assassinat. Quand ils ont découvert l’ordinateur en face de lui, en face d’eux, si vous en cliquez maintenant, ça ne va pas disparaître. C’est la clé comme ça. Quand ils posent une question, qu’est ce qu’il répond ? Il pense à ce moment. Il réfléchit à cette question mais il répond par n’importe quoi puisqu’il est sous l’emprise de la morphine. Parce que son moyen c’est l’opium ou d’autres choses (Thomas De Quincey, etc). Nous en sommes sûrs. Il raconte des mensonges pour couvrir le meurtre de Maria. Comme je disais, une fois entrés dans ces sites, qui vont exister sûrement et que Michael Schlieman mettra en place ensemble, les deux personnes lui posent des questions et sont en train de monter le film. Ils vont revenir en arrière mais la voie est perdue. Absolument et définitivement. D’une certaine façon, c’est sur Debord et Baudrillard. Tout est devenu fragmentaire et désintégré. Ainsi maintenant je suis plutôt du coté de Baudrillard que de Debord puisque c’était Baudrillard qui disait : « Rien ne meurt plus ». Michael Schlieman ne peut pas mourir ou il ne veut pas mourir parce qu’il veut raconter la vérité, ce qu’il a fait pour MI6.
AK : Il veut dire la vérité, quelle vérité ?
PW : Il est obligé de le dire dans ses mémoires sur internet. Ce sont les mémoires de Michael Schlieman. C’est la vérité de ce qui s’est passé avec lui comme agent. Sa vérité, sa version de la réalité. Il doit faire attention parce que MI6 veut les effacer. Elles doivent être fluides, elles doivent être souples et susceptibles de changer de place. D’un site à l’autre. « La fiction est l’infinité ». On ne sait pas, personne ne sait, ce qui va se passer après. L’histoire de Michael Schlieman est dans son site. Et dans ce film c’est la réalité sur l’histoire vraie. « La fiction devient l’infinité » est un grand chapitre. C’était le sous-titre du site Nohzone.com

PW : Et l’interrogatoire continue. Il doit être «in- terror- gé »

AK : J’ai encore une citation pour vous (il écrit ).

« Dites NON à la guerre contre la terreur »

Traduit en français par CA CA CA et Dionysos ANDRONIS

By Mike Everleth

⋅ August 10, 2008

Today, when reading the work of ’60s era Jonas Mekas on the underground film scene, such as his influential Village Voice “Movie Journal” column, he really makes it feel that producing avant-garde / experimental films was a revolutionary act. Actually, he also makes it seem that just watching and screening underground films was a revolutionary act.

Sometimes that was true, especially when the films crossed local obscenity laws, e.g. the work of Kenneth Anger and Jack Smith. But one filmmaker who really embraced the true spirit of revolution in his filmmaking was British intellectual Peter Whitehead.

To be totally upfront, before watching By Any Old Light, I had no idea who Whitehead was. This new documentary co-directed by Dionysos Andronis and Ca Ca Ca is allegedly a filmed “conversation” between Whitehead and South African avant-garde filmmaker Aryan Kaganof, another artist I was previously unfamiliar with. The reason I say this is only an alleged conversation is that the majority of the film feels like a monologue delivered from Whitehead to Kaganof.

That’s not a criticism of the film or of anybody’s participation in it. In fact, I really enjoyed the film and actually appreciate its structure. By Any Old Light captures the first ever meeting between Whitehead and Kaganof and the younger filmmaker stands in total awe of a man who has had a major influence on his own work. Therefore, the film actually casts Kaganof as a student who earnestly absorbs a lesson from a revered professor, which, given Whitehead’s insights into his own work and the ’60s counterculture movement, it’s a great lesson for everyone to listen in on.

When I reviewed Andronis’ previous film, Pandrogeny Manifesto, I claimed it was just “dueling images” of its subjects, Genesis P-Orridge and Lady Jaye Breyer P-Orridge. Although that’s what I thought upon the film’s initial vieweing, subsequent viewings have told me that I was wrong and that Andronis artfully inserts several visual diversions from the dueling monologue to keep the action moving.

Andronis does the same thing with By Any Old Light. The basic set-up is visually kind of dull: just Whitehead and Kaganof sitting at a long table in, what I think is, a bare white classroom. But, during the discourse, Andronis inserts long excerpts from Whitehead’s films as well as filmed performances by Kaganof. (In addition to making movies, Kaganof is a poet and novelist whose public readings are gutteral performance pieces.) Also, the last 10-15 minutes of the film drops all verbal discourse and mostly films Kaganof filming Whitehead. As interesting as Whitehead and Kaganof are, the film excerpts do a good job of breaking things up and expand the documentary’s visual vocabulary, which could have gotten monotonous. It also allows somebody like me, who wasn’t familiar with either director’s work to make me excited about it.

What also comes across in the film is why these two different filmmakers would get along so famously. First, they have the connection that they’re inter-disciplinary artists. Whitehead gave up filmmaking after the ’60s and focused on writing. He’s currently working on a cyber-novel, i.e. a novel that unfolds by clicking on various webpages, called Nohzone about a spy. He also says he plans to return to directing by adapting this online work into a movie.

But both directors here also have very radical, political edges to their work. Whitehead’s most famous film, The Fall, includes a sequence where he joined students at the infamous Columbia University sit-in in 1968. While that was a largely peaceful demonstration, Whitehead discusses here the evolution of early anti-Vietnam peace protests to the violent actions of the Weathermen.

From some limited research, too, I know Kaganof also made primarily documentaries under his first name of Ian Kerkhof. (He changed his name after meeting his biological father.) His latest film, though, SMS Sugar man, is a fictional narrative about a pimp that was all shot on cell phones. However, what we see mostly of Kaganof in By Any Old Light is his poetry performances, which are very abstract pieces.

By featuring this intriguing meeting of the minds by two artists whose works lie at the intersection of art and revolution, By Any Old Light — and the title comes from a touching quote delivered by Whitehead in the film — is a very engaging film. Although we are witnessing a monologue cum conversation, it makes the viewer feel as though he is a participant in the dialogue.

this review first appeared on badlit.com