kagablog

un film de Aryan Kaganof

Ce court métrage de 9 minutes de Aryan Kaganof a été tourné le 4-4-8 à Londres, à l’Université de Westminster, quelques heures avant la première mondiale du film «SMS Sugar Man ». Peter Whitehead était là et il avait suivi avec un grand intérêt la séance. Kaganof en a profité pour tourner un film sur cette rencontre historique, qui est également le sujet de notre dernier film «Par n’importe quelle lumière / By any old light ».

Le film commence avec le tournage des scènes d’un reportage télé dans lequel des manifestants tiennent le panneau «Absence de preuves / Lack of evidence ». C’est sûrement une inscription évidente qui fait allusion au titre pas très énigmatique cette fois du film de Kaganof. Le meurtre «non élucidé » est, bien sûr, suggéré par des mises en abîme, comme celle du reportage refilmé (un tournage dans un autre) et des métaphores visuelles ou audio (le son d’une vrille qui ressemble à celui d’un fusil). Et pourquoi Kaganof aurait-il voulu assassiner Whitehead, comme le titre profanatoire l’aurait voulu ?

L’image se divise par moments en deux parties séparées après avoir montré Whitehead en train de lire des extraits du roman de Thomas de Quincey «Le meurtre considéré comme un art majeur ». C’est le roman qui a servi de point de départ pour le dernier de Whitehead et dont le titre a été modifié intentionnellement. Le mot «meurtre » est une clé. Whitehead lit ces extraits avec une posture étrange, c’est à dire pas confortable. Après, il se promène seul dans les couloirs de l’Université. Les présentations du film de Kaganof commencent. Le premier prend des photos dans l’amphi.

Tout à l’heure, Whitehead se trouve seul sur la terrasse d’un café en pleine avenue. Un espion approche et lui tend un document dans une pochette maron. Il le regarde avec un *il indifférent tout en étant complice. Il part secrètement dans un bus londonien. Le générique de la fin dit «Il a rêvé, donc il était. Il a douté, donc il était filmé ». C’est la citation célèbre mais modifiée d’un ancien entretien de Whitehead. Le titre «Je détruis, donc je suis » a servi encore une fois à la jeune génération des cinéastes alternatifs comme point de constat ou départ. Kaganof a détourné ce titre et voulait dire ainsi que les films de tous les grands auteurs sont des rêves ou des hallucinations personnelles, celles qui hantent l’univers personnel des cinéastes. Du moment qu’un grand cinéaste cesse de rêver ou de faire de cauchemars, il n’est plus actif lui-même mais il est filmé par d’autres. C’est très positif le fait que Kaganof a pris la relève de Whitehead et prolongé ses rêves dans un contexte plus contemporain. Et le reportage des protestataires du début est une autre clé pour deviner que cette «absence de preuves » n’est pas autour du «meurtre » de Whitehead par Kaganof. Il n’y a jamais eu un tel meurtre mais seulement une collaboration très positive entre deux générations différentes de cinéastes alternatifs, dont chacune a cherché à reconstituer l’esprit de contestation dans le film de sa période.

Cette «absence de preuves » serait la clé de la reconnaissance des artistes, des jeunes par les anciens. Les anciens artistes sont bien confortables dans la reconnaissance universelle tandis que les jeunes ont à se battre fort pour «renverser » toutes les absences de preuves de la critique, qu’elle soit de haut ou de bas niveau. Kaganof ainsi n’a jamais voulu «assassiner » Whitehead mais construire un nouveau chemin artistique en suivant ses traces à la manière de Thomas de Quincey, un nouveau chemin où «le meurtre est considéré comme un art majeur » comme dit ce dernier.

April 1968. New York. The barricade was in place. Metal filing cabinets piled on top of the university president’s mahogany desk, to which heavy chairs were tied with rope, locking the barricade against the ornate oak doors. The first blow of the axe split the centre door panel, the second gouged a hole big enough for a cop’s hand to appear, wearing a white protective glove. It turned in the air the way Fonteyn’s hand turned in the air when she was Ondine, emerging for the first time from the water, the way our hands turn when we dip them into a bath to test its temperature. The hand withdrew (during the Civil War it would have been hacked off) and further savage blows of the axe completed its work. Of liberation. The seven day student rebellion and occupation of Columbia university was about to be ‘bust’.

I ran upstairs to the top floor and took the film out of my cine-camera, put it into a tin and sealed it with tape before dropping it from a window into the bushes below, unseen by the ranks of armed police waiting to free the university from the pagan forces of anarchy. Soon I was walking through the splintered wooden doors with the other students, to be arrested. Eagerly the cops opened my camera (I had been a warned) to expose the incriminating film to the light. No film. I collected it the following day. A week later I was flying back to England with twenty hours of film which would later become “The Fall”, and be shown for the first time at the Edinburgh Festival, the last film I would make about the so-called Swinging Sixties; TIME magazine having given the era its belittling name.

Everyone knows the joke (is it a joke?) - that if you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t there. So where does that place me? I can’t remember really being there - true enough - but I can assure myself, remind myself I was there simply by looking at my films. My camera was certainly there! So are my ‘the truth’? More and more, inadvertently, they have inevitably become some kind of ‘undeniable truth’. But I was never fooled by the French for lens: objectif. I know my films were made by someone hovering outside of events, not yet painfully aware that the camera was not attaching him/me to the outside world, but preventing it. The plight of the man with the camera making so-called documentary films, is always to be the voyeur.

Sixties devotees who watch my films - the real thing man! - are mostly too young to have been there, they are a new type of audience for whom film has become the ‘only truth’, a new g-g-g-g-generation at college imbibing Media studies, convinced they can ‘know’, souls saturated with the seminal music of the times: pop music, the era’s true soul, digitally enhanced but ‘true to the spirit of those epic times’, they will say - who am I disagree with such a verdict on the satanic mini-symphonies of the Stones (still my favourites) born in the heat of the night of those stuttering, timeless times?

So the author of this clutch of documentary films is now an authority, as if at the time I was heading out to capture history, my place in history (to make it sound worse) not just filming what seemed to be going on - seemed to concern me. You don’t just go out and make the films you want; they happen to you, fomented by a communal opportunism, people on the make, careless offers of money, equally careless girls you can only ‘pull’ by filming them. I fear my ‘take’ on the Sixties is hidden beneath the only too visible surface ecstasy; the thrill of stealing ‘reality’ by means of the newly invented silent Eclair camera, fast colour films that did away with the tyranny of lights, the world on film appearing more as we see it, ‘as it is’, (the camera designed on the principle of the human eye), not as in good old the black-and-white days, of dreams etched on bread.

But things aren’t always what they appear to be, at the first (mis-taken) glance. My ‘take’ on the brave new world I found myself in, and lost myself in, was one of occult dread, suspicion, foreboding, bewitched by the premonition of personal and collective consciousness falling apart; falcons no longer able to hear the falconer.

Why did I bother to film at all? A kind of protection racket, to repay a debt, to attempt some kind of psychic defence against pain. I had been ripped apart by Godard and Bergman, mutilated by the authenticity of their pessimism, needing to imagine myself like them, in love, in bed, with their beautiful women, unavoidable empathy with their desolate visions as I was emerging ill-prepared for so much chaos in the first-ever world I had needed to grasp (haunted by dreams, unrealised fiction movies clouded with intimations of a former life in Ancient Egypt). I dream therefore I am. I doubt therefore I film. At the end of the abandon of the Sixties, feeling myself to be as ripped apart as the door was splintered by the New York cops, I gave up films, happy to be free of them, of needing to film, film, film, not able to walk along the street without choosing the camera angle, how much to zoom, what detail to focus on, to prove I was alive and part of it all. I sold my camera and escaped into the dubious solace of the desert, to trap and breed falcons (envious of their all-seeing eyes!) for twenty years. Until late in the 1980s, more disillusioned than ever with the so-called ‘real world’, I found another, infinitely more treacherous open space; the desert within; the empty white page. I gave up images again, choosing words. I started to write fiction, creating incorporeal images on a holographic screen ‘inside’ the mind. Fictions that were always screenplays.

So what truth do my films add up to, now, thirty two years later? Sixties London was a daunting place, as its soul was raped by an Imperialist culture hell-bent on dumbing it down to a spiritless faith in a world of objects - we becoming objects ourselves, coerced by the Media to desire to consume more, more, more. Desire Junkies. Thing Junkies. I must hope my films are more than a mere interrogation with the frivolous fable of The Swinging Sixties, the protest, sex, drugs and rock-n-roll antics of a pop-music-loving generation letting their hair down and having fun as it was never had before?

My films are not about me, or London. They are about America!

There was an apocalyptic optimism in the International Poetry Incarnation at London’s Royal Albert Hall, 11th June 1965 … electricity in the air and ecstasy in the hearts. As Allen Ginsberg read, one young girl rose to her feet and began moving slowly in a weird twisting dance, a marvellous moment. This vignette and others that characterized the whole, crazy joyous atmosphere was caught on film in Peter Whitehead’s Wholly Communion, a film that in intention and feeling prefigure’s Monterey Pop and Woodstock. Precisely! Monterey, Woodstock! America.

I’d gone to a poetry reading at BetterBooks to listen to Allen Ginsberg, having read Howl at Cambridge as a stelae of revealing, exposing the manifest sickness of the American soul in a sacred text, incandescent words of pain. Thirty people turned up to that solemn yet inspiring poetry reading, including myself. However, by midnight, stoned out of mind, the poets and various camp followers had decided to rent the Royal Albert Hall, invite Corso, Ferlinghetti, Vosnesensky, Yevtushenko, William Burroughs. Philp Larkin not on the list. Nor Stevie Smith. Only Americans could be so brash to imagine they could fill the Albert Hall with worshippers come to devour heroic sacramental texts, the dubious virtues of hitherto unheard Beat Poetry! Fearing (and yet wanting?) a total fiasco, I was eager to attend the event, soon dubbed The International Poetry Incarnation, �England! awake! awake! awake! Jerusalem thy Sister calls!�. Yup! I’d be there, camera in hand. 7000 people came, 2000 were rejected, the first great ‘Hippie Happening’ in London, the first indisputable manifestation of the so-far unacknowledged counter-culture. Who were all these people emerging from their Bronté-lined closets to listen to a bunch of stoned Americans? I shot 40 minutes of film, edited them to 33. The film won the Gold Medal at Mannheim Film Festival and was shown prime time on German TV; in English. A BBC hack declared it the worst film the institution had ever been offered.

A guy called Andrew Oldham phoned me, somewhat piqued I didn’t know him. I’m the manager of The Rolling Stones! At the time (working class boy sent to a public school by the Atlee government to become ‘posh’) I was listening to Janacek’s House of the Dead. Oldham sent a limousine. Was it true I could film without lights or tripod, I could be invisible, not interfere with events as they happened, not intrude and falsify reality? Yup! That’s me! Direct cinema, cinema Verité. Three days later I was filming the unlikely lads on tour in Ireland; envious of the erotic, pagan power over their nubile audience. At the Mannheim Film Festival, its specially-invited chairman Josef von Sternberg (defending me against a hostile audience claiming I’d made the Stones look drab and inarticulate) asserted that in thirty years time Charlie is my Darling would be the only film to survive; a faithful record of the times. Quelle clairvoyance! Unreliable portrait of a gaggle of scruffy English guys from the LSE who pissed in garages, played a pub in Richmond, lead singer with bruised swollen lips from too much fighting or sex, girls in mini-skirts (a new fetish) fainting in pools of urine? Songs by Chuck Berry, �It’s gotta be rock ‘n’ roll music, If you wanna dance with me.� Buddy Guy. Little Richard. The rent soul of America, finding its voice, refusing to be unheard, the anarchic foetal beat of the unborn; disenfranchised Chicago Blacks. As Stokely Carmichael fumed: people so poor that half the pet food sold in the city was the only meat they ate.

Later our lads would record plaintive, biting masterpieces of their own; Lady Jane, Ninth Nervous Breakdown. But without their financial success in America with Satisfaction, the Stones would now be merely the demented subject of a bunch of music promos (why dressed in drag, why in slow motion?) made by a cynical film-maker (turned falconer) who got the job because he claimed he could be invisible. Charlie is My Darling is about American music and the same fractured soul the Beat poets had bewailed. Now it was English music, too, conceived by a junta of English teenagers who didn’t know why they’d been so seduced; somewhere in their bodies an eerie strain of recognition, abused by the same cultural viruses. Doubt. Ennui. The excluded. Powerless. White Negroes.

Peter Brook asked me to film a ‘Living Theatre’ play he was improvising with his actors and some poets, called US. A double meaning; Us here, but US as in USA. A ‘documentary’ play aimed at revealing our tacit involvement with the Americans in the Vietnam war. The counter-culture in Britain did not start with mini-skirts and pop music but the Aldermarston March, Vanessa Redgrave and the Bertrand Russell Peace Foundation; for whom I was covertly editing films smuggled out of North Vietnam. A play about American political and cultural imperialism. The resulting film, Benefit of the Doubt, and Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (note spelling of Tonite) were shown at the New York Film festival in a double bill: The London Scene. Tonite was the social hit of the Festival. Kerpow! Andy Warhol. Rossellini. Henry Fonda. (But alas, where was Jane? In St. Tropez!). Two thirds of the audience walked out of Benefit, disgusted at seeing the Royal Shakespeare Company challenging the myths behind the waging by their ‘Military Industrial Complex’ of an ideological war in rural Buddhist Vietnam; unconvinced the war was about money, the true purpose being possession of the Michelin rubber plantations; as Bertrand Russell so eloquently insisted.

Tonite was also about America. The Swinging London myth became ‘fact’ because TIME said so: if TIME said London was swinging, trivial, vacuous, then it was. But as I show in my novel Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London - a ‘novel’ about the making of Wholly Communion - this TIME ‘take’ on London was a CIA/DIA (Disinformation Agency) manoeuvre to make British counter-culture appear inconsequential, impotent. The CIA had bought out Encounter Magazine and were as hell-bent on buying out The Left in Britain as they were in bombing it out of Vietnam. Bomb Culture, as Jeff Nuttall wrote. TIME sloughed off Britain as decadent, suffused with the toxic drug of teenage sex, vulgar fashion, primitive mindless pop music - nothing whatsoever to do with the political tropisms under the surface - deep, heart-felt protest against the abuse being inflicted on British culture by America. My novel pursues two DIA agents sent to infiltrate the independent film movement, who inadvertently finance the Albert Hall poetry reading, hoping it will be an embarrassing disaster! The rest is history …

Finally it was inevitable; I had to film in America, go to the source. Tonite had opened in Washington to rave reviews, but the same night Martin Luther King was shot dead, Washington was aflame. No-one could reach the cinema and the film was taken off after two days. I was asked to make a film in Hollywood, but was also offered money by an independent producer to make ‘Tonite Let’s All Make Love in New York’. Yup! Why not! But my ‘take’ was not what they wanted; a portrait of a city saturated with pent-up ‘violence’. So to get more money to complete the film I ‘fictionalised’ the narrative, added a theme about an assassination at a protest rally, the film-maker killing an innocent member of the audience; the ultimate act of protest; murder on film. I put myself in the film to challenge my own role, my voyeurism. (The first ‘video’ diary?) I was asking myself - was I finally participating in the revolution on the streets, part of the gang, or still safe behind my camera? I was accused of narcissism, of making a film to celebrate myself! But I was filming the occupation of Columbia University, April 1968, sleeping rough with the students! Benefit of the Doubt opened in Paris, 5 May 1968. Peter Brook and his actors attended the first night but the film was abandoned two days later. So much for bloody revolutions! The cinema was behind the Sorbonne barricades, the woman in the box office tear gassed.

In Columbia (while Godard’s La Chinoise was showing in Paris) I had filmed with the students, dreaming of a better world, being together in a way that seemed daring and right, singing pop songs: �Strange young girls, colored with sadness, eyes of innocence, hiding their madness�. Chanting: �We want the world and we want it now!� The police obeying orders, beating them to pulp. I was warned to leave America, they were after my film, which I’d prudently hidden in a fridge in a friend’s flat. Suddenly … film and reality were becoming indistinguishable. Arriving back in London, my semi-documentary script for my assassination film in my camera bag, the headlines greeted me: Bobby Kennedy shot dead. I had filmed a whole day with him, three weeks before. Had I killed him? Had I made it necessary with my films, celebrating him, exposing him, making him pure image, that he be shot? Shot on film, by film … Suddenly. This time the film was ’staring’ me - not Frank Sinatra! Or Woody Allen!

I had a nervous breakdown. Didn’t speak for 3 months. The Fall opened at the Edinburgh Festival … the device of cutting all but a few frames from a sequence, printing them as ’stills’ to give a ’stop-go’ effect is no mere gimmick, but absolutely right for suggesting the alienation, the unreality, the edgy beauty, the instability of our bright, ephemeral, syncopated world. The cutting between the sound and some bright hot colour patterns becomes abstract cinema in its own right - one might talk of a ‘Wagnerian’ type of visual music … Raymond Durgnat generously describing my new technique. But I had been trying to change the world not the language of cinema, confront the fascist tyranny of objectification of everything and everyone. I felt defeated, betrayed by film, my own film most of all. Vicarious avoidance of participation; a preoccupation which was its own predicament.

So I went off alone to the desert, Arabia, Pakistan, the Arctic tundra, pursuing the myth of the wanderer, ‘becoming’ the falcon I was hunting, the peregrine, Horus, the pilgrim hawk … Later writing novels like The Risen, the ‘inner story of the falcon’, another ‘take’ on myself and my past, trying to recapture and celebrate some of the wonder of first discovery, amazed to have survived ‘for real’ in such an impalpable, spectral world which others had seemed to experience as solid and tangible, trapped though they were in the prison house of reason; which we anarchists in the Sixties had tried so hard (yet failed) to bring to ruin.

Conspiracy theories? Moi?

this article first appeared here

– London, April 4th, 2008.

Aryan KAGANOF : I just want to thank Max for organizing this event. Then I want to thank my collegues from the Universtity of Malmo : gunnel, Lotta and lajos for being here. And very special thanks to my friend from Paris Dionysos Andronis who is here tonight with an extraordinary man who is the father of the independent filmmaking not only in England, not only in Europe but also in the universe : Peter Whitehead.

Peter Whitehead : «Je détruis donc je suis ». It’s about renewal, it’s about anarchy.
Dionysos Andronis : The destruction will lead to reconstruction.
PW : Absolutely. At the time when I said that and wrote it, it was scandalous. People where not supposed to admit it. There were the auteur destructivists, there were the destructivists in England and then there were the American destructivists that I used in my film « The Fall ». But my choice of title was very much in relationship to the french «Je détruis donc je suis », comme « Je pense donc je suis ». Well the essence of « the Fall » is a chalenge to rationality and to objectivity, but it was also obviously linked to the essential theme of « The Fall » which is the collapse of protest. The legal protest, which you could say and argue, is rational because it is within the legal space. It’s condoned and accepted. The point that protest as it did started to become illegal and to push it beyond, to the point that it became anacrhy, to the point that it became finally terrorism. Because the people at « The Fall », who were in the Columbia University and on the streets, were within 4 months of becoming the Weathermen who were terrorists, not even anarchists.
DA : Mark Rudd ?
PW : Mark Rudd, Rap.H Brown, Tom Hayden. All these people were associated in one way or another to what happened after May 68. And all of that came ahead to Columbia. Columbia was at the point this whole developping thing because it wasn’t just the University that was occupied by the students. Some were students but it drew in all the other radicals who were on the point of making that break saying : « Listen, legal protest isn’t going to work. They condoned us, we’ve been conned. Protest has become fashionable, you can read all about it in the magazines and dress up and look good on the Aldermarston march. That isn’t politics, that’s public relations, that’s consumerism ».

A point was reached clear to me. That point at that time that there had to be violent confrontation because we were being violated. You talk about political correctness. Political correctness was an act of violation of the freedom of individuals, not just women, which is why if you’ve been acted upon violently, if you’ve been violated, you do not have the moral right according to the laws of the state to stand up to it and fight back. You’ll bloody well have and if they are working out a strategy……..
DA : Ahh…here is Aryan !
AK : My apologies for being so late. We had a real crisis. There was no machine to play the DVD.
PW : Ill met by moonlight, well met by sunlight or by any old light.
AK : It’s a great, great honor to meet you.
PW : And for me to meet you too. And seeing your films and knowing what you’re up to and reading your poerty. Come and sit down now.
AK : You know, « The Fall » is one of those documents of the 20th century that defines kind of everything that went crazy and mad for the last 30 years.
PW : Well I didn’ look at « The Fall » for 40 years and having been forced to do it now in all those festivals and retrospectives and hear the way people talk like you do now, I look at it again and say : « yes, I did capture something at that moment, it was made at the spur of the moment but I captured it ».
AK : Everything in that film is so !…. You look at how media will develop after you and I think you are operating outside of yourself.
PW : Everybody says it could have been shot last year which is true, I assume it. I look at it now. Where did it come from ? It was a fascinating moment, it was in a transe. The whole thing was made as a long hallucination. Now I like «The Fall » and I try to make a sequel at the moment. The film I’m making now – I have not made a film for forty years – is in a way a sequel to it, it’s not a sequel, it’s developed from it. I just hope to get recognition with it.

PW : « The Fall » starts with the TV screen, the white dots, and it ends with it. It’s as somebody has been sucked. I’ve taken that idea and I’m making it the whole way. This is why I like what Dionysos brought with him. It reminds me of Yves Klein’s blue and I’m actually using it in « The Fall ». In the « Fall » you’ve got the little portable Sony recorder with me sucked in the image at the beginning and ending. It is really about being transformed. It is pure Debord.
AK : Before Debord. (Note : AK means before the film « The society of the spectacle » which is a 1973 production, 4 years after « The Fall »)
PW : Before Debord. It’s all about spectacle according to one persona, loosing touch with authentic experience. I’m trying to take one step further and deal with the idea of death, psychic death and that deep profound self-murder. If you are exposing yourself on that.

PW : Ah, look !
AK : It seems they are talking a lot ! They talk the English.
PW : About you !
AK : No , they talk about the future.
PW : You are the future ! ….. I’m going to start walking up. It’s going to take me twice as long. Might as well start now.

PW : I didn’t get the recognition I wanted at the time. So I thought it doesn’t matter, there are some things I much prefer and I decided to give it up. And I gave it up. But now it’s giving me the desire to start again. I’ve been very introverted for 30 years or so. Living in the desert is very introverted but using mountains as part of my scenery is good but I’m alone. I’m on my own. So it’s a little bit of a threat to feel that I have to communicate. If you write novels and you do like I’ve done for 30 years, its about that kind of solitude. I think it was Kawabata who said : « I write novels because I’m learning how to write novels », or something like this. I have my reasons, it’s not a big problem. The advantages I suppose outweight this. I don’t know whether I said that to the others. The chalenge of making a new film is to say : « Right, I wanted to relate to my novels. So I’m making now a film from my last novel ». Now the language that I had on my films in the sixties, you talked about it in « The Fall » which I abandoned and went off, I had developed in my writing, not in my filming. So now having got to the point where I’ve been writing french novels for fifteen years and getting no recognition, at last people are looking at my old films and say : « they are french films ». So I can say «Right it’s the french thinking, it’s Debord and Derrida ». It’s not writing in the english way. They are neither canadian novels.
So it gives me certainly a certain confidence. What I try to do now in my new film is quite openly and obviously to use some of the techniques and things I discovered and developed from the writing into the film.

PW : That’s the new film.
AK : It’s a good idea to go through the different chapters or sections.
PW : That’s what is going to happen. This was originally a novel or three novels on the website. The first one is called « Terrorism considered as one of the Fine Arts » which comes from the play by Thomas De Quincey « Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts ». The second novel is called «Nature’s child » which is about eco-terrorism and assassination. It relates the eco-terrorism and assassination and various things. The third novel is called «Girl on the Play ». It’s a pastiche and plagiarism of Kawabata’s novel «Snow Country ». Do you know it ? You must know it ! He made an amazing film in Japan. This film is a version if you like of the original novel which was put on the internet as a kind of interactive novel. All the things of the novel were developed in the satellite website. You could click on one of them and go on each one of them. So, in fact this one is related to the japanese Noh play. If you want to know more about the Noh play, you can click on the Noh play and say « it’s an assassination ». So, you go in the assassination thing and it opens actually « The Old Man in the mountains and the Hashishin ». You can develop the myth, you can read about the mythology of the Hashishin. There’s also another website called « The Absent Father ». I relate it to the myth of the assassination. So if you want to explore some of the themes that are in the three novels, you can do so. That’s all words. This is now going to be a film.

The novels are about largely one single feminin character called Maria Lenoir. She is the girl to commit an act of assassination. It’s like an eco-terrorism and she is part of the revolutionary cell called The Rainbow Warriors. The person she is going to assassinate actually turns out to be someone now considered in the french nuclear industry, working for the « Echelon Network ». He turns out to be the guy who set up the operation that sunk the Rainbow Warrior boat in the New Zeland harbor thirty years before. I’m taking the idea of that original state terrorism and now dealing with a young intelligent sophisticated young girl who is prepared to become an assassin. Because she has the perfect victim. Because by killing the Satin Woman she brings all the things together. So, the original novel was set in Cumbria and was about a nuclear plot. It’s actually about selling fake plutonium to Japan which is why the three novels are about. It starts in Cumbria and goes to Nature’s child. One is about the murder. The assassination involves the guy Michael Schlieman. It’s much closer to «Daddy». It’s actually a novel that explores that sort of sado-masochism, sexual sado-masochism, which can put in this particular character. That’s the novel’s characterization in a certain context. This is how a particular woman has been pushed so far. She is snapped. She is prepared to sacrifice herself. The word « sacrifice » comes from the latin « sacrefacere » which is to be related to what the muslims are doing with their suicide bombings. I’m not related with that specifically but it’s there.

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Each and everyone of us as an individual as a body, especially women, much better or different or more extraordinary sacred attitude to the material world and my feeling is that all this is about this transformation. The idea if you like is about this total transformation into virtuality, into severance. « Sévérance. Différence comme sévérance » or whatever. Actually it’s about how we are destroying the environnement. This is our environnement, this is the food we eat, this is the air we breath. So in fact it’s about this gap opening up now, at such extraordinary speed, between the human being who no longer feels himself or sees himself an authentic part of nature.

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PW : What’s your next film ?
AK : I think we have to make a documentary about your film ! It’s so extraordinary ! The dots are joined for us because I picked this book this morning at the Tate Modern. It’s an essay called «The sick man » and it is about pollution. «Pollution is in fashion today, exactly in the same way as revolution. It dominates the whole life of society and it is represented in illusory form in the spectacle ».
PW : The two key words are here : « spectacle » and «fashion ». When things become totally fashion, you’ve lost everything. This is why in «The Fall » you have Alberta dressed in the fashioners and you have Gloria Steiman saying : « Protest has become fashionable ». Once again, it’s easy to protest. You’ve been conned. You’ve been brought out. That is not the spectacle of the violent revolution but the spectacle of the State and of the whole thing called consumerism.
AK : It was in 2000 when I discovered the mobile phone and made this film in 2005 (note – he means « SMS Sugar Man »). Since then it has become fashionable, an example is this conference. And I realized that the moment when the mobile phone was actually subversive, it was then actually a vehicule. The film hasn’t been released yet. I don’t have a cellphone. I came to this conference with the film but I refuse to be part of the banalification of what was a subversive moment.
PW : Just there the difference is between the banal and the anarchic being subversive and being submissive and being enslaved in it. I’m just going to it now. People forget that for this cheap cellphone is why the Americans are bombing Iraq. Because they need the economy and the energy to sustain the technological advance. To «feel » it litteraly. Yes, to feel it ! I said that to my novels.

PW : You see, Schlieman who writes novels and writes for MI6 is sent to Vienna to infiltrate the Rainbow Warriors and find out who Maria Lenoir is. His front is that he is making about subversive culture in Vienna. So, they are filming him. There are two films. This film ends with the death of Michael Schlieman and him being interrogated. It is an imaginary interrogation, 90 minutes of film, with your soul being weighted by agony. It’s the moment of truth. And everything is in his «memoirs », his memories. He is remembering the real time. Is it filmed or no ? So the film is an interrogation. It starts from the very beginning with him being interrogated, being chalenged, by those two people, the male and the female, that he will never see. Because the guy, when Daumal is finally murdered with his gun (it’s Michael’s gun and his bullets that commit the murder), it is possible that he fell in love with Maria Lenoir. He conducted her assassination. When they got the computer in front of him, in front of them, when you click on this now its not going to eclipse. That’s the key. When they, depending on the question, when they are asking a question, but what does he answer ? Then they might think. They go on and they may look at it to say anything because he is drugged on morphine. Because his time is opium or whatever (Thomas de Quincey, etc). We are quite sure about it. Deliberately. Telling lies obviously to cover up his Maria’s murder. As I was saying in a way, once you’re into this website, which it’s really going to exist, those satellite websites in clip of his film, which - I suppose it - Michael Schlieman wants to put together. These two people who are asking him questions are finally editing the film. And they might go back, but we pulled the rug. Finally and absolutely and utterly. From one objective truth. It is actually about pure Debord or Baudrillard. Everything has become this diaspora or fragmentation and fractal kind of disintegration. So I’m now in Baudrillard rather than Debord because Baudrillard’s the one who said «Nothing dies anymore ». Michael Schlieman cannot die or he doesn’t want to die because he wants to tell the truth about what he did for MI6.
AK : He wants to tell the truth, what truth ?
PW : Well, he has to tell it in his memoirs on the internet. This is the Michael Schlieman memoirs. This is the truth about what really happened with him working as an agent. His truth, his version of the truth, his memoirs. And he has to be careful because MI6 can erase them. So the memoirs have to be fluid, protean, they have to be forever moving around from one place to another. From one different website to another. «Fiction becomes infinity ». We don’t know, nobody ever knows what will happen next, the story that Michael Schlieman tells in his memoirs which are on the website. And in this film is the truth about the real event. « Fiction becomes infinity » is a great chapter. It was in fact the subtitle originally of the Nohzone.com website.

PW : And the «in-terror-gation » goes on. He has to be «in-terror-gated ».

AK : I have one more quote here for you (he writes with his pen on a piece of paper ) :

« Just say NO to the war on terror »

Transcribed by Dionysos ANDRONIS
Transcription par Dionysos ANDRONIS

« Rien n’est véritable dans ce film et tout est permis » annonce le prégénérique de ce documentaire de fiction sur la personnalité étrange et le travail du cinéaste anglais Peter Whitehead. En partant de l’électrocardiogramme du cinéaste, tel qu’il était le lendemain de son double infarctus (du 3 août 1996) les vidéastes Chris Petit (auteur du film « Radio On ») et Iain Sinclair (qui est très connu comme romancier) se livrent à une improvisation fictive pleine d’images névrotiques afin de recréer librement l’angoisse existentielle d’un grand artiste qui a frôlé la mort mais qui lui a échappé de très près grâce à son désir de vivre et de créer. La première partie du film s’intitule « Lettre d’un homme mourant ». Elle est basée sur une lettre fantastique que Whitehead aurait envoyé à deux amies : la photographe Françoise Lacroix et le mannequin russe Olga Utechina. Tourné en vidéo numérique, le film est un hommage au style « cinéma vérité » pour un cinéaste emblématique de la contre-culture, ou une hallucination de 70 minutes sur les différents aspects de l’activité de notre héros. Lacroix, en se demandant « pourrait-il être mon propre père ? », raconte d’une manière intime son admiration pour le cinéaste tandis que le réalisateur Chris Petit, en profil et à contre-jour, raconte son admiration pour le caractère bohème de notre héros, disant en argot que Whitehead est « un jeune ouvrier qui baise le système de l’intérieur ». Ses entretiens télévisés des années 60 à 1995 s’enchaînent en surimpression. Mais Whitehead, ironiquement, nous annonce que « Aucune femme n’a jamais eu autant d’activité sexuelle avec moi que mes faucons. Je me suis entraîné à copuler avec eux». Cette phrase à lui pourrait justifier le titre du film. Kathy Acker, morte la même année que le film, nous laisse une partition mélancolique.

La deuxième partie du film s’intitule « En éteignant la lumière » et consiste à révéler le rapprochement spirituel de notre héros avec Howard Marks, un genre de Timothy Leary anglais, théoricien de la « drug culture » anglaise, qui raconte plusieurs passages de leur vie commune. La troisième partie du film s’intitule « Deux messieurs du club des cadavres ». Le vieux poète Francis Stuart et Stewart Home, un jeune romancier et théoricien de la contre-culture, y racontent leur admiration pour Peter Whitehead en séquences entrecoupées.

En créant un effet d’asymétrie entre les trois parties du film, les vidéastes Petit et Sinclair nous offrent un petit trésor sacrilège et un portrait gonflé de leur objet de culte artistique. En suivant le principe dadaiste de faire l’éloge à travers la parodie, les auteurs exposent au début du film leur obsession fataliste en commentant « A 5h35 du matin, le 3 août 1996, le moment précis de la résurrection de Sirius, Peter Whitehead a souffert d’une crise cardiaque et a été hospitalisé à la Clinique Cromwell ».

Dionysos ANDRONIS

peter whitehead, aryan kaganof and dionysos andronis (photo CA CA CA - Jean Bourbonnais).

directed by paul cronin

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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