A couple of weeks ago, as the news spread that the New York novelist Paul Auster had died, a black-and-white photo of him circulated on social media. It shows Auster in his early twenties, wavy hair swept back, dark crew-neck sweater. He looks off to one side, his fingers outstretched towards something out of frame. He is strikingly handsome, like a French movie star of a bygone era; a young Jean Marais, an Alain Delon.
The picture is a still taken from The Fall, a messy fiction-documentary shot by British director Peter Whitehead in the US between October 1967 and May 1968, and released in 1969. The novelist’s death wasn’t the only reason why this image was doing the rounds. Whitehead had filmed Auster by chance. He was a face in a group of students occupying the Mathematics Building at Columbia University during protests in the spring of 1968. The revolt had begun in March that year, sparked off by revelations about the university’s secret involvement with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a military think-tank. Tensions rose when members of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) were sanctioned over a protest about Columbia’s relationship with the IDA, which contravened the university’s rules against indoor demonstrations. Students and locals alike were also furious that the university was building a new gymnasium for its exclusive use on nearby Morningside Park in Harlem. The plan mandated separate entrances for students and for Harlem residents—it was nicknamed “Gym Crow”—and the development inflamed the mood on campus. But these were symptoms of deeper anxieties: Vietnam, civil rights, despair at a world run by rich old men.
Throughout the 1960s, Whitehead demonstrated an uncanny knack of being in the right place at the right time. He was in New York working on The Fall when he heard about the Columbia protest. Sensing this was something he couldn’t miss, he decided to visit the upper Manhattan campus with his camera, tape recorder and his assistant Sebastian Keep. There he shot footage of activists H. Rap Brown and Stokely Carmichael speaking on behalf of black students who had occupied the university’s nearby Hamilton Hall. He toured sit-ins at the Fayerweather Hall and Low Library. The students occupying the Mathematics Building had barricaded it from the inside, but with the help of Melvin Margolis—a young filmmaker and member of the Newsreel collective—Whitehead gained entry through a second floor window, intending to stay and film either until the students decided to end the occupation or until the police broke it by force. According to his journals—take with a pinch of salt—he was shortly after challenged by student Tom Hurwitz, the occupation’s “head of defense” and later a filmmaker himself. “Look man I'm sorry,” said Hurwitz, “I know we let you in, but you'll have to go. There's no argument. We have decided.” Whitehead pleaded his case, trying to convince Hurwitz that he was on the side of the students. “My third [film] was banned in Greece only last week […] and my last film was the only film about protesting against Vietnam to come out of England.” Then Hurwitz twigged that he had seen Whitehead’s work at the New York Film Festival the previous year. “Why didn’t you tell us who you were!? I know all about you…”
In The Fall, we see shots of chairs, desks, and card file cabinets piled against the entrance doors, defended by a second line of fire hoses. Whitehead catches Auster on camera at a meeting chaired by Tom Hayden, co-founder of the SDS. Hayden, a little older than the others, sits on a desk at one end of the room with half-a-dozen student representatives, quietly guiding the conversation. Hurwitz is discussing responsibility for cleaning up, mopping spills, sweeping broken glass, making sure that emergency flashlights are where they should be. The group is sat on the floor. One man is taking a nap face down and has a copy of Dubliners by James Joyce sticking out of his back pocket. The camera lands on Auster, and watches him in a tight close-up as he takes a smoke from a woman sat next to him. The shot pulls out a fraction. Her hand rests on his shoulder. She looks at him affectionately. The pair seem to be half-listening to the discussion, half-involved in their own private exchange.
Whitehead had originally gone to the US in September 1967 for the New York Film Festival. He screened two documentaries, Benefit of the Doubt and Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, the two films Hurwitz had seen. (Whitehead writes that he later met another student in the Mathematics Building who had also been at the film festival. “She was pretty scathing about my films because she felt I was a depressed, pessimistic person but I was trying too hard to cover [this] up.”) Benefit of the Doubt was a record of director Peter Brook’s anti-Vietnam War play US, staged at the Aldwych Theatre. It featured actress Glenda Jackson speaking the immortal line: “I want to smell the running bowels of fear over the English Sunday morning smell of gin and the roasting joint and hyacinths.” Tonite… was an impressionistic portrait of London under the sign of pop; a blaze of psychedelic colour and clothes set against a backdrop of postwar dilapidation and establishment tradition. It featured actors and rock stars talking about the new moment. Syd-era Pink Floyd drove the soundtrack. After the festival, two theatre producers, Iris Sawyer and Elinor Silverman, put it to Whitehead that he should make another film like Tonite… about New York. They raised the financing to allow him to get started. But as he began work a few weeks later, the director found he was more interested in America’s social unrest than in the New York scene.
In the early 1960s, after a brief stint studying painting, then film, at the Slade School of Fine Art, Whitehead had apprenticed as a cameraman for Italian news television. He learned how to shoot verité-style on handheld equipment and developed a keen eye for the small detail which might tell a big story, for what material would work best in the edit. The techniques allowed him to be nimble, an artist disguised as a reporter. He caught the aftermath of riots in New Jersey and went to Washington DC to film the March on the Pentagon. (The Fall includes a self-deprecating Robert Lowell reading his poem ‘The March’: “I sat in the sunset shade of their Bastille, their Pentagon, / nursing leg and arch-cramps, my cowardly, / foolhardy heart.”) In New York Whitehead’s camera drank in the neon, the skyscrapers, the buzz of radio and glow of TV. He shot countless street marches, filmed pro-Vietnam War rallies attended by zealous young conservatives and scenes of ordinary people arguing in the street about American foreign policy. In one memorable vignette, a respectably-dressed older woman, outraged, tells the crowd gathered around her that the daily cost of military spending could cover two years of rat extermination in the city—a true New Yorker’s take on the war. Whitehead filmed Robert F. Kennedy on the campaign trail. He captured performances by Bread and Puppet Theater and the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a Robert Rauschenberg ballet, and the artist Raphael Montanez Ortiz destroying a piano and dismembering a live chicken in the basement of the Judson Memorial Church.
After returning to the UK to review his material, Whitehead decided to put it to use in a loose fictional narrative. He began to imagine The Fall as a personal film, a psychological portrait of a place. It would be a self-reflexive work about the power of media technology, his big statement about how violence in America was internalized by its people through its communications industries. He would involve a handful of actors and tell the story of a British filmmaker visiting the USA, an underground De Tocqueville, who decides to carry out an assassination. He wrote in his journal that “this must indeed be a masterpiece and can be”—Whitehead was short on modesty and long on bravado—“it really has to be the definitive film at this historical moment in time in world history.” But when he returned to the US in the spring of the following year to continue production, events overtook him at speed, and his confidence began to crack.
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In Paul Cronin’s 2007 fascinating portrait of Whitehead, In the Beginning Was the Image, the filmmaker comes across as a reluctant witness, a man who spent the 1960s trying to dodge the zeitgeist only to keep running headlong into it. For Whitehead, the 1960s didn’t sour with Manson and Altamont in 1969, as the conventional US narrative holds. He believed it was grim from the start. The peace movement didn’t originate with the Vietnam War, but with the horrors of World War II, with the Aldermaston anti-nuclear marches and the “angry young” writers of the late 1950s. What held the UK counterculture together wasn’t LSD and Carnaby Street clothes but anger at what Whitehead described as “the institutionalization of imperialism against the Third World […] against the old monotheistic, patriarchal, Tory, righteous, British elitist shit.” He believed the best account of the 1960s was poet Jeff Nuttall’s memoir Bomb Culture, published in 1968, before the decade had even finished, an extreme and complicated book described by the playwright Dennis Potter as “an abscess which lances itself.”
Whitehead said that he disliked pop culture, said that he only rarely went out, preferring to spend his nights at home in his flat reading and writing. But you could easily have mistaken him for the archetype of a Swinging London man. Son of a Liverpudlian plumber and a factory worker, he was working-class and on the up, part of a symbolic reshuffle in British society in the 1960s. Scholarship to private school, then Cambridge University, provided him with self-confidence and the social camouflage of an upper-middle-class accent. Whitehead was handsome and raffish. He had a flat in the middle of London’s West End and seemed to know everybody on the scene. The new, young aristocracy featured in his films: Michael Caine, Julie Christie, Jimi Hendrix, David Hockney, Vanessa Redgrave, and the Rolling Stones, among others. He had relationships with talented, creative women, including the artists Penny Slinger and Niki de Saint Phalle.
In the early 1970s he went to France and made the bizarre, psycho-sexual movie Daddy with de Saint Phalle (“From the moment I met Niki I was in a surrealist movie. Perhaps a horror movie,” he said in an interview with Virginie Sélavy.) Later that decade he made Fire in the Water with another woman he was involved with, Natalie Delon. But by then he had made sharp off-road diversion from film and taken up falconry. By some accounts he gave, this career followed a revelation in the Egyptian department of the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. By others, it was after seeing a man communicating with birds in an Edinburgh square. Falconry took him to north Africa and to Pakistan. In the early 1980s he moved to Saudi Arabia and with funding from Prince Khalid al-Faisal set up a falcon breeding centre at the top of a mountain. There he lived and worked until the outbreak of the First Gulf War in 1991, after which Whitehead returned to the UK and poured his energies into writing fiction. (In Cronin’s film he also adds death threats from the Spanish mafia to list of the reason he gave up falcon breeding.)
He married into the Goldsmiths family. Rumours floated in the margins of counterculture histories about his friendship with drug dealer Howard Marks, about alleged links to the intelligence services, about his interests in mysticism and the occult. In 1998, Chris Petit and Iain Sinclair made an experimental film portrait of Whitehead for Channel 4, titled The Falconer, deliberately smudging rumour with fact, which led to Whitehead and the film’s directors falling out. Until the early 2000s, his films were difficult to see. Fragments of them surfaced here and there as anonymous archive footage in other people’s accounts of the 1960s. (Watch Catching Fire, a new documentary about Anita Pallenberg, and you will see Whitehead’s work standing in to represent the 1960s pop explosion.)
The director, who died in 2019, was an expert at self-mythologizing. In Cronin’s documentary he tells his life story to camera, and through his digressions gives away his contradictions. He was a raconteur, prone to grandiose statements, but at the same time, he appeared haunted by doubt about the value of his work. He was self-absorbed, but also curious about other people and by the natural world. He tilted at the establishment while taking opportunities offered to him by “British elitist shit” and Saudi royalty. He spoke with pride about his personal relationships, said he was sympathetic to feminism, but in sexist language little changed since the macho 1960s. He was a decent painter who ended up making pottery. A classical music lover famous for his pop documentaries. An artist who gave up art for endangered birds of prey. A trained news cameraman who distrusted reportage and played with the truth.
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After making The Perception of Life, an inventive short film about the history of science and microscopy, Whitehead’s major break came in 1965, when he was handed the opportunity to film the International Poetry Incarnation at the Royal Albert Hall. Wholly Communion captures readings by the poets Harry Fainlight, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Christopher Logue, and Adrian Mitchell among others. We see the writer Alexander Trocchi, the event’s MC and shadowy magus of the London counterculture, lurking at the side of the stage and we hear arguments, cheering, laughter, heckling. But what’s most fascinating is its footage of the audience packed into the smoke-filled Albert Hall, their clothing and attitudes catching an inflection point as beatnik London begins to cross-fade into a hipper, but heavier, psychedelic phase. Whitehead somehow makes the auditorium look vast and intimate at the same time; from one angle his restless camerawork gives the impression of the event taking place in a small club, and from another, a cathedral. The energy in the room is prickly, chaotic. There is a palpable sense of something new coming into being that night, of ‘the underground’ suddenly seeing itself in public in all its uneasy alliances and fragmentary, social coincidences, all of which could disintegrate at any moment. Wholly Communion captures a truth about incoherence often lost to the glue of history and nostalgia.
The film led to a phone call from Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who asked Whitehead to follow the group on tour in Ireland. (“How could I tell him I spend all my time listening to Verdi's Requiem,” he wrote, “that I never go to nightclubs, have never danced to pop music in my life, […] the perfect re-creation of hell on earth for a long-suffering sensitive soul like me!”) In Charlie Is My Darling the Stones are musically confident, but somewhat unsure how to perform for the camera, cockiness masking an awkward immaturity, perhaps shyness. Whitehead is drawn to recording the mayhem that erupted at their gigs, to scenes of fans grabbing and pulling at the members of the band who struggle to keep playing or escape off stage. Michelangelo Antonioni reputedly watched a cut of the film at Whitehead’s flat, shortly before shooting The Yardbirds for his milestone film Blow-Up.
Promotional film work followed for P.P. Arnold, the Beach Boys, Hendrix, Nico, and the Small Faces. Then came Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London. Whitehead thought of it as a retort to Time magazine’s 'Swinging London’ article, published in April 1966, and the emerging media narrative around the city. It’s his first-hand account of what it was like to be embedded in a particular version of mid-1960s London, the one which would later be mistake for everyone’s experience. We see curious nuns browsing clothes at Biba, anti-war marches, the 14 Hour Technicolor Dream rock concert at Alexandra Palace, Pink Floyd in the studio. He repurposes his Stones footage from Charlie Is My Darling, taking scenes of fans invading the stage and putting them in slow-motion in order to pull out a violent subtext. The film’s interviews capture the inchoate feelings of the time, artists struggling to pinpoint what is happening around them. Edna O’Brien discusses female promiscuity. David Hockney says that he finds two footballers on a new Royal Mail stamp sexy. Mick Jagger almost manages to articulate something about violence and consumerism. An insouciant, self-described “dolly bird” talks about her “do what you like, no one cares” lifestyle.
Tonite… strives to be more than a straight documentary. Interviews are cut with long sequences of blurring light trails and strobed shadows of dancers. The camera ogles a naked woman covered in body paint. We see Eric Burdon of The Animals recording a song in the studio, intercut with aerial footage of World War II bombers and fighter planes. There are jumps, dissolves and non-sync sound. The camerawork is casual and present in the moment. With this film, Whitehead was embarking on an inner voyage, reaching for a psychological evocation of his London, edging closer in style to the work of his French New Wave idols or what glimpses of underground cinema he may have caught. But his artistry doesn’t quite hold together. It’s outstripped by his talent for reportage, his remarkable right-place-right-time luck. Over the years, Tonite… would suffer the fate of becoming its own Sixties souvenir.
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Whitehead flew back to New York to continue work on The Fall in April 1968. He arrived the day before Martin Luther King was shot, and soon after filmed King’s memorial service in Central Park, positioned a few feet away from Sammy Davis Jr. As the impact of King’s assassination sank in, he became horrified with the fictional premise of his project, the filmmaker as murderer. “By this time,” he said in a 1969 interview for Films and Filming, “I had a lot of film. What about?—going out with an idea, and discovering it was a wrong one!” The Fall began to mirror his increasing feelings of personal alienation and preoccupation with his responsibilities as an artist. “I was pretty screwed up, I must confess.”
Whitehead used his camera compulsively, as if trying to satisfy a scopophilic urge. It was a mask to hide behind. In a peculiar novelization of Tonite… published years after that film was finished, he wrote, “I can hold the black mirror up to keep the light from burning out my face.” The bulk of The Fall is a blitz of political demonstrations, rock music, happenings, and naked models, weighed heavy with portent and sermonizing about politics and media. Whitehead plays the filmmaker. His girlfriend at the time, Alberta Tuburzi, is cast as Anna, a glamorous Italian model. Angelo Mannsraven plays his driver, credited only as “Driving the Cadillac.” It is hard to understand the roles they serve. Whitehead mopes around his apartment and obsessively watches the TV news. He speaks to an unseen producer on the phone, rolls around in bed with Anna, films her dancing naked in front of his desk. He stares at his editing table and makes sententious remarks about the nature of objectivity and the media. He fixates on his role as a participant-observer. A raucous cover of Leonard Bernstein’s ‘America’ by The Nice roars through the soundtrack. There are lengthy montage sequences—protests, happenings, riots, parties, his own face flickering on a TV screen—accompanied by Whitehead’s bossy voice-over. In these passages the film goes slack, as if Whitehead can’t decide what to do with all the footage he has shot but can’t bring himself to lose any of it on the cutting-room floor either.
Whitehead adored the French New Wave. He was the first to translate Jean-Luc Godard’s screenplays into English. (Decades later he would write a prose poem titled ‘Jean-Luc: I Hate You!’) But his influences were his directorial weaknesses. The Fall is missing what critic Marjorie Rosen called the “lightness” of the French directors, with their “goofy and occasionally soaring mix of cultural touchstones, political outrage, and heady romance.” It takes Whitehead the news cameraman to snap his audience to attention. A tense argument in the street about Vietnam. A stump speech by RFK. Dreamlike footage of model Penelope Tree posing on the subway. And then, in the final third of the film, the Columbia University protest.
Here The Fall changes completely in tone. It could be a rough assembly cut from another film. First we see Whitehead’s camera point-of-view as he balances along a narrow ledge towards a bearded young man—I think this is Melvin Margolis—who smiles at the camera, points inside the building and motions for him to keep quiet. The camera turns to look through the window. Students lay on the desks and floors, fast asleep as if a spell has been cast on them. Boredom and anxiety mix with a sense of purpose. There are meetings, there’s dancing in the reading rooms, a couple making out in the hallway. We see a makeshift canteen and handmade signs trying to draw order and responsibility out of the ad-hoc. Kids perched on the upper floor window ledges sing “We Got the Whole World in Our Hands” to passers-by on the street below who wave and smile. Buckets filled with food and supplies are lifted into the building.
On his voiceover Whitehead tries to stick to facts, but he can’t resist the drama of the moment. He quotes Albert Camus: “‘When everyone is guilty, it will be a democracy,’” he says, “but institutions are built to dissipate guilt, and at Columbia, claimed the institution, only the students were guilty.” The complexities of life inside the sit-in go unmentioned, perhaps because Whitehead is too deeply embedded to see them. (For those accounts, watch Cronin’s monumental oral history of Columbia ’68, A Time to Stir.) He gives a thumbnail outline of the background to the protest and explains that Columbia is a private institution with investments from the corporate sector. The students, he says, would be attacked, impugned and patronized in the media, brutalized by the police, threatened with expulsion and financial penalties.
Then the inevitable arrives. A bagpiper plays a valedictory anthem in the stairwell as students clap and stomp their feet on the wooden boards. “Our revolution!” they chant. Whitehead shows piles of furniture at the bottom of the main staircase. More barricades are shoved against the windows. His film slows, its grain thirsty for any light it can find in the gloom. The sequence is both moving and frightening. The cops begin to push their way inside. Whitehead runs out of film and the sound goes dead. In his journal he writes that he knew anyway that “it would have been suicide to try to film them attacking students.” He describes throwing his cans of film out of the window into bushes below, then making his way down the stairs, punched and kicked by the police all the way to the bottom, trying to resist the urge to hit back.
Next is a shot of a young man, his head bleeding, leaving the building. Students are bundled into paddy wagons. Whitehead collides footage from the Mathematics Building raid with the aftermath of another confrontation he filmed weeks later. The timelines blur. A pair of priests, wearing homemade Red Cross arm bands, anxiously speak to someone on a walkie-talkie. Mark Rudd of the SDS—later the Weather Underground—addresses a crowd. Cops lasso a man by his neck and bring him crashing face-first to the concrete. A student is stretchered to an ambulance while chased by a TV news crews lugging lights and cameras. “It was truly the ugliest sight in my life,” Whitehead wrote. “I was terrified. I never guessed it would be like that.”
Robert Kennedy was killed day Whitehead left the USA to return to Britain. The filmmaker had a nervous breakdown. As he tried edit sense into his material, he swore to never make another movie again. The following year he broke that promise and shot Led Zeppelin live in concert. But The Fall remained the pivotal moment in Whitehead’s film career, perhaps because he could not find the shape he was looking for in what he had shot. “I changed nobody by making The Fall,” he later reflected. “I was just adding to the plethora of images.”
He recorded pictures of protest and injustice that would later become the staple of TV documentaries and educational films, the kind of thing which would be chopped into a short clip salad along with other eye-witness film and military footage of bombs dropping on Vietnam, glossed with Hendrix playing All Along the Watchtower. But in its lack of resolution and clarity, The Fall offers something of specific value. The film is an example of an artist trying to take something from the world—a story, an image, a substance—and make it reflect their own feelings and stylistic ambitions. But they find that the material is too hot, too big, to be bent into the service of their art. The artist is left with the feeling that history is laughing and heckling them from somewhere near the back row of the Albert Hall.
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