After <i>The Fall</i>: Politics, Representation, and the Permanence of Empire in the Cinema of Peter Whitehead

Abstract

Peter Whitehead's difficult and disturbing 1969 masterpiece Fall is a fiercely po liti cal and, by now, a richly historical film. In it, British Whitehead addresses great conflicts and pressures of his day, which far transcend film's American setting. Whitehead had come to York City in September 1967 in conjunction with screening of his two recent films, bundled as The London Scene.1 Invited during his visit to make a film in United States, Whitehead leaped at chance. America, in his view, was at time the most important place in world to be filming by virtue of its unique capacity to project its power globally and re sis tance its power met.2 York City, where great portion of Fall takes place, contained symptoms of disease that . . . was carelessly destroying world.3 Immersing himself in American culture, Whitehead quickly abandoned his initial plan to produce a somewhat innocuous portrait of New York Scene, as film's first backers had wished. After numerous revisions of its concept and moments of personal, po liti cal, and creative crisis, project took on layers of depth, morphing into what would become Fall.4 Described by Whitehead as summation of all his films, Fall was also last he would make for nearly forty years.5 With a suffocating compression, Fall traces narrative arc from protest to re sis tance to revolution that came to define Leftin United States and elsewhere. It stands among most vivid testaments of agony and ecstasy of movements that on a global scale sought, ultimately in vain, to take down an imperial system based in American might. But more than a chronicle of Left, Fall captures diffuse chaos that made era for so many worst and best of times- terrifying, disorienting, and exhilarating all at once. Part documentary, film is a quintessential document of sixties. But if film's jarring power is obvious, any certainty about it ends there. Fall lacks a conventional plot and employs both a surrealist aesthetic and techniques of cinema verite. Anyone without a taste for experimental is likely to be exhausted or even baffled by nearly two- hour film. Wellversed in radical sixties and era's edgier arts, I nonetheless found that repeated viewings only enhanced my appreciation of film's complexity and challenge of making sense of it. Consulting Whitehead's extensive commentary on Fall, as well his multiple written outlines for it, served both to clarify and unsettle its possible meanings. film, in sum, seems a giant puzzle whose pieces multiply harder one tries to discern its overarching pattern and whose pattern changes more pieces one connects. root of challenge is that Fall is about so many things at once: power, protest, violence, art, film, agency, repre sen ta tion, media, subjectivity, and reality. One suffers with Whitehead as he tries to determine their interrelation. effort- driven by a mind that appears to know, contemplate, feel, see, and ask too much- pushes filmmaking to its boundary, where it questions its own legitimacy and risks incoherence. It also drove Whitehead, by his own admission, to brink of insanity. He likewise confessed that assembling film from his vast stores of footage entailed reconstitution of his shattered subjectivity. Honest about what remains film's fragmentary nature, Whitehead captions Fall with line, A Film as a Series of Historical Moments Seeking a Synthesis.6 Analyzing film may be approached as an effort to crafta synthesis, to make movie whole by integrating its moments. I propose nothing so ambitious, and in fact question that such a synthesis is possible. Instead, I offer two plausible readings of Fall based on my impression that it is a twice- told tale, a film doubled on itself through its overlapping treatment of two broad themes: politics and repre sen ta tion. …