Abstract

This major interview appeared in the January 1969 issue of Films and Filming. Along with a similar piece that was published virtually in parallel by Stephen Crofts in Cinema, it represents one of Whitehead's key statements made on the subject of The Fall at the time of the film's completion.1 Although the idea of student revolution in En gland has not been taken too seriously, in other countries over recent months it has taken on a strong po liti cal significance. Protest was beginning to have little effect. Finally it became violent and developed into student rebellion. The Fall is the first film that participated in the revolution. It was made by Peter Whitehead who is probably the most creative and original of the young British filmmakers. His approach and work could form the basis of a new in de pen dent British cinema. After his success with Wholly Communion and Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, which won several festival prizes, Whitehead was offered several major films to direct. But instead of becoming part of the commercial system he chose to make his own personal film, where his only responsibility was to himself. Here, in an interview, he describes how he went to the United States and found himself part of the birth of a revolution. As well as directing and photographing The Fall, Whitehead plays the film's central character. There are certain moments in our life when we transcend ourselves, our self- preoccupation, our search for self- realisation, and manage to achieve what I like to call communion with the outside world. This is not necessarily mystical, it means really being totally integrated with what we experience of the outside world whether it's a person we love, the objects we live with or work with, the city we live in and so on. When the outside world is threatening, it alienates us. Nowadays, we find it increasingly more difficult to identify with the outside world, as it indulges in violence, consumes itself with obscenities like the war in Vietnam, or when the Media become the weapons of frustration, provoking our needs and deliberately never satisfying them. Frustration, deliberate alienation, and then supply is the moral basis of the consumer society. You can only escape into inner space and try and create relationships there. This is possible for someone who has travelled the world and knows what it's all about. It's not possible at sixteen when you're bored with methedrine, when you believe the world is really only there when there's mescaline in your blood and when you don't really know or care if your parents are still alive in Liverpool. The vacuum inside can be as easily filled with the horror of the Hydrogen bomb, as is the world outside, even if it is only the insane who believe it is really inside them! This absolute alienation, from the outside world and from one's own inner world, I try to expose in my film. Finally, in the face of this destruction by the outside world, you must project your own inner death and despair against it. You must revolt. There must be revolution. There is. It is very young and immature because it is largely being created by young and immature people, but I believe, deep down, it is the only solution. There must be a return quickly to an education, a cultural education, that leads people into the revolution and beyond it, beyond simply destroying the outside world of THEM, to creating OUR world, outside, in which there will be far, far more we can identify with and with which we can happily and proudly communicate. But it has to be done quickly, now, because, let's face it, this is not 1917. It takes two hours to get film on the TV sets of a rocket attack in Saigon. The Computer is creating society at its own speed and so it must be destroyed at that speed too, if it cannot be turned to the ser vice of the revolution. Let it be programmed to teach people to return to the real world, instead of making them retreat from a prefabricated, symbolic, competitive one. …

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call

Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.