I Dream Therefore I Am. I Doubt Therefore I Film, <i>Guardian</i>, 2002

Abstract

The following is full, unedited text of an article by Peter Whitehead that appeared in Guardian on November 22, 2002. It was published on occasion of a series of screenings focused on Whitehead's work held at Other Cinema in London, called Peter Whitehead: The Complete Retrospective 1964- 1969. While operating as a useful introduction to Whitehead oeuvre for an audience circa 2002, it is at same time working in retrospective collaboration with Films and Filming interview from 1969. As echoing titles suggest, Whitehead is repeating, developing, and advancing ideas of earlier statement in this recent piece. April 1968. New York. The barricade was in place. Metal filing cabinets piled on top of university president's mahogany desk, to which heavy chairs were tied with rope, locking barricade against ornate oak doors. The first blow of axe split centre door panel, second gouged a hole big enough for a cop's hand to appear, wearing a white protective glove. It turned in air way Fonteyn's hand turned in air when she was Ondine, emerging for first time from water, way our hands turn when we dip them into a bath to test its temperature.1 The hand withdrew (during Civil War it would have been hacked off) and further savage blows of 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 top floor and took film out of my cine- camera, put it into a tin and sealed it with tape before dropping it from a window into bushes below, unseen by ranks of armed police waiting to free university from pagan forces of anarchy. Soon I was walking through splintered wooden doors with other students, to be arrested. Eagerly cops opened my camera (I had been warned) to expose incriminating film to light. No film. I collected it following day. A week later I was flying back to En gland with twenty hours of film which would later become The Fall, and be shown for first time at Edinburgh Festival, last film I would make about so- called Swinging Sixties; TIME magazine having given era its belittling name. Everyone knows joke (is it a joke?)- that if you can remember Sixties, you weren't there. So where does that place me? I can't remember really being there- 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 films the truth? More and more, inadvertently, they have inevitably become some kind of undeniable truth. But I was never fooled by French for lens: objectif. I know my films were made by someone hovering outside of events, not yet painfully aware that camera was not attaching him/me to outside world, but preventing it. The plight of man with camera making so- called documentary films, is always to be voyeur. Sixties devotees who watch my films- real thing man! -are mostly too young to have been there, they are a new type of audience for whom film has become truth, a new g-g- g-g- generation at college imbibing Media studies, convinced they can know, souls saturated with seminal music of times: pop music, era's soul, digitally enhanced but true to spirit of those epic times, they will say- who am I disagree with such a verdict on satanic mini- symphonies of Stones (still my favourites) born in heat of night of those stuttering, timeless times? So author of this clutch of documentary films is now an authority, as if at 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 films you want; they happen to you, fomented by a communal opportunism, people on make, careless offers of money, equally careless girls you can only pull by filming them. …