<i>Wholly Communion</i>: Scenario, Film, Novelization

Abstract

The phrase wholly is a recurring motif in Peter Whitehead's fi lm and fi ction, punning Holy Communion of Christianity and at least two forms of communion that Whitehead aimed to achieve in his cinema of 1960s- that which breaks down borders between artist and theme, fi gure and ground, subjective and objective, and document and reality; and that which blurs boundaries among people sharing an aesthetic experience that is authentic and powerful enough to propel consciousness beyond temporal and material limits that habitually hem it in. While efforts to bring such communions into being characterize virtually all of Whitehead's fi lms, Wholly Communion (UK, 1965) is- as its title suggests- one of his most concentrated, focused, and vibrant endeavors along this line. Wholly Communion is most obviously a spontaneously fi lmed account of International Poetry Incarnation, an event involving members and fellow travelers of Beat Generation that took place at London's venerable Royal Albert Hall in 1965. At same time, Wholly Communion is motion picture equivalent of Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, a novel that Whitehead published in 1999, which swings with Beat- style abandon among visions of what actually happened, what might have happened, and what couldn't possibly have happened to a variety of actual and fi ctitious people before, during, and after legendary event. The richly synthetic quality of both Wholly Communion and Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, conjoined with heterogeneous content of Incarnation itself, place these twin embodiments of Whitehead's swirling vision under cultural rubrics that Soviet theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called and carnivalesque. Dialogism fi nds one of its polyvalent meanings in concept of many equally privileged and fully valid consciousnesses dynamically posed on boundary between one's own and someone else's consciousness, threshold where everything internal . . . is to outside, revealing that very being of man (both external and internal) is deepest communion.1 This is an excellent precis of spirit that was heard, seen, and felt at Incarnation. It is passionately conveyed by Whitehead's novel and fi lm, which portray every consciousness involved in event as a singularity that is turned outward, intensely addressing itself, another, a third person, seeking ecstatic state of eternal co- rejoicing, co- admiration, con- cord that constitutes world symposium in its ideal form, which is to say, dialogic fabric of human life itself.2 Generated by communing minds that experienced Incarnation June 11, 1965, event's polyphonic dialogues continue to thrive in Whitehead's fi lm and book, with Whitehead as psychic intermediary linking singular event with mythic meanings it has been acquiring ever since. The latter point- that Wholly Communion is less a record of Incarnation than an extension, amplifi - cation, and intensifi cation of it- is illuminated if we think of fi lm not as an object for beholding but as a component of a dispersed, multitudinous system. This system constitutes what phi los o phers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call a machinic assemblage- a set of intertwined networks that perform, regulate, effectuate, and guide converging and diverging fl ows of desire, expression, content, and becoming. Considered within this framework, Whitehead's movie resembles a music recording as theorized in Deleuzian terms by Drew Hemment, who observes that when a recording is played and listened to, the fi nal statement is deterritorialized and set adrift in multiple, uncertain circumstances that can never be fully prescribed in advance, presenting only a snap shot of . . . materials and codes circulating in technological networks. In this context, matter at hand in Wholly Communion is understood not as that which was seen, spoken, and heard while Whitehead's camera and sound recorder rolled but rather as a set of multiple, mobile strata that territorialize and deterritorialize afresh every time fi lm is viewed. …