Second Take of Imaginary Narration

Abstract

Second Take of Imaginary Narration Peter Whitehead This text is transcribed from the finished version of The Fall. It is a monologue that is spoken in the opening scenes of part two of the film: "The Word." It is the narration in Peter Whitehead's voice as he writes at the table and Alberta dances around him, distracting him, turning the music up when he turns it down. The sound of the words is partially obliterated. This text presents the full narration as spoken, before the "erasures" inflicted on the monologue by the very loud sound. The City of New York. The Time: the Fall 1967. Now . . . Capital of Capitals . . . and of Capitalism. There is an image of New York inside all of us, sold to us by photographers . . . film-makers . . . A metropolis of Power, where men, worshipping success, build bridges, roads, white buildings . . . Cathedrals to scrape the sky . . . of God . . . except, of course, those Gods who help us to build more bridges, more skyscrapers, more white buildings. The City as symbol of man's ultimate protest against the anarchy of nature, man's power over the empires and communes and jungles of his fears. The City is built BY the people FOR the people . . . it belongs to the people. It is a symbol of their highest ideal . . . freedom. Built with their free enterprise, it is the Capitol of the Free World. But if the City seems to be falling apart, they say it is an illusion. It is because the people in it are moving past it faster and faster. It is not because they are alienated from it, afraid to look at the buildings which now seem no [End Page 525] longer to contain them. The escalation of fear condemns them to addiction to the present, the instantaneous, to the Now, to the New, to the News . . . They become like young people, exiled from the past and from the future. They can no longer claim, idealistically, that they do not live in this City, but in an imaginary one which will be built in the future. So they say that the City has gone mad. It is miraculously building itself with machines, computers, structures which are out of control and accidentally producing proof of their absence. A real world must be somewhere else. So . . . falling away from the City into themselves, the people develop an insatiable hunger for material things . . . desperately trying to make everyone and everything into objects, fragments of protection against the imminent loss of the world, which is now only the sensationalism of the present . . . Finally they insulate themselves from the world with the Media, which feed them the sensation of remaining in touch with the real world . . . But the Media, to remain profitable, exploit the alienation by allowing no withdrawal from needing more objects . . . and for this price, they offer their spiritual and cultural ghettos as substitutes for the world. But, I am a reporter. I report the facts. I have to tell the truth. I have to be objective, which means my subjects have to be objects: if you object to that they can be subjects; you begin to see the problems. Sooner or later you have to take sides. There are no objects left which are not proof of alienation. I came to this City as an alien, a foreigner . . . knowing that a stranger in a City discovers the City . . . or more about himself . . . If you have destroyed yourselves in the suburbs of one city, there are no other cities in which you can escape from yourself. The world is a world is the third world. If you know your enemy you cannot kill him. But society refuses to conceive of a social meaning for death. Fear of losing control of images, or words . . . losing control of objectives . . . The camera is designed on the principle of the human eye. To be objective. I have taken sides . . . I have found myself asking questions. What fragmentation inside the people has made them create such a jungle in the image of themselves? What suppressed fears and violence have exploded against the world, which their Institutions and Corporations and Governments have failed so miserably to control...