Shooting Star: Peter Whitehead and 1960s Documentary

Abstract

Shooting Star:Peter Whitehead and 1960s Documentary Michael Chanan (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Peter Whitehead filming Benefit of the Doubt, 1967 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. Glenda Jackson and Mark Jones in Benefit of the Doubt, 1967 [End Page 324] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Peter Whitehead filming Benefit of the Doubt, 1967 [End Page 325] A decade into the twenty-first century, the 1960s remains a period whose significance and image remains to be recovered and contested. There is the dominant and mediatized version, that of "flower power" and Swinging London, and there is the version that persists in the memory of those who participated in what we then called the counterculture—this writer thinks back to those years in the first person, for whom the decade began when he was fourteen and thus coincided with his coming-of-age in the seething London of the time. As Peter Whitehead—who is nine years older than me—observes in Paul Cronin's film portrait of him, In the Beginning Was the Image (US, 2006), the idea of Swinging London was an invention of Time magazine. For him (as for myself) the sixties were the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and the Aldermaston marches; the movement against American imperialism and the war in Vietnam; and the Dialectics of Liberation, a two-week conference in 1967 at the Round house, London's leading alternative venue, which was or ga nized by a group of psychiatrists—or in the lingo of the day, antipsychiatrists—led by R. D. Laing and David Cooper. The list of participants is a very good guide to the principal currents of thought of the counterculture. Most were American, including Stokely Carmichael and Allen Ginsberg. They included radical academics who had emerged into prominence after the eclipse of McCarthyism and the election of John F. Kennedy as U.S. president. Several were explicitly Marxist, and a good number were European or European-born: the names include Gregory Bateson, John Gerassi, Paul Goodman, Jules Henry, Herbert Marcuse, Paul Sweezy, and (from Paris) Lucien Goldman. In other words, the po liti cal orientation of the gathering was strongly powered by civil rights and revolutionary militancy, [End Page 326] crucially informed by Marxism but in the spirit of Sartre's critique of "lazy Marxism"—in a word, libertarian. I do not recall the presence at the Roundhouse of either Communists or Trotskyites, but I do seem to remember references, in the spirit of anti-imperialism and solidarity with Vietnam, to the Cuban Revolution, Fidel Castro, and Che Guevara. Peter Whitehead was the shooting star of British documentary cinema in the sixties, who rose and fell with the counterculture that he documented, and in Cronin's film calls "a sort of cultural revolution." If the root of this revolution in America, along with the civil rights movement, was the Beat Generation of the fifties, then the En glish equivalent were the "Angry Young Men," the mediatized epithet taken from John Osborne's play Look Back in Anger, which appeared in 1956 and was brought to the screen by Tony Richardson three years later. Richardson's film launched the British new wave, alongside Jack Clayton's Room at the Top (UK, 1958) and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning by Karel Reisz (UK, 1960). Curiously, when Whitehead speaks of what cinema consisted of for him in the early sixties, these are not the films that figure. He says, "You're talking about Bergman, Godard, Fellini, Antonioni. That was the cinema, completely. There was nothing else . . . that's what I was brought up on. God knows why I ended up making documentary films." But perhaps the omission, apart from marking the European orientation of metropolitan film culture in the United Kingdom, also signals, in Whitehead's case, a subconscious act of distantiation from what in fact was closest to him, the milieu of the London-based British new wave. Because in terms of habitus (to invoke Bourdieu), the concept of "in dependent filmmaker" that operated in Britain in the sixties came from the Free Cinema group of the preceding decade and...