Abstract

This review essay appeared in the first issue of Afterimage: Film and Politics (April 1970). When Peter Whitehead began to shoot The Fall he was a man behind a camera, looking at events through the peephole of its viewfinder to make a documentary record of Protest. But the events he witnessed called in question his human right to remain merely an observer. He began to feel increasingly the fraudulence of claiming that in making a film about protest he was in fact protesting. His own impotence, hate, and isolation began to supplant external events in his consciousness to the point where there seemed no resolution but his own death. It was at this point that he found himself inside the buildings held by the students in revolt at Columbia University: he became a participant, making his own act of protest in common with them, his camera empty. Here was something to record that was more than a mere cata logue of events. He resolved his conflict in terms of film by trying to show his own reaction to events and embroilment in them: subject, object, and subjectperceiving object become identified as one. He made a film which would simultaneously show himself making the film. At the beginning, he says Sometimes outsiders see us in a much clearer light than we see ourselves, and sets out to film New York in 1967 because he saw it as the exemplary environment of modern frustration. He is the Outsider, indulging his senses, detached from concern. But he is forced to realise that even if an outsider can see clearly (which is questionable), it doesn't follow that the media can communicate that clarity of vision, and that perception in any case is not enough. The nature of the sickness of these people, of this world, is that they are all outsiders too: to feel alive, he has to be of these people, of this world, not just see them. This realization did not come easily to him, either in fact or on film. Its awakening, and the extreme difficulty of finding means to demolish the wall between his own fragmented selfhood and the external world; and then the means to communicate the whole pro cess through a medium poisoned with cliche and anaesthetized by accepted conventions of film audience response, are the most important substance of The Fall. The first two sections of the film record the struggle to annihilate self as an entity in order to emerge from alienation, and in effect pose the question must we do to be saved- a question not answered in the final section, which is mostly straight documentary of the Columbia revolt. Although he may have seen his participation in violent protest as an answer at the time, the foregoing sections of the film have raised questions of a profundity which reveals this protest as being merely the resolution of the first stage of his dilemma and misery- and that of all of us- not their conclusion. But it's what he has bitten offthat matters more than whether he can chew it. We have been made aware of problems and their consequences that we have all agreed to forget for some centuries passed, yet which underlie our present condition, and are essential to the alleviation of it. Setting out to explore the motive forces of revolution, Whitehead leaves aside the economic level as already understood, expecting to strike gold on the strata of psychology and sociology. But the attempt, in itself, takes him deeper: into questioning the very nature of Self and of Being, onto a level of ontology with implications for beyond simple motives for revolution in this time and place. It is in the light of this that the film's subtitle A Film as a Series of Historical Moments Seeking Synthesis is to be understood, not as an academic exercise in drawing together the threads of events. This is not fashionable. It is much too unsettling, showing the armour of freudenschafte, and indignant confliction of the radical groups to be made of cardboard, and not without a patina of sanctimoniousness. …

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