Wholly Communion: Scenario, Film, Novelization

The phrase "wholly communion" is a recurring motif in Peter Whitehead's film and fiction, punning on the Holy Communion of Christianity and on at least two forms of communion that Whitehead aimed to achieve in his cinema of the 1960s—that which breaks down borders between artist and theme, figure 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 the temporal and material limits that habitually hem it in. While efforts to bring such communions into being characterize virtually all of Whitehead's films, 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 filmed account of the International Poetry Incarnation, an event involving members and fellow travelers of the Beat Generation that took place at London's venerable Royal Albert Hall in 1965. At the same time, Wholly Communion is the 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 fictitious people before, during, and after the legendary event. The richly synthetic quality of both Wholly Communion and Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, conjoined with the heterogeneous content of the Incarnation itself, place these twin embodiments of Whitehead's swirling vision under the cultural rubrics that Soviet theorist Mikhail Bakhtin called the dialogic and the carnivalesque. Dialogism finds one of its polyvalent meanings in the concept of "many equally privileged and fully valid consciousnesses" dynamically posed "on the boundary between one's own and someone else's consciousness, on the threshold" where "everything internal . . . is turned to the outside," revealing that the "very being of man (both external and internal) is the deepest communion."¹

This is an excellent précis of the spirit that was heard, seen, and felt at the Incarnation. It is passionately conveyed by Whitehead's novel and film, which portray every consciousness involved in the event as a singularity that is "turned outward, intensely addressing itself, another, a third person," seeking the ecstatic state of "eternal co-rejoicing, co-admiration, con-cord" that constitutes the "world symposium" in its ideal form, which is to say, the "dialogic fabric of human life" itself.² Generated by the communing minds that experienced the Incarnation on June 11, 1965, the event's polyphonic dialogues continue to thrive in Whitehead's film and book, with Whitehead as the psychic intermediary linking the singular event with the mythic meanings it has been acquiring ever since. The latter point—that Wholly Communion is less a record of the Incarnation than an extension, amplification, and intensification of it—is illuminated if we think of the film not as an object for beholding but as a component of a dispersed, multitudinous system. This system constitutes what philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari call a machinic assemblage—a set of intertwined networks that perform, regulate, effectuate, and guide converging and diverging flows 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 final 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, the 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 the film is viewed.³ The film "that also 'happened' that night at the Albert Hall," in Whitehead's words, also "happens" again every time it is shown, watched, heard, or thought about...