From Alienation to Hallucination: Peter Whitehead's The Fall and the Politics of Perception in the 1960s

Figure 1.

Peter Whitehead shooting The Fall, 1967-1968

Figure 2.

Peter Whitehead shooting The Fall, 1967-1968

Figure 3.

Peter Whitehead shooting The Fall, 1967-1968

Figure 4.

Peter Whitehead shooting The Fall, 1967-1968

Figure 5.

Peter Whitehead shooting The Fall, 1967-1968

Figures 6-8.

Peter Whitehead shooting The Fall, 1967-1968

Figure 9.

Robert Kennedy in The Fall, 1969

Figure 10.

The Fall, 1969

Figure 11.

The Fall, 1969

Figure 12.

The Fall, 1969

Figure 13.

Title card for The Fall, 1969

On September 26, 1967, the New York Film Festival screened the program "The London Scene," comprising two documentaries by thirty-year-old British filmmaker Peter Whitehead, who had flown to America for the occasion. Both the rollicking Tonite Let's All Make Love in London, now hailed as the quintessential portrait of Swinging London, and the sober Benefit of the Doubt, a critical examination of a theatrical production about Britain's role in the Vietnam War (both UK, 1967), played to a full house and were favorably reviewed. Somewhat cantankerously, Whitehead refused his accolades, complaining in his journal that the critic for the East Village Other (to name but one of his targets) was "fooled by the superficial obvious exterior commercial trappings of Tonite and the protest value of Benefit," vowing "next time—it must go much farther."¹

After the screening, two young New Yorkers suggested to Whitehead that he make a film about their city; this inspired him to return in October with the intention of making a grave documentary about "where power lies at the moment," for which he planned to interview figures including presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy, New York mayor John Lindsay, and Black Panther Stokely Carmichael.² But by the end of November, the project had permutated from an investigative report into an avant-garde feature film: in order to attempt a statement more substantive than that of his earlier work, he would integrate his documentary footage with a fictional story about a man "who decides to translate his despair and his will to protest into an act of premeditated murder" by assassinating a stranger at a rally.³ Returning again to New York in April 1968, Whitehead filmed happenings about town, interviews, and sequences of dialogue; he even joined the infamous student occupation at Columbia University, an event that radicalized his politics (he subsequently declared himself "ready to take a gun and die," and actually bought one) and precipitated his return to En gland in June, under threat of surveillance and harassment by federal agents.⁴ In a remarkable coincidence of timing, Robert Kennedy was assassinated the day Whitehead left America, mirroring the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on the day of Whitehead's most recent arrival. Unable to "distinguish any more between what was real and what wasn't," Whitehead suffered a breakdown and spent "a harrowing three months" convalescing by editing his footage into The Fall.⁵

On one level, the resulting chef d'oeuvre is a tripartite allegory of the historical transition from nonviolent protest toward more radical forms of action in the late 1960s, made at a time when widespread social transformation seemed both possible and imminent. On another level, it is an experiment that attempts to "go much farther" than Whitehead's earlier documentaries by asking whether film—a medium that Whitehead described as ideologically compromised by its fundamental ties to the experience of illusion—can effect real change. In overlaying its examination...