Requiem for the Sixties, Film Proposal, 1974

"Requiem for the Sixties" was one of the originally suggested titles for the project that became Fire in the Water. This early proposal, written in 1974, outlines the intended critical impetus of the film, its attempt to diagnose the consequences of the sixties, and the decade's extensive symbolic mediation. Just as The Fall captured the late sixties shift from protest to violence, Requiem in particular encapsulates the sense of retreat and seclusion that characterized the postsixties "comedown."

Requiem for the Sixties, a Film by Peter Whitehead

Introduction

The decade of the Sixties already seems to be sufficiently lost in the past, for us to be able to cast a historical eye upon it. The nostalgia that brought back the 30s, then the 40s, then the 50s ... is at work. There has been so much gloom, so much emptiness since 1970, that it now seems even more necessary to ask the question ... what happened in the Sixties? What did we do to ourselves? Why has it turned out like this? At least we may ask the question and try to propose an answer.

Is there not a direct link between the optimism that so characterised the Sixties and the pessimism and flight from reality that characterises the so young, and yet so annihilating Seventies?

It is probably impossible to say what really happened in the Sixties. But is it not irrelevant, especially to the subject of this film, how the people remember it?

It seems to be unanimously agreed that the Sixties was a period of optimism, enthusiasm, pleasure ... the "Swinging Sixties." And so must the film begin.

It was the decade of POP, when the culture of the young took root and flowered as a multi-petalled blossoming of pleasure, of music, of art, of fashion ... but above all of pop music and POP as an idea itself. A way of life. But what was POP?

It was the label of the young. The badge of the teenager. It was the journalistic description attached to anything and everything that the young—mostly the teenager—did, or made, or expressed ... but most of all, consumed. It was the decade when the teenager became such an economic block in itself, that the grown up world almost took the teenager "seriously." It did so as long as the teenager paid. It stopped ... when the label of POP became the label of protest and eventually revolution.

The teenager, under the image of its own identity, united by the banner of POP, International POP, stood up and demanded to be taken seriously. It stood up and voted ... and voted against the world that had nourished it, and lost it. The teenager ego exploded and deluded itself, and in an ill founded revolt, challenged and confronted even civilisation itself. It became suddenly political. It started by legal protest. Then the methods of protest, like the war in Vietnam, escalated. And the same flair and experience that, on the surface seemed so innocent and young and refreshing started to become the screen behind which deep, fundamental changes were about to make themselves manifest in the world spirit.

At first, protest was considered merely POP style, part of the POP fashion. It was "natural that the kids should like to rebel a bit." But did anyone imagine that such a bunch of kids on a march could stop the war in Vietnam? Did anyone imagine that this sub-culture, this underground of humus of narcissistic self-indulgence, would explode on the surface so resolutely in the Student Rebellions that the Sixties would end with the students being shot dead within the University walls?

This film must reveal, with authentic documentary footage throughout, that the Pop movement was from the start pre-occupied with a dream of violence, of revolt ... that it was never a mere teenage frolic and prank that had got out of hand. Underlying the optimism from the start, was an honest and radical faith in the possibility of changing the whole structure and meaning of the western world as we saw it and felt and experienced it. A faith which was put...