Memory Material and Material Memory: The Film Archive of Peter Whitehead

A topless boy is climbing on the Eros statue in London's Piccadilly with playful determination. A crowd has gathered and police look on with a mixture of bemusement and concern. The boy is tripping on LSD, but he has also interrupted the controlled flow of life in central London and at one level challenged the idea of the monument and at another reclaimed the notion of love (Eros) from a nineteenth-century architect. It sounds like a perfect poetic short film. The filmmaker who recorded the event, however, doesn't present us with a conventional piece of observational cinema; his camera zooms in and out and he moves from side to side—sometimes with a steady action, sometimes less so. This isn't the result of someone trying out his camera for the first time, uncertain of what he is doing though; this is a work in progress by documentary filmmaker and countercultural force, Peter Whitehead.

Whitehead's film archive is substantial and includes material representing the varying stages of his film feature production as well as a number of other sequences never formally used. Spread between the British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive and Contemporary Films, it ranges from material shot during Whitehead's time at the Slade School of Art—The Theft (UK, 1963) and Parallels (UK, 1964)—through to his last film to be made on celluloid, Fire in the Water (UK, 1977). There are theater performances, pop films, footage of volcanic Iceland, outtakes from The Fall (UK, 1969), longer sequences from Tonite Let's All Make Love in London (UK, 1967) (both directed by Peter Whitehead), and more besides. Study of the actual celluloid on which these moments were captured offers two discrete but interlocking forms of information. On one hand, we can identify quantifiable details about the material—the stocks that Whitehead used, the extent of any decay, the use of color or black-and-white, etcetera—and on the other, we can reflect on the clues and details they offer about his practice and approach to filmmaking.

This secondary information is latent in the material and requires (more overt) interpretation. It's a little like when the filmmaker in Whitehead's Fire in the Water reviews his archive of sixties happenings and unlocks some kind of hidden power. Details, information, and clues about Peter Whitehead's practice are contained in the actual celluloid evidence that survives.

The Boy on Eros sequence (as the archive calls it), for example, suggests much about Whitehead's style when seen in juxtaposition with his other work. But first, a little background. When Peter Whitehead made his energy-infused documentation of the International Poetry Incarnation in 1965, Wholly Communion, he did so with limited resources. He was used to the tight schedules thrust upon him via assignments for Italian TV, but the Beat poetry reading at the Albert Hall, which brought thousands of people and several hours of reading, drinking, and lunacy, was a different kind of challenge. Whitehead had just forty minutes of film and an Éclair 16 mm camera with which to shoot it. The situation forced him to engage fiercely, shoot selectively, and edit with considerable thought and inventiveness. The finished film, Wholly Communion, was highly distinctive and received the Gold Medal at the prestigious Mannheim Film Festival and also prompted commissions from the manager of the Rolling Stones and theater director Peter Brook. It is a matter of interpretation, but looking at the films that came later—particularly sequences in Tonite Let's All Make Love in London—Wholly Communion also seemed to lay the stylistic foundations for elements of the work to come.

Arguably, in all his subsequent work, when Whitehead wanted to create urgency and play with a reportage-like aesthetic, he acted as if he was still in the Albert Hall. He wouldn't so much reflect drama as create it. It's like in Boy on Eros, where he zoomed and kept the camera moving, even though he was essentially standing still. It's as if he was acknowledging the passivity of documentary...