Peter Whitehead and Terrorism

Avant-Garde

In April 2007, Peter Whitehead was invited to London's Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) to talk about some of the pop promo films he had made in the sixties. His frenetically edited clips of Eric Burdon and World War II dive-bombers played on a kaleidoscopic program of similarly themed film and video work by the likes of Gerard Malanga and Nam June Paik. Interviewed onstage after the screening, Whitehead patiently fielded the usual questions about his work with the Stones and Hendrix in a further display of the seemingly endless public appetite for nostalgic sixties anecdotes. Toward the end of the session however, he was asked about his thoughts on contemporary film: as a director primarily associated with the sixties—perhaps the pivotal decade of the twentieth century—who, in his opinion, did he feel was making interesting work in the twenty-first? Whitehead paused momentarily before announcing that the greatest film of the twenty-first century had, in fact, already been made. It had been made in New York on September 11, 2001, and it had been made by Osama bin Laden. Heads shook and there were no more questions.

Here, Whitehead was recapitulating comments he had made a year earlier in "In the Beginning was the Image; before the Beginning was the Avant-Garde." This was an essay on the current status of avant-garde art written as the preface for La Cinéma Critique (2010), a book on experimental film published by the Sorbonne. In it, he argued that in the current cultural context, the terrorist has rendered the artist redundant having "learned the tricks and gambits of art's artifice." Working from the basis that "the true purpose of the avant-garde" is to "nurture (if not enact) acts of war ... a calculated violation of frigid sterile form," Whitehead presents Bin Laden's "cleverly contrived film of Several Missile Planes" as a supreme example. The events of 9/11 and the widely disseminated matrix of footage are seen to be monumentally effective in creating a work that is "directly and belligerently dangerous." Whitehead goes on to suggest that Bin Laden's "legacy—his film" should be called Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts, a phrase that would have significant resonance for his own subsequent work.1 He took it as the title for his 2007 novel, which he then adapted into a full-length film that recently premiered at the Viennale.

Terrorism as art. What to make of this? The icy response of the ICA audience indicates that the connection obviously doesn't work as a joke. Is this uncomfortable juxtaposition intended as provocation or an expression of misanthropic delight? Whitehead is certainly no stranger to the former. As a filmmaker, he is best known for a series of documentaries, the most incendiary of which are Benefit of the Doubt (1967), an account of the Royal Shakespeare Company performing the play US, and The Fall (1969), an examination of the decline of the American protest movement. Benefit contains a sequence in which Glenda Jackson delivers a monologue begging for the horrors of the Vietnam War to be brought into polite English gardens. Similarly, The Fall presents the viewer with riots, police beatings, and equally brutal performance art to suggest that violence is the inevitable outcome of initially peaceful protest.

Much of the critique in these films was directed toward the paralysis Whitehead saw as characterizing mainstream responses to Vietnam; the public inability or unwillingness to adequately make sense of a seemingly distant conflict. His comments on terrorism could be taken in the same spirit—a cultural wake-up call designed to trouble Western complacency. The problem with this comparison is that 9/11 essentially fulfills the mid-sixties wish of Peter Brook and the Royal Shakespeare Company; one of the entanglements of American foreign policy is devastatingly realized in the domestic sphere. As such, a crucial difference emerges. The performance documented in Benefit shows the use of an art form—dramatic theater—to galvanize political commitment. The elevation of the twin tower attacks to the level of art could be seen...