 Although unquestionably one of the most remarkable maverick British
filmmakers of the 1960s, Peter Whitehead's impact on British film culture is
often underestimated. Given the mercurial character of his career, in some
respects this is unsurprising. Like the man, his work defies easy
categorisation, and his films are not widely distributed. Consequently they are
rarely seen. Paradoxically, much of his iconic documentation has surreptitiously
disseminated the myths of the 1960s: footage from his films regularly turns up
in television documentaries on Britain in the period.
An exceptionally bright and gifted lad born to working-class parents in
Liverpool, the young Whitehead benefited from postwar educational reforms and
won a scholarship to Cambridge University to study science. He later became one
of the first students in the newly opened film studies department (Britain's
first) at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, headed by film director
Thorold Dickinson.
After the Slade, in early June 1965 he filmed a gathering of 'Beat' poets,
including Allen Ginsberg, at an unexpectedly packed Albert Hall. The event
confirmed the arrival of an alternative to mainstream youth culture in this
country, later known as the hippy movement. Meanwhile the film, Wholly Communion
(1965), successfully captured the excitement of the event and attracted much
attention to Whitehead as the leading British practitioner of the then new
experimental documentary style: 'direct cinema'. The following year it won the
Gold Medal at the Mannheim film festival in Germany.
The success of Wholly Communion led him into a career of filming
performances, both on stage and in the streets. A film of the Rolling Stones'
1965 tour of Ireland, Charlie is My Darling, sprung him into a career making pop
culture films, culminating in his most successful and widely known film, Tonite
Let's All Make Love in London (1967). A 'pop concerto for film' that spoke to a
cross-section of Swinging London's most seminal faces - Michael Caine, Julie
Christie, David Hockney - with a psychedelic Pink Floyd soundtrack, it remains a definitive document of the English Summer of Love.
Tonite's transatlantic sequel was filmed on location in New York. To capture
what was in the air in that city, however, he entered much darker territory as
he chronicled assassination, race riots and students protesting the Vietnam War.
Cut with an unsettling, fragmented editing style, The Fall (1968) impacted on
his mental state, culminating in nervous exhaustion and an eventual abandonment
of filmmaking at the peak of his talents. Instead he embraced an exotic new life
in the Middle East, trapping and breeding rare falcons for Saudi Arabian
royalty.
The outbreak of the first Gulf War in 1991 compelled Whitehead to return to
England. In 1996, while making The Falconer with Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit (a film for Channel 4, which Whitehead publicly rejected), he suffered a massive
heart-attack and went through a near-death-experience. He survived and today
continues working in his latest incarnation, as a novelist.
Stuart Heaney
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FILM & TV CREDITS
