Reviews
14th November 2006
44th Gijon Film Festival
Peter Whitehead born in the late 30s in working-class
Liverpool, has worked in various fields, such as physics and crystallography,
writing and falconry (he created the biggest Falcon breeding centre in Saudi
Arabia) as well as painting and filmmaking. His documentaries about the pop and
rock scene of the 60s, following the Rolling Stones, Eric Burdon and The Animals
or Jimi Hendrix are just as groundbreaking as rarely seen. Furthermore, he shot
Allen Gingsberg at the Royal Albert Hall, the protests of the Royal Shakespeare
Company against the Vietnam War, Robert Kennedy during his campaign for
presidency or the New York university students taking over the campuses, all of
which brings to the screen the most independent, exciting and revolutionary
piece of live history which has ever been produced in the world.
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VARIETY.com
In the Beginning Was the Image:
Conversations With Peter Whitehead
Directed by Paul Cronin.
With: Peter Whitehead.
By LISA NESSELSON
Paul Cronin's mesmerizing docu "In the Beginning Was the Image: Conversations
With Peter Whitehead" is a long, continually surprising film about a remarkable
Englishman who turned his back on film. A debonair, charismatic workaholic,
Whitehead, now nearly 70, is a dream subject: As an independent-minded cameraman
in 1960s London, he recorded key moments of cultural upheaval with an eye as
keen as his intellect. With retrospectives slated for Anthology Film Archives
and the Rotterdam Film Festival, a re-discovery of Whitehead's underseen oeuvre
is under way to which this ambitious docu, world-preemed in Vienna in October,
is an invaluable companion piece.
Whitehead has lived so many lives, cats are jealous. No additional commentators
weigh in for this docu. It's just gifted raconteur Whitehead -- whose adventures
in publishing, music recording, high finance, lensing et al. fairly drip with
historic serendipity -- relating his life and his work. But in Cronin's deft
hands, that's more than enough to profitably fill more than three hours of
sometimes contradictory screentime.
Well-edited visuals -- mostly drawn from Whitehead's own drool-worthy archives
--accompany the subject's non-stop flow of anecdotes and pithy, tantalizing
observations. Cronin, whose previous sprightly excavations of film lore include
a doc on Amos Vogel and one about the making of "Medium Cool," put this only
slightly overlong portrait together for a mere $6,000.
Whitehead was working as a newsreel cameraman for Italian television when he
shot "Wholly Communion," a unique record of the night in 1965 that the leading
American beat poets -- Ginsburg, Ferlinghetti, Corso -- read to a capacity crowd
of 7,000 at London's Royal Albert Hall. Forty minutes worth of black-and-white
film stock edited down to 33 minutes got a commercial release and put Whitehead
on the map.
When, as a direct result, the Rolling Stones' manager hired him to shoot the
Stones on tour in Dublin and Belfast, Whitehead "had never heard a single Stones
song." Whitehead was apparently the first person ever to film Jimi Hendrix and
became the first ever to record Pink Floyd. All the same, Whitehead insists '60s
London was not swinging except to the headline writers at Time magazine.
The leading foreign filmmakers of the day had a huge impact on Whitehead, who
watched Godard's "Alphaville" "in a trance" and was "demolished and
psychologically ill for weeks." Determined to publish the screenplay in English,
Whitehead offers an account of meeting Godard to arrange a translation even
though "there was no script" that's a hoot.
Living in New York from October 1967 through May 1968, Whitehead caught footage
of the student occupation of Columbia U. that shows, among other things, a young
Paul Auster listening to a young Tom Hayden.
Andy Warhol approached the textbook handsome Whitehead about appearing in a film
that would entail having sex with Viva. Whitehead declined, but was intimate
with an exciting roster of artistic women from Nico to Nathalie Delon to Niki de
Saint-Phalle.
Questioning film's ability to depict reality and concluding that "the technology
was standing between me and authentic experience," Whitehead quit filmmaking
after six years.
The two-part docu looks at the layers of Whitehead's richly varied life
including his adventures as a painter, mutual funds wiz, compulsive diarist and
aspiring novelist. The first half lasts 100 minutes.
Second half, clocking in at 96 minutes, examines how Whitehead morphed from an
urban media maven into a truth seeker at one with nature. Cronin orders the
information so as to keep viewers guessing about his mercurial subject -- just
as we think we "know" who he is, we have the figurative rug pulled out from
under us.
The polar opposite of an ivory tower academic or flippant playboy, Whitehead
possesses a restless energy and obvious work ethic that save him from being a
dilettante. Seeing Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal" had a life-changing
impact on the man; it's not too far-fetched to imagine that seeing this doc and
watching Whitehead's small but seminal body of work might send some unsuspecting
lad or lass careening off on hitherto unimagined adventures.
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