‘One experimental film-maker, enfant terrible Peter Whitehead (who has made films about underground poets, theatre-makers and pop musicians) approaches another, Chris Petit, with the request to make a film about the life and work of the former. The result is The Falconer, the definitive (and significantly different) version of the work in progress that was screened last year in Rotterdam. For a couple of years, Chris Petit has been investigating the possibilities of the new digital technologies. The Falconer shows that his quest for new forms of narrative and representation was not in vain: the far-reaching mixture of fiction and documentary, the digital processing of images, the use of text on screen and the complex soundtrack have made The Falconer an amusing, exciting and above all intelligent film that is a cut above those that tend to be called biographical documentaries.’ Mieke Bernink, Skrien
