The Fall

To accompany In the Beginning Was the Image we decided it would be an asset to the festival to screen one of Peter Whitehead’s own films, the one he himself sees as his most important film, and certainly his most political film, The Fall. Between October 1967 and June 1968 he filmed in and around New York. Whitehead concentrated on some of the central figures of the civil-rights movement and counter-culture like Stokely Carmichael, Robert Lowell, Paul Auster, Arthur Miller and Robert Rauschenberg. He even managed to get behind the barricades of the radical students from Columbia University while police units insist on trying to break up the occupation of the campus.
John Patterson (Vienna Festival Catalogue): ‘Whitehead was his own one-man film unit and was fond of asynchronous images and sounds, allowing new meanings and feelings to arise from the creative use of incongruity. The exemplar of his approach was the dizzyingly impressionistic essay-movie The Fall. Like many a 60s Englishman in America – Hockney, Boorman, Schlesinger, Peter Watkins – he came to the U.S. equipped with freshly-peeled eyeballs and saw a turbulent, vibrant, violent nation in ways Americans themselves often did not. The Fall is unlike any other record of the period – a time a lot like now, full of anti-war and civil-rights demonstrations and profound national self-examination – perhaps because its very obscurity has kept it fresh.’ (EH)