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The Word and the Image: Films of Peter Whitehead

An unsung hero of British cinema, Peter Whitehead is an extraordinary figure whose films offer a singular record of the late 1960s counterculture movements in London and New York. Born in Liverpool in 1937, Whitehead was at the very heart of the swinging music and arts scenes from the Rolling Stones in drag to Allen Ginsberg at the Royal Albert Hall, and Peter Brook directing the Royal Shakespeare Company's protest against the Vietnam War. In the US, he captured Robert Kennedy's presidential campaign and the occupation of Columbia University by student radicals. Whitehead was a pioneer of the pop music promo, working for "Top of the Pops" on British television and filming acts such as The Animals, The Small Faces, Pink Floyd, Jimi Hendrix, Nico, and the Stones. Featuring rare and previously unseen material from Whitehead's extensive archive, this touring program and the accompanying program notes were organized by The Maysles Institute, New York and Sticking Place Films, Contemporary Films, and Reality Films, London. Speical thanks to Peter Whitehead, Paul Cronin, and Michael Chaiken, Program Director for Film at the Maysles Institute.

Sun, Jan 7, 2007 at 7 PM	TONIGHT LET'S ALL MAKE LOVE IN LONDON DIRECTOR: PETER WHITEHEAD BRITAIN Mods, mini skirts, topless models and music by, among many others, The Pink Floyd, back when the band was the definite article. Peter Whitehead's sexy, psychedelic record of the Swinging London scene could be the documentary cousin of Antonioni's BLOW UP. A self-described "Pop Concerto for Film," it captures a heady time when Britannia no longer ruled the waves but Carnaby Street definitely ruled the music and fashion worlds. Amid the pop art, pop music, paisley, anti-war protests and painted naked ladies are appearances by Mick Jagger, Julie Christie, Michael Caine, Lee Marvin (opining on mini skirts), Andrew Loog Oldham, artists Alan Aldridge and David Hockney, and a bevy of sexually liberated "dolly girls." One of the few filmmakers trusted within the perfumed gardens of the 60s rock illuminati, Whitehead was allowed unparalleled access into the center of the pop circle to capture the moment for this dazzling, kaleidoscopic record from the very core of the in-crowd." ( 70 min ) ^ Top
Sun, Jan 7, 2007 at 7 PM	THE BEACH BOYS IN LONDON DIRECTOR: PETER WHITEHEAD BRITAIN Whitehead's rare document of the Beach Boys' 1966 UK Tour features the band at its peak, but with a missing Brian Wilson, in Los Angeles to finish recording "Smile." ( 30 min ) ^ Top
Tue, Jan 9, 2007 at 7 PM	WHOLLY COMMUNION DIRECTOR: PETER WHITEHEAD BRITAIN A dynamic documentary that effectively launched Whitehead's career, WHOLLY COMMUNION captures an historic literary event: June 11, 1965, at the Royal Albert Hall in London, where an audience of thousands took in the enthralling first meeting of Beat poets from America and England. Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Alexander Trocchi, Gregory Corso, and Adrian Mitchell are among the figures featured. At one point, mayhem nearly erupts when Harry Fainlight, heckled for a poem about LSD, refuses to relinquish the stage. The film ends with a fabulous full-throttle performance from the great Ginsburg. ( 33 min ) ^ Top
Tue, Jan 9, 2007 at 7 PM	BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT DIRECTOR: PETER WHITEHEAD BRITAIN All of Whitehead's major films are powerful reminders of how the war in Vietnam galvanized, and radicalized, an entire generation of artists, activists, students and citizens, not only in America, but around the world. BENEFIT OF THE DOUBT documents British theatre great Peter Brook producing and directing the Royal Shakespeare Company, with Glenda Jackson, in a ground-breaking production of US, an adventurous and controversial piece of avant-garde agitprop meant to protest Britain's unacknowledged role in the war. Brook's play, like Whitehead's head-spinning body of work, is an inspiring souvenir from a seemingly lost Golden Age of radical, daring, engaged, experimental art making. ( 65 min ) ^ Top
Wed, Jan 10, 2007 at 7 PM	FIRE IN THE WATER DIRECTOR: PETER WHITEHEAD BRITAIN Whithead's last film is an alchemical allegory set in the Highlands of Scotland in which a filmmaker reviews his brief movie career while his girlfriend explores the countryside alone. Along with appearances by David Hockney and John Lennon, Whitehead incorporates footage from some of his previous films to fashion a coda to era. ( 90 min ) ^ Top
Wed, Jan 10, 2007 at 7 PM	PINK FLOYD: LONDON 1966/67 DIRECTOR: PETER WHITEHEAD BRITAIN The first-ever footage of Pink Floyd and the legendary Syd Barrett, performing live in the UFO Club in London and at the Sound Techniques Studio. ( 30 min ) ^ Top
Thu, Jan 11, 2007 at 7 PM	PETER WHITEHEAD: POP FILMS DIRECTOR: PETER WHITEHEAD BRITAIN Whitehead's films for The Small Faces, The Animals, The Shadows and other major, minor and mega pop music figures of the era were the very inception of the artful, experimental and daring pop promo. This compilation program brings together a wealth of his proto-music videos, including vintage pieces made with The Jimi Hendrix Experience ("Hey Joe"), Nico ("I'm Not Saying"), Eric Burdon and The Animals ("When I Was Young"), The Small Faces ("Itchycoo Park"), and many others. Dramatist Dennis Potter (THE SINGING DETECTIVE), in an admiring 1967 newspaper review, described one of the pieces included here-The Dubliner's "Seven Drunken Nights"-as "a brilliant piece of footage...Pop records do not have to be surrounded by inane superlatives, it seems." Along with the recognizable are some very rare surprises from Whitehead's extensive archives. ( 100 min ) ^ Top
Sat, Jan 13, 2007 at 4 PM	DADDY DIRECTOR: PETER WHITEHEAD BRITAIN/FRANCE The closest Whitehead ever got to making a fictional movie, DADDY is a garish, uninhibitedly relentless assault on the Law of the Father, in which a daughter (sculptor Niki de St. Phalle), returning to the French chateau of her childhood, re-lives and re-imagines a series of erotic taboos and transgressions visited on the hapless daddy (Rainer von Dietz) featuring herself, her mother and a pubescent convent girl (Mia Martin). Deliberately vulgar and tasteless, with a level of non-acting that achieves a certain kind of awful brilliance, "What began as a documentary on Niki de St. Phalle finished up as a fantasy about a woman's attempts to exorcise the influence of her sexually domineering father . . . .a whole ragbag of Freudian neuroses, six-foot phalluses in coffins, nubile girls in nun's habits stripping in front of altars, masturbation, some obvious jokes, pretty photography, abysmal acting, and a commentary that reads and sounds like a Home Service children's story for adults"-TIME OUT. ( 90 min ) ^ Top
Sat, Jan 13, 2007 at 4 PM	NOTHING TO DO WITH ME DIRECTOR: PETER WHITEHEAD BRITAIN This revealing autobiographical document, made several months after Peter Whitehead returned to London after shooting THE FALL in New York, has the erudite and perhaps very stoned filmmaker philosophizing about language, moviemaking, and sex in the desert. ( 30 min ) ^ Top
Sun, Jan 14, 2007 at 1 PM	THE FALL DIRECTOR: PETER WHITEHEAD BRITAIN An extraordinary piece of personal and political filmmaking, shot in and around New York between October 1967 and June 1968, THE FALL eyes America with the same psychedelic kaleidoscope, the same LSD-era aesthetic, that Whitehead earlier aimed at Swinging England. Rather than cheeky youth rebellions of mini skirts, pop music and premarital sex, this is about life-and-death matters of war, race, violence, and serious social unrest, with America deeply divided over Vietnam, and the assassination of Martin Luther King and the subsequent riots unfolding as we watch. "The Fall is unlike any other record of the period, perhaps because its very obscurity has kept it fresh. Dizzyingly impressionistic . . . the nearest Whitehead came to a masterpiece."-LA WEEKLY. Featuring Robert Kennedy, the Bread and Puppet Theater, Paul Auster, Tom Hayden, Mark Rudd, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Arthur Miller, Robert Lowell and Robert Rauschenberg. ( 120 min ) ^ Top