In the last thirteen issues, this segment was about works of media history that were believed lost or are now forgotten. »Lost & Found«, or »Found & Lost Again«, as one could often have said – finds that are washed briefly to the surface as part of an ever more comprehensive revival culture, only to disappear again all the more inevitably in a general cloud of amnesia. Retro, to be able to forget better. These days, no piece of the past is safe from the grasp of clever marketing archaeologists, and the fact that something believed to have disappeared has been salvaged or revamped affords no kind of protection from the long-term effects of an aimlessly roaming »revivalism«. An erratic memory that is forgetful of the present is often of no more value than a historically blind celebration of the moment. As from now, this segment is dedicated to interconnections between future and past in media culture – in a »today« that is so saturated by history on the grand scale that the many small histories with lasting after-effects barely find any room. The filmmaker Peter Whitehead was able to tell one of these histories, or even to embody it, when he presented his small but significant body of works from the 1960s as a guest of the Viennale in October 2006. Whitehead came to film rather by chance when he filmed one of the first large counter-cultural manifestations in Great Britain, a beat-poetry festival in June 1965 in the Royal Albert Hall attended by no fewer than 7,000 people. »Wholly Communion«, the title of the film, is in the then much overused cinema vérité style. His instructions were, says Whitehead, to remain as invisible as possible as filmmaker and not to get in the way while the greats of the beatnik scene, from Lawrence Ferlinghetti to Allen Ginsberg, made their illuminated appearances. The big success of the evening, according to »Wholly Communion«, was probably the Austrian Ernst Jandl, who presented his sound-poems »schtzngrmm« or »Na-po-le-on« like a seasoned one-man band and reaped tumultuous applause.
From such unexpected discharges of energy, it was only a small step to actual pop culture, and the idea of poetry for the masses took on a more and more concrete form in the mid-1960s. Whitehead was asked to film an Ireland tour by the Rolling Stones as powerfully as he had done for the stammering verbal acrobats in the Albert Hall. »Charlie Is My Darling«, dedicated to the least obtrusive and dreamiest of the five musicians, contains images of exuberant fan enthusiasm, for example the legendary storming of the stage and the flinging of arms around the singer’s neck, phenomena which are likely to remain for ever unique to the 1960s. Historically seen, this bottled-up and thus all the more tempestuously released emotion first had to find an outlet for itself, and documents like those of Whitehead record this for posterity, in traces at least.
From this moment on, an interdisciplinary counter-cultural space was opened, although many historiographers are of the opinion that it began closing again in the mid-sixties. It is true that Whitehead’s »Benefit of the Doubt« (1967), with its documentation of a Peter Brook production of an anti-Vietnam War play, emphasises the atmosphere of protest of this time. However, the next works, particularly the most famous but, from today’s point of view, probably the weakest film of the Liverpudlian, »Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London« (1967), deviate decisively from such clear political agendas. »Tonite«, legitimately enough, starts out from the American view of counter-culture, which at this time was represented by a spectrum ranging from »Time Magazine« to all sorts of cultural entrepreneurs. The film takes on the marketing aspect, but gets stuck on short-lived glamour phenomena instead of providing much in the way of analysis or political agitation. So when Vanessa Redgrave starts singing the protest song »Guantanamera« with a wavering voice and unaccompanied at a political happening, the call literally disappears into thin air.
But the statement »I come from Guantánamo« could have had a multi-dimensional explosive force – something that is suggested in Whitehead’s most ambitious work, »The Fall«. »The Fall«, made in 1967-8 in New York and completely focused on events there, contains a number of unexpected, undoubtedly dialectic oppositions: pro-Vietnam demonstrations, Robert Rauschenberg explaining how a picture becomes and object, and finally a detailed reportage on the 1968 revolts at Columbia University. But Whitehead allows this material inevitably to end in a dead-end by sprinkling in endless reflections at the editing bench about the extent to which all of this is only medium and image. A model that has to pose in peacenik clothes before his condescending eye contributes to making this unnecessary media apocalypse a total one.
The picture of the counter-culture thus ends precisely where the CIA and Richard Nixon wanted: in darkness and obscurity, from which it has not really recovered even today. This, although Whitehead’s »The Fall« had presented the motto that he himself was not prepared to follow right at the beginning: »Film is a series of historical moments seeking a synthesis«. The fact that this does not necessarily have to mean total virtuality is something that is often only accepted thirty years later by chroniclers of counter-culture like Whitehead.

http://www.viennale.at/
http://www.peterwhitehead.net/

 

Translated by Timothy Jones

 

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