24 JULY 2002: DECLINE
AND FALCONRY
From The Independent on Sunday,
30th August, 1998
Film-maker Peter Whitehead
was the coolest dude in Sixties London. Then he dropped out and
went strange. Now Iain
Sinclair and Chris Petit have made a film about him — and Whitehead
hates it. Chris Darke
reports.
There’s a scene in The
Falconer in which Peter Whitehead, the man described as the film’s
“fictive core”, is
being interviewed on Swedish
TV. “I copulated with falcons,” he declares. The female interviewer tries
to
keep a straight face while
looking like someone who’s just had her chat-show stolen from under her
nose.
“I did it physically. I
built a special hat…” That’s how Whitehead describes his method for inseminating
the
gyrs; “I was in love with
those falcons,” he sighs. Behind him, the digitally animated figure of
a young
woman strolls into the scene
and bends to kiss him. Black leathery wings unfurl from her back.
During
the 1960s, Peter Whitehead made a series of films which have since become
documents of the
decade. “I had one foot
in the counterculture and one in Swinging London,” he says of the period
in which
he filmed Wholly Communion,
a cinéma vérité account of the legendary 1965 International
Poetry
Incarnation at the Royal
Albert Hall. Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, a glossy trawl through
the faces
and places of the “swinging”
metropolis, followed in 1967. Over this period, Whitehead was also making
promos for groups as diverse
as the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd and the Dubliners. The Fall (1969), an
attempt to marry Godard
with footage of the American police crushing the counterculture, was Whitehead’s
last serious piece of film-making.
He now writes self-published novels, and makes his living from selling
off
bits of his archive to television.
After
he dropped out of film-making, Whitehead made falconry his life. He trapped
the birds and bred them.
By 1982 he was building
a falconry centre for a Saudi prince. The Gulf War put an end to this operation
but,
by then, Whitehead was convinced
that he was living out the ancient Egyptian myth of Isis and Osiris. “Isis
copulates with the live
body of her dismembered husband Osiris and gives birth to Horns the falcon,”
Whitehead explains to the
uninitiated. “I am Horus. I have lived out becoming Horus. It is my myth.”
Whitehead seems happily
to adopt any number of myths – Horns, Oedipus, Salome – as his own.
“I kept
thinking – there are gaps,” runs a commentary in the Falconer film. “How
do you get from
film-making to falconry?
How do you get from falconry to writing novels?” And it’s in these gaps
that The
Falconer, made by writer
lain Sinclair and writer-director Chris Petit, forges its fictions. The
film works on
layers of unreliable memory,
flashback-blizzards, origami structures of doubles and doubling, hotel
rooms
that metamorphose into a
whalebone box which supposedly possesses occult powers.
Chris
Petit, the director, is something of an underground polymath. He was film
editor at the London events
magazine Time Out in the
mid-1970s, when it still had some countercultural cred. He then moved directly
into film-making with Radio
On (1979), a beautiful and austere British road movie, an impressive take
on PD
James’s An Unsuitable Job
for a Woman (1981), and two thrillers, Flight to Berlin (1983) and Chinese
Boxes
(1984). He then dropped
out of features to make television films and write two novels, Robinson
(1993)
and The Psalm Killer (1997).
The Falconer has allowed Petit to explore the form of the essay-film, using
video technology. Since
finishing it, he has gone on to produce another video essay, Dead TV.
And his
working partner, lain Sinclair – as readers of Lights Out for the Territory
will know – is a curio-sifter
at the cultural margins.
So, if you watch The Falconer as you’d read one of Sinclair’s essays, you’ll
understand how it works.
It’s
a sort of caricature, produced by a couple of avant-garde satirists. Hogarth
worked with pen and ink;
his inheritors take the
language of Sixties experimental film, and throw it in with digital editing
and
multimedia design. And Whitehead
fed himself to the film-makers. As Sinclair has said in an interview, “He’s
someone who always has one
more story to tell … He’s got a kind of mesmerising, Ancient Mariner
quality.
The stories initially were
fascinating, you wanted to know the rest. But when he told you them they
were
never as interesting as
they seemed …”
Whitehead
now lives in a run-together assembly of cottages in a Northamptonshire
village, which he shares
with his wife Dido, the
daughter of Teddy Goldsmith and niece of the late James. When I visited,
Whitehead’s two
daughters were sitting around
the kitchen table singing “Brown-Eyed Girl” to a guitar accompaniment.
The scene was exactly as I’d
hoped, a high-class Bohemian
enclave in the Shires. We spent the afternoon in Whitehead’s den. He talked
about the 1960s,
and told me about a group
of academics at Leicester De Montford University who had invited him to
a
conference on 1968 and radical
film. “I’m an objet retrouvé” he declared. He then asked Robin,
his
14-yearold daughter, to
show me around the garden. “But Dad,” she protested. “I don’t know anything
about your stuff.”
Whitehead’s
“stuff” consists of a temple that he built himself in his yard, and where
he intends to be buried.
The temple was constructed
from columns salvaged from a demolished bank, adhering to numerological
principles derived from
Egyptian myth. I wondered whether this structure might partly explain why
Sinclair is
fascinated with Whitehead.
Each in his way is a builder of follies dedicated to his own self-elected
mythology.
The Whitehead
story, as Petit narrates it, is one of “drug culture, high society, weird
showbiz liaisons,
dealings with the black
economy”. But it was the women in Whitehead’s life that, further down the
line,
would become the sore point
in the story of the film. Whitehead has been linked to a number of famous
beauties, among them Nico,
Bianca Jagger and Nathalie Delon. Liaisons and working partnerships with
sculptors Penny Slinger
and Nikki de St Phalle (he made the film Daddy, an excruciating sexual
psychodrama, with the latter
in 1974) and the actress Mia Martin. Sinclair speaks of Whitehead “vampirising”
his female collaborators
and Whitehead himself plays with the idea of incest as a mystical metaphor,
as his
being haunted by the daughter
as the image of his “soul”. He tells of how, when he photographs women,
he does so “as a woman”.
Incest as a metaphor was to prove a source of controversy, to put it mildly.
In
one scene in The Falconer,
Whitehead relates how he took “a honeymoon” with his daughter, then eight
years old. The father-daughter
relationship was a trope that was worked into the film.
In April
this year, Whitehead finally watched the finished film, having previously
resisted Sinclair’s offers of a
screening. “It really is
a masterpiece,” he wrote. “I think it will go down in the history of movies
(as did
Eliot’s The Waste Land for
poetry) – establishing a new way of seeing, within film, which really is
visionary. It
is a film about me, a very
generous one – and I am humbled by it … I was expecting more gore, blood
and
Hammer horror stuff. I also
think that I come off quite lightly, considering the truth (But remind
me to say
less, next time!)”.
Then,
two months later, Whitehead took umbrage. Over the latter part of June,
threats of legal action were
arriving daily on the producer’s
desk. Whitehead claimed that he was the victim of “a deliberate calculated
betrayal, foisted on me
by a close friend for whom I had the greatest respect as an artist and
a person”. It
got worse. Petit was now
“a c***”, Sinclair “emotionally retarded”. More disturbing still, Whitehead
claimed
to “have all Sinclair’s
telephone calls recorded from Christmas. “I have the whole proof of the
deliberate
deception.” He went on to
admit that he was “doing [his] best to screw the thing up”.
In January,
Whitehead had produced a signed statement that read “I have willingly contributed
to a work
that I understand is not
a documentary but a fabulous version of my life and my varied careers …
a fiction
disguised as a documentary,
a life explained through its underlying mythology and not through a mere
recitation of chronological
facts.” So why the savage volte-face?
One reason
may have been the response The Falconer received when it was shown at De
Montford
University. Among the panellists
was Caroline Coon, radical feminist, former Sixties activist and founder
of
Release, the drugs advice
organisation. Coon was so incensed by the film that she wrote a vitriolic
open
memo to the organisers.
“How could you collude with this film?” she demanded. “What is your position
on
bestiality and the abuse
of children?” Coon went on to describe Whitehead as a “self-confessed
pseudomythologising narcissist”
and the film as “a snuff movie … that is obdurately reactionary, White
Power and orthodox, a film
only masquerading as radical and avant-garde.” There were rumours that
Whitehead enthusiasts from
the US had been bending their erstwhile hero’s ear. It seemed that they’d
found the film, well, a
little too extreme.
A friend
rings. “I have a definition that might interest you,” he tells me. “It’s
from James Morton’s book
Lowspeak: A Dictionary of
Criminal and Sexual Slang. Check this out. Under ‘falconer’ it reads, ‘A
conman
posing as an aristocrat’.”
But Sinclair
knew this all along. Didn’t he?
‘The Falconer’: Renegade
TV Channel 4, 24 September.
COURTESY: JOHN C.!!!!
Arthur Magazine 