In “I Destroy, Therefore I Am”, a revealing essay written shortly after completing The Fall, Peter Whitehead writes, “For me my only weapon is film.” Notions of the assaultive power of moving images are almost as old as cinema itself, but such rhetoric came into its own in the 1960s. The increasingly transparent forces of state oppression, particularly as seen in the Vietnam War (the first televised war), lent an air of urgency to artistic activity. The Newsreel, a New York-based radical film collective, talked about making films that “explode like grenades in peoples’ faces”, and this desire for confrontation was widespread, informing strategies across the arts. Whitehead was not a political activist, however, and if he used cinema as a weapon, it was an interrogative rather than a coercive one, and something he wielded against himself as much as those around him. He describes his film in its opening as “a series of historical moments seeking a synthesis”, and in its diverse documentation of late ‘60s New York it is certainly that. But it is also very much a personal attempt to make sense of the world in order to act within it: a study of an individual seeking a praxis. As Whitehead would later say, “I put myself together by putting the film together.”
Starting his career as a TV cameraman, Whitehead directed a series of documentaries on British subjects throughout the ‘60s, including Charlie Is My Darling (1966), following the Rolling Stones on tour in Ireland, and culminating with Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967), the quintessential document of “Swingin’ London”. Feeling he had exhausted his interest in the London scene—he later said, “There seemed nothing more to film in London except my boredom, despair and apathy”—Whitehead took the opportunity of an invitation to the New York Film Festival to make a film about the cultural and political upheavals then in motion in the US. He would spend the next few months (from October 1967 to June 1968) living in and filming New York City.
From the sixty or so hours of footage Whitehead brought back to England with him, several films could have been made. There was undoubtedly ample material for a compelling cinema verité-style documentary, as his contemporaries Frederick Wiseman and the Maysles Brothers were (and still are) doing: a document of things “as they happened”, without narration or interviews. A director with a specific political agenda may have assembled the footage as a defence and rallying call for the New Left Movement, venerating activists and reinforcing their claims, while demonising the State. But Whitehead’s film is unique in that it is neither impartial nor didactic. The Fall does not argue the case of the New Left movement or any of its factions, but neither does it assume any pretense of objectivity towards its subjects. Instead, it foregrounds Whitehead’s own relationship to events (going so far as to add scenes of himself revisiting footage in the editing room), and creates a dialectic between distanced appraisal and impassioned advocacy, facilitated by Whitehead’s ambivalence towards radical politics. A natural filmmaker-voyeur (he admitted to impulsively “zooming and panning and editing with my eyes and ears”), Whitehead was astute and observant enough to recognise the myriad ways in which modern society was alienating and dispossessing its citizens, and the need for individual and collective resistance. But he was too observant to commit wholeheartedly to most of the forms of resistance he saw taking place. Yearning for a way to engage with and counter the injustice around him, Whitehead was nonetheless committed to doing so with his eyes wide open—whether that meant including details that undermined the radical cause, or even those that undermined his own authority as the filmmaker.
This (perhaps irreconcilable) struggle between taking action and seeing clearly is so fundamental that it informs The Fall at every level—politically, aesthetically and metaphysically—and explains why the film takes the shape it does; it wouldn’t make sense to explore such a question within a form that had already, implicitly, settled on answer. Stylistically raw, exultant and startling, and packed with unexpected cuts and abrasive music, The Fall juts and jars around in ways that can at first seem haphazard and confused. While confusion is a necessary component of the problem Whitehead is exploring, if the film itself seems unformed, it’s only because, on a narrative level, we are not privy to a story or verbal argument on which to hang on to. Most political cinema tends to foreground “the message”, considering formal concerns as secondary or even peripheral, so it may take some adjustment to recognise that it’s at the formal level that Whitehead’s real political exploration is taking place.
The most overt element of this approach is the film’s three-part structure: In part one, “The Image”, Whitehead absorbs himself in the spectacle of the city, passively taking in the sights and the sounds. Part two, “The Word”, introduces Whitehead in the editing room, trying to structure and take control of this imagery; here, he says, “I start cutting, analysing and thinking.” In the final section, “Word and Image”, the possibility of a synthesis of vision and action is explored through the filmmaker’s participation in the 1968 student occupation of Columbia University.
Within each of these parts, Whitehead explores the film’s central question in several ways, considering different forms of resistance (and co-option), critiquing his own position as an observer, and in the tour de force climactic frenzy of the middle section, seeking a way to act through film itself. As it progresses, there are elements that may seem highly objectionable, but start to make more sense when considered in relation to the whole. In the film’s first section, Whitehead articulates his passive submission to spectacle through a channel-hopping montage aesthetic that actively works against the kind of synthesis the film professes to be seeking. Addressing the commodification and co-option of radical politics (already remarkably widespread by 1967), he dives into it head first, arranging a fashion shoot of an Italian model wearing a “peace dress” and telling her to act sexy. As isolated segments, these sequences could be argued to be part of the problem Whitehead is seeking to overcome, but within the multi-layered and self-critical mosaic that The Fall amounts to, they are strategies to be experienced and questioned rather than approved or submitted to.
Two more complex examples later on in the film bring this issue into focus. In what at first seems like one of the film’s most irrelevant and indulgent sequences, Whitehead films the Italian model (now his girlfriend) dancing in his apartment, his camera roaming her body in an unabashedly sexualised and predatory fashion. But the legitimacy of this scene’s approach is undermined from all directions. Aurally, the scene’s imagery is undercut with a quite brilliant narration from Whitehead that seems oblivious to the allure of its visual counterpart, abstractly discussing urban alienation and notions of objectification and objectivity, particularly as exploited by the media. Structurally, it is directly followed by a photographer discussing an erotic image of Marilyn Monroe and how the photograph must be transformed into an object in order to be sold. But above all, by emphasising Whitehead’s presence in the scene, and his relationship with his subject, the film brings the idea of objectification out of the mass media and into an interpersonal context, and in the process underlines the flawed and partial gaze of the cameraman whose images we have been immersed in.
A little later, we witness perhaps the most disturbing scene in the film: a Destructivist performance art event in which the artist Ralph Ortiz beats a chicken to death against a piano. The act is horrific, and the degree of Whitehead’s complicity in filming the event (though no more so than that of the paying audience which also witnessed it) should not be glossed over. But by being positioned so centrally and openly in the film (and paired with another steely voiceover, this time asserting that “murder is the ultimate act of objectification”), the scene serves both as a corrective to historical notions of ‘60s radical art, and a further interrogation of Whitehead’s position within the film. On the one hand, the alienation and frustration that fueled the social and cultural storms of the ‘60s is revealed at its basest and least romantic; on the other, Whitehead’s equivocation between detachment and engagement is now no longer tenable: witnessing is participating.
Whitehead has speculated that his films may have been “acts of aggression against film, against limits put on me by the nature of film itself”—and The Fall can be understood as an attempt to put those limits to the test. As participatory as the act of filming inevitably is, the indexical, second-hand nature of moving images can often militate against any sense of participation and engagement for the viewer—the social effect of which Guy Debord had brilliantly outlined in his book The Society of the Spectacle, the same year that Whitehead began The Fall. In Whitehead’s words:
In the culture we live in images are used to alienate us, not to invite us to participate. … The whole principle of the modern society in which we are saturated by images is that the images are aggressive, violating. They are violating us and deliberately making us feel alienated from everything, including ourselves, our own feelings and our own natural selves. The Fall is the ultimate expression of this kind of engulfment in images.
However, in “expressing” this engulfment, Whitehead seeks not to submit to it but to transform it. How to make an image that is not alienating—an image that demands participation, that empowers rather than pacifies? Whitehead implies: not by telling us to be empowered, or by illustrating empowerment, but by embodying it. As critic Ray Carney has put it, “you must reinvent the language to make it capable of carrying the meanings [you want] it to bear”. Recalling Serge Daney’s phrase that someone with a true passion for cinema expects everything from cinema, including “that cinema should free him from cinema”, Whitehead ultimately rejects the (too easily co-opted) theatre of protest and the (self-defeating) frustrated idealism of destruction, hesitantly embracing instead the collective and prefigurative direct action of the Columbia occupation—a position that inevitably pushes beyond cinema altogether.
Of course, as The Fall powerfully depicts, the Columbia occupation—and the ‘60s New Left movement as a whole—largely failed. As Whitehead would later say, “What I was actually filming was the collapse - the 'fall' - of an increasingly ineffective and impotent protest movement.” Nonetheless, as an attempt to redefine the relationship between cinema and the spectator that is both forceful and generous, this film has few peers. At one point in the film, Robert Lowell introduces a poem by clarifying, “This is not a propaganda poem, it’s a lived poem—there’s a difference”. Whitehead would later assert:
I want people to examine, re-examine their response to the world, their ability to see it as true or false. It's the basis of any morality, this belief in one's own experience. … I have used this film to re-examine my own existence and hope it will thus become valid for someone else, not because I tell them about it. I try to let it happen to them, by letting the film that happened to me, happen to them.
In bringing us into a “lived film”, Whitehead challenges us to match his own interrogative powers and to consider different models of vision and action—while acknowledging that the fundamental question of “what next?” is not something he can answer for us.
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