| 16th February 2007 06:59 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
Seeing the 1960s Through a Keyhole
Movies
By BRUCE BENNETT
February 15, 2007
Globe&TheMail
"Everyone knows the joke," the seminal English documentarian Peter Whitehead wrote many years after he made his final film (to date) in 1977, "that if you can remember the '60's, you weren't there." Mr. Whitehead's all too brief incarnation as a filmmaker equally comfortable with the D.A Pennebaker vérité school and Warhol house filmmaker Paul Morrissey's celebrity home-movie approach is the focus of a series of film programs this week at Anthology Film Archives.
"I can't remember really being there — true enough," Mr. Whitehead wrote. "But I can assure myself, remind myself I was there simply by looking at my films."
Born in working-class Liverpool in 1937, Mr. Whitehead received a scholarship to an otherwise out-ofreach British boarding school courtesy of Clement Atlee's postwar social reformist Labor Party. Mr. Whitehead attended Cambridge University alongside the poet Ted Hughes, star-crossed Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett, and actors Peter Cooke and Ian McKellen.
But it wasn't until Mr. Whitehead arrived at the Slade School of Art in London tha he shot his first commissioned work, a science film about microscopic organisms called "The Perception of Life," which proffered that our ideas of what constitutes living matter are tethered to our technological abilities.
A cursory examination of 20th century countercultural history will confirm that for many heavy hitters of vanguard creative movements, hanging out was destiny. An habitué of London's Better Books, the early-1960s British center for Beat literature readers and writers, Mr. Whitehead found himself among kindred creative spirits. When he attended an ambitious Better Books-sponsored reading by American Beat poets at the Royal Albert Hall in 1965, he arrived with a 16 mm camera in hand.
The resulting film, "Wholly Communion," like Mr. Pennebaker's Bob Dylan documentary "Don't Look Back," captured a key moment in the trans-Atlantic artistic back-and-forth in a gritty blackand-white time capsule. To the astonishment of skeptics, 2,000 people had to be turned away from the Albert Hall doors. "Wholly Communion" has an exciting stolenmoment quality created by one man with one camera taking on an event that in better-funded, more conventionally inclined hands would occupy a half-dozen cameras. Watching "Wholly Communion," you are there, but looking through a keyhole.
"Wholly Communion" caught the eye of the Rolling Stones manager and impresario Andrew Loog Oldham. Eager to keep boosting his clients up the entertainment ladder, Mr. Oldham had in mind a Rolling Stones feature film. He commissioned Mr. Whitehead to shoot a modestly budgeted documentary of a 1966 Stones concert as a kind of screen test.
The film was titled "Charlie Is My Darling," a name Mr. Whitehead chose to acknowledge drummer Charlie Watts's superior ability to behave naturally in interview segments. When "Charlie" was shown at the Mannheim Film Festival in 1966, Mr. Whitehead was criticized for rendering the Stones "drab and inarticulate." But no less an authority on glamour than Marlene Dietrich's director, Josef Von Sternberg, staunchly defended "Charlie" at the festival, saying that in future decades it would survive as a faithful record of the times. Would that were true. "Charlie Is My Darling" has remained mired in copyright red tape for decades and cannot be shown at Anthology or anywhere else.
Though Mr. Oldham's feature project on the Stones never materialized, "Charlie" became a successful screen test for Mr. Whitehead. After seeing the film, producers of the BBC's "Top of the Pops" music program engaged Mr. Whitehead to create short accompaniments for various hit (or would-be hit) records of the day. Anthology has collected nearly two full hours of these clips, featuring the Small Faces and several other acts from Mr. Oldham's Immediate Record label, including Eric Burdon and the Animals, Nico, Jimi Hendrix, and Hank B. Marvin and the Shadows, among many others.
The program is a Mojo magazine reader's fantasy of mid-to-late-'60s musical giants and obscurities lipsynching, brooding, and playing the fool on film in the "Hard Day's Night" style of the day. A Stones promo for "Lady Jane" made from double-printed footage culled from "Charlie Is My Darling" presents a montage of the band struggling to finish songs while besieged by fans. The slow-motion, black-and-white concert clip gives the sensation of a fight sequence in Martin Scorsese's "Raging Bull" restaged as a rock 'n' roll performance.
In his prime, Mr. Whitehead worked frequently and quickly. While documenting the creation and performance of Peter Brook and the Royal Shakespeare Company's anti-war agitprop play "US" (1967's "Benefit of the Doubt"), Mr. Whitehead simultaneously compiled a kind of ragged " Mondo Cane" travelogue confined entirely to 1967 London titled, "Tonite Let's All Make Love in London."
Both films are dated in the best sense. "Benefit" captures a peculiar locus of the equally hermetically sealed worlds of performance and politics, while "Tonite," subtitled "A Pop Concerto for Film," lampoons and celebrates the faddishness, press exploitation, and narcissism of "Swinging London" at its zenith. Launched with a volley of rattling quarter-note down strokes courtesy of Syd Barrett's electric guitar, "Tonite" is haphazardly democratic, combining footage of body painting, concert "happenings," Playboy bunny photo calls, and interview segments with late-'60s art and entertainment icons into an arty tabloid confessional goulash.
Both Michael Caine and David Hockney decry the early closing times of British pubs entirely independently of each other. Vanessa Redgrave, leading a pro-Castro rally, looks like Garbo in fatigues. Lee Marvin, also in uniform, but on the set of "The Dirty Dozen," rhapsodizes about the new British social freedoms symbolized by the Mini Cooper and the miniskirt. Julie Christie embodies the unbidden self-absorption of a movie star at rest, while the Irish author Edna O'Brien appears on the threshold of setting the sexual revolution back 30 years.
It's a strange and fascinating film that messily and presciently hints at more flagrant mainstream acts of unabashed media celebrity worship yet to come. Like the rest of the films in Anthology's retrospective, "Tonite Let's All Make Love in London" is a vibrant shared memory of an era that offered little distinction between looking forward and looking inward.
Through February 19 (32 Second Ave., between 1st and 2nd streets, 212-505-5181).
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| 16th February 2007 10:40 AM |
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| glencar |
Charlie Is My Darling was viewed as "inarticulate"? Standards have changed. |
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