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The 1st draft is a little like this...
Falconer, film-maker, fabulist?
Nick Garrard
It happens like this.
Enlisted by the college to beg old boys for money, I punch in the morning’s numbers with trepidation. A crackle at the end of the line, a sonorous voice trembles into life. I await the usual curmudgeon, wrinkled at the edges and empty in the pocket. Instead he fills my ears with words I barely understand; references to Ancient Egyptian myth, holography, Alphaville and Iain Sinclair. By sheer chance he will be in Cambridge next Monday, attending a PhD discussion of his work. Shall we meet up, he asks, talk these things through? Instantly I agree. A pure coincidence, a chance phone call and suddenly I’m in contact with a man whose myth insinuates its way far into the past.
Peter Whitehead’s name means many things; film-maker, falconer and physicist, writer and chronicler of the counter-culture. A working class boy adrift in a world of public school and privilege, Whitehead found himself recipient of a scholarship to Cambridge in the early 60s. Graduating from Peterhouse he then moved on to the Slade where, starting out as a painter, he gravitated swiftly towards the new formed discipline of cinema.
His films are verité documents of their time; Pink Floyd at the UFO club, helmed by Syd Barrett, long before acid psychosis robbed him of his clarity; Ginsberg and the beats at the Royal Albert Hall holding an audience of thousands to rapt attention. His self-proclaimed masterpiece is The Fall, a portrait of the counter-culture’s bloody collapse beamed from within its dying heart. The final section of the film finds Whitehead ensconced in Columbia University alongside protesting students as a mass of riot police hammer furiously on the walls outside.
“My life has been a little strange these past few years”
A plain truth perhaps, from the mouth of a man so often dressed in myth. We meet in the sedate confines of “Auntie’s Tea Shop”. The assembled patrons, treading finely the lip of their own mortality, are shaken to the core, nearly forced over the edge by the rigours of our peculiar conversation; sex magick, Brontëgate (Whitehead adamantly believes that Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley is a steal from a work half-finished by Emily), fifth dimensional theory, even Pete Doherty are all encompassed. It’s like “Withnail and I”, the naughty words and booze switched for arcane truths and steaming mugs of cocoa.
In person Whitehead is unquestionably charismatic. A friend pops by while we eat together in hall and ends up staying half an hour, mesmerized by his way with an anecdote and a stirring impression of comics-magus Alan Moore stoned out of his skull.
“I was never a marijuana man myself” says Whitehead, “I always preferred hallucinogens”
Since retiring from film (and after training falcons in the Saudi East for a good few decades- a story, as Whitehead would say, for another time..) he has written several novels- complex, non-linear dissections of his many interests; bondage, falconry, psychopharmacology and the breaking down of identity. They are certainly not without their fans. Iain Sinclair said of The Risen “It belongs alongside Norman Mailer's 'Ancient Evenings' and William Burroughs' 'The Western Lands'.” But ah! Here things get complicated. Sinclair and Whitehead’s paths converge elsewhere: in 1998 to be exact.
With their “mythic documentary” The Falconer, Iain Sinclair and Chris Petit ran him through with his own tongue, pinioned on the end of a self-perpetuated myth like a beetle squirming on a pin. To them, Whitehead was a monster, a “vampire”. In the words of Petit himself, they were merely “treating this man’s life as more of a fiction than he’s treated his own.” And yet, The Falconer is more than that. It’s a psychic assassination, a cruel inversion of the sinister spy movie trappings in which he has so long dressed his experience, Whitehead redrawn as a magickal Harry Lime for the post cold-war generation.
Where both men seem to take exception is with Whitehead’s knack for a tale. He sees his whole life in the context of the birthing of Horus and claims that his obsession with falcons stems from his possession by a statue he saw on a trip to the Louvre.
“Whereas Croweley might have summoned his myth through ritual” He tells me
“I have always lived mine”.
Later on we are sat in his car, parked along Trumpington street.
“Everything you can see is an illusion” he says, pointing at the lamp-lit street ahead. He talks passionately about the possibilities of the human mind, how little we know and understand of what we see. He is an optimist, an idealist in thrall to the unknown.
Perhaps the sole grain of truth that can be dredged From The Falconer is Petit’s assertion that Whitehead is “somebody who always seems to have one more story to tell”. Amongst all the half-truths and fantasies I know this true.
I am waiting…
For more information see peterwhitehead.net |
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