I have to tell the truth, I have to be objective. My subjects have to be objects. But sooner or later you have to take sides. —PETER WHITEHEAD, THE FALL
To watch The Fall is to be embattled by The Fall. An essay, a dialectical exercise, a visual and sonic experi- mentation, a documentary, a stunt, a record, a state- ment, an idea, a harangue, a grenade, an opus, The Fall presses hard against its time and place until it pulses outward to the past and future, then back in on itself, as exhausting as it is exhaustive, as totaliz- ing as it is total. The Fall is a bow shot and parting shot for Peter Whitehead, a 30-year-old filmmaker who dropped the mic and scarcely returned to the stage after all was edited and done, literally wander- ing the desert to teach falconry in Saudi Arabia in the decades that followed. This would be tragic if the film didn’t entail a career’s worth of ideas and develop- ments deployed at once, if it weren’t a whole hog, endgame, Don Quixote of meta-filmic kaleidoscopic disquisitions. Falconry seems like a logical next chap- ter after The Fall.
Even the title is manifold, describing a societal descent, a specifically New York/American civilization plummet, a personal breakdown, a filmic materialist
disintegration, and simply the time of year when Whitehead set out to make The Fall. In town for the 1967 New York Film Festival, where his films Benefit of the Doubt and Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London were screening, the Englishman was cajoled into training his lens on Gotham, the de facto capital of a civilization he found both kinetically alluring and politically deplorable. From that autumn through May of 1968, he would shoot a daunting spectrum of activity: a pro-military rally in Washington Square Park, an anti-war march on Washington D.C., lefty traveling theater troupes in Union Square and Central Park, art openings, art happenings, poetry readings, football games, dance parties, photo shoots, Newark in smoldering ruins, and the tide-turning sit-ins at Columbia University.
One of the more important things to realize about The Fall, which is apparent throughout the film, is that not only didn’t Whitehead arrive in NYC without preconceptions, those preconceptions are the basis for the film’s very conception. Whitehead’s damning
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