view of the city, and of the country, culture, and poli- tics he asserts the city stands for, accounts for the most infuriatingly intractable aspect of the film. But it also stands as a built-in proof of the film’s subjec- tivity— and thus only affirms Whitehead’s prevailing purpose, which is to obliterate any notion of objec- tivity. There’s no pretending that the filmmaker is a mere vessel for footage, that he’s ever just pointing and shooting whatever passes before him, and the film starts from that place. Whitehead has his beliefs, his theories and notions about the city, and he’s mak- ing a film motivated by them. In a sense, The Fall is the ultimate tourist film. The tourist can observe, but can never cease being a tourist; he can’t ever look but from the eyes he’s imported, for good and for ill. Rather than shrink from this reality, Whitehead cops to and embraces it. He samples street scenes and protest rallies like a diner at a buffet, and sizes up the culture by flipping through the TV dial. “Sometimes outsiders see us with a much clearer light than we see ourselves,” he says, with a heavy dose of entitle- ment that’s cannily deconstructed moments later via footage of the director touring the city next to a rent-a-model from the plush back seat of a Cadillac, the landscape speeding past and comfortably framed by the car window. It’s preening, but also an admission of preening. For starters, these sequences were staged—the gal isn’t an actual paramour but model Alberta Tiburzi (“No she doesn’t have to be able to act,” he tells her casting agent), and the man behind the wheel gets one of the grooviest screen credits in history, “Angelo Mannsraven—Driving the Cadillac.” But also Whitehead’s epileptic, cubistic, MTV-15-years-before-MTV editing style turns every
20
second of the film into a construct. Whether any par- ticular sequence is acquired on the fly or concocted for the camera, it all ultimately functions as matter for the director’s infinitely malleable cinematic col- lage. Supplementing, and at times overwhelming the visuals, is a soundscape riddled with haunting, often atonal Hammond organ riffs on Bernstein- Sondheim’s “America,” contrapuntal atmospherics, and the warping hum of a TV tuner. It may contain invaluable documentation, and it may come on as an audio-visual essay, but The Fall is never other than a work of art.
Though quite opposite to Direct Cinema in its inter- ventionist, fiddly, textural, editorializing execution, The Fall is startlingly direct in intent. Unlike his kindred spirit and semi-hero Godard, Whitehead doesn’t mince his words or riddle his meanings. This can make him, and his film, rather didactic, too transparently condemnatory and condescendingly English in its anti-Americanism. “A city gone mad,” he drones as Tiburzi cavorts in his rented flat, “con- demned to an addiction to the present, the now, the news,” his words pegging that New York min- ute yet echoing with centuries of Euro disgust with upstart, culturally greener America. “The real world must be somewhere else.” But that overflowing revulsion also makes him impossible to laugh off or relegate, and makes even his broadsides double as confessions, his naïveté seem calculated, the thinness of his diatribes feel subjectively weighted. Rather than slink about, Godard-like, in sunglasses, the raffishly, practically self-mockingly handsome Whitehead spends ample screen time looking
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36