straight into the camera lens, his gaze as frankly direct as cinema gets.
After fairly attacking the notion of objectivity, and asserting the work’s multilayered subjectivity, Whitehead takes the film to a genuinely surprising place for its third act. From swirling psychedelic notions of the apocalypse, replete with fantasies of assassinations (the Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy murders bring out the macabre thought experimentalist in Whitehead), the film left-turns to something like a Whiteheadian utopia. We move behind the barricades of the Columbia University sit-ins, where students seized control of Hamilton Hall and the Low Library in protest of the University’s affiliation with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a weapons think tank, and the construction of a school gymnasium in Harlem’s Morningside Park. These sequences are notably free of both Whitehead’s violent, slice-and-dice editing style and contrapuntal sound, and are the closest The Fall gets to the brand of Direct Cinema that he otherwise aims to denude. Yet since these events most closely illustrate the director’s own outlook and ambitions—the collectivism, the activism, the
youth and vibrancy—they also represent him at his most subjective. His footage is warm and playful, and shows students effectively forming an ad-hoc society within the barricaded halls of the library; what it doesn’t show are the conflicts between pro- testing factions, the rancorous split along racial lines, the complications of paradise. Though the protests would last for eight days, and, it should be noted, proved effective at both dissolving the University’s association with IDA and halting construction of the gym, Whitehead’s parting impressions are of the swift and violent denouement witnessed by his cam- era. Always, ever, a fall. From nocturnal shots of stu- dents nursing bloody foreheads and being yanked to the ground by cops, he cuts to his own image on a flickered TV set, the modern carnival mirror revealing a face befogged by static, as electric and flatly medi- ated as everything else we’ve just seen. This final fall from grace is apparently more than he can bear, has- tening a film-ending crash into silence and darkness. For its time, and also for the psyche of its maker, The Fall is both a record and a projection. Subjective and objective. Documentary and fiction. Its great feat, thrilling and devastating to this day, is managing to make those phenomena one and the same.
in t e r view with peter whitehead
ERIC HYNES: In looking through all of these films from the 1960s I realized that the most fascinating ones were made basically from around mid ’67 through late ’68.
PETER WHITEHEAD, writer/director of The Fall: Yeah, that was the high point I would think. After that people became a little more self-conscious. When I made The Fall, I was not quite sure about anything,
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