wonderful it is you’ve occupied the University.” And they said, “Fuck off.” [Laughs] “We’re not having any fucking media coming in.” And I said, “Hey, I just made a film about Vietnam. I just made a film with [Allen] Ginsberg. It was shown at the New York Film Festival in September.” And suddenly I heard a voice from behind one of the other blokes. He had seen my films. He disappeared for two minutes and came back and said, “I’ve had a word with Tom Hayden—Peter Whitehead, come on in and join us,” which was the most wonderful moment of my life. I was inside. I was one of them. I ceased to be an observing voyeur. I had become a participant. And that was the significance of Columbia for me, that I was merely one out of a bunch of people who were standing up and saying, “This is wrong. We don’t like it, and we don’t want it to happen.”
EH: The film is so intricately constructed, so rhythmically put together. How difficult was it to edit?
PW: I had to cut every single shot with a razor blade and glue it together. It’s the most edited film in his- tory. Well, it certainly was at the time. I had a complete nervous breakdown in the middle of it. Nearly ended up drowning in the sea in bloody Sardinia. I had such a total collapse that I had to put myself together, and I discovered the only way to do that was to put the film together. Then I spent 30 years in the desert trapping falcons and everything. I’m sure you know all that. But then all these years later, when it was playing at the Edinburgh Film Festival, I was so amazed. I guess you do forget things, because I felt like it had been made by somebody else. There wasn’t a single edit or word
or image that was out of place. I was under some kind of trance, you know?
EH: Do you think you were accurately seeing what was in front of you in New York? Were you even going for accuracy?
PW: The first film I ever made was called The Perception of Life. I had to shoot the whole thing through micro- scopes because it was a history of the theories made by scientists as to what was living material. Since their theories were based on what they saw through micro- scopes, I went back to the museums and started film- ing through those microscopes to show what they saw, to show how they were forced to come to their conclusions because they were limited by the technol- ogy. I was aware that the microscope stood between the mind and the decisions made. By the time I made The Fall, I was aware that my camera was standing between me and authentic experience. I could never believe again in making a film without questioning everything about subjectivity and objectivity, what was true and what wasn’t true. Being aware that every edit was a lie. If you cut something, it is a lie. Godard had this problem, too, and so did the Russians for God’s sake. But back to your question, I never ques- tioned whether it was true what I was filming. You’re trying to say to me, “Well, can I look at The Fall as an objective truth?” And I’m saying, Well fuck me, no. The whole film is about the fact that you can’t do that.
EH: What I’m trying to get at is that your film seems to fight against the whole notion that documentary can be a truth.
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