The Films of Peter Whitehead: Wholly Communion
| August 10th, 2008
This great little article from Vertigo Magazine, a UK-based indie film thing, covers the work of Peter Whitehead, including a bit on Wholly Communion which features pop-poet-of-the-decade Allen Ginsberg at some point in 1965.
Wholly Communion (1965) is an exquisite document of the 11th June 1965, in equal parts both fantastical and shambolic that, if Whitehead hadn’t filmed it, no-one would have.
Captured in all its amateur glory, calamity strikes ten minutes in, when, stumbling with nerves, Harry Fainlight is heckled by a loveable idiot who repeats the words “love, love, love”, getting more applause than the act whilst the camera frantically searches for his close up. When order is restored by the intervening host, Fainlight, hilariously destabilised, digs himself into a deeper hole of humiliation by trying to redress the balance, and is ordered to just read the words. The ever roving lens is as interested in the pretty little polka dot mod girls holding flowers and sipping red wine as it is in the poets themselves. Adrian Mitchell redresses the balance with a poem about Vietnam. Smoking groupies, caught somewhere between beatniks and hippies, look on, wondering why they’re there. The native poets assemble for a penultimate performance of poems about sneezing, all trying to upstage each other, before headline act Ginsberg, like some demented, pot-bellied Christ, trounces them all.
With its spontaneous zooms, coarsely racked exposures and no time to check if there’s a hair in the gate, it is less of a conscious homage to the vérité experiments of Pennebaker and Shirley Clarke, whom the dedicated cinephile Whitehead must surely have been an admirer of, the style undoubtedly dictated by the shooting conditions – its freezes, cutaways and black frames more a necessity than a plan. Whitehead has subsequently pointed out that, the much debated segment of Gregory Corso, partially obscured and framed between the heads of two spectators, was, rather than premeditated mise-en-scene, a result of him being pushed to the floor by a horizontal Ginsberg so that he could see.
