Peter Whitehead, The Risen: A Holographic Novel, Hathor, 1994.
"Whitehead's 3-D 'Holographic Novel', a vivid quest into the mysteries of ancient mythology, occultism and female sexuality. A similar menage-a-trois to Nora And... except this time the uptight doctor (a crystallographer), the troubled sculptress, and the incandescently beautiful actress are haunted by a vanished character, the psychic and hallucinatory pilgrim John (a spectralized version of Syd Barrett, to whom the book is dedicated). In an old country house in Cornwall, the two women seduce the doctor physically (with a series of pornographic dance-rituals), while John's computer hypertexts of shamanic knowledge initiate him psychically. As his scepticism peels away he realises way too late that to find John, he has to go all the way. Paperback and film rights have already been sold to Mirabilis, The Risen is rumoured to contain the encoded proof of reincarnation." - Entropy
"It belongs alongside Norman Mailer's 'Ancient Evenings' and William Burroughs' 'The Western Lands'. - Iain Sinclair
"Peter Whitehead is a mythologiser. If one really needs to fit him into a niche, he belongs in the small yet crucial one with the likes of JG Ballard, William Burroughs, HP Lovecraft, Mervyn Peake, and more recently Iain Sinclair, Alan Moore and David Britton. Although stylistically the aforementioned vary drastically, in terms of motivation and psychological makeup they function in basically the same way. All have looped perception, all portray self-referential visions of the world. All of them see the external world as the superficial aspects – a mere skin – of an underlying world of noumena and sentient symbols.
Peter Whitehead’s novels are an adjunct to his film work of the sixties, although not a substitute. One could say that his films were essentially literary, that he was a novelist trying to make film fulfil a literary function. Equally, that his novels are intensely visual and evoke the cinematic. The Risen is a continuation and development of his book Nora And . . ., with similar plot construction and similar progression of unfolding layers of psychological discovery. But The Risen goes beyond the earlier book, into the realms of shamanism, magic, prescience and possession.
I’ve heard various complaints about aspects of the work – the repetitive plot, the stilted dialogue, the artificial characters. I’ve pointed out to them that one could say the same thing about Kafka. The basis of the book necessitates the portrayal of the characters in a specific ‘non-naturalistic’ manner. They are not real people – or, rather all are aspects of one real person – Peter Whitehead. They are different pieces of a puzzle which, when connected in the correct combination, unfolds the ultimate revelation of SELF. It’s not as pretentious as I’ve made it sound! Like Baby Doll, reviewed last issue, the essential element in The Risen is what Austin Spare called ‘self-love’. The absorption of the self into the SELF to the exclusion of the phenomenal world.
Two women – lovers – seduce a crystallographer who has become obsessed with a bust of the Egyptian princess, Meritaten. They spirit him away to their country home, where they entertain him with erotic performances while he attempts to decode computer messages left by the vanished shaman/scientist John. As the book progresses, the web of references and synchronicities spin out like the web of the great spider goddess and twist reality in a masterful way. It’s not for people with short attention spans. There are no pyrotechnics in this book; this is invocatory.
At times it reminds of Roeg’s film, Performance, with its claustrophobia and voyeurism, but whereas Performance was about the outside world, mirrored in Turner’s little hideaway fantasy house, The Risen is an escape from a world which Peter Whitehead had turned away from in disgust and injured idealism – as recorded in his film The Fall.
I recommend all of Peter’s books and films, as they’re parts of an interlinking, developing mythology. In fact, read them several times each." - DM Mitchell
"Rationality is deconstructed in Peter Whitehead's 'The Risen', the '90's first bona fide cult novel.
Shamanism, the primal belief system that pre-dates organised religion by tens of thousands of years, centres around the ultimate trip, the last great adventure left to humankind, the journey within oneself. In a modern context, it's a useful tool for honing and planing our spiritual selves in such a way as to interact better with dimensions of the sacred, something we in the West, in particular, have lost contact with. It's also a fundamental theme of 'The Risen'.
The novel, a revelational rollercoaster ride into a world of psychedelic smart drugs, religion, lucid dreaming and cyberspace, charts the investigations of crystallographer Matthew Sutherland into the life and works of physicist manque John Faulkner, and uses his explorations as an analogy for the shamanistic experience. Sutherland trawls through 'the network' of Faulkner's computer files in an effort to understand, and hopefully eventually locate, the missing scientist. The further Sutherland delves into the work (and thus mind) of Faulkner, the further his perception and understanding of reality and rationality become altered.
What makes the novel even more fascinating, and neatly illustrates its multi-layered design, is the way in which the written narrative mirrors Faulkner's electronic compositions. In effect, the words in the book become the words on Sutherland's computer screen. The spiritual metamorphosis that Sutherland undergoes as he reads Faulkner's missives can be seen to be the paradigm of what Whitehead hopes will happen to the reader, with the reader experiencing what Sutherland experienced. Sutherland's attitude to Faulkner's legacy is like editing a movie, except this time the movie is editing him.
Whitehead is a thrifty gatherer of stray narratives and elaborates on a number of other interesting themes and arguments. By utilising a writing style that is at once informative but also atmospheric, he produces a highly readable tale embracing concepts such as David Bohm's idea of holographic structure of the mind and Rupert Sheldrake's theory of morphic resonance. Stephen Hawking's notions of time, space and chaos are explored side-by-side with suppositions about the use of psychedelic chemicals to access the unconscious, all the while beguiling the reader with a ripping good yarn. Again, this exemplifies the multi-layered and holistic strcuture of 'The Risen'. In the hands of a lesser author, the story would have been hampered by potentially over-complex scientitif theory.
The construction of 'The Risen' parallels that of the Internet. The book is not a linear story, but rather can be read on a number of different levels. You plot your way through the book, much in the same way you journey around the global electronic village, taking up the viewpoints of different characters and thus coming to all number of potential conclusions. Essentially, the book is what you make of it.
Above all, 'The Risen' is a book that makes you think, something that so few seem able to do these days. By drawing people in on their own terms and then gradually eroding them away with a bit of seductive writing, Whitehead dares to tackle some of the fundamental questions at the heart of human existence. He's trying to restructure reality in a sacred way and get the reader to think "That could happen to me." As Whitehead testifies, you can let go and survive, but you need to prepare yourself. And there's no better preparation for the ultimate trip, the one within yourself, than The Risen." - Kieran Wyatt
"The occult novel, a rather Edwardian-looking edifice, presides gloomily over the most sodden and untrodden reaches of the literary landscape; a critical hinterland forever infused by the peculiar, paranoiac shade of Dennis Wheatley and thus seldom visited by those of subtler talent or more sophisticated intellect.
Wheatley's Manichean world, hopelessly confusing Satan with Stalin, is a place where fat and unpleasant Devil-worshippers with bad breath (often of uncertain ethnic origin) indulge in astral rumbles with a charming array of right-wing, upper class occult dilettantes. We can tell that the devil-worshippers are the bad guys because of their generally "evil" demeanour and their willingness to French kiss a goat's rectum while chanting "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law!"
Sadly, when genuine occultists have made forays into fiction the result is little better. While less hysterical than Wheatley, Crowley's "Moonchild" reads most often like a mirror-image version of "The Satanist". Here, the diabolists are good guys but the general sense of middle-class decorum and lacklustre prose remain the same. One could cite Dion Fortune or Sax Rohmer, or, on a more elevated level, Arthur Machen or Algernon Blackwood. Even with such glittering examples as these last-named gentlemen it is quite clear, however, that little of worth has been accomplished in the field of occult fiction for the best part of a century.
Part of the problem is the changing face of the occult itself, or to be more precise, the change that has occurred in our perception of the occult world. In that occult means "hidden", the latter half of the twentieth century has seen much that was formerly occult resolved into a scientific sphere of influence that is expanding exponentially.Even the most die-hard aficionado of the magickal arts must surely admit that the frontiers of understanding are these days more usually the province of the quantum physicist than the sorcerer. In the day of John Dee, or even of Isaac Newton, magic and science had a close fraternal relationship, and were indeed in many instances exactly the same thing. Since then, there has been a schism. Mysteries of the Universe that were previously the sole domain of the philosopher or thaumaturge now display themselves brazenly to our tunnelling microscopes and astronomical apparatus, in service to a rational, Cartesian world-view that has no room for Newton's alchemy or Dee's angels.
Christianity, balking at a God that could not create the world in seven days, failed to come to terms with advances in cosmology and our understanding of evolutionary principles. In doing so, it left itself intellectually isolated and thus hastened its own collapse into self-doubt and spiritual impotence. The contemporary occultist faces just such a dilemma: if the traditions and essence of magickal thinking are not to disappear into the same mists as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fairies or Swedenborg's spirits then magick must once more embrace science; become as familiar with cyberspace as it has formerly been with the Aethyrs.
Which brings us, at last, to "The Risen". Some years in the crafting and yet written in fierce and visionary rushes, "The Risen" maps a viable new territory for the occult novel that is both vital and inclusive, drawing upon holography, crystallography and quantum physics every bit as much as upon timeless Egyptian myth or the SOMA mysteries that also provide part of its substance.
Linking diverse areas of scientific and metaphysical speculation is a narrative that on one level reads as a heavily eroticized version of a country house detective story: a missing-person mystery is posed that opens like a black hole in the text to draw both characters and readers inexorably into a deeper, truer mystery. Investigations here are carried out on more than merely mundane levels, probing in the dark recesses of Great Pyramid or human mind alike to furnish not so much "Whodunnit?" as "Whatarewe?" Peter Whitehead's literary style betrays his splendid cinematic origins with streams of imagery that linger in the mind's eye to create an almost virtual space in which the mystery unfolds. Iconic characters are drawn into a dance where in the last analysis they are made aspects of each other, caught up in an archetypal drama that was old when Earth was young: the scattered pieces of the God Osiris are here pieced together as computer files. The mysteries of Isis emerge unexpectedly in the midst of hard-core dildo-wielding pornography. The drugged hedonism of our late twentieth century connects in a chilling arc-flash with the occult spaces of a much older gnosis.
While Whitehead's prior experience pays off here in his skilful use of visual imagery and narrative, his treatment of the basic subject matter also indicates a man who knows of whereof he speaks. The various musings upon crystallography gain much support from Whitehead's own experience as a crystallographer. The keen descriptions of the feel of magic as presented in the work have the resounding smack of authenticity, and one suspects these occult aspects, although obviously fictionalised, may also have their origins in the personal experience.
In summary, "The Risen" is remarkable both for its entertainment value as a fiction and its educational potential as a non-fictional treatise on some interesting aspects of our occult and scientific culture. More than this, it is to be hoped that it may become a template for the occult fictions of the future. Move over, Dennis Wheatley, and tell Sax Rohmer the news." - Alan Moore
"Two seemingly unconnected experiments occur at the same moment. Matthew, a physicist, splits a pyramid-shaped diamond with a green X-ray laser. John, a dreamer and occultist, splits his mind with a pyramidine crystal of the psychedelic smart drug, Tiresiamine. Their parallel researches are destined to lead them to the inevitable meeting point: infinity.
As a result of the two experiments, John mysteriously disappears and Matthew is asked by John's two girlfriends to find him. The clues for his search come from John's "unconscious" communications to Matthew in the form of dreams, information contained on 13 (or maybe 14) computer discs and the erotic/esoteric performances of John's lover, Ms Rosetta Stone. As Matthew endeavours to decipher their meanings his mind is gradually altered; his thought patterns, no longer linear, enter a virtual reality, becoming part of a vast neural internet interfaced with John's mind, accessing information through the crystalline lattices of cyberspace, propelling Matthew towards ultimate revelation.
Taking the basic narrative device of many occult (and detective) novels - the search for hidden knowledge leading to enlightenment - Peter Whitehead has transcended genre boundaries, creating the first truly holographic novel. 'The Risen' is at once an affirmation of the mystical nature of mankind and an exploration of current radical thinking, taking in Rupert Sheldrake's theory of Morphic resonance and David Bohm's notion of the holographic structure of the mind/brain, finally reuniting and overlapping the polarised discplines of science and occultism, creating gaps in the resulting moire pattern through which a greater truth can be accessed. Shamanism, Sexual Magick, Holography, Crystallography, Egyptology, Virtual Reality and Psychopharmacology combine to draw the reader into the virtual space inhabited by the novel, becoming, with Matthew, a fellow initiate into the Lesser and Greater Egyptian Mysteries.
At the moment of the two experiments - is it a coincidence that a small robot with a green laser eye breaks through the door into the hidden chamber of the Giza Pyramid, discovered recently at the end of a small shaft rising from the Queen's chamber?
A book to be read three times; once to program the narrative, the second time to decipher the dreams and the third time... the third time it will be played directly onto disk from the reconfigured hard drive in your brain." - Jonathon Davies
Excerpt
Peter Whitehead, Nora and..., Brookside Press, 1990.
"This ingenious novel is the dream of the film that Godard never made. Erotic and disturbing." - Andrew Sinclair
"An intimate exorcism of mnemonic ghosts. Starting off amidst the violent chaos of the barricades, Paris '68, the narrative retreats to a country house where a three-way sex tangle commences. An uptight English biologist is in love with a German girl Nora - the unreachable daughter of a Freudian psychoanalyst (she's transcribing his final case study from flawed recollection), but he fucks her French dancer/actress/nympho best friend. The narrative then switches to Nora, as she attempts to deal with memories of her father and her emerging sexual desires. Whitehead folds in the ideas - plagiarism, sexuality, possession, mythology, the unknowability of the feminine, with his own luminous black and white imagery of the child filmed whist digging for food in the Warsaw Ghetto, and a whore/virgin - bound and acquiescent, for the voyeur's gaze, in a darkened room." - Entropy
Peter Whitehead, Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, Hathor, 1999.
"Novel as History, History as novel. Film-maker and artist without portfolio, Peter Whitehead centres a tale of espionage and illumination on the Beat Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall in June 1965 (also the subject of his 1966 documentary, “Wholly Communion”). The nearest progenitor is probably Norman Mailer’s book on the yippie march on the Pentagon, “The Armies of the Night”.
"In the 1960s, Whitehead was at the heart of swinging London and the counter-culture: he made documentaries such as "Wholly Communion" (on the Poetry Incarnation of 1965) and "Tonite Let's All Make Love in London". This novel recycles material from the films, but to new ends: in the memoirs of Milton Crookshank, the spy with an interest in the occult, counter-culture gets muddled up with counter-espionage, Whitehead's own films are spliced with the Zapruder film and conspiracies sprawl like krakens under the surface (we're told that Crookshank was behind "Squidgygate"). It's not terribly well-written in conventional terms, but conventional terms are the last thing Whitehead's interested in." - Robert Hanks
"Narrated by MI5 agent Milton Crookshank after Whitehead’s alter ego Patrick Walker slips into psychedelia-induced catatonia in the Egyptian section of the British Museum, “Tonite...” deals with nearly everything, including the infiltration and takeover of nascent Brit counter-culture by the American intelligence services. The spies, counter-spies and luscious under-age au-pairs (Gunvor, Gunilla) begin to seem interchangeable and self-replicating after a while, but maybe that’s the point. The narrative swaps energetically between notes, tapes, film and slash-punctuated stream-of-consciousness musings in a way which might be intended as a mirror of Whitehead/Walker’s fractured consciousness or a statement about society’s schizophrenic nature. Or something else that I’ve missed entirely. Can a blind owl fly by insight? as someone asks. It’s a relief eventually to find yourself under the Albert Hall dome where the prose is calmed by a beautiful and mysterious dancer and the visionary outpourings of Ginsberg, Corso and others seem comparatively mild and unassuming.
With the self-confidence of the already damned, Whitehead tackles life, death, sex and European cinema at a run, ignoring or failing to notice the usual dull concerns of the novel to produce something that is in parts perilously close to being unreadable while being also rather wonderful. “Intermingled songlines of mermaids and jellybabies melting in the sun.” That’s right." - Stephen Blanchard
"In the 1960s, Whitehead was at the heart of swinging London and the counter-culture: he made documentaries such as “Wholly Communion” (on the International Poetry Incarnation of 1965 at the Royal Albert Hall) and “Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London”. This novel recycles material from the films, but to new ends; in the memoirs of Milton Crookshank, the spy with an interest in the occult, counter-culture gets muddled up with counter-espionage, Whitehead’s own films are spliced with the Zapruder film and conspiracies crawl like krakens under the surface (we’re told that Crookshank was behind “Squidgygate”). It’s not terribly well-written in conventional terms, but conventional terms are the last thing Whitehead’s interested in." - Robert HanksExcerpt
Peter Whitehead, BrontëGate, Hathor Books, 1995.
"The true story behind MI5's recording of the "Squidgy" tapes Renegade MI5 agent Milton Crookshank reveals the sordid and shameful story of his most notorious assignment, recording the erotic mobile 'phone calls of our Once and Future Queen. Showing the dubious methods of the British Secret Services as protectors of the realm, this sinister book confirms the threat posed by Princess Diana to the House of Windsor. Colluding with MI5, who else could gain by having Milton's recordings 'hacked' from his super-computer and released 'inadvertently' into the public domain, other than the British Royal family'?
Milton tells us of the assassination attempt by the glamorous 'literary-journalist' Rachel Bishop, seducing him with a treacherous sadomasochistic scenario - MI5 never suspecting the erotic situation would get so out of hand. Was it the poetry or the opium?
Since the subversive revelations in "Spycatcher" by Milton's ex-boss, Peter Wright, other MI5 agents have ended up on the run, leaking more scurrilous facts to the press. Milton's Gothic disappearance came soon after MI5 learnt he was close to completing his Memoirs, telling of his recruitment from Cambridge University (he was acting Professor of English) and his subsequent career as a part-time spy. None of his fellow agents doubted he'd been 'taken out' by the luscious Ms Bishop in a fabulous act of sexual theatre, but would David Shayler and Richard Tomlinson be next'? MI5, meanwhile, searching for the body of Rachel Bishop ...
But while Milton was operating his exotic super-computer with its jade-green X-ray laser 'eyes' scanning all the air-waves known to man and beast, entrapping Squidgy chattering about secret trysts with her lover in a cottage on the Wuthering Edge of the Yorkshire moors, did he record other spectres, ancestral lovers wandering those moors in the ghostly moonlight, still making love, whispering occult sweet-nothings into the listening winds? Was it the ghost of Emily Bronte herself, or Cathy, or Princess Diana, in the cruel savage arms of a swarthy, dark-eyed Heathcliff, the pitiless Gypsy predator of innocent young English girls?"
Peter Whitehead, Pulp Election: The Booker Prize Fix, Bluedove Publishing, 1996.
"The further adventures of Milton Crookshank, former MI5 fixer, assassin and whipping boy. Failing miserably to write his government shattering memoirs, he becomes."
"Fascinated by the meteoric rise of some plagiarised Romance novel which a mysterious agency seems to be promoting for the Booker. Suspecting that the roxy dominatrix living upstairs is involved, Crookshank decides to investigate. Pseudonymously written by Whitehead, its a fecund combo of deranged literary satire, pulp thriller and bondage romance. Some have suspected that it conceals the truth about the British government's collusions with the publishing industry. These rumours are allegedly false." - Entropy
"...I’d just finished reading Mr Nice when a jiffy bag containing a far stranger book dropped onto my mat: Pulp Election by Carmen St Keeldare. I was instantly alerted, the author’s name sounded so much like another Howard Hunt alias. I dived in and was not disappointed. This was the companion volume to the Marks autobiography. Secret State confessions recycled as gash fiction. (Hackwork cobbled together by a manic, Post-Modern autodidact. A collagist who lurched from T.S. Eliot to Mickey Spillane.) A text so fractured and peculiar, so dark in its obsessions, that it could only have been assembled by an entire office of black propagandists. And what’s more, Howard Marks was quickly keyed into the story as a character (or signifier).
“Next, I called my ex-accomplice (from the MI6 days), Howard Marks... and asked if he still had access to the bent CIA guy with the gadget that could tap into the tap and reach the number behind it... Howard came round and we soon got the number of the fascists tapping my phone... I reckoned it was some kind of new technology, sending holographic interference waves down the line, fed back upon themselves and diffracted through trillion bit laser-illuminated crystal cubes of artificial diamond, to turn my mind into something resembling a belly-full of pulsating quanta- distressed baby jelly-fish inside the irradiated body of an unpensioned schizophrenic ex-CIA dolphin.”
The ravings of a new-wave physicist, someone who had worked with Francis Crick. And done too much mescaline. A classic William Burroughs paranoid believing herself to be the only person ‘in possession of all the facts’. Ms Keeldare’s text was paralysed with self-consciousness, mesmerised by its own audacity. Out of the stew of Hank Janson autopsy porn, lingering into photo sessions with beautiful corpses fished out of the Thames, came shafts of wit, parodies of Victorian three-deckers. Jane Eyre put to the sword. The ‘Madame in the attic’. ‘And, Derrida, I married him.’ Repetitions of terrible jokes: ‘a port in every girl’.
Keeldare knew just what she was doing: “The two parasitic mythemes, fiction and faction, hungrily feeding on each other... amounted to some kind of composite truth.” The novel had been put together, in a hurry, as a riposte to the Marks version. It used some of the same characters and most of the plot. It was being circulated among the usual counter-culture outposts (piles of copies in Compendium Bookshop, Camden Town). And it was being sent to anyone who was known to be reviewing Mr Nice. The book appeared to be vanity-published - but which frustrated novelist could afford such a slick hardcover production? The name “Bluedove” was a covert gesture in the direction of the Conservative logo.
Pulp Election borrowed the parodic form of Dennis Potter’s Singing Detective, and Martin Rowson’s hard boiled Waste Land comic-strip, but plagiarism was only one of its boasts. There was also the mirror-world voyeurism of Blackeyes. The Secret State, according to Keeldare, fed on perversion, an occulted sexuality. ‘She was wearing a long black leather coat, and was naked underneath, except for a black leather corset, which I untied slowly...’ Fetishistic rituals forced into the computer, alongside dreary extracts from Peter Wright’s ghosted memoirs. Everything that is not forbidden is compulsory.
‘The book was a detective novel, in code - if you know how to decipher the names and the places.’ I was beginning to work it out. I alternated chapters with parallel passages from Mr Nice. Keeldare borrowed her victim, Rachael Neal, from a true-life killing ( in case I missed the point, there was a newspaper cutting slipped into the book). ‘I pulled out the knife and started stabbing her in the back and she turned around and called my name... The attack was carried out near the perimeter fence at RAF Cottishall.’ The murdered Norfolk student was called Rachael Lean. Keeldare was one of those anagram-fixated conspiracy freaks who uses documentary evidence (photocopied newscuttings, accounts of fireballs over stone circles) as confirmation of their seriously skewed world view. ‘The capricious process by which facts mysteriously copulate with facts and breed fiction - the way fiction copulates with fiction and breeds crime... Coincidence was becoming a much more pervasive kind of logic than reason.’
I began to see where Keeldare’s Christian name came from: Carmen Callil. The sub-text of the book was a satire on the Booker Prize (doomed to failure). It suggested that the whole thing was a fix. Revealing an author so out of touch with metropolitan gossip that she felt this was worth mentioning. Who would bother to carry out such an elaborate literary hoax, having fun with David Lodge and his alleged plagiarism of Mrs Gaskell’s North and South? Someone who wanted to carry the argument from a class perspective. ‘Their fantasies were always class-based .. Romance - but with its secret, repressed underbelly revealed. Whores. Drugs. Prostitution. Bondage.’ The illicit marriage of the publishing industry and the Secret State, a conspiracy to silence Carmen St Keeldare. A leaked transcript from Smith Square disguised as a Derek Raymond ‘Factory thriller. ‘Chapter by chapter - an embodiment, lock, stock and barrel, of the next Tory manifesto. Almost every sickly hypocritical promise and lie has been injected, like an infection, into the text of our book... To make the Tory election manifesto into a Booker Prize-winning romance novel.’ The plot thins nicely when Lord Archer’s collection of Booker winners turns up on a stall in Petticoat Lane. And archer demands a national referendum - to help him find the title for his next faction novel. Before John Major, wisely, decides to pick up his cards and retire to New Zealand.
Pulp Election was so blatantly ghosted that it should have been reviewed by Madame Blavatsky. I wanted to know who was behind it. Whose cod autobiography this was. ‘I had to be careful not to let slip to anyone that I was writing my memoirs. Too many people would know instantly how explosive such a book could be, and guess my reason for writing it - nothing less than - to bring the Government down! If news of my literary project was leaked, I’d be rubbed out of my own story before I‘d finished the prologue.’
I had to move fast (the Keeldare style is addictive), to follow the clues so lavishly scattered across these pulp pages. (Pulp with Bloomsbury production values.) Milton Crookshank, the disgraced operative, trails the woman, with whom he is linked in fetishism (black leather so tight it looked as if it was painted on her by Leonor Fini’), to Kettering. To a second-hand bookshop. A shop that I discovered, when I visited the town, containing a fine selection of books by a local author. All of them self-published. Nobody goes to Kettering without a very good reason. It was beginning to fit together. An Arab in dark glasses sitting in the back of a gleaming Mercedes clinched it. I tracked the car through the pylon-slung countryside to a virtually unmapped village.
Keeldare admits that she has given the bones of her story - ‘an involute of improbable narratives’ - to a journalist from Harpers. I checked the current (November 1996) issue to see if there was anything crazy enough to fit my script. And there it was, a four page spread, on a self-published and otherwise unremarked novel, The Risen. ‘Writer, filmmaker, falconer to Arab princes, former boyfriend of Bianca Jagger... Jenny Fabian profiles the counter-culture’s greatest chronicler’.
Fabian, another notable Sixties floater, author of Groupie and A Chemical Romance (‘Life in a world where the extraordinary is commonplace and to be commonplace is a sin’), had been hired to come forward as the author of Pulp Election when the story broke. Which, of course, it never did. Fabian was an unrequired ghost for whom there would be no author interviews, and no profiles, other than those she wrote herself. To resurrect a career that had been taking a long sabbatical. Her comeback was this glowing tribute to Peter Whitehead. ‘Peter looked like a Nordic god, with wild blonde hair, and an intense charm.’
This was the same Whitehead who had been the chief prosecution witness in the Howard Marks trial. (‘The suave figure of Whitehead climbed into the witness-box. He had blondish hair and a moustache that was slightly reminiscent of Clark Gable,’ according to David Leigh in High Time).This was the egg smuggler from the high Arctic who was able to brandish letters of support, signed ‘Philip’, on notepaper from Windsor Castle. (‘Falconers, just as much as bird-watchers, want to prevent the extinction of birds of prey. No one has worked harder to achieve this than Peter Whitehead.’) This was the man who, according to Howard Marks said, ‘knew an awful lot, but never for one second thought of becoming a grass’.
Even more than Marks, Whitehead felt the compulsion to tell his story. An endless, Arabian Nights’ pipe-dream, each tale more fantastic than the last. Every episode backed by hard evidence: videos, interviews on Swedish television, reports from San Francisco, mounds of newspaper clippings. (‘Dawn Raiders Swoop on Saudi Falcon Smugglers.’ Sunday Times. ‘Seeking Enlightenment through an Ancient Sport. Falconer Peter Whitehead Looks Back on a Life that Soared, Then Sank.’ Wall Street Journal. ‘Falcon Smuggling and the British Connection’. New Scientist. ‘Film Director is Fined for Snatching Eagles.’ Daily Mail. ‘Philip Ready to Fight for the Falcons!’ Nigel Dempster, Daily Mail. ‘MI6 Gags Spy Who Has Vanished into the Cold.’ Sunday Times.) The sort of documentation that has to be provided by the archivists of the Secret State. The precise package that comes with Mr Nice, a crisp mound of Howard Marks cuttings.
There was no other form in which Whitehead’s amazing story could be told. He’d been driven, he said, to use fiction. Worried about his health, his safety, he wrote his books fast, at night. There were already half a dozen novels in various stages of development. He’d published a few himself. Released them in obscure places. ‘I’m not a crime writer. I’m writing my memoirs to bring down the Government.’ He would end each session of his debriefing with the same cryptic hook. ‘You must come back. Next time I’ll tell you the true story.’ And he would give me another book to read, another number to call.
What became increasingly clear was that Whitehead was the invisible man, always at the edge of the frame, never there when the net closed in. Zelig-like, he moved through the history of the counter-culture. Filming the Rolling Stones at the time of Jagger’s drug bust. Involved with Howard Marks, and renting a Scottish estate to receive a major shipment from Colombia, at the time the arrests were made. Falconer to Prince Khaled al Faisal in the Gulf. Implicated (as ‘Pete the Porn’) in a CIA sting operation in Canada. Travelling in Afghanistan, like a John Buchan clubman-adventurer, just ahead of the war zone. Always there, never remembered. ‘Double-dealing provocateur, arms salesman, terrorist (but for whom no one has ever figured out)...covert MI5 operative’.
Whitehead’s favourite image is the caduceus, interwoven narratives, twin lives twisting round a single stem. Two working-class boys who decided to fuck the system from the inside. Howard Marks who went public, charmed the media and the judiciary, took the fall. And Whitehead - who stalked him through the shadows, logging the images, backdating the evidence, editing reality - waited for the moment when he could use an obscure, self-publishing pulp novel to fabricate the beginning of the fantastic story of his many lives and careers." - Ian Sinclair (read the rest of the article)
Peter Whitehead, Terrorism: Considered as One of the Fine Arts
read it here
"The novel from which Peter Whitehead derived his new film of the same title, recently premiered at the Vienna Viennale."
"Reading “Terrorism Considered As One Of The Fine Arts”, the first part of the “Nohzone Trilogy”, by Peter Whitehead, is like slipping on a cosy pair of slippers, or climbing into a hot bath. Its hero, Michael Schlieman, an academic drafted into MI5 whilst at Cambridge, loves the Lakeland poets, malt whisky, pretty young girls and a bit of noir. He has a helpless everyman quality which is endearing, but only to the point where familiar references hold sway. But this is Peter Whitehead, and familiar references are the first things up against the wall.
Schlieman has gone AWOL in the Lakes, and his story is pieced together by a narrator who searches for him at first in the Lake District itself, then in carefully annotated second hand books, then in laboriously decoded web addresses and finally in the reaches of his own psyche. A tale of intrigue involving eco terrorism and the sale of nuclear material ensues. We learn about him through his associations with a pair of Femmes Fatale (who may or may not be aspects of his own anima), through his painstaking self-immolation in myriad concealed hypertexts and from rumours divulged by his estranged MI5 handlers. The cosy hot chocolate-ness rapidly takes on a wormwood bitterness.
Widescreen atmospheric inserts give us heady glimpses of Egyptian brothels, homely snapshots of the slightly depressing provincial lecture circuit, and nouvelle vague memories from Paris in the late sixties, all cranked up with a dose of laboratory strength laudanum.
Whitehead makes use of copious literary quotations, from De Quincey to Kawabata to Kotzwinkle to Coleridge. These serve ostensibly as a frame of reference, but become inevitably a springboard into the void, a void into which all his characters, and indeed ourselves, seem to be headed.
A central theme is that of the palimpsest, a text written over other erased texts, and here Whitehead has not only written over the erased remains of all his other novels, but also succeeds in interweaving the events in his characters’ lives to such an extent that the reader experiences a vertiginous feeling of déjà vu, a warp in consensus reality.
The novel’s most significant achievement, however, is to present a cogent narrative that emerges from the chaos of its shattered compositional style.
Each thread is a link in a vast interconnected labyrinth of allusions, a Qabbalistic raft of elision, a glittering panoply of synaptic flashes multiplying and self fertilizing, rather like neural pathways in the human brain, out of which emerges a new mindset. One cannot divorce oneself from complicity in this process, and in fact the fourth novel in the trilogy, “ And Death Shall Have No Domain Name” may or may not manifest solely in the mind of the reader.
Michael Schlieman straddles this web like Adam Kadmon, the archetypal man, the great within the small, He represents an opium- drenched messiah who not only drags Eros and Thanatos in his slipstream, but heralds the new google consciousness beloved of information technology evangelists.
In Nature’s Child, part two of Peter Whitehead’s Nohzone trilogy, we find ourselves becalmed in a pastoral lacuna. From the opening quote by Coleridge and references to the climactic anomalies of El Nino, to the conclusion with its clear parallels in shamanic transformation, we have Nature as transcendent force, mystical and physical in equal measure.
Whitehead gives us Nature besieged, in the overt story of eco-terrorism, which serves as the exoskeleton of the tale. Beautiful and idealistic young people bent on the assassination of corrupt and double-dealing French businessmen coupled with revenge on murdered activists (think Rainbow Warrior). The possibility of eco-disaster as an anarchistic lesson in political chicanery.
Central to the novel, and indeed to the entire trilogy, is Maria, and Nature’s child is specifically Maria’s story. Like Nature, however, nothing here is straightforward, and while Maria would seem to be a chimera, in that she is a shattered glass reflecting myriad different elements, she is also, like Nature, a quantum polymorph whose life encapsulates millions of alternate potentials which happen to be crystallised into one particular narrative by Michael Schlieman.
Those of us who are easily distracted should take comfort, however, in the gripping style of Schlieman and Maria’s encounter. We are quickly enmeshed in a quagmire of spy thriller thrust and counter thrust, whereby everything we think we know is rapidly eroded, and gradually the artifice of surety is deconstructed until nothing is true (and probably everything is permitted).
Reassuringly we are soon in familiar Whitehead territory, as the protagonists engage loins and the real action begins. An intense psychodrama ensues, in which the struggle for dominion over mind is engrossing and deeply erotic.
In Girl On A Train, Peter Whitehead resolves some of the thematic strands which have entwined, in ophidian fashion, around the central pillar of the caduceus that is Nohzone.
Taking as a template Kawabata’s “Snow Country” and the notion of plagiarism; of novels, of lives, of the curlicues of existence; he revisits his old stomping grounds- academia, spies, sex, the esoteric. Milton Schlieman travels to Japan for a Kawabata conference, encounters a mixed race courtesan on a train, then becomes involved with a pretty translator, who turns out to be more than just a cunning linguist.
The novel pivots on a sex-magickal ritual in which the ghost of Kawabata is evoked.
As with all of Whitehead’s novels the occult perpetually hovers at the periphery of the narrative, waiting to warp events whenever the parameters of reality are weakened. Whether it be ghostly occurrences, discreet espionage or unspoken emotional agendas, the hidden constantly strives to be revealed. Here, revelation is held up to us like a trophy head, then snatched back, leaving perhaps a greater awareness of just how precarious the truth is.
At the culmination of Girl On A Train we discover the Girl’s (Yoko’s), letter to Schlieman, where a story of two sisters’ lives unfolds. In it we have a tale of sibling devotion and a hitherto unexpectedly frank expurgation of events. This narrative, coming as the denouement of so many twists, turns, false alleys and blurred memories, is shocking in its candour, as well as profoundly moving. One cannot help striving for explanations, tying up loose ends, correlating the miasma of half lives, chimeras, ghosts.
The final nail in this sarcophagus is both disorienting and hugely audacious, as our presumptions are turned on their heads yet again. The facts themselves are too pivotal to expose here, suffice to say we question novelistic logic and simultaneously our own precarious foothold on reality.
To simply recount the events of a Peter Whitehead novel is always to reduce it’s epic nature to the level of the prosaic. His writing is literature as total immersion, and his world is one where writing and magic are co-conspirators.
Peter Whitehead has always stood at the brink of cultural change, documenting and shaping significant resonances long before their delineations have been absorbed into the mainstream. With the Nohzone Trilogy, he anticipates a truly interactive new breed of novel.
Prepare to have your mind messed with." - Cameron Lindo
Interview with Peter Whitehead by John Berra
As part of the Peter Whitehead Archive project (2010-2013) I edited an edition of the screenplay for the 2009 film Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts. The book included the full screenplay text, a series of additional essays and previously unpublished archival material.
See below for my introductory essay written for the volume.
*
Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts is a film by Peter Whitehead that had its premiere at the 2009 Viennale. Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts is a novel by Peter Whitehead that was published in 2007. Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts is also a novel by Peter Whitehead that was published online in 2000. To this set of we now add the present volume, Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts: A Screenplay. 
The idea of a single work existing in multiple editions is not new nor is it uncommon to see a work move across multiple platforms via film adaptations and online versions. However, in the case of Whitehead’s oeuvre the four works that carry the title Terrorism represent something akin to a quartet rather than a single work and several supplements. They share themes but remain formally distinct. They are connected but – certainly in the case of the novel and film – can also be seen as stand-alone texts.
The matter is further complicated by the fact that Terrorism, the novel, was written as the first volume of Whitehead’s Nohzone trilogy, a set of novels that includes Nature’s Child (2001) Girl on the Train (2003) and the ‘fourth’ novel of the three And Death Shall Have no Domain Name (2007). Girl, the third novel has just followed Terrorism, the first, into print. Terrorism, the film, began as an adaptation of the second novel Nature’s Child before incorporating into its final form aspects of each of the Nohzone texts. As such, whilst the film uses the title of the novel, the novel is not the ‘source’ of the film.
Confused? You should be because that’s sort of the point, not least because a major theme of Whitehead’s Nohzone project is informatic and bibliographic proliferation. Between 1990 and 1999 Whitehead published five novels that dealt in various ways with notions of autobiography and textual reconstruction. From the attempt to complete an unfinished psychoanalytic case-study in Nora and … (1990) to the interception of ghostly conversation in BrontëGate (1999), Whitehead’s fictions are archives of memoir, dream records, letters, diary entries and transcripts. With the completion of Terrorism, Whitehead took this concept one step further and used the memoirs of ex-MI6 agent Michael Schlieman as a main structural motif.
Schlieman previously appeared as the investigate protagonist of BrontëGate but in Terrorism he is said to have vanished whilst on assignment in Cumbria . The novel charts the attempt of an equally ambiguous narrator to retrieve and analyse the memoirs Schlieman has posted online. This fluid and ambiguous text includes letters, journal entries, fictional scenarios, and (un) reliable passages of autobiography. What emerges is a mise en abyme of texts within texts and an impression of Schlieman as a constantly deferred, fractal identity, a presence that is active within the writing but which never makes the full leap from spectrality to embodiment. Nature’s Child continues the investigation of the memoirs and uncovers Schlieman’s destructive love affair with Maria Lenoir (a key aspect of the Terrorism film), whilst Girl on the Train couples the oneiric interiority of the material with an extended plagiarism of the Kawabata’s novel Snow Country (1947). And Death compounds the vertigo of this whole editorial enterprise as it purports to be another possible sequencing of Schlieman’s memoirs. A portmanteau text that uses sections from the three previous novels it works as a ‘new’ novel which has possibly been imagined in the mind of a reader adept in the art of hypertext linking.Although there is more narrative connection between the first three texts, And Death works as a signal of the potentiality that underpins the rest of the trilogy. As each of the novels unfold, the retrieved texts constantly accumulate to the extent that Schlieman’s memoirs seem like a vast digital abyss. For both the narrator and the reader who navigate this information there is little feeling of completion but rather an impression of radical contingency; the sense that the texts which constitute the novels could combine and recombine into further versions ad infinitum.
Whitehead’s Terrorism film maintains this fluidity. Watch it and you’ll initially think you’re seeing a detective movie or espionage thriller. Whitehead appears as Schlieman on assignment in Vienna and he circles through the city’s tram lines in search of Maria Lenoir and her ecoterrorist cell. However, as Schlieman’s drifting generates a complex web of entanglements, all such generic expectations go out of the window. This is no urban quest or sewer-chase but a descent into an informatic rabbit hole. Dense with meaning, the film uses an associative cutting style in combination with an allusive voice-over and an often obscure set of on-screen texts to create an intricate and dissonant web of reference. Just as the Nohzone novels exist as strange textual archives, so too does the structure of Whitehead’s Terrorism film emphasise its own status as a videographic archive. As a non-linear narrative, the jarring energy of its montage suggests that we are seeing only one of many possible records of Schlieman’s movement through the city.
The point here is that Whitehead’s Nohzone work is significantly performative. Whether working in print, with video or online, Whitehead foregrounds the formal specificity of his chosen media and closes the gap between representation and representational frame. That’s to say, in the novel Terrorism, Schlieman’s memoirs refer to Girl on the Train which is of course the novel we read when we come to the third volume of the trilogy. Similarly, when watching the film Terrorism, we may indeed be watching the film Schlieman purports to be making as a cover for his operations in Vienna . In a curious act of manifestation it is suggested that the Whitehead texts that we hold, watch or surf are not about Schlieman’s memoirs but actually are Schlieman’s memoirs.
All of which is a preamble to the questions posed by the present Screenplay volume. What exactly are you reading here? Is this a dossier of material explaining the film and documenting its production or is it a further iteration of the Nohzone project? Are you about to read Whitehead’s screenplay or Schlieman’s? It would be tempting to go for the latter or just to say “both” and leave it at that. However, this would obscure the book's role of exposition. It is offered as a supplement, but one that aims to illuminate Whitehead’s work, particularly the Terrorism film, rather than extend the fictional Nohzone world.
As a point of comparison one should look to the screenplay editions that Whitehead published under his Lorrimer imprint between 1966 and 1969 as opposed to para-texts such as And Death. In particular his edition of Jean-Luc Goddard’s Alphaville published in 1966 places the screenplay alongside Godard’s original treatment. Whitehead is credited with the translation and also the “description of the action”, because although he paid Godard for the rights to produce a book, Godard had no actual screenplay to offer him. After making the deal Whitehead had to sit with a print of the film and produce his own version. The situation was much the same for the Terrorism screenplay. Although (as the dossier included in this volume indicates) Whitehead produced a wide range of drafts and outlines, the film was not made in accordance with a pre-written text. Much of the dialogue was improvised between the various participants and Whitehead developed scenes in situ. Terrorism is also a film that found its form in the editing room. Working with a considerable amount of footage shot between 2007 and 2008, Whitehead spent time experimenting with different combinations of voice, image and text until he achieved the consistency he was looking for. As a result, the screenplay included in this volume has been compiled in retrospect. Working closely with the completed version of the film, the dialogue and on-screen texts have been transcribed and a Whitehead-approved description of the action has been added.
The decision to publish the text in this form alongside a range of other material was made as part of the Nohzone Archive publishing and editorial project. This programme is linked to Whitehead’s extensive private archive of films, texts and production materials. The project came into operation shortly after Whitehead completed the Terrorism film and has to date produced two texts: Things Fall Apart (2012), a two-volume edition of the journal Framework dedicated to Whitehead’s life and work and ‘Selections from the Nohzone Archive, 1965-1969’, an extensive section of the Adam Matthew Digital anthology Rock n Roll, Counterculture Peace and Protest (2013). Specifically, the current volume should be seen as the natural extension of the Terrorism dossier included in Framework 52.2 (see the list of suggested further reading elsewhere in this volume for more details).
The Framework section contained a number of essays on the film and an extract of the screenplay. What is presented in this volume is the whole text which has been edited to a much more comprehensive level of detail. All three chapters are here complete with extensive annotations, full cast and crew information and two additional documents by Peter Whitehead: ‘Synopsis’ and ‘Dramatis Personae’. Following this, the book presents a dossier of previously unpublished material detailing the gestation and composition of the Terrorism film project. This includes Whitehead’s original outlines for the Nature’s Child film; his correspondence with key participants such as Sophie Strohmeier, Samantha Berger and Manuel Knapp; two texts by Strohmeier detailing (amongst other things) her working partnership with Whitehead and a series of additional Whitehead documents taken from the Nohzone Archive. An extract from the Terrorism novel has also been included in this section and the volume concludes with two specially commissioned essays on the film by leading Whitehead scholars, Stephan Kurz and John Berra. As with the screenplay chapters all the texts have, where relevant, been annotated and introduced. Particular care has been taken to highlight points of overlap between the dossier texts and the screenplay chapters. It is hoped that this cross-referencing will provide some insight into Whitehead’s creative process by alluding to the movement of an idea from a notebook extract or early outline into the completed film.
As the content of the screenplay chapters evidence (and the notion of a film having a ‘chapter’ implies) Terrorism is a multi-layered, self-consciously ‘literary’ film. In fact ‘film’ is probably the wrong term to use. Whitehead shot Terrorism on digital video and this medium has informed its style, ambience and aesthetic. Certainly the numerous ‘holographic’ scenes of Schlieman on the Vienna tram, his face reflected in the window like a ghost, would appear significantly less ethereal if Whitehead had used film-stock. The obvious portability of video also allowed Whitehead to shoot on the move and experiment with improvisation. Beyond this formal specificity, Whitehead has also referred to Terrorism as a graphic novel rather than a ‘film’, precisely because he intends it to be an artwork that one ‘reads’ rather than ‘watches’. See for yourself: the full film can be viewed on the You Tube channel Plagiarisme.Inc. The three chapters are text heavy and much of the significance generated on-screen comes from the interplay between the word and the image. As such, watching Terrorism in three parts online is preferable to seeing it in a single festival screening. One can move chronologically through chapters 1 to 3 but there’s also the possibility of a more associative movement across the film by viewing, pausing, revisiting and moving between each of the posted videos.
This is the type of rhizomic navigation Whitehead intended to encourage when he posted his novels online within a dense network of hyperlinks. It’s also the movement that his protagonists embark upon when attempting to retrieve, explore and reconstruct the texts at the heart of each novel. Schlieman is engaged in a similar pursuit through the streets and scenes of Vienna in Terrorism, and the Screenplay has been designed to help the reader/viewer of the ‘film’ participate in a similar sense of speculation. Read this book in conjunction with the film. Read this book in dissonance with the film. It provides the most detailed and comprehensive account of the film’s gestation and includes supplementary material available nowhere else. There is no better map of the various pathways and dead-ends that populate the Terrorism film. Conversely, there is enough material in this book to allude to other possible versions of the completed film. Keep in mind that reading is an act of interpretation and interpretation invariably involves the creation of new narratives. This book will help you understand Terrorism and it will also help you to create your own speculative version. There is no completion. It never ends. - James Riley
Peter Whitehead, Baby Doll, Velvet Publications, 1997.
"Peter Whitehead is best remembered these days for chronicling the rise of sixties London psychedelia in such films as Charlie is My Darling (arguably the finest Rolling Stones film ever made) and Tonite Let's All Make Love in London. Whitehead found himself in the south of France in 1972 with a month's supply of psychedelic drugs, a month's supply of film, and model/actress/heiress Mia Martin (best remembered these days as one of the Benny Hill Show girls during the 1971-72 season). The result was Baby Doll.
Baby Doll didn't see publication for twenty-five years. One wonders, cynically, whether the reason is the nudity or the track marks it exposes in a few of the photos. Either way, Velvet got hold of it in 1997 and brought it to light. The photos are stark black-and-white surrealist images; Whitehead obviously spent a good deal of time during his formative years looking at Hans Bellmer's disturbing photographs of dolls. (Aside from the obvious connection, Whitehead also uses disembodied doll heads and mannequins as props; Mia is the only live subject.)
What sticks in the mind, though, is Whitehead's ability to conceptualize. The whole, though it's obvious in various ways that the photographs are presented out of chronological order, comes together in a coherent way. The book is presented in four "chapters" of photographs, each building on the ones before in surreal/dadaist content until, in the climactic photographs, there are little more than blurred figures. (It's worthwhile speculating that Alan Parker may have had this in mind when conceiving the "Comfortably Numb" segment from Pink Floyd's The Wall; there are a number of similarities between the way the book and the filmed version of the song build.) The construction of the presentation makes this more than just prurient interest in a now-retired TV actress. It's not earth-shattering, and Whitehead wasn't covering any new ground here, but it's not bad by any means." - Robert Beveridge at goodreads
"This was interesting: its concept possible outweighs its execution, but it's still a book of some amazing photographs, organized in a coherent manner. There is movement between the sections, but there's not a lot of variation between the photos as a whole. However, the photos are gorgeous, tinged with shades of Irina Ionesco but wrapped up in instability instead of the escapist secrecy of an individual.
The photos are all set with a stark deep black, structures and the body-as-object (though not in a "subjected object" kind of way) float in the void." - review at goodreads
"Baby Doll didn't see publication for twenty-five years. One wonders, cynically, whether the reason is the nudity or the track marks it exposes in a few of the photos. Either way, Velvet got hold of it in 1997 and brought it to light. The photos are stark black-and-white surrealist images; Whitehead obviously spent a good deal of time during his formative years looking at Hans Bellmer's disturbing photographs of dolls. (Aside from the obvious connection, Whitehead also uses disembodied doll heads and mannequins as props; Mia is the only live subject.)
What sticks in the mind, though, is Whitehead's ability to conceptualize. The whole, though it's obvious in various ways that the photographs are presented out of chronological order, comes together in a coherent way. The book is presented in four "chapters" of photographs, each building on the ones before in surreal/dadaist content until, in the climactic photographs, there are little more than blurred figures. (It's worthwhile speculating that Alan Parker may have had this in mind when conceiving the "Comfortably Numb" segment from Pink Floyd's The Wall; there are a number of similarities between the way the book and the filmed version of the song build.) The construction of the presentation makes this more than just prurient interest in a now-retired TV actress. It's not earth-shattering, and Whitehead wasn't covering any new ground here, but it's not bad by any means." - Robert P. Beveridge "xterminal"
"Niki de Saint-Phalle and Jean Tinguely were collaborating with Whitehead and Mia Martin on the film DADDY to enter into the New York Film Festival, but film production was spotty at best, so Martin and Whitehead whiled away the time by shooting the photos that now appear, all these years later, under the title of BABY DOLL. In some ways it is Whitehead's response to the uber-feminism of Saint-Phalle's vision of DADDY, and so there's a harshness and a coldness that speaks as a rebuke.
Otherwise the warmth and passion of the French Riviera suffuse these photographs. You can almost feel the summer air puff back the curtains at the French windows, smell the salt and the fish in the air. At least a dozen different dolls can be identified from their arms, legs, and china faces, and this body of work shares an affinity to the "Doll Parts" that Courtney Love wrote about in Hole's first LP. Mia Martin, who was to go on and become one of the most memorable Hammer girls in THE SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA with Joanna Lumley, is very young and sweet, and looks pretty high even when she manages to get her eyes open. If you wanted a time capsule of the very early 1970s, this book wouldn't be a bad place to start. It's a concept album without a concept, but it has virtues and fans of its own." - Kevin Killian
Whitehead's films:
1964 - The Perception of Life
1965 - Wholly Communion
1966 - Charlie Is My Darling
1967 - London '66-'67
1967 - Tonite Let's All Make Love in London
1967 - Benefit of the Doubt
1969 - The Fall
1969 - Tell Me Lies
1973 - Daddy
1977 - Fire in the Water
2009 - Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts
"Whitehead's darkest and deepest trepanning of guilt and fear and risk. A bent and bifurcated autobiography of the other, the fatally haunted shadow side of the narcissist sun god.
A profoundly schizophrenic Old Kingdom dream-romance. A spine-freezing exhibition of historical revisionism that marries posthumous fabulation with the near-pornographic (blue studio) ravishment of the imagination. A book of loudly whispered secrets, lies between truths in the telling.
A necromantic retrieval that glorifies its damnation." - Iain Sinclair
"The brilliant work of Peter Lorrimer Whitehead, full of an incomparable energy, pulverises the false barriers between formal research, documentary reportage, psychedelic cinema, cinema engage, pop cinema and auteur cinema. Whitehead's work accomplishes an exceptional synthesis, open to every different dimension of avant-garde cinema, tending towards perceptual explosion and euphoric fusion with phenomena." - Nicole Brenez
"Peter Whitehead has been a scientist, newsreel cameraman, writer, publisher, falconer, erotic photographer and an occultist. He has lived a rich life of extraordinary, almost hallucinogenic, intensity. He pioneered a highly subjective, personal style of documentary cinema influenced by the cinema vérité and direct cinema movements that offers audiences a singular vision.
Whitehead's films are a unique interaction with documentary, art, politics and the supernatural (in its inventive rather than religious sense). This retrospective of his films exists to place Whitehead firmly at the forefront of cinematic experimentation and proclaims him as a genius of the Documentary Art." - Mark Goodall
"Whitehead’s works speak for themselves, presenting an artist who struggled to come up with a straight definition for the turbulent period he documented. If you can't wrap your head around the questions Whitehead poses in The Fall or any of his other eleven films, it’s not hard to sit back and enjoy the music." - John Lichman
"PETER WHITEHEAD WAS THERE. "As much scene-maker as film-maker, Whitehead personified the late-'60s breakdown of boundaries in post-war Britain. This working-class Cambridge grad was the original rock'n'roll documentarian: with reckless camerawork, matched by tumultuous editing, he plunged into London’s sex-drugs-and-protest counterculture with a frenzied there-ness" - J. Hoberman
"STILL SWINGING: The Art-House auteur Peter Whitehead: "For years, the British director Peter Whitehead has been a legend among a rarefied group of cineastes. Now the rest of us will be able to enjoy this work." - Maura Egan
"The CRAZED GENIUS OF BRITISH FILM. Audience with Peter Whitehead: "I invented the pop video? Not likely!" ... “Pioneering film-maker, falconer and father of eight, Peter Whitehead has led a full life." His world-wide retrospective includes "Charlie is my Darling", The first documentary made of The Stones, and "The Fall", the film that devotees consider to be his masterpiece." - John Preston
"The work of Peter Whitehead says much about how post-imperial Britain was seduced into becoming a manipulable appendage of the United States, with ominous consequences for the rest of the world. Its re-discovery is nothing if not timely”. - Neil Barry
"The single theme binding all of Whitehead's films together - including his extensive music videos - is the idea of life as an ongoing performance. Everywhere his camera looks, people are putting on a show: the singers doing their stuff; the poets in concert; the street-theatre troupes; the soap box orators; the demonstrators; the interviewees with their airs and their earnestness (Julie Christie fusing beauty and banality); Robert Kennedy addressing a crowd; people displaying their fashion sense, or their lack of it, in the street." - Media Monitors
"POP, AGIT-PROP, PARADOXE. Les films de Peter Whitehead. "Le montage pour Whitehead est une acte de la pensée, d'aggression contre la matiere premiere, une appropriation logique." - Eithne O’Neill
"In the few films that he made - at the age of 40, he more or less gave it all up to breed falcons - Whitehead re-created the world in his own images, inviting us to probe their surfaces for the truths hidden away in the everyday. He says his training as a newsreel cameraman, working in London with only primitive equipment at his disposal, taught him how to shoot on the run and "look for essentials".
His brilliant 1967 film, Tonite Let's All Make Love In London (its title from a line in an Allen Ginsberg poem), is a compelling account of the era unfolding around him: a music video - in the days before music videos - of Eric Burdon and the Animals miming When I Was Young; of Nico (in the days before the Velvet Underground) and the Rolling Stones; interviews with Mick Jagger, David Hockney and many others." - Media Monitors
"In a brilliant four-year burst, Peter Whitehead shot footage of some of the seminal events of the 1960s. And then, at the height of his powers, he gave it all up". The Ceremony of Innocence." - Paul Cronin
"Harpers & Queen" by Jenny Fabian
"The Falconer: The Three Lives of Peter Whitehead" by Gareth Evans and Ben Slater
Peter Whitehead net
Peter Whitehead's books
Peter Whitehead's films
Interview published in Entropy
Interview with Peter Whitehead by Dee in Fringecore
A conversation with Peter Whitehead by R.F. Paul
"DIONYSUS ANDRONIS: THE INFLUENCE OF PETER WHITEHEAD ON THE NEW GENERATION OF EXPERIMENTAL FILM MAKERS"
"Peter Whitehead and Terrorism"
Whitehead on kagablog
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