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Figure 1. Cambridge acceptance letter, 1956

Figure 2. London County Council scholarship, 1956

Figure 3. Letter from the Guardian, 1961

Figure 4. Letter to hire Whitehead as Bertrand Russell’s cameraman, 1965

Framework 52, No. 1, Spring 2011, pp. 30–49.Copyright © 2011 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309.

Eternal Return

There’s a story Peter Whitehead likes to tell about his masterpiece, The Fall. He had decided to abandon fi lmmaking for good while attending its pre-miere at the 1969 Edinburgh Film Festival, and later that year, after its brief run at the London Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), he took the fi lm for a screening— its last for all he knew, since it had not been picked up by a distributor— at the place where he had become a fi lmmaker seven years ear-lier, bringing his career full circle. This was the Slade School of Fine Art, more precisely the Physics Theatre of University College London (UCL), which Thorold Dickinson, who had run the Slade’s Film Department since its inception in 1960, had colonized as a repertory venue, open to students across the city, to rival the National Film Theatre.

All of Whitehead’s fi lms had come into being through a confrontation of serendipity and—behind- the- scenes, after- hours—deepwater study, philo-sophical and scientifi c as much as cinematic, and The Fall was no exception, a spontaneous response to an apparently decisive moment in American his-tory as it unfolded over the course of 1967 and 1968, reconstructed if not in tranquility then at least away from the violence. It was also a record of this reconstruction, a dramatization of the director’s attempt to understand what he had seen. So he was taken aback when Dickinson told him, recall-ing a student short of Whitehead’s, shown in the same theater half a de cade earlier, that “it’s exactly the same fi lm. The subject, structure— I thought I was watching Parallels again.”1

The fi lm, twelve minutes long, hasn’t been seen in public since that fi rst screening in 1964, and Whitehead himself has dismissed it as apprentice

Peter Whitehead: The Slade YearsHenry K. Miller

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work. But was Dickinson right? Does this strange unconscious continuity provide the ultimate key to the Whitehead mystery? All will be revealed.

First Shorts

Whitehead had arrived at the Slade in the autumn of 1962, just as Dickin-son’s department was fi nding its feet. The course, as Whitehead described it a year later, comprised three weekly screenings in the Physics Theatre, and a seminar in Dickinson’s windowless basement room. “ ‘It’s not a fi lm school,’ ” Whitehead quoted Dickinson as saying. “ ‘We are not teaching practical techniques. We are pioneering. Jacques Ledoux [director of the Belgian Ciné-mathèque] shook me at the IFFS [International Federation of Film Societies] recently when he pointed out that this is unique. Nowhere else in this hemi-sphere has a University taken the fi lm under its wing and placed it right in the middle of a School of Fine Arts.’ ”2 Its novelty is still underestimated. The main programs in 1962– 1963—painstakingly put together by Dickinson, who called in favors from friends like Ledoux and Henri Langlois— were “A Survey of Italian Film,” which included a number of titles never seen before in Britain, such as Rossellini’s La Nave Bianca (IT, 1941), and, during the fi rst term, “A Film Record of the 1930s,” a mixture of nonfi ction and feature fi lms which climaxed with Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu (FR, 1939).

Whitehead, however, had not gone there to study fi lm. During his second year at Cambridge, he had taken up painting, fi rst exhibiting at the town’s Arts Council gallery in June 1960, and in his fi nal year, by which time he had begun to frequent the local art school, he won both a paint er’s place at the Slade and a London County Council scholarship to pay for it. Whitehead initially identifi ed himself as a fi gurative paint er, his primary infl uences Francis Bacon and Keith Vaughan. Typically, however, his varied interests interbred and— this in the era of the legendary “Two Cultures” debate, a Cam-bridge row that went global— his academic work fed into his art, for he had gone to Cambridge not to paint but to study natural sciences. As Whitehead developed, his paintings remained repre sen ta tional, but they represented things that were hidden to the naked eye, things he had seen through an elec-tron microscope in the course of his studies in crystallography.

When you get a piece of granite, and slice it all the way down till you’ve got a microscopically thin slice, then look at it through a microscope, and through polarized light, they look like translucent, absolutely extraordinary images, pure abstract, millions and millions of interlocking crystals— they are the most beautiful things you ever saw in your life, and when you rotate the polarizing mirror, so that the axis of polarization changes, all the colors of all the crystals change in different ways . . . it was that that made me paint.3

Whitehead took a year out during 1961– 1962 to hone his technique— it was around then that he encountered Syd Barrett, and through him his future collaborator Anthony Stern, also painters— but even then kept other interests

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alive, pursuing a job at the Guardian off the back of his student journalism and occasional work for the local daily.

When it comes to his biography, which now exists in countless itera-tions, Whitehead may often seem to be spinning a yarn— he relishes the creation of dramatic, no- turning- back moments, like his renunciation of the camera in an Edinburgh park in 1969— but what he says about his move to London and what followed it in the autumn of 1962 is solidly backed by documentary evidence. “I started painting like mad when I arrived at the Slade and promptly stopped after a week,” he wrote to a friend at the end of his fi rst term. “Then I started writing a novel, and wrote from morn till night solidly for two weeks. I threw it away last night as chance would have it. But then— well, it happened.”4

Around the time of the Cuban missile crisis, Whitehead, having caught wind of the Slade’s fl edgling Film Department, presented himself at Thorold Dickinson’s offi ce. Though Dickinson had to stress to outsiders that his department was not in the business of “teaching practical techniques,” he endeavored to make opportunities for students who wanted to make fi lms and had already had some success; and so the tyro paint er emerged from the meeting with a 16 mm Bolex camera and, it seems, some money toward stock. According to Whitehead today, Dickinson— whose own route into the mov-ies came through a similarly fortunate meeting with an eminent fi lmmaker, George Pearson, while at Oxford in the 1920s— was heard saying that “at the end, after about two hours, after which he had interviewed me about every-thing to do with the Slade and my life, I had the impression I was no longer in charge of the fi lm department.”5 According to Whitehead at the time, “I got a grip of the fi lm department— and they haven’t stopped since, and nor have I. At last I have found my medium— it seems to combine all aspects of myself that I believe in (and some others too) and I have been like an abso-lute maniac making fi lms ever since.”6

Film was by no means a new medium for Whitehead as an afi cionado. Since at least as early as his freshman year at university he had been a com-mitted cinephile, a reader of Sight and Sound, Films and Filming, and the serious- salacious Continental Film Review. In the Arts Cinema, Cambridge had, and has, what could just about plausibly claim to be En gland’s fi rst pro-vincial specialist fi lm venue, and when Whitehead went up in 1958– 1959, the town was in the grip of Bergmania. Soon there were rumors, and later the fi rst manifestations, of the French New Wave; and after the belated arrival in 1959 of Le Amiche (IT, 1955), Antonioni’s fi rst release in Britain, a miniboom of his fi lms followed, with L’Avventura (IT, 1960), Il Grido (IT, 1957), and La Notte (IT, 1961) appearing in that order over the course of 1961. Nor was the Arts the only venue for art house cinema. The Rex, in the northern suburbs, a stone’s throw from Whitehead’s digs at one point, regularly put on repertory double bills during his stay—Seven Samurai ( JP, 1954) with Night and Fog (FR, 1955); Cassavetes’ Shadows (US, 1959) with Franju’s Eyes without a Face (FR, 1960); and Breathless (FR, 1960) with The Third Man (UK, 1949, a skeleton key

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to The Fall)— while other cinemas were pushed by the precipitous decline in attendances to put on revival programs of classic British and Hollywood fare.

Cambridge, then, was a good place to get an education, and it was on its store of art house memories that Whitehead drew when he fi rst picked up a camera at the Slade. Having agreed to make a fi lm for the Christmas ball, showing off the students’ work—“the fi rst fi lm I shot was of these guys doing sculpture and painting”— Whitehead made two pastiches: one of Last Year at Marienbad (FR, 1961) and the other of the Orpheus tale, which had been fi lmed both by Jean Cocteau, whose sequel to Orphée (FR, 1950), Testament d‘Orphée (FR, 1960), was put on at the Arts in October 1960, and by Marcel Camus, whose Orphée Nègre (FR, 1959) appeared there in the same term.7 Marienbad, fi rst shown in London in late 1961, was among the cinematic sensations of the de cade, in a crowded fi eld. Debates over its meaning carried on for months, and it had been shown in Cambridge not in a cinema but at the Arts Theatre, John Maynard Keynes’s gift to the city, in May 1962.

Whitehead was already a great admirer of Marienbad’s screenwriter, Alain Robbe- Grillet, and apart from its topicality, the Slade itself put him in mind of the fi lm’s architecture, “the columns, the classical buildings, and the peo-ple who are trapped in an instantaneous moment of time.”8 The Orpheus episode, mostly shot at Clacton- on- Sea, just outside London, involves some time freezing— apparently of Whitehead’s invention— with his actors station-ary on an out- of- season merry- go- round while the camera revolves around them. The theme of suspended time fascinated him, in part because of the heady scientifi c ideas he had absorbed at Cambridge, but perhaps more because of what he calls “one of the most important experiences of my life in watching fi lm,” presumably during childhood, when he saw Powell and Pressburger’s A Matter of Life and Death (UK, 1946). Whitehead now theorizes the fi lm’s scenes “outside time” as “going from linear time into cyclic time.”9 (Of course, his belief in the nonlinearity of time underlies his story about Thorold Dickinson’s notion of The Fall as the unconscious repetition of Parallels.)

The two fi lms, made in “two weeks fl at,” were shown, probably for the one and only time, on December 14, 1962. After the screening, Whitehead was approached by Fotis Mestheneos, a freelance cameraman who had steady work at the Nuffi eld Foundation Unit for the History of Ideas. A pub-lishing and fi lmmaking venture run by the husband- and- wife team of Ste-phen Toulmin and June Goodfi eld, the Nuffi eld was— by no coincidence at all— sited on the same Bloomsbury street as Dickinson’s offi ce, Dickinson hav-ing taken a hand in the unit’s establishment at UCL a few years earlier with the idea of sharing equipment clearly in mind.10 “We shall now be able to begin testing out conclusions and dabbling in practical work on behalf of, for example, the Physics Department, the Bartlett School of Architecture and the Slade School of Fine Art itself,” he had written in 1961, shortly before Don Levy, another Cambridge scientist and one of his fi rst students, began

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work there on fi lms including Time Is (UK, 1964).11 Through Mestheneos— though Dickinson’s involvement seems likely too— Whitehead, within two weeks of the debut of his fi rst shorts, was invited to write and direct for the Nuffi eld what at that moment was titled “History of the Living Unit,” and later called The Perception of Life. “It’s a wonderful life and there is no going back,” he refl ected at the year’s end.12

The Theft

Whitehead’s contract with the Nuffi eld— whenever it was fi nalized— did not formally begin until June 1, 1963. In the meantime, he kept on fi lming, hav-ing decided to combine the two Christmas shorts into a single fi lm, The Theft, the “unifying force” in the marriage being a real theft— carried out sometime in late 1962 on the streets of South Kensington— of a poster display advertis-ing an exhibition at the Royal College of Art (RCA), designed by recent graduate and rising star David Hockney (later one of the “faces” in Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London). Whitehead was the thief. The poster, for a ten- year retrospective called “Towards Art?” which covered the period during which the RCA, under the infl uence of R. B. Kitaj, had established itself as one of the creative centers of Pop Art, was a collage that included images made by Hockney himself, as well as stills from— yes—Marienbad. Whitehead, who describes his own paintings of the time as the “exact opposite” of Pop Art, was nonetheless inspired by the coincidence to use Hockney’s “Pop Art col-lage as the basis of my montage”— and here is the point at which to cut away.13

* * *There was next to no infrastructure for the making and showing of what we now call “the artist’s fi lm” in Britain in the early 1960s. The fi lmmakers with whom Whitehead might best be compared, John Latham and Jeff Keen, who would in 1966 have their work shown alongside Whitehead’s and Levy’s in the festival that launched the London Film- makers’ Co- op, were strangers until not long before then, “amis inconnus.” By contrast, their American con-temporaries, the likes of Stan Brakhage, were at least known from descrip-tions in magazines. In 1959, for example, Jonas Mekas had appeared in Sight and Sound to tell the world about New York’s “spontaneous cinema,”

intimately linked with the general feeling in other areas of life and art: with the ardour for rock and roll; the interest in Zen Buddhism; the development of abstract expressionism (action painting); the emergence of spontaneous prose and New Poetry— all a long- delayed reaction against puritanism and the mechanisation of life.

We can imagine most of these ideas as having appealed to the under-graduate Whitehead.14 Some of the fi lms Mekas was talking about were shown at the National Film Theatre in the summer of 1960 as part of a sea-son, “Beat, Square and Cool,” that mixed up tough Hollywood B movies

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with the Cinema 16 back cata log; there are hints and rumors that fi lms of the latter sort would have had fi lm society screenings. And at the Slade, one can think of occasions like the day in November 1962, when Dickinson showed his students Vigo’s À Propos de Nice (FR, 1930) and Bartosch’s L’Idée (FR, 1932) among other comparable titles. Ultimately, however, it must be concluded that as Whitehead embarked on his fi rst original fi lm, he knew little of the cinematic avant-garde.

The decision to experiment with montage was not idly made. At the beginning of the 1960s, Siegfried Kracauer and André Bazin were infl uential voices espousing “the objective nature of photography” against the trickery of creative editing, Bazin winning a number of Anglophone converts owing to the success of his protégés as fi lmmakers. But other perspectives were available, and Resnais’ fi lms in par tic u lar, so important to Whitehead as a cinephile, seemed to promise the revival of what had recently been seen as a lost art.15 In a long interview with Resnais and Robbe- Grillet in Cahiers du Cinéma, translated in the February and March 1962 issues of Films and Film-ing, Marienbad ’s director repeatedly avowed his affi nities with the Rus sian directors of the 1920s. At the same time, his collaborator Henri Colpi had appeared in a Cahiers dossier on montage, translated in Mekas’s journal Film Culture in 1961, stoutly resisting Bazin’s espousal of “the simple photographic respect of unity of space” in the cause of the “sacrosanct rhythm” of editing.16

Closer to home, Thorold Dickinson, who had begun his fi lm career in earnest as an editor during the 1930s while moonlighting as a leading fi gure in the London Film Society, was part of the generation of critics and fi lm-makers who had made editing, in Pudovkin’s ringing phrase, “the founda-tion of fi lm art.” It is not inconceivable that Dickinson transmitted some of this inheritance to Whitehead, who had certainly read the classic book on the topic, the distilled wisdom of the 1930s and 1940s, whose writing Dick-inson had supervised, Karel Reisz’s The Technique of Film Editing, fi rst pub-lished in 1953. But at the same time, one should allow instinct and character their share: sometimes what seems like an infl uence is really an affi nity. “I’ve always seen fi lm as music,” Whitehead says now. He had been an organist at school, and a fondly related anecdote of his Cambridge years involves his attempts to turn Syd Barrett, the young rock ’n’ roller, on to Bartok. The sound track to Whitehead’s early twenties comprised Messiaen, Hindemith, Janacek’s Glagolitic Mass and Book of the Dead, and perhaps above all Wagner’s Rheingold, along with “MJQ,” the Modern Jazz Quartet. “You’re improvising all the time, you’re connecting things— my fl uidity in editing and camerawork came absolutely from this internalization of music at school.”17 Whitehead recalls his discovery with infectious excitement:

The cut, the moment you cut, that slice of the cut, is that moment of stillness in Marienbad; it is the moment of stillness in A Matter of Life and Death— and yet it is a portal, it is Orphée, you slip through time, and in and out of time. Although

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there’s a cut, it becomes invisible, because your consciousness covers it, leaps above it, it is sensed unconsciously as a cut.18

* * *The frames within Hockney’s collage, Whitehead intuited, must correspond to the fi lms he had already shot. The Theft would be “an attempt to build up a continuum of images unrelated in the normal time sense, but all related to the context of the stolen painting— the subject of the painting is the subject of the fi lm.”19 Granted access to the Nuffi eld’s editing equipment, Whitehead got to work in the fi rst weeks of 1963.

The Theft begins and ends with a sculptor at work— on a bottom, in stone— and is, or can be seen as, an attempt to render his creative consciousness on fi lm. It continues with a series of visual rhymes— on seeing an image in a fi lm about bees on tele vi sion, Whitehead, grabbing his camera, exclaimed to himself, “It’s the same bottom!”— before cutting to the theft itself, a sequence that includes a disorientating shot of an advertisement- emblazoned bus that will be echoed in more than one later fi lm.20 The transition from the scene of the crime— a rightward pan along the wall from the three- panel poster that cuts to a three- shot rail yard sequence (two rightward pans interrupted by a static shot of a train passing from right to left, so achieving the same effect)—to the thief’s fl at, where we fi rst get a good look at the poster, zooming in on Delphine Seyrig, is an elliptical marvel. The collage elements, divided into close- ups or sometimes carefully juxtaposed, set off mental associations—a Hockney doodle representing an animal cuts to one of Whitehead’s Marienbad fi gures atop a statue of an elephant, and so on— before the author himself appears in the room, at work on a typewriter.

Within the fi lm as experienced, though not in Whitehead’s written syn-opsis, he appears to be “writing” the story as it happens, as if the sculptor’s story and the daydream within it, were someone else’s again. Whitehead looks up sharply and a distorted shot of a lightbulb takes us into “Marienbad,” or its stand- ins: the Slade and— foreshadowing the opening sequence of Wholly Communion— the Albert Memorial; and into the Orphic world of off- season Clacton. A downward pan from a dome in the Slade’s roof (another orb, as in the fi rst shot) to a Resnaisian corridor is immediately refi gured as a vertical pan down Hockney’s poster, from a drawn circle to a still from the “real” Marienbad. (The drawn circle is also made to trigger the shots of the merry- go- round.) Whitehead’s Seyrig proxy tries, and eventually succeeds, to escape the camera’s gaze, or perhaps the sculptor’s dream; the Orphée girl (sixteen- year- old Coralie Meacock) fares less well— and soon we are back in the fl at and fi nally shown what Whitehead’s been typing. It’s gibberish. From his fi ngers on the keys, we return to the sculptor’s fi ngers on the bottom— and there, after just short of seven minutes, it ends.

The Theft is not the kind of fi lm that invites comprehensive interpreta-tion. My reading— which is probably shaded by The Fall, in which White-head again appears behind a typewriter— contradicts the author’s written synopsis, in which the man tapping the keys is meant to represent an

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interrogator who, having caught the thief, is trying to obtain an explanation for his crime. But it is powerfully suggestive, nonetheless: effective as a dream fi lm, but also a challenge to our commonplace idea of fi lm as a simple record-ing medium in the context of a reality that has been saturated by man- made images so as to resemble an infi nitely recursive series of “thefts.” The sculp-tor, his memory or dream life indistinguishable from fi lm imagery, steals an image or cluster of images that are themselves “stolen” from a visual realm that is fi lled with other stolen images, repre sen ta tions, and forms.21 Or, as the critic Lawrence Alloway put it in a famous article published at exactly the time Whitehead was at work on The Theft, and describing a group of art-ists who had been Whitehead’s contemporaries at Cambridge, “the basic assumption was that our idea of nature has changed because of the bom-bardment of our sense by the signs, colours, and lights of the mass media.”22

* * *It is probable that The Theft in the form we have it— or rather, in the form Whitehead and the National Film and Tele vi sion Archive have it; like Par-allels, it has not been seen publicly in almost half a century— was more or less complete by mid- 1963, but Whitehead had plans to expand and refi ne it. As early as February that year, he had written a synopsis for a twelve- minute version as the basis for a funding application. The Nuffi eld was not the only Slade- affi liated source of money and equipment for would- be experimental fi lmmakers in the early 1960s. Another small pie in which Dickinson was knuckles deep was the British Film Institute (BFI), whose Experimental Pro-duction Committee (EPC), set up a de cade earlier, was best known for back-ing the “Free Cinema” fi lmmakers of the mid- to late 1950s— one of them, Lorenza Mazzetti, a Slade alumna. Though Dickinson himself had left the committee when he went to work in New York in 1956, he still had ties to the BFI, which had been instrumental in setting up the Film Department at the Slade and in recruiting him.

At the start of 1962, the EPC had given £150 to one of Dickinson’s semi-narians, James Scott, to complete his short The Rocking Horse (1962). That autumn, about the time Whitehead arrived, Don Levy was assigned pro-duction funds to make Herostratus (1967), the EPC’s fi rst and only feature; as things turned out, on its long- delayed release, Herostratus incorporated footage shot by Whitehead from as early as 1963. Having provided this encouragement, the committee in March that year faced quite a number of entries from the Slade, very probably including Whitehead, who had cer-tainly requested application forms beforehand, one of them for completion money toward The Theft. But it was not to be, and as a result, The Theft’s sound track— a cut up, musique concrète affair that incorporates whispered voices in French and En glish, typewriter clacks, drones, and tape effects— constructed by Wilfred Josephs, was only added, it is Whitehead’s surmise, a full year later; and it is possible that the fi lm as a whole was unfi nished until then.23

In the meantime, developing on the method and the themes of The Theft, Whitehead had already embarked on a follow- up—what became Parallels— and

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simultaneously had begun an investigation into the intellectual climate that had helped shape him and his work.

Mental Set

With Dickinson’s encouragement, Whitehead began work during January 1963 on a research proposal, aiming to win one of the two studentships on offer at the Slade for the following autumn, worth £600 (about £10,000 in today’s money). On the night of January 24, following a meeting with Dick-inson that concerned, among other matters, Rivette’s Paris Nous Appartient (FR, 1961), which was then being shown at the National Film Theatre, White-head wrote in his journal:

While talking, I decided quite defi nitely the subject. . . . I want to trace the loss of “story” in the modern cinema (and literature and theatre) as a growing re- awareness of man’s relationship with environment. Persons, and things, are seen no more in stories, but as objects reacting with their environments.24

Seeing Rivette’s fi lm that eve ning made Whitehead even more certain of his aim. The thesis would trace the common philosophical roots of recent developments in painting, in the novel, the drama, and in par tic u lar the cinema. In these, as suggested by his journal entry, Whitehead detected an antihumanist reaction against psychology; a dissolution of character into setting, social and otherwise; and an emphasis on action and chance over interiority and depth. This tendency he termed “the nonfi gurative cinema.” The next day, January 25, he wrote a note that jumped from the same topic to his still- brewing second fi lm, titled at that point Abstraction 1963 or Art 1963 (or 1962), and back again. “This fi lm must show the progress, starting from fi guration, to a position of total rejection of the fi gurative HUMAN image anyway . . . and this must be compared continually to my plans for the thesis.”25

Following this fi rst intuition of a combined project at the end of January was a period of intense study, and although Whitehead was fi nally unsuccess-ful in his application, undated but completed for the May 1 deadline, the work informed and so helps illuminate not only Parallels, which he began to shoot as his preparations for the thesis continued, but much else in his oeu-vre besides. The proposal that he eventually submitted seems to have been titled “A Comparative Study of ‘La Nouvelle Vague’ and ‘Le Nouveau Roman’: A Study of the Modern French Cinema, and Its Relationship to Modern French Creative Writing,”26 but Whitehead’s initial fi eld of inquiry was far broader than this suggests; indeed, at some point, he produced a separate proposal on the theme “New Formal Structures in the Cinema.”27 His many notes from the period of the proposals’ composition constitute an attempt to synthesize a remarkable variety of interests— from mass media theory to perceptual psychology, from the philosophy of science (one of his subjects at Cambridge) to beat literature. When the time came, his Slade supervisor,

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Harold Cohen, wrote in his testimonial: “I have been impressed not so much by his ability as a paint er but by the very wide range of his knowledge and interests.”28

The cinematic tendency, the nonfi gurative fi lm, whose intellectual ori-gins Whitehead intended to anatomize and to which his fi lm would belong, was a work in progress, a phenomenon as far as he was concerned of the preceding two years— that is, since the release in 1961 of L’Avventura and Breathless. It was not visually abstract, “yet its form is such that it is revealing aspects of reality that bear nothing whatsoever to do with the appearance of reality.”29 The proposal named as examples principally French and Italian fi lms shown in London during Whitehead’s time at the Slade: Rouch and Morin’s Chronicle of a Summer (FR, 1961), the late show at the Academy, Lon-don’s principal art house cinema, through the summer of 1962; Varda’s Cleo from 5 to 7 (FR, 1962) at the Paris Pullman that November; Godard’s Vivre sa Vie (FR, 1962) at the Academy the following month; and at the start of Feb-ruary 1963, Antonioni’s The Eclipse (IT, 1962) at the Cameo- Poly.30 Just as he got under way, the National Film Theatre had put on a season of fi lms by the “Left Bank Group,” which included the fi rst British screenings of docu-mentaries by Varda and Chris Marker, as well as a number of Resnais’ shorts, also referred to in the proposals.31

The Slade, whose long 1962– 1963 season climaxed with La Notte, was quite alive to these developments. Dickinson, who tried about this time to entice Jean Rouch over for a screening, showed Resnais’ tele vi sion docu-mentary on Robbe- Grillet in February, and in the same month, as a special edition of the little magazine Motion, his former student Raymond Durgnat published the fi rst monograph in En glish on the French New Wave. More-over, the trends in painting that Whitehead saw as prefi guring the rise of nonfi gurative cinema were obviously apparent among his fellow students; the teachings of Cohen and of Ernst Gombrich, who held a Slade professor-ship during 1961– 1963, fed directly into his work.

Whitehead’s excited confrontation of all this material with the various bodies of thought outlined above did not result in a fi nished piece of written work, but rather a mass of notes, a partial map of a young man’s mind brought to greater or lesser degrees of coherence, and therefore not easy to summa-rize. With that said, the subheading that stands out is “Mental Set— Audience Consciousness in the Cinema.”32 Whitehead set out to analyze the intellec-tual formation of a generation of fi lmmakers— and how their work refl ected or represented the mental environment of a generation of fi lmgoers. Thus, the interest in Antonioni was “his awareness of the metaphysical signifi -cance of environment and how this presence can infl uence the actions of us all.”33 Robbe- Grillet became the central fi gure in the fi nal proposal because he sought methodically to remove this “mental set” at a metaphysical level “by making place unimportant— i.e. it was Marienbad, or . . . he excludes time . . . it was last year, or maybe some other time . . . he excludes the ‘human’— the two characters are seen simply in a context of persuading.”34

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All this implied not only an understanding of contemporary society, which Whitehead— in common with many others who later helped defi ne the underground, and with culture heroes like Antonioni— saw as defi ned by scientifi c materialism, alienation, and fear of nuclear war, but also an under-standing of the nature of sensory perception itself, insofar as the two could be distinguished, for a constant preoccupation of the time (again, not unique to Whitehead) was the power of the mass media. In his notes toward Paral-lels, as it began to expand beyond its initial conception as a fi lm concerned with paint erly abstraction and fi guration, Whitehead more than once cop-ied out a citation from Lawrence Alloway, fi rst published in a Cambridge magazine during his time there: “The mass media has replaced nature, or the weather, as the fund of cohesive knowledge, or common references.”35 Its operators— it was argued in infl uential books like Vance Packard’s The Hidden Persuaders, the cover of which made a cameo in the fi lm— used psy-choperceptual manipulation to achieve their commercial and po liti cal ends. Parallels, at one point subtitled “A Pop Concerto,” was to be an attempt at unraveling their work.36

Words, Images, and Words as Images: Parallels“Abstraction Film” was expanded into “Images 1963,” quite quickly, at some point during February 1963. One of the fi rst images to appear in White-head’s notes was stolen, as it were, from The Theft. The typewriter would return in a starring role, for among the many ideas swirling around White-head’s head that made the cut, and which would recur in The Fall, was the ancient phrase from Simonides, given new meaning in the world described by Alloway, “Words are the images of things,” with the stress on image.37

The fi lm would mount a critique of the mental set of the postwar West in part through mimicry. Taking on the “Hidden Persuaders” directly, White-head saw one of his tasks as “investigating this quality of impact that these images have— just how long, for example, must an image be left before it becomes recognizable?”38 This had been a perennial pragmatic concern of fi lm editors, but Whitehead connected it to contemporary art theory, par-ticularly Gombrich, whose classic Art and Illusion, which dealt in part with the mechanics and psychology of perception, he absorbed early on in his studies. Testing what he had written of Robbe- Grillet’s achievement, Gom-brich became the source for another recurring nugget in Whitehead’s notes—“There is no reality without interpretation,” no way to escape mental set altogether.39

* * *On the day after he made this important note, intended as much for his the-sis as for the fi lm, February 6, 1963, Whitehead wrote to Ilford, the lab that had provided the fi lm for The Theft, asking for color stock, for the purpose of fi lming a large collaborative painting by the Slade fi nalists Roger Cook,

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Alan Welsford, and Chris Paice, the original subject of “Abstraction 1963.”40 On February 14, Ilford sent two 100- foot sample rolls of 16 mm Ilfochrome reversal stock, half of which had been shot by March 24, some of it out-doors.41 The second half was used up by the end of April.42 On May 5, Whitehead wrote of his happiness with the results, which are indeed extraordinary, especially coming from a second- time fi lmmaker with lim-ited resources. “Such images,” he wrote to the lab, “are favourites with paint-ers at present, especially the POP school, and the Montage/Collage paint ers infl uenced by Kitaj and people.”43 He had already started cutting, and also postrationalizing, producing a plan for a twelve- minute fi lm now called “Images 1963.” Like The Theft, it would be “a temporal collage of montage”; like The Fall, it would be in three dialectical movements.44

Also like The Fall, though planned out in great detail, Parallels would be in part a product of sheer contingency, and while most of the footage seems to have been shot in February– April 1963, the fi lm’s fi nal section— whose theme, as it happens, was contingency— came much later. Whitehead’s writ-ings over the course of 1963, after his offi cial move to the Nuffi eld Unit in June, exhibit an increasingly greater skepticism toward, put crudely, theo-ries of realism, scientifi c and artistic.45 One seemingly new infl uence was Ludwig Klages, whose theory of logocentricism Whitehead boiled down to two phrases quite compatible with what he had taken from Robbe- Grillet—“Language is as man- made as anything else,” and “our reality is dictated to us by our pre- set interpretation.”46

Whitehead’s respect for the desire to get past this, to get to the real, the nonverbal, the pre- rational, and his recognition of its impossibility— or at least of the inevitability of mental set— were expressed, within his working notes toward Parallels, in the idea of the moiré pattern, whence, in all prob-ability, the fi lm’s fi nal title. “If two similar patterns interact with each other,” he wrote more than a few times over the year of the fi lm’s completion, “a third pattern is formed. . . . The painted image resembles reality because it parallels a more complex experience of reality— a fusion of the rational and irrational— the fi gurative and the abstract.”47 He suggested that this ought to be the aim of the cinema too; but the idea also had other meanings for him, and one— the confrontation of viewer- pattern and fi lm- pattern—should be kept in mind. Whitehead’s intentions are hardly irrelevant to the fi lm, but in the end, it has its own in de pen dent life in the mind of its viewers.

* * *Whitehead, not one of nature’s collaborators, and working at cross- purposes with his bosses, did not enjoy his time at the Nuffi eld— and, indeed, he was not always at the Nuffi eld, having become Fotis Mestheneos’s assistant, and so working often for the Italian tele vi sion network RAI, sometimes abroad. The fi nished version of the fi lm he had been commissioned to make, which was not solely Whitehead’s work, concludes on an optimistic note, with sci-entists reaching a point where our “observation and theory are giving us

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identical pictures.” One senses that for Whitehead, on the contrary, scientists would always be at the mercy of their instruments and their preconceptions, however accurate the former may become; and that his true fascination, to quote another line of commentary, was the sheer beauty and mystery of that “other world within our own” that they, and he, had discovered.

Writing candidly to a contact at the BBC in the autumn of 1963, White-head said that he found fi lmmaking “a little too ‘distant,’ ” and that he had “decided to return to the ‘silence, exile and cunning’ and go somewhere to dedicate myself completely to writing and painting. If I don’t try to make a few of my dreams come a little closer to reality now, then I never will.”48 A year after writing that he had “found his medium,” in the course of an emo-tional letter to another potential employer, he expressed severe doubts about his calling, describing himself as “a writer fi rst and foremost,” and provid-ing a synopsis of a novel stemming from an abandoned fi lm script, whose theme of po liti cal futility clearly foreshadows The Fall in its protagonist’s “realization of the necessity for him fi nally to act for himself, instead of writ-ing a fi ctional story about some- one else, his protagonist, who has the cour-age to shout out against it.”49

Parallels remained incomplete until after its director had fi nished work on The Perception of Life, and the late additions he made to it, a full year after shooting began, can be seen as a critique of what the Nuffi eld had come to represent for Whitehead— in a phrase, “domination by science and scientifi c materialism.”50 This, he had written in one draft of his thesis proposal, was coming to be challenged by metaphysical philosophy. Whitehead claimed that “it has been these re- orientations (symbolised by a turning towards Eastern cultures and philosophies e.g. the Buddhism of the Beats) that have been responsible for the new developments in intellectual thought in Paris and Greenwich Village.” His new material, which was concerned with the confrontation between rational and irrational, chance and repetition, was likely informed by just these “new developments.”51 Perception was all but fi nished by the start of April 1964, at which point Whitehead wrote to Dickinson to say of his other fi lm that “there is only the fi nal editing to sound, and a few more shots to be made (at my expense!) before it will be fi nished.”52

He explained that the delay was down to his steep learning curve over the year, which caused him to be dissatisfi ed with what he had done before. “Each week I tried to modify it to incorporate my new ideas. Add to this the progress in my ideas about the ‘subject’ of the fi lm, and it is not surprising that I have worked at it rather half- heartedly. I am pleased to say that I have now decided that I know exactly what it is about!!”53 One senses that these were the days when Whitehead took to sleeping in his offi ce at the Nuffi eld after long nights of editing, despite its proximity to his own fl at near the British Museum. “After all, I had a bed and bedroom offi ce of my own, there.”54 Parallels was completed by the end of May 1964. On May 14, he wrote Dickinson that it “should be fi nished this week. I think that it is the best thing

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43

I’ve done. It has taken me so long that it must be terrible. Anyway, it will be a fi lm and has lots of funny things in it.”55

* * *As Dickinson was perhaps reminded, Parallels begins with a pre- credits sequence that anticipates that of The Fall— a barrage of quick- cut seemingly miscellaneous images interspersed with black gaps and titled, as in the later fi lm, “Images,” most of which will reappear: a printing press running off copies of a woman’s face; a surreally subverted advertising image; the col-laborative Slade painting at an early stage. Over the gaps there are street sounds; over the images there is silence. The main title itself appears over an Op Art background, a shift in which causes the word— the image of the word— to disappear. The credit, “A Film by Peter Whitehead,” appears as typed words on a fi lmstrip. An optical trick— the camera suddenly confront-ing itself in a mirror— apparently produced by a fl uctuation in a moiré pat-tern, is followed by two quick rightward pans, both ending on a typewriter from different angles, the second fi nishing with a close shot of fi ngers at the keys. The naturalistic clacks that accompanied the fi rst shot of the type-writer are replaced by a Jew’s harp, heard over traffi c, in the second.

What all of this suggests is a fi lm in which the camera is not recording but creating— like a typewriter. The optical tricks establish the camera’s nonobjectivity. Successive images of the typewriter’s parts at a close, disori-entating range— it appears, like the camera and the printing press, to be a machine like any other— are followed by a shot of a fi lmstrip running under the ribbon. When the typist types “CUT,” we cut; more fi lm runs through the typewriter and we see indecipherable code, leader, various scripts— words as pure images. Then, realizing one of Whitehead’s very earliest ideas for the fi lm, when the typist types “Imagine RED,” after an ultrafast series of predominantly red images— a London bus, red paint, the poster for Kubrick’s Lolita (US, 1962)— we have a pure red fi eld.56 The next words typed upon this, “RED & BLACK,” similarly provoke fi rst shots of fi lm running through an editing machine— another anticipation of The Fall— and then a barrage of man- made images, posters, road signs, all kinds of signs, also highly remi-niscent of The Fall, particularly its opening section.

When the painting fi rst glimpsed at the start of the fi lm reappears, it no longer seems abstract, but a fair repre sen ta tion of the world we’ve seen. As with Hockney’s poster in The Theft, Whitehead cuts and pans across its sur-face. His framing of advertising imagery, which is brought into the montage to suggest the paint ers’ “competition with the power of the image of the mass media,” similarly creates collages in situ.57 Having established the paint er’s situation and fl ashed the cover of Hidden Persuaders, Whitehead commences— with the reintroduction of the printing press, again from the fi lm’s fi rst moments— a section testing Packard’s theory.

Advertising images of women’s faces proliferate at extreme speed before a shot of Whitehead’s fi lmstrip arrives, which has, of course, reproduced the same images many more times— another note of refl exivity— and, resembling

Henry K. Miller

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the same, and almost exactly prefi guring The Fall, a contact sheet and a photo of Marilyn Monroe. Among all these faces, cropped from the paint-ing, is Monica Vitti, again underlining the modern paint er’s dilemma, and repeated reminders of the image- making machine, the printing press. Over a sound track of mournful singing over a Jew’s harp rhythm— Calabrian folk music, says Whitehead— the women in newsprint become progressively more pixelated.

The subsequent section is concerned with the people who live among these images, and it begins brilliantly. A monochrome vérité shot of a London street is interrupted when amid the gray faces a girl looks directly into Whitehead’s lens and instantly becomes— another image. A rushing red bus, covered in the very same advertisement (Air France) as the bus in The Theft, exits right to reveal the face of a man in agony on a theater billboard (The Diary of a Madman at the Royal Court, staged in March 1963), just as in The Theft it revealed the face of the sculptor. Echoing the previous sec-tion, the shot is followed by a montage of similarly agonized male faces on the streets and in the underground, scored to what I believe are dissonant frag-ments of Honegger. (It was these latter shots that found their way into Herostratus.)

After seven minutes— over highly abstract shots of Paris and London walls, some of them resembling “found” collages— comes the fi rst bit of (quite opaque) voiceover narration, “Time gives form to the irrational,” followed by the return of the Jew’s harp and street sounds that were heard earlier over the typewriter, reminding us of the camera’s creative role.

Back at the painting for the last time, over a sound track of African drumming, it becomes clear that within the world of Parallels reality is mass- produced, and that the artist struggles to keep pace with it, however hard he or she strives for abstraction.

The closing section, which is mostly composed of what Whitehead shot in the spring of 1964, including some shots from The Perception of Life, is cryptic in the extreme and slower than the body of the fi lm. Accompanied by experimental electronic sounds, it also features the distorted voice of Whitehead himself, reading scientifi c texts apparently “cut up” as a tribute to William Burroughs and to thumb his nose at scientifi c materialism.58 The section begins with an echo of the fi rst section— not a camera this time, but a microscope. Cell life seen through it is made to resemble pure abstract paint-ing (perhaps the artist’s own), the fi nal test of Plato’s theorem cited in White-head’s notes on Gombrich, that a painting could not “be made like any real thing, if there were not pigments out of which the painting is composed, which were by nature like the objects which the paint er’s art imitates.”59 Even Op Art represents something in reality.

The fi nal minutes of the fi lm introduce chess, cards, dice— all represent-ing forms of chance within pa ram e ters, suggesting Whitehead’s “third pat-tern,” all contrasting with rational machines like the camera and printing press— but this is to watch the fi lm with his comprehensively documented

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45

intentions in mind. The fi rst, unknowing exposure offers up a different expe-rience, though not one incompatible with the more informed reading. Like the Columbia section of The Fall, it offers a strange kind of respite after the bombardment, and the combination of pure geometric shapes and the sug-gestion of pure contingency, especially when put with the Radiophonic Workshop– like instrumentation, hint at something quite ineffable, even transcendental— not at all like the later fi lm’s downbeat but warmly human conclusion.

Premiere, Finale, Eclipse

The Perception of Life had its premiere in tandem with that of Levy’s Perfection of Matter and A Question of Time, the school- friendly version of his Time Is, at UCL during mid- May 1964, gaining national press attention— no doubt bit-tersweet since the Nuffi eld Unit was soon to be wound up. Glad to have com-pleted two meticulously planned and long- gestating fi lms in one month, Whitehead looked forward to trying something new. He and Mestheneos had been asked to fi lm Aldo Moro’s visit to London at the end of April, and had pulled off a great success, giving Whitehead “the feeling for making a complete story in pictures, without any planning, scripting etc etc. The idea of newsreel as opposed to the fi ctional cinema,” he wrote to Thorold Dick-inson, “has fi nally stamped itself indelibly on my sensibility.”60

* * *Finally, on June 25, Whitehead had his own afternoon program at the Slade—The Theft, Parallels, and The Perception of Life. Two of the three, to the best of my knowledge, would never be seen again.

* * *Plans to follow up with more experiments— rather contradicting what he had told Dickinson— like “a short colour fi lm of as many interesting images as possible all ‘cut’ directly to music, with no words,” pitched to a scientifi c instru-ments company, came to naught.61 Others simply took longer than envisaged. “As I told you,” he wrote a correspondent three days after Parallels made its debut, “I have always wanted to make THE fi lm about New York.”62 His idea was to make a “pi lot fi lm” about a Eu ro pe an city, about twenty minutes long, which would sell in itself but also serve as a calling card, costing about $2,500.

The cities I know are Paris and Munich and Stockholm . . . and of course Lon-don, although that is the one I should least like to do— and the most diffi cult for me. I know the city too well. . . . If we could start on a short fi lm, or two!, we might be in New York next Spring— for THE fi lm— THE cinema- verite fi lm.63

The idea stayed in his mind, of course, but the main story Whitehead tells about the year following the fi rst screenings of his fi rst fi lms, is one of distraction.64 “After one divorce,” he told the New York Times during the early

Henry K. Miller

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stages of production on The Fall, “I sort of withdrew and wrote novels for a year, living on nothing. Perhaps I was being kept by some actress?”65 There’s a little more to it. Over the summer of 1964, Whitehead worked in Greece, but on returning to London in the autumn and moving into the Soho fl at that would be his base for the next half de cade, he did try to fi nd fi lm work, but on his own nonnegotiable terms. On Dickinson’s urging, he had withdrawn Parallels from the Edinburgh Film Festival’s submission board and sent it instead to Bergamo, but without success (the cause of a money dispute between the Slade and Whitehead that was eventually resolved by having the Slade own two- thirds of Parallels for their investment in it). “Anyway,” the story continues, “one day a documentary I’d made at the Slade School of Art actually was showing in the neighbourhood. I thought, ‘Maybe I am a fi lmmaker.’ ”66

George Hoellering, who had run the Academy cinema on Oxford Street, just around the corner from Whitehead, since 1944, had included The Perception of Life, a year after its Slade debut, in the program with Luis Buñuel’s The Exterminating Angel (MX, 1962). A few days later, Whitehead attended an Allen Ginsberg poetry reading at Better Books, and was legiti-mately able to announce himself to the organizers as a fi lmmaker. He sent Hoellering the only copy in existence of Parallels to consider as a follow- up, selling it primarily as an “art fi lm” in the old- fashioned sense, on the creden-tials, quite properly, of the artists whose working methods it preserved. He also offered “another fi lm which is even more experimental called The Theft— which I believe could be shown with Parallels— but is really ‘way- out’—I wonder how far way out you are prepared to go.”67 Discussions followed, and on June 11, 1965, Dickinson wrote to coach Whitehead on handling the Academy— to make sure his fi lm was press- shown with the fi lm it would be accompanying, and to get a new corrected print made in lieu of a hire charge.68

But that eve ning, having put himself forward at Better Books a few weeks before, Whitehead found himself making the fi lm that would make his name—Wholly Communion. In a sense, he did not stop for the next four years, and it is no wonder that what he did fi rst slipped from view in the melee. But that it has remained out of sight ever since is absurd.

Henry K. Miller read Modern History at Wadham College, Oxford. Since 2005, he has been researching and writing a PhD thesis on the origins of fi lm culture in Britain at Birkbeck, University of London. He has contributed to Film Comment, Cinema Scope, N1BR, and London’s Time Out, blogs occasionally for the Guardian, and has been a regular reviewer for Sight and Sound since 2006. He is the editor of a collection of Raymond Durgnat’s criticism, forthcoming from the BFI, and wrote a foreword to the second edition of Durgnat’s Long Hard Look at Psycho, published in 2010, which dealt with his time at the Slade in the 1960s.

Miller has also published two essays in Vertigo Magazine (winter and spring 2007), tracing the Slade Film Department’s prehistory, and another piece

The Slade Years

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on Whitehead’s colleague and collaborator Don Levy in the DVD booklet for Levy’s Herostratus.

Notes 1. Author interview with Peter Whitehead, July 17, 2010. 2. Whitehead, “Film as a Creative Medium,” unpublished typescript dated June

1963, UCL Slade Archive, Box 5. 3. Author interview with Whitehead, August 7, 2010. 4. Whitehead Archive: Letter to Ed Roncarelli, December 29, 1962. 5. Interview with Whitehead, July 17, 2010. 6. Letter to Roncarelli. 7. Interview with Whitehead, July 17, 2010. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid. 10. Thorold Dickinson, “The Study of the Film,” in Screen Education Year Book, 1962

(London: SEFT), 15. 11. Ibid., 16. 12. Letter to Roncarelli. 13. Interviews with Whitehead, August 7 and July 17, 2010. 14. Jonas Mekas, “New York Letter: Towards a Spontaneous Cinema,” Sight and

Sound 28, nos. 3– 4 (Summer– Autumn 1959): 119. 15. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Film Quarterly 13, no.

4 (Summer 1960): 7. 16. André Bazin, “The Forbidden Montage,” Film Culture 22– 23 (Summer 1961):

46; Henri Colpi, “The Debasement of Montage,” ibid., 36. 17. Interview with Whitehead, July 17, 2010. 18. Ibid. 19. Whitehead Archive: “The Theft,” February 1963. This echoes the surrealist

Jacques Brunius’s description of Marienbad as representing a “ ‘mental conti-nuity,’ a continuity of thought, instead of the usual factual- spatial continuity” (“Every Year in Marienbad, or the Discipline of Uncertainty,” Sight and Sound 31, no. 3 (Summer 1962): 123).

20. Or rather— for this gets complicated— it is an echo of a later fi lm. Whitehead says the theft was real, but the event is covered from a number of setups, and on close inspection involves a different poster from the Hockney. Going by the date on this non- Hockney poster, the sequence in the fi nal version of the fi lm was shot in about April 1963, after Whitehead had begun work on Parallels.

21. In an undated, untitled jotting, quite likely to have postdated his conception of the fi lm but illuminating it nonetheless, Whitehead quotes a line from Michel Butor’s essay “The Mosques of New York, or the Art of Mark Rothko,” published in New World Writing in late 1962. “Rothko’s art is the answer to a crowded city. All these rectangles, of which the canvas is only one example, are crammed with a host of heterogeneous objects and people, who have lost all memory of their real links.”

22. Lawrence Alloway, “ ‘Pop Art’ since 1949,” Listener 68, no. 1761 (December 27, 1962): 1086. The artists in question comprised the “Scroope Group” around future Beatles photographer Robert Freeman.

23. BFI Special Collection, BFI Archive/Production Board, Box: P/1, “Experimental Production Committee 1952– 67”; Folder: “Experimental Production Committee

Henry K. Miller

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Signed Minutes”; Item: minutes to March 20, 1963 meeting. Gavin Millar, one of Dickinson’s postgraduates during 1961– 1962, who went on to write a new section for the 1968 edition of The Technique of Film Editing, had funds approved; as did Scott once more, for In Separation (1965), on which Whitehead would serve as director of photography. Raymond Durgnat— who had been in Dickinson’s fi rst cohort in 1960 and who had shown the committee rushes, presumably shot on the Slade’s Bolex— was turned down.

24. Whitehead Archive: “Thesis for the Slade,” January 24, 1963. 25. Whitehead Archive: Untitled note, January 25, 1963. 26. Whitehead Archive: “Proposal for Thesis,” undated. 27. Whitehead Archive: “Proposed Thesis for Slade,” undated. 28. Whitehead Archive: Testimonial Letter by Harold Cohen, May 1, 1963. 29. Whitehead Archive: “The Development of the Non- fi gurative Cinema,” undated. 30. He also put in his proposal two fi lms that were then still in production, based

on their discussion in magazines: Resnais’ Muriel (1963) and Robbe- Grillet’s L’Immortelle (1963).

31. For a fi ne contemporary account of their work by the season’s programmer, likely read by Whitehead, see Richard Roud, “The Left Bank,” Sight and Sound (Winter 1962– 1963) 32, no.1: 24– 27.

32. Whitehead Archive: “Synopsis for the Study of the New Form Structures in the Cinema,” undated.

33. Ibid. Elsewhere, Whitehead used a term he attributed to Godard, “sujet fi lm,” to be distinguished from “histoire fi lm”; to clarify, this distinction is intrigu-ingly close to Dickinson’s discussion of the “generalizing fi lm” as against the “story fi lm” (“This Documentary Business,” Film Culture 13 (October 1957): 5).

34. Whitehead Archive: “Slade Thesis Proposals,” January 30, 1963. 35. Lawrence Alloway, “Avant- Garde, London,” Image 2 (October 1960): 40. 36. Whitehead Archive: “Abstraction Film,” January 30, 1963. The phrase was

eventually used four years later for Tonite. 37. Whitehead Archive: “Brief Treatment for Colour Documentary Film” [that is,

“Images 1963”], undated. 38. Whitehead Archive: “The London Bus,” undated. 39. Whitehead Archive: “Gombrich XI Repre sen ta tion to Expression,” February

5, 1963. 40. Whitehead Archive: Letter from Ilford, February 14, 1963. 41. Whitehead Archive: Letter to Ilford, March 24, 1963. 42. Whitehead Archive: Letter from Ilford, May 3, 1963. 43. Whitehead Archive: Letter to Ilford, May 5, 1963. 44. Whitehead Archive: “Images 1963,” May 1963. 45. See, for example, Whitehead Archive: “One of the Last Fragments,” May 1963. 46. Whitehead Archive: “Lecture by Martin Esslin,” May 13, 1963. 47. Whitehead Archive: Untitled, undated note, circa late 1963. 48. Whitehead Archive: Letter to Rattray Taylor, September 30, 1963. 49. Whitehead Archive: Letter to Jack Hardy, January 11, 1964, my italics. The

letter was no ordinary one, as recipient and author acknowledged. In a missive of June 2, 1965, Whitehead remembered it as “an impassioned, idealistic out-burst of a very young man. I haven’t changed a bit!”

50. Whitehead Archive: “General Notes about Thesis,” circa March 1963. 51. Ibid. 52. Whitehead Archive: Letter to Thorold Dickinson, April 5, 1964. 53. Ibid.

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54. E-mail from Whitehead, September 23, 2010. 55. Whitehead Archive: Letter to Thorold Dickinson, May 14, 1964. 56. Whitehead Archive: “Abstraction Film 1963,” circa February 1963. 57. Whitehead Archive: “Images 1963,” May 1963. 58. Burroughs’s collaboration with Anthony Balch, Towers Open Fire, had premiered

in London in June 1963, shown in a double bill with Vivre sa Vie at the Paris Pullman.

59. Whitehead Archive: “Gombrich XI Repre sen ta tion to Expression,” February 5, 1963.

60. Whitehead Archive: Letter to Thorold Dickinson, May 14, 1964. 61. Whitehead Archive: Letter to A. C. Sibert, June 29, 1964. 62. Whitehead Archive: Letter to Ed Roncarelli, June 28, 1964. 63. Ibid. On June 25, 1966, just as he began work on the fi lm, Whitehead described

Tonite to Dickinson as “a sort of Swinging Cultural London. A Parallels at length.” 64. Whitehead Archive: Letter to Ed Roncarelli, August 25, 1964. 65. Paul Gardner, “A Briton Who Came to Manhattan,” New York Times, November

12, 1967, 147. 66. Ibid. 67. Whitehead Archive: Letter to George Hoellering, May 31, 1965. 68. Whitehead Archive: Letter from Thorold Dickinson, June 11, 1965.