PETER WHITEHEAD

(8 January 1937 - 10 June 2019)

The British-born documentary film director Peter Whitehead, who has died aged 82, was a pioneer in his own field and a definite influence on other filmmakers and the music video scene. Born in Liverpool, he studied music, played the organ and won a scholarship to Cambridge where he read chemistry, mathematics and physics, although he later wanted to study English literature and become a writer. He won another scholarship to the Slade School of Art to train as a painter but, as a cinephile, he was soon diverted into studying film under the veteran director Thorold Dickinson. Whitehead began his filmmaking career with short documentaries for the Nuffield Foundation. Then he appeared to concentrate on the zeitgeist of Britain in the ‘swinging’ 1960s. Wholly Communion (1965) was a record of a beat poetry convention at the Royal Albert Hall, with Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Christopher Logue, Adrian Mitchell, etc. Then he made Charlie Is My Darling (1966) with The Rolling Stones but the band’s manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who had commissioned the film, disapproved of the results and it wasn’t fully released until 2012. However, Whitehead did work with the Stones again on various promotions and filmed other musicians such as Pink Floyd, The Beach Boys, Jimi Hendrix, The Small Faces, etc. For Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967) the filmmaker really captured the spirit of the times in interviews with Mick Jagger, David Hockney, Edna O’Brien, Vanessa Redgrave, Lee Marvin, Roman Polanski, Terence Stamp and Michael Caine, among others. He joined Peter Brook at the Royal Shakespeare Company to produce Benefit of the Doubt (1967), a film of Brook’s production of US, about the war in Vietnam, with Ian Hogg, Michael Kustow, Michael Williams and Glenda Jackson. In 1969 he made The Fall, probably Whitehead’s most personal film and his most political, dealing as it dealt with protest, violence and revolution in 1960s' America. It had such an effect on him that he turned to fictional subjects including Daddy (1973) and Fire in the Water (1977). He also wrote some novels, one of which he made into a film, Terrorism Considered As One of the Fine Arts (2007) about state control of culture. Before that he was interviewed for Paul Cronin’s documentary about Whitehead, In the Beginning Was the Image (2006). Peter Whitehead was married to Dianne Leigh, Dido Goldsmith and Liza Kareninam. He fathered seven children including a son and daughter from his relationships with Coral Atkins and Deanna Woodrow.

MICHAEL DARVELL