Viewing Notes: Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts

 

Vienna Vertigo: Peter Whitehead / Michael Schlieman waiting for Lenoir

In 2010, while working with Peter Whitehead, I was dispatched to that year’s Bradford Film Festival. The year before, the festival had honoured Whitehead with their Fellowship Award while screening the highly acclaimed retrospective programme put together by Paul Cronin at Sticking Place Films. The success of that programme, particularly at the 2006 Viennale, had spurred Whitehead onto another large-scale project, a full-length feature film based on his novel Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts (2007). I’ve written about this project previously, as I went onto develop a screenplay volume based on the significant amount of material Whitehead amassed during its production. The film, Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts had its premiere at the 2009 Viennale, and Whitehead asked me to go to Vienna to introduce it – a good but deeply weird trip that deserves a lengthy essay of its own. Bradford was essentially the same occasion. Organised by the brilliant Mark Goodall, it was an evening screening that functioned as Terrorism’s UK premiere.

After making such as splash with the retrospective, news of this new Whitehead film caused a certain degree of anticipation among those previewing the Bradford’s 2010 edition. As Mike Everleth, writing in the Underground Film Journal put it:

[…] the most thrilling screening of the entire 10-day affair is the new film by British filmmaker Peter Whitehead, Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts. In the U.S., Whitehead is a “lost” filmmaker from the underground’s heyday in the ’60s, being left out of most histories of the underground movement. Whitehead directed several influential films, including Wholly Communion and The Fall, before dropping out of filmmaking in the mid-’70s.

Whitehead as ‘lost’ film-maker was something the retrospective and a lot of the activities that came after – edited volumes, essays, archive consolidation – tried to redress. Admittedly, though, the idea did help confer a certain aura upon Whitehead’s work, the sense that when watching his films you were seeing something long hidden that could change how you understand the 1960s and documentary film. Terrorism, when it arrived, reiterated this sensibility. It was along, frequently digressive but nonetheless fascinating film account of Whitehead’s movement through Vienna’s geographic and artistic zones. It was not quite the triumphant ‘return’ to narrative cinema Whitehead touted it as and, admittedly, there is much about it that doesn’t really work as a film. Seen, though, as a personal, involuted and quixotic video journal, and it becomes a lot more rewarding.

The notes below represent the introduction speech I gave before the screening at Bradford. Whitehead was very keen to attend retrospective screenings during this period, less so individual events. He did attend a later Terrorism screening in Paris at the La Cinémathèque française. Sending me in his place, though, did not suggest he was in some way uninterested. Quite the opposite. He was extremely interested to hear of audience reactions. In both Vienna and Bradford, he was always on the phone - giving instructions, asking questions - before and after each screening. As was his wont, Whitehead was also interested to hear of any synchronicities observed or experienced. During the Bradford trip he was delighted to hear that my hotel had put me in their ‘Whitehead Room’ for the night.

For a while after its premiere, Terrorism was viewable only via selected screenings and Whitehead’s own self-produced DVDs. Since then, it has appeared online. One posting via Plagiarisme.Inc, a You Tube channel established by Whitehead in 2014, has the film in three separate chapters. This should be considered Whitehead’s preferred mode of viewing. Another more recent – and most likely unauthorised – posting courtesy of Celluloid Monk, presents the film as a single video.  

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Whitehead as Schlieman, Schlieman as Whitehead. 

You are about to see Terrorism Considered as One of the Fine Arts, which represents Peter Whitehead’s return to feature-length film after a sizable hiatus.

When placed alongside his other work, particularly the documentaries he made in the 1960s such as Wholly Communion (1965) and The Fall (1969), Terrorism initially seems to mark a significant departure. In its degree of formal experimentation and concern with aspects of media technology there is an overlap with the likes of The Fall but, overall, Terrorism moves closer to the realm of fiction than documentary. But of course, that distinction is not entirely stable which is one of the film’s many interesting features.

Where Terrorism does establish continuity with Whitehead’s previous projects is in the case of his work as a novelist. Whitehead has been writing throughout his career and Terrorism is, in fact, an adaptation of the novel of the same name. Terrorism, the novel, first published in 2007, is part of Whitehead’s ‘Nohzone Trilogy’, a sequence of strange espionage texts that continues with Nature’s Child (2001) and concludes with Girl on the Train (2003). These hugely intertextual novels were originally published online via Whitehead’s website Nohzone.com. At the level of content and form they are very much indebted to the specificity of this medium. In terms of plot, the outline the attempt of an unnamed narrator to track down one Michael Schlieman, a missing MI6 agent who has disappeared during a counter-terrorism operation. The narrator tracks Schlieman by retrieving, reviewing and reconstructing the various memoirs Schlieman has written about his time in the intelligence services. Uploaded onto a series of tumbleweed websites, these screeds contain letters, e-mails, journal entries and metaphysical rants. As a reading experience it’s not unlike William Burroughs’ The Last Words of Dutch Schultz (1970) meets Peter Wright’s Spycatcher (1987). This material gradually reveals that the dying Schlieman, possibly in the thralls of an intense opium high, had become obsessed with and gone in pursuit of Maria Lenoir, the head of a eco-terrorist cell and the intended object of his surveillance.

In the film, this scenario is transposed to Vienna, and we follow Schlieman – played by Whitehead himself – as he drifts around the city on the two circles of the Ringstrasse. As he moves clockwise and counter clockwise, he tries to locate and encircle Lenoir and the other women who make up her group. The central conceit relates to Lenoir’s planned act of terrorism, one performed as an act of retribution in response to the sinking of the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior. This occurred in 1985 when the French intelligence agency, the DGSE, detonated two bombs in the hull of the berthed ship to prevent it protesting French nuclear testing in Moruroa. The incident led to the death of the Greenpeace photographer Fernando Pereira who was trapped on board when he tried to retrieve his camera. Pereira is one of the dedicatees of the film. In marshalling their response to this actual event, Whitehead presents his fictional terrorists as vengeful furies, symbolic manifestation of Gaia, the Earth Goddess. Much of this plot-structure is taken from the novel which is very much recommended. However, where the novel frames Schlieman’s experiences within a narrative of textual reconstruction, the film positions the viewer at the heart of this pursuit. Thanks to Whitehead’s often POV-style camerawork, we directly inhabit Schlieman’s perspective as the events unfold and, possibly, as his mind comes apart.

This interiority is key to what Whitehead was trying to achieve with Terrorism. He accumulated the project’s raw footage on the streets and trams of Vienna between 2006 and 2008 using lightweight digital video equipment that easily allowed the maintenance of a first-person viewpoint. These tapes were essentially a record of the period he spent in the city: it is footage of Peter Whitehead meeting people, travelling on the tram, talking about ideas, attending events. However, once this material is edited into his fictionalised frame the on-screen figures are rendered as both real and imaginary. Whitehead becomes Schlieman and the people he meets become terrorists. Here Whitehead is using the standard narrative of investigation, the basic approach of the spy and detective genres, to make a wider point about the transformative capabilities of individual consciousness. Through the figure of the psychologically deteriorating Schlieman, Whitehead explores the fluidity and productive potential inherent to the act of remembering and misremembering.

Within the film Whitehead-as-Schlieman acts as a sort of Tiresias figure, mirroring the way that this mythical character is represented in T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’ (1922). He is the perpetual spectator. He remains somewhat detached from events, but it is also his presence which unites and motivates the narrative. The thrust of the film is that while Whitehead / Schlieman encounters a whole series of different people they are, essentially, all the same woman: they are the faces and voices of the eternally absent Lenoir that Schlieman projects onto all those around him.

This notion of an all-encompassing subject position also works as an oblique comment on Whitehead’s use of technology. The film makes self-conscious reference to online communications, mobile technology and digital video. One of the dominant formal features of the film is the extended use of captions and on-screen texts. These references to literature, philosophy and film are visual representations of Schlieman’s interception and interpretation of the e-mail communication between the members of the activist cell. They also provide a running textual commentary on the on-goings events of the film. Whitehead thus folds into the texture of the film, the operational traces of the digital economy, the tools that facilitate the contemporary ‘me’ culture: the endless live feed of self-absorbed blogs, tweets and chat rooms.

Incidentally, it’s on account of this technical specificity that Whitehead doesn’t want Terrorism to be seen as a ‘film’ per se, but as DVD, something that can be put onto the shelf alongside your books and consumed in the same way. It is intentionally split into three chapters in order to encourage repeated and extended viewing. You can watch one chapter, go away and think about it, come back and watch another, Maybe even watch them in a different order.

While stylistically very different, Terrorism could productively be placed alongside Nicholas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now (1973) and Alain Tanner’s In the White City (1983) insofar as they each use images of transit through urban terrain to highlight and exacerbate changes in the memory functions of the protagonists. However, where the thematic emphasis of these two examples is upon images of decay, in Whitehead’s film the hallucinatory journey is creative. As Schlieman’s idiosyncratic camera I/eye traverses the multiple circles of Vienna – the city of dreams the Freudian unconscious and The Third Man – it is as if he is making unexpected synaptic connections across different artistic, philosophical and historical zones.   

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