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 The book included the full screenplay text, a series of additional essays and previously unpublished archival material.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.
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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.
