He filmed Allen Ginsberg, Mick Jagger (a friend), Syd Barrett (a brother), Nico (among his numerous lovers), Jimmy Page, Peter Brook, the Black Panthers, Mark Rudd (future member of the Weathermen, American terrorist group), Nikki de Saint-Phalle (co-director of his Daddy [1973]), Vanessa Redgrave singing a Cuban revolutionary song, and so many others ... His work disappeared for thirty years: its author, an independent British filmmaker, had gone off to train falcons in Saudi Arabia. Today, his novels are hailed as the foerunner of cyberculture.

The brilliant work of Peter Lorrimer Whitehead, full of an incomparable energy, pulverises the false barriers between formal research, documentary reportage, psychedelic cinema, cinéma engagé, pop cinema and auteur cinema. In the tradition of Jean Epstein in his Pasteur (1922), Whithead began his career with a film on the history of science and especially visibility: The Perception of Life (1964). There he acquired a heteroscopic vision of reality, allowing him to connect the plastic and rhythmic resources of cinema, for the sake of an eternally amorous, sensual and musical account of things.

Wholly Communion (1965) documents a poetry evening with Allen Ginsberg and a grand assembly of the Beat Generation; Charlie is My Darling (1966) a Rolling Stones tour of Ireland; Benefit of the Doubt (1967) a militant theatrical tour of the play US by Peter Brook; Led Zeppelin (1970) a concert at the Royal Albert Hall. In the amazing masterpieces Pink Floyd London ’66-’67 (1967), Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967) and The Fall (1969), Whitehead made some of the most innovative films of his time – and among the richest in terms of formal invention and political exigency.

From plastic abstraction to documentary reportage, from psychic investigation to political pamphleteering, from the autobiographical essay to a demonstration of the powers of montage, from graphic and textural work to militant revindication – Whitehead’s work accomplishes an exceptional synthesis, open to every different dimension of avant-garde cinema, tending towards percpetual explosion and euphoric fusion with phenomena.

Such an inquiry does not exlude its melancholic counterpoint – and one understands, through discovering this magnificent œuvre, why Whitehead formed the basis for the character played by David Hemmings in Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966). Peter Whitehead, or the creation of a Wholly Cinema.

Whitehead’s work returns to us today, distributed by the Maysles Brothers, and becomes instantly indispensable to our mental landscape. Why? Because it has largely fixeed the vocabulary of exchanges between image and pop music, in an inventive, radical and energetic way that has given rise to many pale imitations. Whitehead filmed like no-one else the early performances of Pink Floyd and The Rolling Stones; he made clips for Nico, Jimi Hendrix, Eric Burdon and the New Animals, Jimmy James and The Vagabonds ... The way in which he shot a Led Zeppelin concert in 1970 at London’s Royal Albert Hall – with only two 16mm cameras and creative intuition at his disposal – gives us not only the masterpiece of concert films, but also an admirable lesson in cinema, montage, empathy.

For Whitehead, the alliance of cinema and music leads to a deflagration of the senses which constitutes the profane, collective, authentically popular version of more ritual ecstasies. London ’66 – Pink Floyd, thirty minutes of pure rhythmic genius worthy of Ronald Nameth’s Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable made the same year, offers the precious document, captured in a studio, of the long version of ‘Interstellar Overdrive’ (its only known recording), and places it in parallel montage with the 14 Hour Technicolour Dream happening, where one can glimpse Yoko Ono and John Lennon first crossing paths. This parallel montage structure was possibly the source for Jean-Luc Godard’s One + One (1968) – Whitehead transcribed and translated four Godard films (À bout de souffle [1960], Le Petit Soldat [1960], Alphaville [1965], Pierrot le fou [1965]), in effect creating an ad hoc publishing house, Immediate Publishing Company, which would later become Lorrimer Publishing – akin to Fassbinder hypothetically creating a publishing house to print the scripts by Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet. Whitehead also produced one of the most radical film magazines of its time, Afterimage, edited by Simon Field and Peter Sainsbury, which published the first English-language version of Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s ‘Towards a Third Cinema’, not to mention interviews with Philippe Garrel, Andy Warhol, the Newsreel group ... It was to Afterimage that Godard contributed a crucial text, ‘What is to be Done?’, in 1970.

Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, featuring Jagger, Julie Christie, Michael Caine, Lee Marvin and David Hockney, offers a highly energetic description of the artistic excitement peculiar to London at the time, a hymn to counter-culture which opposes the legend of Swinging London – according to Whitehead, a legend entirely fabricated by the CIA in order to depoliticise the movement. The astonishing formal freedom of Whitehead’s films takes us to an exigency of joy that indeed determines the directly political dimension of the work. This is evident in his films on the Beat Generation (Wholly Communion) and Peter Brook (Benefit of the Doubt), against patriarchy (Daddy), and above all in his autobiographical essay The Fall.

In The Fall, a fashionable filmmaker on a trip to New York looks for meaning in life, while dramatic events occur around him (the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King). He explores a love affair with a model, enters artistic and counter-cultural circles, while frenetically researching the montage forms offered by cinema and video – ceasessly returning to his electronic self-portrait, which he relentlessly distorts and tortures ... But in the end he becomes a participant in a concrete struggle, the occupation of Columbia University by students protesting the Vietnam War and the collaboration of their Uinversity with the CIA, alongside Mark Rudd, Bernardine Dohrn, Tom Hayden and the Black Panthers, there to support the strike.

In the course of an anthological scene in The Fall, the protestors tensely wait, behind barricaded doors, for the inevitable police assault, while a red flag flies atop Columbia University. Suddenly these students, doomed to failure and violence, begin to dance: their festive demonstration unleashes, in this moment, the forces of collective energy facing repression. A moment of fraternal euphoria amid an ocean of despair, a précis of everything in the human condition that is noble and beautiful.

A complete retrospective of Peter Whitehead’s work is running at the Cinémathèque française between January and March 2007.