The Falconer (1998)
Chris Petit & Iain Sinclair's liminal, laminal tribute to underground filmmaker Peter Whitehead, featuring image manipulation by Dave Mckean & reminiscences from various countercultural characters. A fitting epitaph for an English margin walker.
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best movie i've ever seen.
Good films always raise compelling questions, whether the format is fiction or documentary fact.
All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.
Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.
A barrage of images, an aural onslaught of eerie vocals - this documentary starts with the death of an enigma. It asks the audience the question - who was Peter Whitehead? The 'docudrama' form of this film deals with a man shrouded in mystery. It uses snippets of his life, excerpts from his films, and staged encounters with the many women of his life to convey the psyche of a man who was so caught-up in his own existence that it eventually had the better of him. The power of his character had an immense effect on the spectator, and evidently, also on those who bothered to listen to him. His hypnotic and charismatic demeanour, often dealing with the erotic fetishisation of Falcons (hence the title), explained his lifestyle in terms of the ancient mythological power of the great bird. Perhaps his behaviour was the result of the drug-induced psychedellic ethos of the 1970s, or maybe it was just a huge ego-trip. Either way, by the end of the film the answer to the question - who was Peter Whitehead? - is still left open.