Detail

• Artist: Francois Smit
• Published in: The Sunday Independent
  
• Author of article: John Preston
• Date: 3/03/2007
• Paper: 280gsm 100% cotton acid free paper
• Ink: Epson ultrachrome archival pigment ink
• Image Size: 594mm x 420mm
• Frame: Optional
• Edition: Limited edition of 12

 
A short extract from the article

'I'm not interested in the real world'
Film mystic, pioneering film-maker, falconer and father of eight: Peter Whitehead has led a full life. John Preston tracks down one of the counterculture's most intriguing figures to a housing estate in the British Midlands and finds the address is not the only surprise
The car park at Kettering station is not the sort of place you expect to meet a mystic. But here is Peter Whitehead with long white hair and dark glasses emerging through the gloom of a January afternoon in a beaten-up, red Vauxhall Astra.
There can be no doubt that Whitehead is a mystic - apart from anything else, he claims to be 4 000 years old and to have been reborn early one morning in August 1996.
But he is, mercifully, a lot of other things besides: pioneer documentary-maker, novelist, falconer and the man who may have invented the pop video - an idea that he finds abhorrent.
For 10 years Whitehead ran a falcon-breeding programme in Saudi Arabia founded by King Faisal's son, Prince Khalid al-Faisal.
Once he showed Prince Charles around his falconry centre, a visit that went very well despite the fact that one of the falcons ejaculated over Whitehead's hat.
"Charles wrote to me afterwards and said it was the most extraordinary thing he'd ever seen," he says.
Having fallen into deepest obscurity, Whitehead is now making a comeback.
Next month, the National Film Theatre is showing a season of his work, and there's a new three-hour documentary by Paul Cronin, In the Beginning was the Image: Conversations with Peter Whitehead, to go with it. The season will include Charlie is My Darling, the first documentary ever made about the Rolling Stones, as well as The Fall, the film that devotees consider to be his masterpiece, which has never received a commercial release.
Another 30 film festivals around the world are also in the process of mounting Whitehead festivals. All this belated recognition has had a dramatic effect on him. Having sworn more than 30 years ago that he would never make another film, Whitehead, now aged 70, is planning to take up his camera again for one final time. Recently, he's been limbering up by shooting some footage of Pete Doherty in the recording studio, at Doherty's request.

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