The Fall

Plot synopsis:
Los Angeles, 1915: stuntman Roy Walker (Lee Pace) is hospitalized, as he is bedridden and possibly paralyzed after a jump he took in his first film. He meets Alexandria (Catinca Untaru), a young Romanian-born patient in the hospital who is recovering from a broken arm, and begins to tell her a story about her namesake. Alexandria is told she has to leave, but Roy promises to tell her an epic tale if she returns the next day.
The next morning, as Roy spins his tale of fantasy, Alexandria's imagination brings his characters to life. Roy's tale is about five heroes: a silent Indian warrior (Jeetu Verma), a muscular ex-slave named Otta Benga (Marcus Wesley), an Italian explosives expert called Luigi (Robin Smith), Charles Darwin (Leo Bill) with a pet monkey called Wallace, and a masked swashbuckling bandit. An evil ruler named Governor Odious (Daniel Caltagirone) has committed an offense against each of the five, who all seek revenge. The heroes are later joined by a sixth hero, a mystic.
Alexandria vividly imagines her friends and people around her appearing as the characters in Roy's story. Although Roy develops affection for Alexandria, he also has an ulterior motive: by gaining her trust, he tricks her into stealing morphine from the hospital pharmacy so that he can attempt suicide; a choice driven by his love leaving him for the actor for whom he provided the stunt footage. However, Alexandria returns with only three pills, having mistaken the "E" on the piece of paper Roy gave her for a "3". The stories become a collaborative tale to which Alexandria also contributes. Alexandria herself becomes a character: while Roy is the masked bandit, she is his daughter.
Roy talks Alexandria into stealing a bottle of morphine tablets locked in a fellow patient's cabinet, and then downs it all. The next morning, Roy awakens from his sleep and realizes he is only alive because his neighboring patient is receiving a placebo rather than actual morphine. Alexandria, desperate to help Roy, sneaks out of bed to the pharmacy. She climbs onto the cabinet but loses her footing, falls, and is badly injured. She receives surgery, after which she is visited by Roy, where he confesses his deception. He encourages Alexandria to ask someone else to end the story, but she insists on hearing Roy's ending. Roy reluctantly begins the rest of the story.
The heroes die one by one, and it seems that Governor Odious will be triumphant. Alexandria becomes upset, and Roy insists, "It's my story." She declares that it is hers too and exerts some influence on the course of the tale. Finally, the epic tale comes to an end with only the Bandit and his daughter remaining alive and Governor Odious dying. Roy and Alexandria, along with the patients and staff of the hospital, watch a viewing of the finished 'flicker' that Roy appeared in. With everyone laughing, only Roy's smile is broken in confusion when he sees that his life-threatening jump has been edited out of the film as another stuntman jumps instead.
Alexandria’s arm heals and she returns to the orange orchard where her family works. Her voice-over reveals that Roy had recovered and was now back at work again. As she talks, a montage of cuts from several of silent films' greatest and most dangerous stunts plays; she imagines all the stuntmen to be Roy.

Tags: anti war, violence, cult, philosophical

Review:
Anybody with an opinion of Iraq War should watch this. The Fall is a difficult movie to assess; I watched it yesterday and thought it a masterpiece. However, the main reason why I thought that is the scenes in which various people tell what they think about the Vietnam war. The director shows both people who are supporting it and against it. And the striking thing is how extraordinarily similar what they are saying are to the way people talk about the Iraq war. So I think it's masterpiece for today because it's highly relevant.The movie itself works to prove the phrase "history repeats itself". Especially, after watching an elderly lady talk passionately about why the war is only about profits, I couldn't hold my tears back. Because at that moment, I understood that we failed those people who fought against the same things 40 years back.However, I also can see why somebody might think this film is a pretentious piece of stick job. As some scenes in between feels very much like filler material, thus the bloated running time. The Italian lady takes much of the flak; but at least she is very pretty to look at. But pay attention to one sequence where Whitehead is talking about Americans and New York, all the while the very sexy Italian lady is strutting seductively on screen. I think it achieves the director's aim of differentiating Word and Image.Also the Colombia University scenes are very revelatory and you just can't look at all that bright young people, fighting - albeit aimlessly - for something they believe in, on screen and don't feel a pang of guilt and shame today.. A magnificent documentary portrait of an era of angst. This highly creative and individualistic documentary epic is one of the crowning achievements of its time. It was directed, photographed, edited, and in story segments staged and written, by the amazing Peter Whitehead. How he does it I do not know. In these documentaries of his, he gains the confidence of just about anybody and everybody, and they open up to him and let him film things no one else ever managed to film. The underlying theme of this film is the discontent in the late sixties in America. Although primarily it was the Vietnam War which was the object of protest, that was not the only issue, and there is much prominence given to Martin Luther King's and Robert Kennedy's assassinations, with highly revealing footage, especially of Kennedy (who recurs throughout the film as a continuous strand upon which Whitehead broods) and those assassinations and their aftermaths were certainly not about Viet Nam. The film was mostly made in New York City, but Whitehead shot also in Washington, DC, and at Newark, New Jersey. His footage of the destruction of much of Newark by fire as a result of the riots after King's assassination are astounding, and I do not believe any comparable film record of it exists. In the film it looks much like Aleppo does today. It is doubtful that the American public ever got to see the true extent of the Newark disaster. But the most fantastic part of this film, certainly ranking as one of the finest documentary portraits of its kind in cinema history, is the coverage from the inside of the besieged students at Columbia University. The sit-ins and protests there went on for a long time, initially led by a far-left group called Students for a Democratic Society (known by initials as SDS), led by Mark Rudd, who is seen in the film of course. While the standard coverage of these events was all done from the outside, Whitehead's revealing film is the only record of what took place from the inside. Never has a revolutionary movement been so intimately portrayed, with all its main personalities vividly shown as people. Whitehead is never judgemental, and he is just 'a seeing eye' impartially recording everything. It is incredible to think that he was allowed to do this by a group of frightened revolutionary students under siege, and who were eventually overrun and savagely beaten by the police. They then regrouped and started yet again, and Whitehead records that too. When Whitehead went to New York with the intention of making a documentary about the city, he naturally had no idea that these things were going to happen in the months ahead, and that he would unexpectedly become one of the greatest flies on the wall of documentary history. The film is quirky and highly personal in other linking portions, where Whitehead and his girl friend of the time, Alberta Tiburzi, feature prominently, including in bed kissing and necking. To say that the girl friend is a cheerful exhibitionist is an understatement. She does some of the wildest and most revealing dancing imaginable around their bedroom while Whitehead is trying to listen to broadcasts of dramatic public events on the radio or watch them on the grainy black and white televisions of those days. Intercut in a kind of surrealist manner with many of the documentary segments are also breath-taking shots of going up and down a service elevator on the side of a skyscraper under construction, and one expects to see Gary Cooper at the top, but he is not there. Whitehead staged a truly remarkable surrealistic scene on a New York subway train featuring the top model of the time, Penelope Tree, standing enigmatically and impassively in the train while an infatuated man literally dances around her in mad and fantastic undulations of homage. Whitehead was certainly influenced by the early surrealist films of Man Ray and his friends. He appears to have wanted to show us that the events outside in the real world (assuming the 'real' world is really real, that is) and the bizarre staged events in various inner spaces used by him share in a commensurate level of phantasmagoria. He evidently wishes us to question just how real 'real' things really are. The film is made at a high intellectual plane and much of its apparent incoherence at times is intentional. Of the many famous persons appearing in the film, I have met five: Penelope Tree (who is not credited on IMDb), Arthur Miller, Robert Lowell, Gloria Steinem, and Sammy Davis, Jr., though my conversations with Miller and Davis were cursory and insignificant. It was glorious to see the alluring Gloria Steinem again as she was then, about the time I met her. She was certainly the most glamorous of the feminist activists of those days, and I remember that all the men were chasing her. The film footage of the poet Robert Lowell is deeply touching and apparently unique. There is also revealing footage of Allen Ginsberg, whom Whitehead already knew, as he had filmed him in his earlier documentary, WHOLLY COMMUNION (1965). By no means all of Peter Whitehead's films are listed on IMDb, and of those which are, some have not been reviewed. All of his films are privately preserved, all or most on 35 mm, and let us hope that after half a century of not being seen, this great treasure trove will be released so that the public can marvel at it. His major works have not been publicly available since they were made, although this film THE FALL was prominently shown, though privately, by the 'Occupy' movement on Wall Street in our time, presumably because of the intimate portrait of the Columbia University sit-ins and protests which gave them heart in their own struggle in the same city. The film includes culture, such as conversation with pop artist Robert Rauschenburg.. Hymn to 1968. This is a problematic documentary. It depicts certain scenes in New York City between October 1967 and March 1968, shot by the independent film maker, Peter Whitehead. It is a very personal documentary, and Whitehead appears in a large number of scenes, and we hear his lengthy ruminations on the state of the United States and the war in Vietnam (in actual fact his commentary is frequently inaudible, as it has to compete with rock music that is being played at a higher volume than his voice).The film contains several striking scenes: of an elevator (and elevator shaft), of a montage inspired by Marilyn Monroe, of debates between NYC residents, and the occupation of Columbia University buildings.However, the negatives outweigh the positives. The film is often maddeningly tedious and prolix. Whilst we are forewarned that it is a series of vignettes, they are too frequently disconnected. The quality of the camera work (and of the print) is highly variable. The various scenes are supposed to revolve about the subject of Vietnam - and they do, to some extent, but then the effect is dissipated by wandering off to art galleries. There is far, far too much of Whitehead himself and his cavorting with a not overly interesting model in her flat. No doubt some viewers will be left wondering what was actually going on in NYC whilst he was gazing at the TV or filming the pouting of his girlfriend. Some of his previous films had been devoted to the world of rock and fashion in London (a real blind alley), and he can't throw it off his predilection for it - worse, he tries to integrate the worlds of fashion and politics. The effect is quite unhappy, although it is possible to argue that in the mid-1960s these worlds did indeed elide. Unfortunately, Whitehead also comes across as a caricature of a modish, floppy haired public schoolboy and varsity man. And to continue in an ad hominem vein, there is a scene in which a piano is smashed and a live chicken is first rubbed and then dashed brutally against the wreckage, which is acutely painful to watch. It is hoped that Whitehead's subsequent career as a falconer was in part an atonement for his complicity in that lamentable episode.Much of what is interesting in this film - the scenes of the peace march in Washington, the riot at the Pentagon, the threnody of Robert Lowell - seems to have been taken from the TV. I cannot be sure of that - but it looks as though it was second hand material. This can be excused only on the ground that the great majority of the American people watched the events of 1968 unfold via the tube, and that Whitehead was sharing that experience. However, the footage of Robert Kennedy at a political meeting seems authentic.I think that Whitehead would have done better to have spent his entire time in Central Park. That is where he obtained some of his best material: middle aged matrons complaining about the excessive coverage of hippies; an orthodox priest fulminating against communism at a meeting of the Russian community; a woman decrying the expenditure on ordnance; 'flower children' playing in a pond...However, the real meat was taken at Morningside Heights, and in particular at Hamilton Hall and the Seth Low 'Library'. There is an interesting scene in which a piper plays in a stairwell whilst a fellow protester dances a reel, and we do get a little feel for how the sit-in changed from being fairly placid to anarchic and then violent as the NYPD moved in. The treatment is quite one-sided - no attempt is made to see the Columbia sit-in from the viewpoint of the University authorities (though we do see a couple of nervous chaplains with first aid armbands). This is quite predictable, as the sit-in was largely a self-indulgent affair by the radical section of the student body. The violence of the police shocked many hitherto complacent New Yorkers (who had associated the political violence of the time with the south and Newark), but sympathies were not entirely with the protesters. I dimly recall Alistair Cooke (admittedly something of an establishment figure, but formerly on the liberal left) writing of his dismay at the sight of president Grayson Kirk's office in the Seth Low Library, and of all his books having been torn and trashed. What sort of sentient, humane protesters wreck a library? Whitehead remarks, very acutely, that opposition to Vietnam had become an article of faith amongst everyone under the age of 25, irrespective of the merits or demerits of American involvement - there was an absence of genuine argument amongst the young themselves. Rage and intolerance had infected the student population (arguably the most pampered in history), which then preceded to act in a monolithic, almost fascistic manner. This line of argument is one of the many threads with which Whitehead toys, and then discards.