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Wholly Communion

1965 British film by Peter Whitehead

Summary

1965 British film by Peter Whitehead

Field	Value
name	Wholly Communion
image	Wholly Communion film Opening titles (1965).png
director	Peter Whitehead
released
runtime	33 minutes
country	United Kingdom
language	English

Wholly Communion is a short documentary film made in 1965 by British filmmaker Peter Whitehead. It was filmed at the Royal Albert Hall, London, and documents a poetry event held on 11 June 1965 called the International Poetry Incarnation. It features poetry readings by Beat poets from the UK and U.S.

Cast

Gregory Corso
Harry Fainlight
Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Allen Ginsberg
Michael Horovitz
Ernst Jandl
Christopher Logue
Adrian Mitchell
Alexander Trocchi
Andrei Voznesensky

Reception

The Monthly Film Bulletin wrote: "As a record of that celebrated meeting of poets which packed the Royal Albert Hall last June, Wholly Communion certainly has its points: here, preserved for the curious and the social historian, are the narcissistically mumbling poets (Logue, Ferlinghetti and Mitchell are notable exceptions), and the huge audience, which came expecting one knows not what, listening reverentially (did they enjoy themselves?). Aside from its interest as a document, unfortunately, the film is a clumsy piece of work. The single camera, rather uncertainly doing its best to give an overall coverage, wobbles and shudders, zooms in to a target, misses, tries again and re-focuses, in a poor approximation to the much more professional American cinéma-vérité approach. A good deal of the framing is also ugly, and there is an interminable sequence in which the camera seems to be hypnotised by a girl in the audience who is waving her arms about like a third-rate interpretative dancer in time to Ginsberg's poetical mutterings."

References

"Wholly Communion". British Film Institute.
"BFI Screenonline: Wholly Communion (1965)".
Donnelly, Mark. (2011). "Wholly Communion: Truths, Histories, and the Albert Hall Poetry Reading". Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media.
Riley, James. (2019). "The Bad Trip: Dark omens, new worlds and the end of the sixties.". ICON Books Ltd.
(1 January 1966). "Wholly Communion". [[The Monthly Film Bulletin]].

Wikipedia Source

This article was imported from Wikipedia and is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Content has been adapted to SurfDoc format. Original contributors can be found on the article history page.

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