Nov. 8, 2007

WHO: The Virginia Film Society
WHAT: “The Fall” by Peter Whitehead
WHEN: Wednesday, Nov. 14, 7 p.m.
WHERE: Vinegar Hill Theatre

The Virginia Film Society continues its fall film series with a screening of “The Fall” by Peter Whitehead on Nov. 14. Whitehead, known for his documentation of the 1960s counterculture in New York and London, explores the Vietnam War in this 1968 film.

Considered by Whitehead to be his most important film, “The Fall” is an extremely personal statement on violence, revolution and the turbulence within late-1960s America. Filmed entirely in and around New York between October 1967 and June 1968, it features Robert Kennedy, The Bread and Puppet Theater, Paul Auster (fresh-faced as a Columbia student), Tom Hayden, Mark Rudd, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Arthur Miller, Robert Lowell, Robert Rauschenberg and The Deconstructivists.

“Peter Whitehead was the greatest avant-garde British filmmaker of the Sixties,” wrote Dave Calhoun in Time Out magazine. “His films stand together as an unrivaled record of that decade’s counterculture.”

The Virginia Film Society will conclude its fall schedule with Ingmar Bergman’s “Smiles of a Summer Night” on Dec. 5. This film is co-sponsored by Live Arts, which is presenting Stephen Sondheim’s musical adaptation, “A Little Night Music.”

All Virginia Film Society events are co-sponsored by the Virginia Film Festival and the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Admission tickets may be purchased 30 minutes before the screening at the venue box office, when seats are available.

Press Contact: Jane Ford
(434) 924-4298
jford@virginia.edu