Thursday 7 February, 2013 - 9pm

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Tickets £6/£4 concession (£3 members). Proof of concession or membership to be shown on the doors.

An evening of films and discussion on the flourishing of UK Cinema in the late 60s and early 70s.

Documenting the Counterculture: Peter Whitehead and Harley Cokeliss
To mark the Gallery's current archive exhibition on the legendary Aspen magazine (including issue 7, ‘The British Issue’, which tracked the creative explosion across the arts and society of London and beyond in the late 1960s and early 1970s), an evening of three little-seen British documentary / film essays that capture this great moment in the life of the capital.

J.G. Ballard’s Crash (BBC, 1971) 20 minutes
San Diego-born (but London-educated) Harley Cokeliss directed a version of this visionary text for primetime BBC transmission, amazingly, given its darkness of vision. Since Crash, the novel, was still two years down the road, Cokeliss based the film on some fragments found in Ballard’s Atrocity Exhibition. And Ballard himself starred. ‘With his brooding, hyper-masculine presence, Ballard plays a version of Atrocity’s ‘T’ character alongside the actor Gabrielle Drake (singer Nick Drake’s sister), her own role a composite of the book’s archetypal ’sex-kit’ women. The film was a product of the most experimental and darkest phase of Ballard’s career.’ (from The Ballardian).

Peter Whitehead was the documentarist of UK Sixties counterculture (www.peterwhitehead.net).

Wholly Communion (1965) 33 minutes
Whitehead's breakthrough film, the documentation of the great Albert Hall Poetry Festival in 1965, which won him acclaim and awards. Verse luminaries include a bill-topping Allen, the gruff, pipe-smoking compere Alex Trocchi, an incendiary Adrian Mitchell and, most memorably, the stoned heckler who disrupts the wired Harry Fainlight, to the delight of the massive crowd.

Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1967) 70 minutes
Beautifully shot, with a Syd Barrett-led Pink Floyd supplying the soundtrack, this is perhaps the only true masterpiece of the period, offering a visually captivating window on the 'in' crowd. Revealing, often very personal interviews with the era's prime movers - Michael Caine, Julie Christie, David Hockney and Mick Jagger - are interspersed by dazzling images of the 'dedicated followers of fashion', patronising the clubs and discotheques of the day (Ali Catterall & Simon Wells).

Image: Copyright Peter Whitehead/Contemporary Films

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