-1— 0— +1— Framework 52, No. 1, Spring 2011, pp. 128–144. Copyright © 2011 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. We’re present at an important historical crossroads. We must pay attention to such a sign. 7,000 people turn up to listen to Allen Ginsberg, famous for one poem—HOWL—a diatribe against the very soul of American culture. I’m getting more worried with every poem, not because of the words—but because 7,000 people are trying to listen, or just watching and are enjoying it. And they aren’t all so-called Beats. Just look! These are normal decent God-fearing people. Most of ’em! Peter Whitehead, Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London (1999) Any pretensions I had as a cameraman about the objectivity of film have, since making this movie, also been abandoned. Anyone seeing the film who thinks that at last he has seen the “truth” about what DID happen, is deluded. He has seen the film that also “happened” that night at the Albert Hall. Peter Whitehead, Wholly Communion (“Notes on the Filming,” 1965) Wholly Communion is Peter Whitehead’s thirty-three-minute documentary of a four-hour poetry reading that took place at London’s Royal Albert Hall on Friday, June 11, 1965. The film won a gold medal at the Mannheim Festi- val and premiered at London’s Academy Cinema in April 1966. The event it portrayed saw poets from North America and Europe reading their work to a full auditorium of some seven thousand people, with hundreds more turned away at the door. It was an unprecedented audience for a poetry read- ing, an occasion that has come to be regarded as a “historic” moment in sixties British culture. Whitehead at this time had no particular ambition to make conventional documentaries. He was never interested in John Grierson’s Wholly Communion : Truths, Histories, and the Albert Hall Poetry Reading Mark Donnelly 537-46706_ch01_1P.indd 128 537-46706_ch01_1P.indd 128 8/6/11 6:16 PM 8/6/11 6:16 PM