The Mystical Filmmaker: An Encounter

This lively cinema dialogue — in the form of a cross-Atlantic email correspondence — investigates the idea of The Mystical Filmmaker. It is a complement to the films and fiction of Peter Whitehead, and exposes Whitehead’s marvelous gift for finding myriad connections between a host of subjects that are “in play” in a living conversation. Many filmmakers are interesting in an interview setting, where they can tell stories and be the raconteur, but there are very few who are so engaging in the context of an epistolary-dialogue. There is a vivid dramatic unity to this correspondence, which is not “just a bunch of letters” written over a rambling period of time – but is, rather, a complete and concise conversation-in-writing, with a distinct beginning, middle and end: a pas-de-deux of words that took place almost entirely within the time-nutshell of a six-months period. At its best, the correspondence has a vibration not unlike Antonin Artaud’s description of Balinese theater, and illustrates Artaud’s declaration that actors “should be like torture victims who are being burned and making signs from the stake.” Because of the painful context of these letters, The Mystical Filmmaker is a collection of “signs from the stake.”

Peter Whitehead (1937-2019) was one of Britain’s great countercultural filmmakers. His films include Wholly Communion, Charlie Is My Darling (the first Rolling Stones film), Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London and The Fall, filmed in New York in 1968.

John Sorensen is the creator and director of the Jumble Shop Theater of Greenwich Village. His film work as writer/director includes The Quilted Conscience (for Public Television), The Andy Warhol Robot (for the Carnegie Museum) and Midsummer (a silent film adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie). He is the author or editor of several books, including A Sister’s Memories (Chicago, 2015) and The Herridge Style: The Life and Work of a Television Revolutionary (Kentucky, 2025).

^{The Mystical Filmmaker: An Encounter (2015)
Paperback ISBN 978-0-9905308-5-5 196pp 5×8 inches
Hardback ISBN 978-1-942782-18-6 196pp 5×8 inches}