The Fall is a bow shot and parting shot for Peter Whitehead, a 30 year-old British filmmaker who dropped the mic and scarcely returned to the stage after all was edited and done, literally wandering the desert to teach falconry in Saudi Arabia the decades that followed. This would be tragic if the film didn’t entail a career’s worth of ideas and developments deployed at once. In town for the 1967 New York Film Festival, Whitehead was cajoled into training his lens on Gotham, the de facto capital of a civilization he found both kinetically alluring and politically deplorable. From that autumn through May of 1968, he would shoot a daunting spectrum of activity: a pro military rally in Washington Square Park, an anti-war march on D.C., art openings, art happenings, poetry readings, football games, dance parties, photo shoots, Newark in smoldering ruins, and the tide-turning sit-ins at Columbia University. Sponsored byNEA Artworks (EH)