Tuesday, July 9, 2024 at 7:30pm
Peter Whitehead's Benefit of the Doubt

361 Stagg Street, Suite 407, Brooklyn

Benefit of the Doubt, Peter Whitehead, 1967, digital projection, 65 mins

Peter Whitehead’s Benefit of the Doubt documents the preparation, production, and controversial reception of US, Peter Brook’s experimental anti-war drama that confronted British apathy about Vietnam. Staged with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Brook’s play brought avant-garde techniques inspired by Grotowski and the Living Theater to London’s West End, presenting an absurd and violent music-hall revue constructed out of transcribed interviews with American soldiers, North Vietnamese propaganda, and re-enacted protests, all performed with an emotional intensity and formal anarchy meant to “destabilize” the English audience and make them face their own complicity.

Brook approached Whitehead to film US after admiring his previous documentaries Wholly Communion (1965), shot at an historic Beat poetry convocation at Royal Albert Hall, and Charlie Is My Darling (1966), a vérité portrait of the Rolling Stones on tour in Ireland. Intent on rethinking the staid format of filmed theater, Whitehead built Benefit of the Doubt out of color footage shot during a one-day rehearsal, with costumes and sets still in process, along with black-and-white interviews with members of the production and coverage of the heated public discussions that followed the play. Whitehead films from on-stage, getting into the scrum, zooming in for close-ups, crouching down for low-angle shots, as dynamic a participant as any of the actors.

Brook’s play is both transmitted and transformed by Whitehead, fragmented into a fever dream of military atrocities and grotesque Americana. The film’s finale features a soliloquy by a young Glenda Jackson, who demands the audience imagine that the war were happening in their own country. “I want it—to get worse. I want it to come here,” she declares. “I would like to smell the running bowels of fear over the English Sunday morning smell of gin and the roasting joint and hyacinths. I would like to see an English dog playing on an English lawn with part of a burnt hand. I would like to see a gas grenade go off in an English flower show and nice English ladies crawling in each others’ sick. And all this I would like to be filmed and photographed so that someone a long way off, safe in his chair, could watch us in our indignity.”

Tickets - Pay what you can ($10 suggested donation), available at door.

Please note: seating is limited. First-come, first-served. Box office opens at 7pm. No entry 10 minutes after start of show.