Lindsay Anderson Revisited

Unknown Aspects of a Film Director

Erik Hedling, Christophe Dupin, Erik Hedling, Christophe Dupin

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137539434
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film Direction & Production

This book is about the British film-maker Lindsay Anderson. Anderson was a highly influential personality within British cinema, mostly famous for landmark films like This Sporting Life (1963) and If…. (1968). Lindsay Anderson Revisited deals primarily with hitherto unexplored aspects of his career: his biographical background in the British upper class, his devoted film criticism, and his angry relationship to contemporary society in general. Thus, the book contains chapters about his childhood in India, his writings about John Ford, his relationship to French star Serge Reggiani, his work on TV in the 1950s, his troubles with the British film establishment, and his gradually emerging preoccupation with being Scottish, not English. Also featured are chapters written by close friends of Anderson, who died in 1994, dwelling on his penchant for controversy and quarrel, but also on his remarkable artistic talent and commitment.

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Erik Hedling and Christophe Dupin (eds.)Lindsay Anderson Revisited10.1057/978-1-137-53943-4_1

Begin Abstract

1. Lindsay Anderson’s Legacy: An Introduction

Erik Hedling¹ and Christophe Dupin²

(1)

Center For Languages and Literature, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

(2)

International Federation of Film Avchives (FIAF), Brussels, Belgium

End Abstract

Biographical Notes

Lindsay Anderson (1923–1994) was a major British filmmaker, theatre director, and film critic. Although his cinematic output was rather limited in quantitative terms (half a dozen feature films, added to a few documentaries and some occasional TV work), some of his feature films were highly influential. He is probably best known for his ‘trilogy’—the Cannes-winning If…. (1968), O Lucky Man! (1973), and Britannia Hospital (1982). Here, Anderson follows his anti-hero Mick Travis, played by Malcolm McDowell in all three films, through the hidden corners of modern society. With razor sharp social satire as the preferred artistic method, Anderson, and his scriptwriter David Sherwin, dissect what they perceive as various dysfunctions in contemporary Britain: the public school system in If…., neo-colonialism in O Lucky Man!, and the emerging—and catastrophic—effects of New Public Management in Britannia Hospital. Anderson’s sometimes-idiosyncratic direction called for Brechtian Verfremdungseffekts, theatrical stylization, and a large portion of ingenious humour.

Anderson was also the director of the British New Wave classic This Sporting Life (1963), a strong drama, realist in style, about a Rugby League-player in the north of England. He also directed the elegiac American film The Whales of August (1987), where acting legend Lillian Gish made her farewell to a lifetime in cinema (it was Bette Davis’s penultimate film). Despite making relatively few feature films over his 40-year career, Anderson left a rich legacy on film when he died of a heart attack at the age of 71 in France in August 1994.

Anderson was born in India in 1923 into a military upper middle-class family; his father eventually reached the rank of major general. He had an upbringing typical of his class, attending boarding school at Cheltenham College, and Oxford University, graduating with an MA in English in 1948. By then, Anderson was already devoted to film, having with some colleagues established the classic journal Sequence, which was published between 1947 and 1952. He later came to write film criticism for the BFI journals Sight & Sound and Monthly Film Bulletin.

He had already at that time begun to make films himself, starting in 1948 with Meet the Pioneers, a documentary about a conveyor-belt factory. From then on he established himself as a regular maker of documentaries (as many as fifteen between 1948 and 1957, ranging from commissioned industrial films to more personal and poetic essays). Highlights of this early career include the beautiful Thursday’s Children (1953), codirected by Guy Brenton, a film about the Royal School for the Deaf in Margate, which earned him an Oscar, and Every Day Except Christmas (1957), winner of the Grand Prix at the Venice Film Festival, and since acknowledged as a classic of British documentary. Between 1956 and 1959, Anderson also created a series of film programmes at the National Film Theatre under the heading ‘Free Cinema’, and he became the undisputed leader of the eponymous movement, advocating a new realism and political commitment in films.

Fig. 1.1

Lindsay Anderson and his cameraman Walter Lassally shooting Three Installations (1952)

It was through his work as a director at the Royal Court Theatre in London that Anderson would finally make his debut as a director of feature films with This Sporting Life. The film was a critical success and enabled the filmmaker to embark on his trilogy. Over the years, he would alternate between the theatre and the cinema, much like other great directors like Ingmar Bergman, Orson Welles, and Andrzej Wajda. In the 1980s Anderson’s career, however, was somewhat in decline. Britannia Hospital had been both a critical and box-office failure, and he had problems securing new film projects. Consequently, his career became mostly geared towards the theatre. He managed a few more film projects, such as the Canadian TV-series Glory! Glory! (1988) and his final project, the auto-biographical ‘mockumentary’ Is That All There Is? (1992).

Lindsay Anderson was a complex man, a celibate homosexual, and a fierce anti-Establishment figure. He was highly temperamental, controversial, and radically uncompromising, and he became towards the end of his life increasingly embittered. All of these characteristics made him enemies in the film business, among film workers, scholars, and journalists. This perhaps is the main reason his output of films is relatively small. Critics and scholars disagree on the qualities of his small œuvre, although many seem to cherish particularly This Sporting Life and If…. as two cinematic masterpieces. However, for almost half a century he was undoubtedly a very important figure in British film history, particularly on account of his now classic writings on the cinema, his documentary work, and his role in Free Cinema. Accordingly, his life and work have become the object of a steadily increasing stream of scholarly and other biographical works, the most recent ones having greatly benefited from the availability of a rich collection of personal papers (correspondence, diaries, press cuttings, etc.) which Anderson carefully collected throughout the years. These documents now constitute the Lindsay Anderson Archive at the University of Stirling in Scotland.

Previous Research on Anderson

The first book-length study of Lindsay Anderson’s work in the cinema was Elizabeth Sussex’ Lindsay Anderson, a booklet published in a series of monographs by the film journal Movie in 1969.¹ Thoroughly researched and based on extensive interviews with Anderson, Sussex’s book, like the others in the series, was written very much from the auteurist perspective flourishing at the time. It is a mine of information on Anderson’s early career as a critic and documentary director and provides a serious analysis of his first two feature films. It also includes analysis of two less-famous, but aesthetically very important films: The White Bus (1966), a 46-minute long featurette, based on a short story by Shelagh Delaney, intended to form part of a cinematic triptych that was never completed (the directors of the other parts were to be Tony Richardson and Peter Brook); and The Singing Lesson (1967), a short film that Anderson directed in Poland.

Sussex’ book was followed ten years later by Charles L.P. Silet’s research guide Lindsay Anderson: A Guide to References and Resources, an indispensable study to future scholars.² This book, belonging to a series of research guides on various film directors, supplied meticulous lists of works involving Anderson as an author, including newspaper articles and journal reviews, television commercials for Whitbread and Campari, and his theatre productions. Besides the films analysed by Sussex, this volume covered his two feature films from the 1970s, O Lucky Man! and In Celebration (1974), (five years after Anderson had directed a stage production of the same drama at the Royal Court Theatre). The latter film was an adaptation of a play by David Storey for the acclaimed American Film Theater. Silet also drew up a highly useful and extensive list of critical works on Anderson’s œuvre, from film reviews and overviews to academic essays.

The American scholar Allison Graham, a contributor to this book, wrote the first academic thesis on Anderson’s films; this later led to a published monograph, Lindsay Anderson, in the Twayne’s Filmmakers Series in 1981.³ Graham’s investigation was another auteurist study, relating Anderson’s films to contemporary British society of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. She offered readers a deepened analytical perspective, taking into consideration the sophisticated formal development of Anderson’s artistic methods, and his gradual appropriation of Brechtian techniques in The White Bus, If…. and O Lucky Man!.

Fast-forward 15 years and the next book available was Anderson’s co-writing partner David Sherwin’s autobiographical Going Mad in Hollywood and Life with Lindsay Anderson, published in 1996.⁴ Sherwin offers a witty description of his personal failure to become a screenwriter who can actually live from his trade, despite managing to coauthor Anderson’s trilogy and thus making a lasting contribution to British cinema. The book contains much historical information regarding the making of the films, as well as material concerning the projects that never came to be, like If2…., a follow up to their old film from the 1960s that Anderson and Sherwin were working on when Anderson died.

Erik Hedling’s Lindsay Anderson: Maverick Film-Maker was the first scholarly study on Anderson to be published following the director’s death and thus the first to deal with the entirety of Anderson’s works.⁵ Hedling follows the Brechtian track from Graham. Drawing on contemporary film theory, Hedling argues that Anderson contributed to the development of a self-reflexive mode of art cinema in British cinema, based on Brechtian devices, theatrical stylization, and self-conscious intertextuality. This is seen primarily in the trilogy but also in The White Bus and the television adaptation of Alan Bennett’s The Old Crowd (1979). Hedling was the first scholar to be able to consult, however superficially, the huge archive of papers that Anderson left behind after his passing.

The first biography of Anderson was written by his old friend and colleague from Sequence, Gavin Lambert. Mainly About Lindsay Anderson,⁶ as much about Lambert himself as about Anderson, deals mainly with questions of sexuality and art, juxtaposing Lambert’s acceptance of his own homosexuality with Anderson’s tragic rejection of his, turning Anderson into what Lambert in his obituary in Sight and Sound would call an ‘unrequited lover’.⁷ Lambert probes deeply into Anderson’s personality, connecting the director’s artistic development to a troubled psychological trajectory, and how this affected all aspects of his life and work. Beside the biographical information—Lambert came to know Anderson at Cheltenham College in the 1930s, and they remained friends for the rest of their lives—the book contains vivid analyses of Anderson’s work as a writer and as a director, both in theatre and film.

The year 2004 saw the publication of no fewer than three books on Lindsay Anderson. Mark Sinker wrote a study of If…. for the BFI Film Classics series.⁸ The book, written in a literary style, focuses primarily on the aspects of the film addressed by previous scholars: the connection to Kipling’s famous poem, the influences from Jean Vigo, the Brechtian aesthetics, the public school stories, the anarchism and the general rebelliousness of the1960s. But it also discusses, for instance, the homosexual allusions in the film, hardly addressed before Gavin Lambert’s intense biography.

Anderson was a keen diarist and his private diaries are now kept in the Lindsay Anderson Archive at the University of Stirling. An edited version of the diaries, Lindsay Anderson: The Diaries, was compiled by Paul Sutton (although it did create some controversy, as discussed by Paul Ryan elsewhere in this book).⁹ Here, the reader can follow Anderson’s often very frank remarks on his life and work, as well as on the work of his contemporaries, from 1942 until 26 July 1994, a few weeks before his death in France. The diaries were written in a compelling prose style. In ‘the most poignant passages, the diary becomes a self-analytical tract, or poem, that reaches into the heart of light and shade within himself’, as editor Paul Sutton notes in his introduction.¹⁰ Certainly, the diaries provide lots of new material for prospective scholars on Anderson’s works.

Perhaps even more material was offered by the massive volume of Anderson’s published writings under the titillating title N...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Lindsay Anderson’s Legacy: An Introduction
• 2. Just Remembering Lindsay
• 3. Lindsay Anderson: Child of Empire
• 4. A Kind of Friendship: Lindsay Anderson and John Ford
• 5. Secret People: Lindsay Anderson and Thorold Dickinson
• 6. Lindsay Anderson and Serge Reggiani: Writing, Friendship and Directorial Practice
• 7. Notes from Sherwood
• 8. Lindsay Anderson: The Polish Connection
• 9. Lindsay: With a Little Help from His Friends
• 10. Anderson in America: Transatlantic Satire in the 1960s
• 11. The Auteur vs. the Institution: The Tempestuous Relationship Between Lindsay Anderson and the BFI, 1949–1994
• 12. Theatre, Film, and Television: Lindsay Anderson Directs David Storey’s In Celebration (1969) and Home (1970)
• 13. Strange Bedfellows: Lindsay Anderson and Chariots of Fire
• 14. Lindsay Anderson and Scotland: Identity and the Inveterate Outsider
• 15. A Critical Conscience
• Backmatter