Last night we screened Lindsay Anderson's classic If...
Our good friend Christy Fowlston wrote a piece for our program and heres what he had to say...
No
film can be too personal.
The
image speaks. Sound amplifies and comments.
Size
is irrelevant. Perfection is not an aim.
An
attitude means a style. A style means an attitude.
Or
so said the first manifesto of the Free Cinema movement. Several
years before the Royal Court’s ‘angry young men’ reshaped
British drama forever, Lindsay Anderson was already busy challenging
the cultural and social order, cutting his cinematic teeth with
shoestring documentaries funded by the BFI. Struggling to get his
films shown, Anderson joined forces with friends Karel Reisz, Tony
Richardson and Lorenza Mazzetti, the four of them deciding to show
their short documentary films in a single programme at the National
Film Theatre. Despite the fact that the group had made their films
independently of one another, Anderson identified a shared, novel
attitude to their filmmaking, and opportunistically concocted a ‘Free
Cinema Manifesto’ for the occasion. Such was the press attention
garnered by Anderson’s manifesto that not only did all the
screenings sell out, but a further five Free Cinema programmes took
place over the next three years (with notable contributions from
Roman Polanski and François Truffaut). With its evident contempt for
mainstream British films, institutions and attitudes, and its
respectful portrayal of ordinary people, Free Cinema, With Anderson
as its spokesman, was the artistic melting pot from which the British
New Wave was born.
What
do
you have?
Picking
up where Free Cinema left off in 1959, The British New wave (BNW)
consisted of perhaps no more than 9 major works, more than half of
which were directed by the founders of Free Cinema (including Tony
Richardson’s Look
Back in Anger,
A
Taste of Honey,
and The
Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner,
and Karel Reisz’s Saturday
Night Sunday Morning).
The late 50s saw the emergence of a youth culture eager to reject the
fustiness and hidebound attitudes of their parents and the prevalent
culture. BNW films told the stories of characters and issues on the
social margins of society that would previously have been left
untold. Anderson’s own contribution, This
Sporting Life
(1963), was his first feature length film and arguably the final film
in the BNW movement. In
common with most of the BNW’s films, This
Sporting Life
was based on a novel with a screenplay adapted by the author, David
Storey (from his novel of the same name). It tells the story of
Richard Harris’ inimical, violent coal miner, manipulated on the
rugby field and manipulator off it. It wouldn’t be until 1968 that
Anderson made another full length film. But This
Sporting Life’s
themes of power and class would be central to his next, and greatest,
film.
There's
no such thing as a wrong war. Violence and revolution are the only
pure acts.
Set
in an elite and elitist public school, Anderson’s 1968 film, If…
is
certainly a departure from the BNW’s focus on working or lower
middle class people. Malcolm McDowell takes the lead (in his first
screen appearance) as the sixth form rebel Mick Travis.
Arriving back at
school at the beginning of term with a non-regulation moustache, a
fellow pupil remarks "God, it's Guy Fawkes back again".
It’s a line that anticipates the unexpected finale of a film that
was made while the students were literally manning the barricades in
protests in France.
If…
is a searing allegory of British society where public school serves
as a microcosm. The contempt for British mores and institutions of
Anderson’s earlier work is present, and so too are some more
esoteric cinematic elements that Anderson had temporarily abandoned
in This
Sporting Life.
Colour scenes are interspersed with monochrome, the day-to-day
drudgery of school life is broken up with fantasy and surrealism. The
repeated use of a Congolese mass as a musical motif hints at the
escape to another world that Travis and his friends long for.
Many
people (myself included) have looked for some sort of meaning in the
unusual mixture of black and white, and colour film in If…,
there was even a rumour at the time of the film’s release that the
black and white scenes had been included because the production had
run out of money and could not afford to process all the scenes in
colour. In fact, they filmed the first chapel scene in black and
white because, in tests, the natural light rendered the high speed
colour film they were using grainy, and shifting colours coming
through the stained glass window made colour-correction impossible.
When Anderson checked the dailies he liked the way the monochrome
‘broke up the surface of the film’ and decided to insert more
black and white scenes to disorientate the viewer.
Although
a piece of its time If…
still resonates. The young, charismatic, pseudo-liberal headmaster
with his condescending understanding of Travis and his band of ‘hair
rebels’ smacks of David Cameron (or any of the current shower of
‘caring’ Tories). And having served a brief sentence in the early
nineties at a public school where some of the scenes in If…
were shot, I can confirm that many of the prefects’ more
unadmirable attitudes were still very much in evidence then. With the
UK government’s Cabinet once again stuffed full of Eton’s spawn,
and many of the grand old institutions in the City teetering, what
better time to take a seditious look at Anderson’s anarchic
fantasy?
