Part of the spring season programme at the BFI O Dreamland! Lindsay Anderson’s Dark British Cinema is dedicated to the unflinching director and influential film critic whose ground breaking work is told through his shorts, documentaries, features and televised theatre that continues to reverberate through British film today.

Interview with the BFI Curators James Bell and William Fowler

Speaking with the programme’s curators James Bell and William Fowler they gave their thoughts on the significance of a British director, who has possibly had more of an influence on British film than people give credit, in a career spanning 45 years from 1948 to 1993.

James Bell: “I’m the senior curator of fiction at the BFI, which means looking after the archives collection of fiction titles, primarily British, but the archive is truly international.

Before I joined the curatorial team here at the BFI I worked for years at Sight and Sound, I was working as an editor there involved in publishing and criticism, and of course Lindsay Anderson wrote for Sight and Sound famously. Some very famous articles. Most famous ‘Stand Up Stand Up’ where he took British cinema and British criticism to task for being parochial, lazy and treating film as mere mass entertainment not art and other things.

I’ve got that background as well, that’s why I find Lindsay Anderson a fascinating figure because he’s a filmmaker, but he’s a filmmaker who emerged through criticism and that critical engagement with film culture and he was always nothing if not opinionated. As well, what makes him fascinating there’s all the film work running alongside that. There is a commentary that he offers us from the writing he did for different magazines. 

He started writing ‘Sequence’ which he co-founded with Gavin Lambert and Peter Ericsson when he was in Oxford in the late 40s. This was a really pioneering film magazine, that almost for the first  time in Britain took film seriously and inspired Sight and Sound to change and become more engaged in that culture. 

William Fowler: “My professional specialism is on artists and experimental films and trying to understand what that means in the context of the BFI national archive. My personal interests, which I’ve been able to incorporate into that is around independent film, alternative film culture, and counter culture; and how they relate to cinema. Myself and Vic Pratt set up and programmed the Flipside strand which was first at BFI Southbank and I feel that relates to something of what Lindsay Anderson has done.

What interests me is that he is an alternative independent filmmaker. There are these thorny, tricky subjects and tonal approaches to think about when you look at his work, yet at the same time he was a successful filmmaker and a well-known filmmaker if you know about historic cinema. He also worked with major American studios. So he’s quite an interesting figure in British cinema.”

Why a programme on Lindsay Anderson now?

WF: “Most crudely it was his centenary last year of when he was born. 

His films are very varied, with theatre, within the different themes and strands they explore. There is this sense of looking at the state of the nation. He’s very interested in, not so much in a Ken Loach overtly left wing political perspective, he is interested in British politics and social politics. What life is like on the ground and how that relates to larger forces that govern our lives, particularly within the British context.

There is something interesting about his political positioning, he’s neither really clearly right or left. Having that slightly left leaning but being ambiguous politically and this preoccupation with the state of the nation and this kind of bleakness of his films feels like aspects of where we’ve gone in this country in the last few years.”

JB: “He does feel very timely, in an age when there is so much polarisation. You’re this, you’re that; you’re right, you’re left; you’re these things. Lindsay Anderson was absolutely an iconoclast. As soon as he felt pegged, politically, he would resist that.

I think that goes back to that he’s Scottish. His dad was wholly Scottish, his mother was half Scottish, South African Scottish. But he was born in India and then his parents separated and he moved back to England. He had this sense of being an outsider and in a sense that always stays. He went to Cheltenham College, a big private school known for a gateway or pathway into the army and then he went to Oxford University so he had this very elite education and this very traditional upper-middle, lower-upper class background but he chaffed at any of those pegs always.

He would talk about his time in the war, the clash of the class strata that he observed in the different levels of the army and how absurd the British class system was and how Britain suffered from having all of these traditions, these codes of conduct.

So that spirit, famously when he was at Cheltenham, he wrote: ‘I am a rebel’ on the blackboard and he proposed a motion that the British public school system is not fit for purpose. He resisted all along whilst also being a member of that. He’s a fascinating, contradictory questioning figure and that all comes through in the films.”

WF: “In a similar vein, after he died his friend at college, Gavin Lambert, who subsequently fed him to Sight and Sound and knew lots of filmmakers, who kind of grew up with him, he had access to his diaries. He knew him at school and he knew that Anderson was gay but Anderson had never disclosed this publicly and so this book came out after he died, kind of revealing it, probably many people implicitly knew or it was just unsaid. I’m sure that contributed in some sense to him as an outsider or questioning how things fitted together. To what extent is there a queer lens going through his work is a question that hasn’t really been pondered about a huge amount.”

JB: “If you’re new to his name, he didn’t make that many films, he certainly didn’t make that many features. But in his lifetime he was a major cultural figure in Britain. Each film was an event. He was known for directing at the Royal Court, his theatre productions were hugely acclaimed and as a critic he was known as a voice, a cultural voice and he was so opinionated, so clear with those opinions that people were aware of him. He was a big cultural figure and we shouldn’t forget that. He was an outsider but absolutely central and known.”

WF: “Someone said, relative to his output he’s had the most books written about him or by him, more than any other filmmaker, which says something about his standing, his opinions and this desire to understand him.”

What was Lindsay Anderson’s impact on British cinema and should he be more widely known?

JB: “He famously was one of four people who launched the ‘Free Cinema’ (with Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and Lorenza Mazzetti).  

He wrote a manifesto in the mid 50s called ‘Free Cinema’, this was a series of screenings at the NFT, now the BFI Southbank, proposing a different cinema. Through ‘Sequence’, the magazine talked about before, that was highly critical of British cinema, which he and the other writers there attacked as middle brow, suburban was the pejorative they used to throw at things, and just lacking ambition; he would say what we need is a more truly independent cinema. 

Through ‘Free Cinema’, the manifesto argued that no film could be too personal and the whole idea was to create personal filmmaking that was aimed for the poetic rather than just the parochial. It wasn’t about making films about the right subjects, making films as mere entertainment, it was expressing something poetic, whatever you were making.

So through the 50s he made documentaries, very inspired by the 1930s and 40s British documentarian Humphrey Jennings, he alone among that era of documentary filmmakers he saw as having that poetic, artistic sensibility. But he saw this as a whole separate seam to the mainstream of the British industry. 

In the mid 80s, I think 1985 was the year of British cinema, Alan Parker made a documentary arguing that the British film industry needs to be more commercial, needs to ape the Hollywood model a bit more. Lindsay Anderson filmed a reply basically saying, no, there’s this whole other side to what film can be and what British cinema should be and that’s personal and poetic. 

So if he hasn’t had that acclaim it’s partly because he stood in opposition, in conflict with what a central idea of what British cinema often has been.”

WF: “In many ways, he only made three films which had true visibility, ‘If…’, ‘O Lucky Man!’, ‘Britannia Hospital’ …and ‘This Sporting Life’. Four films. Almost a film for each decade. His screen time presence is quite small. There is more work than that but that’s the stuff that got wide release and had financial support.

There’s definitely plenty to discover. We are showing ‘In Celebration’, which is a filmed theatre play that he shot, that was facilitated through American television, which had Brian Cox, Alan Bates and James Bolam in it.” Brian Cox of ‘Succession.’

JB: “Brian Cox did Radio 4s Great Lives, where they nominate someone they consider has had a great life and Brian Cox chose Lindsay Anderson because he had an absolutely profound effect on his life as a young actor working with him on ‘In Celebration’. He said he could be difficult, he was very sharp but it was because he was the most principled man he ever met and he lived by those principles.

He was famously acerbic and difficult. He had this prickly persona, which comes through in his criticism and it made him often unlikeable but everyone that worked with him said it was always about the work. Actually he was an extremely compassionate, kind person but he had absolutely unshakeable convictions and principles.”

How did the industrial documentaries come about?

JB: “He gets into filmmaking by being commissioned to make films for industrial companies. ‘Meet the Pioneers’, ‘Idlers that Work’ he makes for the Sutcliffe Company, but even then, we talked about poetry, when you watch there’s a lovely poetic quality to it. It’s not just telling you the information, it’s finding some kind of poetry in the rhythm of the machines. Then in ‘O Dreamland’ it’s very very dark and disturbing but it’s quite poetic. There’s more going on than what you see on screen. It’s not just here’s a slice of social realism, there’s something disquieting about it, it’s hitting at some other quality and that’s true all the way through.”

WF: “What’s interesting with those industrial films, those were the first films he made and he hadn’t made home movies or played around with ideas or learning how to use a camera beforehand, he was literally asked to make those films off the back of ‘Sequence’. He really learned from making and looking at film. So, not going to film school, not trying stuff out, right on actually doing it, there’s that sense of presence in the film that reflects that, which is quite interesting.”

JB: “It was through working on ‘Sequence’ which was self-run, self-published with Gavin Lambert, who would go on to edit Sight and Sound and write with Nicholas Ray, who directed ‘Rebel Without A Cause’. Lindsay Anderson and this guy called Peter Ericsson published out of their flat in North London after coming down from Oxford. This Lady called Lois Sutcliffe, who was married to someone running the Sutcliffe company, she had read ‘Sequence’ and been so impressed by what she read and took a punt. She met him and was even more convinced. This is someone who had these absolutely clear principles, this clear sense of direction and she thought this person is interesting, he will bring a perspective to the films we want to make.

That was the break-in, it wasn’t that these commercial opportunities opened up, it was on the strength of his convictions and his work in criticism. 

What was his connection with the theatre?

How he got into the theatre, this was the time of the ‘Angry Young Man’, in the late 1950s. He would say it was almost impossible at the time to break into filmmaking, unless you went through the studio route. But in the 50s these opportunities opened up through cinema and then the Royal Court. The great success of the play ‘Look Back in Anger’ opened up all these opportunities for new voices that would tell working class stories or stories that hadn’t necessarily been told on film before and Anderson was part of that young generation that was questioning the old. 

He made ‘This Sporting Life’, which is his first feature, but that is usually considered the last film of the British New Wave in the early ‘60s and it has a lot in common with those films, like ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ and ‘A Taste of Honey’, in that it is set in the north and it is about working class characters but it has some different qualities to it, it’s much more psychological, it’s much more poetic.”

WF: “His films are much more brutal to me. The very beginning, there is this rugby match, there are these huge guys that are slamming into each other, it’s almost extreme in a way.”

What was Lindsay Anderson’s influence on Malcolm McDowell?

JB: “Malcolm McDowell credits Lindsay Anderson…well… he discovered him for ‘If…’ and made him a star. He did this lecture at the end of a film festival on Lindsay Anderson, which was then filmed and released ‘Never Apologise’ and he talks about what an influence Lindsay Anderson was on his life.”

WF: “’If…’ was immediately positively critically acclaimed in all the different papers but it was also very financially successful. I don’t want to spoil it for you but it’s almost like revolution at public school. Mark E. Smith from the Fall, the band, was a long term Lindsay Anderson fan and even though he had a working class background, Lindsay Anderson was effectively upper class, this experience of this brutish school environment, Mark E. Smith could still relate to and he completely loved this film. It’s curious it’s this elitist milieu, but it appeared to have this almost universality about it that spoke to different classes, but also at the time, because it came out in 1968 when there were riots and would be revolution all around the world, so it’s incredibly timely.”

JB: “I think it was a generation defining film. It was hugely important in the way ‘Easy Rider’ was in America. It captured a certain moment, it was 1968 and it anticipated that anti-authoritarianism, youth against tradition. It had a huge impact and real influence on a lot of people.”

What else can be expected from the programme?

WF: “There are lots of different things to engage with. One thing I would mention is there is an artist called Stephen Sutcliffe, not connected to the Sutcliffe factories that Lindsay Anderson made films about, but he’s a long term Lindsay Anderson fan who made a film about Anderson’s relationship with Richard Harris. He’s made a compilation of clips of Lindsay Anderson films sort of related to things thematically from television at the time, cameos in various films, he’s in Chariots of Fire for example, and it includes some adverts Lindsay Anderson made. It’s this seamless block of Lindsay Anderson stuff that draws out quite a lot of what he’s talking about. He has a real talent for this collage montage kind of thing, I think it is a fun and special thing to engage with.”

JB: “We try to organise stuff so that you don’t chronologically trudge through the films. We tried to make some sense of themes or collaborations. Key collaborations in Lindsay Anderson’s life. There’s one section which is the trilogy, the ‘Mick Travis’ trilogy. The Malcolm McDowell films effectively, which are these kind of satirical, darkly comic state of Britain addresses and then there is this other strand. He worked with the playwright David Storey on adapting and staging many of his plays at the Royal Court and other theatres. David Storey wrote ‘This Sporting Life’. He wrote the novel and adapted it for Anderson’s first feature as well as the plays ‘Home’ and ‘In Celebration’. They are effectively filmed plays. ‘In Celebration’ is slightly more cinematic. 

These are two crucial collaborations. There’s the David Storey ones and the Mick Travis ones written by David Sherwin. Then we’re looking at the early shorts like the Free Cinema films, the industrial films separate to that and then towards the end of his life after ‘Britannia Hospital’, Anderson went to America and made a film called ‘The Whales of August’ with Betty Davis and Lillian Gish. Real Hollywood veterans.”

Why should people go and see the Lindsay Anderson programme?

WF: “I think it makes you look at British cinema in a different way. It’s not necessarily things you might see, there’s a more acerbic bite and there is the sense of the unpredictable around them but something very poetic and combative going on. There are few other figures that work in that way and at that level, so he’s iconic and singular in that sense.”

JB: “It’s interesting he worked quite a lot and was fascinated by the filmmakers in Eastern Europe in the 1960s working in Czechoslovakia and Poland, who were obviously working under real censorship and restrictions. People like Miloš Forman and Ivan Passer and others who made really individual personal films but they made them under real restrictions. They cited Anderson as a real example to them because of his absolute principle and his individuality and refusal to compromise. 

So I think there is a valuable lesson to be taken from his example and the example you find in his films for us today, for filmmakers today to stay true to your convictions, to question constantly, to interrogate your own work and to interrogate those of others and maintain a critical relationship with culture and with everything. So I think that’s why now and why the programme.”

O Dreamland! Lindsay Anderson’s Dark British Cinema is on at BFI Southbank from 1-31 May.