O Dreamland! Lindsay Anderson’s Dark British Cinema
As a director and as an influential critic, Lindsay Anderson was a singularly acerbic and unflinching force who created searing social commentary that captured Britain like few others.
‘Lindsay Anderson was f**kin’ acidic! The best. If you want to know what Britain was like in 1973, watch O Lucky Man!’
– Mark E. Smith
A totemic figure in British filmmaking, often associated with cinematic truth and realism by way of the Free Cinema movement that he helped launch in the 1950s, Lindsay Anderson’s powerfully concentrated output in fact reveals more widely inspired, sometimes awkward ideas about film and British society. Anderson’s scarifying grotesqueries and satirical state-of-the-nation addresses punch out from the screen, refusing to draw a clear political allegiance as they depict a Britain divided and in thrall to commercial interests, empty platitudes, hypocritical bourgeois liberalism and evasive, nostalgic fantasies. Sounds familiar?
William Fowler and James Bell, BFI National Archive curators and season curators
With thanks to
The Lindsay Anderson Archive at the University of Stirling.
O Lucky Lindsay Anderson!
Four week course from 7 May to 28 May, 2t to 4pm at City Lit, Keeley Street. exploring the work and influence of visionary director, Lindsay Anderson, with course tutor John Wischmeyer. Book online or call 020 3871 3111 and quote course code HF364.
Events
Lindsay Anderson: Meet the Pioneer
An introduction to the work of this great British filmmaker.
In Collaboration: Anderson and Others
Two films, produced by Lindsay Anderson and directed by James Broughton and Lorenza Mazzetti, that showcase Anderson’s championing of other talents.
Lindsay Anderson Experimenta Mixtape, curated by Stephen Sutcliffe
TV clips, film extracts and short films are collaged together for this unusual iteration of the Experimenta Mixtape series. Not to be missed.
Outing Anderson
A panel discusses Gavin Lambert’s excellent 2001 Lindsay Anderson biography and the repercussions and ethics of Lambert’s decision to out Anderson as gay.
Meet the Pioneer
Anderson’s documentaries and early cinematic missives brought both innovations and a spiky antagonism to the British film industry.
No Film Can Be Too Personal
You better believe it! Lindsay Anderson fights for his vision of an incisive, poetic cinema that speaks to and for us, without fear or favour, in two brilliant television films.
Lindsay Anderson vs the Short Films Industry + intro by Patrick Russell, Senior Curator of Non-fiction, BFI National Archive
A chance to catch rare early Anderson films and explore his troubled relationship with Britain’s documentary industry.
Stand Up! Stand Up!
Experience the mood of urgency and change that permeated the late 1950s in films by Lindsay Anderson and his circle in the poetic, influential Free Cinema movement.
Home Truths
Anderson’s collaborations with writer David Storey and others explore domestic tensions, class division and strained family relations, and get right under the skin.
This Sporting Life
Richard Harris gives a ferociously powerful performance as a coal mining rugby player battling demons in Lindsay Anderson’s complex and gritty debut feature.
Home
A television adaptation, for the BBC’s Play for Today strand, of David Storey’s acclaimed play about four aging inmates reflecting on life.
In Celebration
Lindsay Anderson and David Storey return to – and hone – their powerful Royal Court Theatre production about three brothers returning to their family home.
The Old Crowd
Lindsay Anderson and Alan Bennett’s absurdist, Buñuel-esque television play about a faltering London dinner party was controversial in its day, and has been unjustly overlooked.
State of the Nation
Core Anderson. The darkly comic satires Anderson made with writer David Sherwin skewer the flaws and foibles of British life, and punch straight for the optic nerve.
The White Bus
Originally intended as part of an aborted trilogy of Shelagh Delaney adaptations, Lindsay Anderson’s inventive satire takes a magical mystery tour through mid-60s England.
If...
Revolution, British style. Malcolm McDowell takes on the forces of repression at his boarding school in Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s rebellious classic.
O Lucky Man!
Malcolm McDowell’s Mick Travis character takes an odyssey around modern Britain in Lindsay Anderson and David Sherwin’s one-of-a-kind satirical epic.
Britannia Hospital
A film for our times? Mark E. Smith’s favourite film sees Lindsay Anderson providing a sharp, wild, gallows-humour riposte to the contemporaneous transatlantic jingoism of Chariots of Fire and all the rest.
Late Anderson and more
The opportunities declined but Anderson’s visceral bite could not be exhausted.
The Whales of August
Lillian Gish and Bette Davis play two elderly sisters in Lindsay Anderson’s reflective, acutely observed study of old age, relationships and the passing of time.
Never Apologize
Malcolm McDowell pays entertaining and insightful tribute to Lindsay Anderson, his great friend and mentor – warts and all.
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