LATE SHOW WITH LINDSAY ANDERSON

Whatever he thought of this country he railed against it he was never happy out of it he was very British he was Scott’s also his background very English in his concerns and institutions and was trying to create images of this country.

Clip: After they finish work the boys usually make for Albert’s one of the cafes around the garden that is open late at night.

It was quite clear to Lindsay Anderson and his friend (name) it was impossible to break into the British cinema coming straight out of the university the only way to get into cinema was to make documentaries.

We were all sort of socialist but the films weren’t at all in sense bulimic or programmatic or anything like that they were they actually took their queue from I suppose the cinema from Humphrey Jennings that is to say working from observation of unrehearsed human details.

We were very conscious of, I was very conscious of the need to be what I call ethic to fashioned the material into something and not suddenly sit down and have a lot of talking heads blathering into the camera lens pretty uninteresting I think.

It was never a school or an organization or an office or a company it was an idea and everybody went on to do other things, I mean Lindsay for instance went on to do a lot of theatre.

I was assigned to Lindsay as an assistant at the Royal Court I had never met him before and my first memory rather than even been about the play was he taking me to the transport cable rather than putting me on the mat to find out if I was going to work out alright with him and as I remember he was very anxious to kind of challenged anything he thought of as being middle class bully minded conventional, but I think everyone felt that something new and exciting was happening.

We were going to change things perhaps naïve at that point which of course excited Lindsay very much and I think he really thrived on that atmosphere and probably the court was as nearer spiritually as Lindsay has ever found.

CLIP: I don’t know in the process of this and you putting it down and then we got stuck and we don’t have any more to do.

I thought I would take it off and put it over my arm wait for Bill to finish his.

It gave him much greater experience and a very useful one of dealing with actors which he didn’t have much of before this was of course extremely valuable for him when he came to make his feature film.

CLIP: Man: I know much about you to keep you in the rubber room for the rest of your life.

Lady: You don’t know nothing about Eddie or me you don’t know nothing about Eddie.

Man: I know he put the file through his guts.

He directed in a way that there was almost non directorial every time you turn the corner he was there facing you every time you turn around he was at your shoulder, he was always under your bed when you went to bed, always with you always with you always talking about it always investigating it always planting seeds and one day you thought you were on your own you were part of his world.

He was a great free spirit Lindsay and is a great emotional Lindsay which if you ever touch it wonderfully free and embracing.

Stories book is in a tradition of a DH logs because it was about people who have great difficulty in articulating their emotions and in the way and to bring this out was to convey this stylistically in the movie.

Lindsay’s difficulty and the generosity in making it were really focused around that and trying to get inside and some very personal experience from the outside and finding his rational and being able in somewhere to understand it and not seem to objectively or too objectively so it became an objective almost an expressionistic technique.

One would have thought that after the sporting life that Lindesay would have been in great demand as it happened the film did not make a great deal of money and so he wasn’t a bankable director, the British ran in quite a lot of trouble the London cinema came out (5:26) which he greatly despise and eventually he had the opportunity to make if which came in with the revolutionary of the late sixties.

CLIP: You mustn’t think that I don’t understand it is a natural characteristic of adolescent.

Interestingly Peter Jeffers Donald in this scene was to a large extent lifted from the book called How Eating Works but I didn’t.

CLIP: I think you boys know I keep an open mind on most things and one thing I am certain short hair is no indication of (inaudible 6:08) so often I noticed hair rebels who stepped in the British whether there is a fire in the house or to sacrifice in order to give a holiday party to slum days in the country.

The country was arthritic in the sense that it was arthritic and yet it was the particular young people who were after change so the school pubic school would be a very good place to would be precisely where you set the (6:36) and that it was both traditional and yet somehow trading people who were discontent.

CLIP: You done it. like here really it comes out of documentary background you know you shoot in here it’s just a record of what it is like to being in this room and he also done a lot of theatre work so he knows how to dramatize the area but it’s still draws line in a way you know that Hollywood director would have started. He would have built all this and he wouldn’t have bothered to address the detail of it.

It is a film which conveys I think what I feel about life which is certainly a suspicion of all institutions and authorities and as for it hitting the right moment of that, it was absolutely astonishing because you could see it was transparently what everybody was interested in what went to the center of their lives and in that way it sometimes happens.

The film came at a time for Lindsay his careeralmost(8:22) from 1945 when as a young army officer he put the red flag out above the officers mess in India where he was then serving right through his disillusion with labour.

CLIP: Good morning say hello to Mr. Travis, please to meet you Mr Travis Barlo name), please to meet you at your service oh, this is Mavis be nice to Mr Travis Mavis, but not too nice, happy to greet you. Great pleasure, Come here come here. We have come to the part of the show you have all been waiting for.

I think Lindsay was some of the needed support and encouragement despite there is apparent self sufficient ironic defiant exterior and I think this starting collapsing and I think the subjects for the films really went out of fashion out of politically fashion and when once the agency came Lindsay is much too radical and to subversive about what he said about society about England.

No artist is worth much as name change the world of course no artist can be judge by his success or failure but to change the world since none of us have succeed we can only hope to change or to influenced likeminded spirits or hearts by telling the truth.

Hanson as a film critique and as a film director do these two things come together is one of the great English (10:21) he is a person who calls us as readers and …to see that film is of the utmost social importance. This is the kind of cinema he wanted to create and despite all he should not have the opportunity to stick around and making movies, but the sad thing was that his own writing his own example meant so little to the younger film makers so certainly neglected.

CLIP: Would you like standard or golden, standard or golden what the difference, well the golden service they retexture and hand finish. Okay, golden service. We are on it keep the crease in the trousers? “keep the crease yes and don’t forget I am a shareholder”. Do you ever let us forget? I certainly can’t afford to.

You can see Lindsay Anderson’s last film Is That all There Is on BBC 2 on Saturday and indeed that is all there is for the late show for Night.

CHRONICLE OF A SUMMER

Subsequent to this festival where they met each other ..claims some critical writing where they Cinema Verite or cinema of truth which often gets interpreted it is in a sense homage to the work of (name 14) the Russian film maker who claimed the term KINNO-NPBBA meaning also the truth of cinema in both cases their meaning not that the film is showing us the truth but the film provokes its own kind of truth that within the film we see a kind of truth emerging.

So very differently the that direct cinema folks in the US at the time who were like the camera will tell the truth it’s the fly on the wall that will just follow people the idea of interfering and showing people making up a film and at the same time was you know completely shocking and often the two movements are considered to be very much the same and they are not they are very much in dialogue.

So they were very interested in creating these kinds of scenario to evoke a kind of explanation of what the truth might be and the lives of parishioners at this time and just by the fact that diversity of people in the film they were already anticipating there were many ways to imagine what that might be.

Bruce believed that people in performance or in ritual or any form of dramatization people only become more of they really are so there is not a lack of truthfulness because people are performing because people are in ritual I mean he sort of extends this from his view of ritual they are just revealing another aspect of themselves.

I think that they were somewhat naively hopeful that somehow all these people would come to really love each other through the film and be comfortable with each other’s representations and that actually did not occur. It is part of what I think makes the film successful from most viewers.