Lindsay Anderson

Rip It Up, Issue 60, 1 July 1982, Page 25

Lindsay Anderson

A kitsch anonymous motelstyled room at the White Heron seemed a strange setting for Lindsay Anderson, the director of such celebrated cinematic assaults on the British establishment as If and O Lucky Man. Anderson's screen work, discounting his early documentaries, has been occasional (four feature films in almost twenty years) but prestigious, and his new film Britannia Hospital is due for New Zealand release later this month. The film’s origins lie in the staffing crisis at the Charing Cross Hospital a few years back. Not strikes for more wages, as Anderson wryly comments, but founded on the staff's dissatisfaction with certain well-heeled patients paying for and receiving superior service and accommodation in a National Health institution. That the hospital of the film is a symbol of something bigger goes without saying, and Anderson indicates that his field of reference is the widest possible. When Professor Millar is giving his final lecture and revealing his brainchild, Genesis, it is mankind itself that he is addressing as the camera roams around the faces in the lecture theatre audience. And what faces there are in the film! Vivian Pickles, Joan Plowright, Dandy Nichols, Betty Marsden, Arthur Clough (ia his last screen role), Valentine Dyall talents seen far too rarely on the cinema screen. Anderson points out how Britannia Hospital uses actors from most of his various stage and screen productions. Out of his lively West End production of Orton's What the Butler Saw which I caught up with in London in early 1976, he used all but one of the stage cast in the new film.

Cinema is an art-form of great personal commitment to the

director, and this brought up the thorpy issue of Politics and Art. Although some minds today consider all art should have political foundations, Anderson prefers to see it rising from social feelings and issues as did Britannia Hospital. He brings up the matter of Brecht, in whose work the conflict of artist and polemicist is particularly apparent. Brecht may instruct us to see the moral justification of Mother Courage left alone at the end of the play but, as an artist, he can't help but build up sympathy for this isolated figure. Anderson mentions the British director Ken Loach whose filmmaking career is limited by the

overt political content of his material, where perhaps a little more ambition would take Loach into a wider field of reference.

Britannia Hospital has enough material for three or four films, its director states. He agrees with that element of theatricality that runs through the film with everyone consciously "performing", whether it be the manic Millar constantly delivering his spiel to the everpresent television crew, the megaphone orations of the protesters or the frenetic preparations inside the hospital for H.R.H.'s impending visit. Anderson names the style heightened realism with elements of caricature. Caricature which becomes broader and broader as the film progresses one representative from the palace turns out to be actor John Bett as a wonderfully limp Lady Felicity and Anderson is particularly pleased with the result of pairing the 'lady" with a midget playing the irrascible Sir Anthony. There are links with the earlier film O Lucky Man. Malcolm McDowell again plays the Mick Travis character, although he comes to a rather unfortunate and particularly gory end in the hospital. Alan Price again provides the music and Anderson outlines the circumstances under which he met the musician. The director had caught up with the new pop aesthetic in the late sixties when it seemed to him that pop music had found a new lyricism, as seen in the Beatles' Sgt Pepper. He had not been familiar with the work of the Animals, but Price's music in its intense lyricism and eclecticism with strong folk and church roots appealed to Anderson. He invited Price to do a score for his Royal Court production of David Storey's play Home, and from that grew Alan Price's involvement in O Lucky Man both as an actor and composer a fine score with Price's songs totally integrated into this most Brechtian of films.. A comment on the successful television airings of his films, brought forth Anderson's views on this medium. His video film of

Alan Bennett's Old Crowd had received a generally hostile critical reaction because it was, in Anderson's own words, "experimental, innovatory and somewhat anarchistic in tone" and the experience made Anderson realise how intensely conventional television was as a medium. Paradoxically, though it might be harder to set up a film, once done, the artist was much freer to be true to his inspiration and experiment with the material and medium. And what of television itself? It should be stopped, retorted Anderson. He sees the struggle between television and cinema as being responsible for the presentday American cinema having to cast its net for a wider and wider audience, trying to appeal to a public that was not even adolescent, but positively infantile. He spoke though of the vitality and energy of America, being still a young country with its culture built upon its many and varied immigrants. His friend Milos Forman chose to settle in the States rather than Britain when-he left Czechoslovakia because he would always have been a foreigner in Britain whereas he was naturally accepted as an American, going on to make films such as Taking Off, Hair, One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest and the soon-to-be-released Ragtime. What a contrast with the Britain of Britannia Hospital, a nation crippled by the most bitter of class struggles - ' a factor' which Anderson sees as having prevented Britain ever achieve its full potential. And, he stresses, this issue had not disappeared in the post-war years as journalists

claimed but was as bitter as ever, now complicated by the rising voices of other minorities within the country. Lindsay Anderson is a director for those who like their cinema to be literate with a strong but not overbearing social conscience the man has too much wit and irony for that. As a final comment, on behing asked whether any other films or filmmakers had particularly impressed him over the last decade, he paused and then concluded, "1 must say chiefly my own ... to be perfectly honest". William Dart