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Celluloid with a conscience

ALLAN HUNTER

LINDSAY Anderson held a passionate belief that cinema could change the world. A fierce critic and uncompromising filmmaker, he believed that cinema was more than disposable entertainment to be consumed one moment and forgotten the next. Anderson and his peers fought to liberate British cinema from its enslavement to chirpy comedies, class stereotypes and endless celebrations of stiff upper lip heroics. A guiding light in what was dubbed the Free Cinema documentary movement, Anderson became a champion of films with a social conscience and a radical streak.

Along with Tony Richardson, Karel Reisz and John Schlesinger, he changed the face of British cinema. Their efforts ushered in an era of gritty, class conscious dramas that reflected the times and brought the angry young men tradition of 1950s British theatre to the attention of audiences around the world. His best films would include This Sporting Life (1963), If (1968) and O, Lucky Man! (1973). Often a lone voice, he came to wonder if it had all been worthwhile, once declaring: "I suppose I’m the boy who stood on the burning deck whence all but he had fled. The trouble is I don’t know whether the boy was a hero or a bloody idiot."

The son of a Scottish major general, Anderson died in 1994. The 10th anniversary of his death will be marked at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival with a number of screenings and special events. Anderson’s close friend, the actor Malcolm McDowell, will lead the commemorations by presenting what is billed as an affectionate yet unsparing tribute to the notoriously prickly gay director.

Anderson’s legacy will be honoured with fine words, but there is a sense that it is also being honoured in some of the new work by British filmmakers that the Film Festival is screening.

A recent editorial in film magazine Sight and Sound suggested there may be another new wave of energy, talent and ambition quietly sweeping through the British film industry. Digital technology has liberated filmmakers from the burdensome costs of production and the pitfalls involved in searching for finance. Richard Jobson made his directorial debut 16 Years of Alcohol for £420,000, the cost of a decent action sequence in a Hollywood blockbuster. The New Found Land Films scheme supported by Scottish Screen, Scottish Television and Grampian Television has already made the award-winning Afterlife and Blinded for the kind of budgets that make £420,000 seem extravagant.

The argument goes that if digital technology can cut the costs of production so significantly, it should set filmmakers free to tell the stories they want to tell without compromise or restraint. They should be able to make the kind of radical, irreverent cinema that Anderson himself created in a biting, bilious state of the nation diatribe such as Britannia Hospital (1982). Citing a list of titles that ranges from Trauma to Bride and Prejudice, Ladies in Lavender, Danny Boyle’s Millions, Mike Leigh’s Vera Drake and the Quay brothers’ The Piano Tuner of Earthquakes, Sight and Sound senses "something different about British cinema" and the "potentially interesting and/or impressive films at every stage of the production process".

IN RECENT YEARS, Edinburgh has become the UK’s most significant showcase for the best that British cinema has to offer. Films such as Young Adam, Morvern Callar, Billy Elliot, Ratcatcher, 16 Years of Alcohol and Afterlife have all had their premieres at Edinburgh. Whether this year’s Festival is just observing a trend or anointing it, it is possible to detect the "something different" about British cinema that Sight and Sound has noticed.

The strong British programme at Edinburgh this year highlights the number of filmmakers keen to engage with the political realities of the world around them. There is perhaps a final acknowledgement that we really cannot compete in the big budget blockbuster stakes and therefore we should make the films in which we are true to ourselves and the kind of issues that are torn from the headlines. These films can certainly entertain, but if they can make you think a little as well then so much the better.

A previous winner of the Michael Powell Award for Gas Attack, director Kenny Glennan returns to the Festival this year with the hard-hitting Yasmin. It tells of a British Muslim woman whose Pakistani-born husband is falsely imprisoned as a terrorist suspect after the events of September 11. Director Antonia Bird returns to the Festival with Hamburg Cell, a semi-documentary account of the September 11 hijackers and the growing radicalisation of a Muslim student in Germany who becomes a committed jihadist and terrorist.

Director Ken Loach has also chosen Edinburgh for the British premiere of Ae Fond Kiss, charting the emotional fallout from a romance between a white Irish-Catholic music teacher and the handsome young Asian-Scottish brother of one of her pupils. These three titles alone promise to spark debate with their depictions of racism, fear, terrorism and the fragile sense of the world in which we now live.

There may be more than one explanation for the apparent rise in radicalism in British cinema. There is possibly some kind of backlash against the commercial success of the unjustly derided Richard Curtis school of romantic comedy; a desire to show that Britain produces more than feel-good escapism. There is also the fact that British television has become hung up on ratings and lifestyle shows in which wives are swapped, wild children are tamed, and houses are painted and restored. All of this has been to the detriment of original, provocative drama which was why a recent series like The Long Firm or the one-off play When I’m 64 have been manna to those who have felt starved of such quality fare.

The trend of more politically charged films certainly doesn’t seem likely to wane. Peter Mullan has talked of creating something that reflects the injustices faced by asylum seekers and their families in this country. John Boorman’s latest film, Country of my Skull, stars Samuel L Jackson as a Washington Post reporter sent to South Africa to report on the Truth And Reconciliation Commission Hearings. Scots director Michael Caton-Jones is currently filming Shooting Dogs, in which John Hurt and Hugh Dancy play peacekeepers caught up in the Rwanda genocide of 1994.

British filmmakers seem to be embracing socially conscious, issue-based political drama in the kind of collective mass that hasn’t been seen for a generation. Suddenly, Lindsay Anderson’s beliefs are more relevant than ever. His rallying cry for a cinema that can change the world, or at least reflect it with accuracy and intensity, is being heeded in ways that might even have brought a smile to his curmudgeonly features. Edinburgh’s decision to salute his legacy and reflect that sense of something new in the air underlines its unique ability to celebrate the past, capture the present and maybe even predict the future.

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More Reviews of Lindsay Anderson: A Personal Remembrance by Malcolm McDowell

The Guardian - The Man Who Gave Me A Slap In The Face - by Malcolm McDowell

Evening News - Review of A Personal Remembrance... - by Thom Dibdin

Scotland On Sunday - Celluloid With A Conscience - by Allan Hunter

The Scotsman - O Missed Man - by Alastair Mckay

Independent - If He Could See Me Now - by Sarah Jones

Sunday Herald - Whatever Happened To The Likely Lad - by Chris Lee