Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film

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ANDERSON, LINDSAY

Lindsay Gordon Anderson, a Scottish director, critic and co-founder of the Free Cinema movement, played a seminal role in post-war British filmmaking. When Anderson entered the film world in 1947, British filmmakers had largely forsaken art for propaganda because of the utilitarian demands created by World War II. Accustomed to making movies that served a national purpose, British directors churned out works that, to Anderson's eyes, lacked aesthetic appeal. Preferring romanticism to realism, he urged documentarians to abandon the studios, abstain from sophisticated technology, and rediscover the freedom found in the harmony of expression and substance. His search for high art led him to direct low-budget documentaries in the 1940s and 1950s and to create the Free Cinema movement, which encouraged other filmmakers to slip out of their political and social chains. The naturalistic look at the working classes promoted by Anderson would culminate in the British new wave.

As an editor with the influential film magazine Sequence in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Anderson championed film as art and the director as the master of the medium. He argued that only the director was in a position to determine cinematic expression. On the basis of his reputation, he received a commission to make a series of industrial films for a Yorkshire conveyor belt company, Richard Sutcliffe Ltd. He accepted the offer because he wanted to learn how to make films and documentaries offered an avenue to larger projects. Anderson's first documentary, Meet the Pioneers (1948), focused on the firm's underground conveyor system that brought coal from the mines to the pithead in Yorkshire. This series of films share a characteristic common to Anderson documentaries, in that the subject is work itself, with the director focusing on how things are made and how processes are set in motion.

Anderson's first non-industrial film, the thirty-minute Wakefield Express (1952), was commissioned to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of the newspaper. Shot as usual with 16 mm film, the documentary begins in typical Anderson fashion not with background information, but with people. Although the history of the paper is provided, the director focuses on the work of producing an edition. Aiming to capture the dignity of ordinary Britons, Anderson follows a reporter as he interviews local people in search of stories, shows communal activities such as children playing, and has a final sequence of the paper going to press. Anderson was an admirer of Humphrey Jennings, and this film reflects Jennings' influence in its poetic style and focus on common subjects. By showing a reporter interviewing a 95-year-old woman, Anderson imitates Jennings' manner of linking person to person to show the relationship of the past to the present. Nothing about the film is impartial, another Anderson trait. The subjects frequently play to the camera, while the director does not attempt to hide his affection, respect, and occasional exasperation for the Wakefield community.

For his next film, Anderson collaborated with Guy Brenton, an Oxford acquaintance, to direct Thursday's Children (1953), about the Royal School for Deaf Children in Margate, UK. Named after the old nursery rhyme in which "Thursday-born children have far to go," the twenty-minute documentary follows Anderson's adage that to make a film, one must create a world. Immersing the viewer fully in the lives of the children, he shows them in their boarding school as they receive lessons and explains how they came to live away from their families. Without informing the filmmakers, the British Office of Information in New York submitted the film to the Motion Picture Academy and it won an Oscar for best short subject.

Not far from the deaf school was the most popular working-class amusement part in the south of England, called "Dreamland." Anderson paid it a visit, and was fascinated by exhibits such as "Torture Through the Ages" and "Famous Executions." He reacted harshly to the passivity of the audience in the face of the unimaginative diversions, sad exhibitions, and pitifully caged animals. It is his anger at the undemanding aesthetic criteria of the crowd that makes this documentary an aggressive criticism rather than the positive affirmation found in his other films. The thirteen-minute O Dreamland (1953) was the first film that he directed with no other impetus other than his own wish to make it.

Every Day Except Christmas (1957) is a forty-minute portrait of the workers who sold fruit, flowers, and vegetables 364 days year in London's Covent Garden market. The bustling workers, who occasionally mug for the camera, were generally filmed in long shot or close-ups to show both their coordinated physical activity and their unique personalities.

Once Anderson developed a mastery of filmmaking, his impatience with the mediocrity and prescriptive narrative style of most British films of the era increased. To encourage social realist films and freedom for the filmmaker, Anderson helped develop the small Free Cinema movement. This British group presented six programs of films at the National Film Theatre from 1956-59, including O Dreamland in 1956, Wakefield Express in 1957, and Every Day Except Christmas also in 1957. In the broadest sense, Free Cinema had two objectives: to show what it valued in the cinema, with the emphasis on the work of the young contemporary filmmakers, and by showing films to encourage other similar films to be made. Anderson coined the phrase "Free Cinema," wrote most of the movement's propaganda, and directed the greatest percentage of documentaries in the programs.

Anderson always refused to give his definition of a documentary, arguing that the term limited discussion of the film in question. He cherished freedom, and his films both reflect and examine this concept. In all of his works, Anderson explores the ways in which subjects interact, and the ultimate impossibility of being subjective. Poetic and lacking technological tricks, his documentaries are unvarnished portrayals of British life at mid-twentieth century.

Caryn E. Neumann

See also: Every Day Except Christmas; Jennings, Humphrey

Biography
Born in Bangalore, India to a South African mother and Scottish father in the Royal Engineers, April 17, 1923. Parents separated 1926, moved to England with his mother. Graduated from Wadham College, Oxford University, reading classical studies, in 1942. Drafted into the Army serving with the King's Royal Rifles as a clerk in India, 1943-45. Graduated from Oxford with a Master of Arts in English, 1948. Co-founder and editor of Sequence, 1949-51. Directed industrial films for Richard Sutcliffe, Ltd., the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, the National Industrial Fuel Efficiency Service, and the Central Office of Information for the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, and Food, 1948-1955. Wrote Making a Film: The Story of "Secret People" 1952. Directed and acted in feature films and television commercials, 1963[-]1987. Wrote About John Ford, 1981. Died of a heart attack in Angoulême, Charente, Poitou-Charentes, France, August 20, 1994.

Selected Films

1948, Meet the Pioneers: director, editor, commentator
1949, Idlers That Work: director, commentator
1952, Three Installations: director, commentator
1952, Trunk Conveyor: director, commentator
1952, Wakefield Express: director
1953, Thursday's Children: co-director
1953, O Dreamland: director
1955, Green and Pleasant Land: director and script writer
1955, Henry: director and script writer
1955, The Children Upstairs: director and script writer
1955, A Hundred Thousand Children: director and script writer
1955, £20 a Ton: director
1955, Energy First: director
1955, Foot and Mouth: director and script writer
1957, Every Day Except Christmas: director

Further Reading:
Graham, Allison. Lindsay Anderson, Boston: Twayne, 1981.
Hedling, Erik. Lindsay Anderson: Maverick Film-Maker, London: Cassell, 1998.
Lambert, Gavin. Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000.
Lovell, Alan and Jim Hillier. Studies in Documentary

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