Lindsay Gordon Anderson was born in Bangalore, South India, where his father was stationed with the Royal Engineers, on 17 April 1923.[6][7] His father Captain (later Major General) Alexander Vass Anderson[8][9][10] was a British Army officer who had come from Scotland. His mother Estelle Bell Gasson was born in Queenstown, South Africa, the daughter of a wool merchant.[11][12] Lindsay was the second son. His parents separated in 1926, and Estelle returned to England with the two boys. In 1932 the couple tried to reconcile in Bangalore, and when Estelle returned to England she was pregnant with their third son, who was named Alexander Vass Anderson after his father.[11] The Andersons divorced. Estelle married again in 1936, to Major Cuthbert Sleigh.[11] Lindsay's father remarried while in India. Gavin Lambert writes, in Mainly About Lindsay Anderson: A Memoir (Faber and Faber, 2000, p. 18), that the father Alexander Vass Anderson 'cut (his first family) out of his life', making no reference to them in his Who's Who entry. But Lindsay often saw his father and looked after his house and dogs when he was away.[13]
In August 1945, Anderson assisted in nailing the Red flag to the roof of the Junior Officers' mess in Annan Parbat, after the victory of the Labour Party in the general election was confirmed.[16] Their colonel did not approve, he recalled a decade later, but took no disciplinary action against the junior officers.
Lindsay returned to Oxford in 1946 but changed from classical studies to English;[11] he graduated in 1948.[7]
In a 1956 polemical article, "Stand Up, Stand Up" published in Sight and Sound, Anderson attacked contemporary critical practices, in particular the pursuit of objectivity. Taking as an example some comments made by Alistair Cooke in 1935, in which Cooke had claimed to be without politics as a critic, Anderson responded:
The problems of commitment are directly stated, but only apparently faced. …The denial of the critic's moral responsibility is specific; but only at the cost of sacrificing his dignity. … [These assumptions:] the holding of liberal, or humane, values; the proviso that these must not be taken too far; the adoption of a tone which enables the writer to evade through humour [mean] the fundamental issues are balked."[16][clarification needed]
Following a series of screenings which he and the National Film Theatre programmer Karel Reisz organized for the venue of independently produced short films by himself and others, he developed a philosophy of cinema that was expressed in what became known, by the late-1950s, as the Free Cinema movement.[17] He and other leaders in the field believed that the British cinema must break away from its class-bound attitudes and that non-metropolitan Britain ought to be shown on the nation's screens. Anderson had already begun to make films himself, starting in 1948 with Meet the Pioneers, a documentary about a conveyor-belt factory.[18]
Anderson was invited to join the British Film Institute's Board of Governors in 1969 with the aim of bolstering support for independent British directors, but left the role after a year.[19]
Filmmaking
Along with Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and others, he secured funding from a variety of sources (including Ford of Britain). Each of these founders made a series of short documentaries on a variety of subjects. One of Anderson's early short films, Thursday's Children (1954), concerning the education of deaf children, was made in collaboration with Guy Brenton, a friend from his Oxford days; it won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short in 1954.[6]Thursday's Children was preserved by the Academy Film Archive in 2005.[20]
Anderson is perhaps best remembered as a filmmaker for his "Mick Travis trilogy", all of which star Malcolm McDowell as the title character: if.... (1968), a satire on public schools; O Lucky Man! (1973) a Pilgrim's Progress-inspired road movie; and Britannia Hospital (1982), a fantasia taking stylistic influence from the populist wing of British cinema represented by Hammer horror films and Carry On comedies.[5]
Anderson developed an acquaintance from 1950 with John Ford. Anderson wrote what has come to be regarded as one of the standard books on that director, About John Ford (1983). Based on half a dozen meetings over more than two decades, and Anderson's lifetime study of the man's work, the book has been described as "One of the best books published by a film-maker on a film-maker".[21]
In 1985, producer Martin Lewis invited Anderson to chronicle Wham!'s visit to China, among the first-ever visits by Western pop artists. Anderson made the film Wham! in China: Foreign Skies. He admitted in his diary on 31 March 1985, to having "no interest in Wham!", or China, and he was simply "'doing this for the money'".[22] Anderson's own cut of the tour, titled If You Were There, was never released after George Michael objected to this version. It featured only four songs from the tour. Anderson was fired from the project, and Michael turned out the film that was entitled Wham! in China: Foreign Skies.[23]
Anderson was also a significant British theatre director. He was long associated with London's Royal Court Theatre, where he was Co-Artistic Director 1969–70, and Associate Artistic Director 1971–75. He directed premiere productions of plays by David Storey, among others.[citation needed]
In 1992, as a close friend of the late actresses Jill Bennett and Rachel Roberts, Anderson arranged a boat trip to scatter the women's ashes in the Thames River. Professional colleagues and friends were also on the boat and musician Alan Price sang the song "Is That All There Is?". Anderson included this event in his autobiographical BBC film Is That All There Is?[citation needed]
Every year, the International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam (IDFA) gives an acclaimed filmmaker the chance to screen his or her personal Top 10 favorite films. In 2007, Iranian filmmaker Maziar Bahari selected two of Anderson's short documentaries, O Dreamland and Every Day Except Christmas (1957), a record of a day in the old Covent Garden market, for his top 10 classics from the history of documentary.[3]
Personal life
Gavin Lambert's memoir, Mainly About Lindsay Anderson, wrote that Anderson was homosexual and repressed his orientation, which was seen as a betrayal by his other friends.[25] In November 2006 Malcolm McDowell told The Independent that he believed Anderson was gay, and said:
I know that he was in love with Richard Harris the star of Anderson's first feature, This Sporting Life. I am sure that it was the same with me and Albert Finney and the rest. It wasn't a physical thing. But I suppose he always fell in love with his leading men. He would always pick someone who was unattainable because he was heterosexual.[26]
Death and Legacy
Anderson died from a heart attack on 30 August 1994 at the age of 71.
Following the publication of Anderson's diaries and collected writings in 2004 there has been a revival of interest in Anderson scholarship, including several edited collections and monographs addressing his work from a variety of critical perspectives.[27] The centenary of Anderson's birth in 2023 was marked by special events at the University of Stirling, where the Anderson papers are currently held.
Theatre productions
All Royal Court, London, unless otherwise indicated:
^ abSight and Sound, Autumn 1956, reprinted in Paul Ryan (ed) Never Apologise: The Collected Writings, 2004, London: Plexus, p218-32, 228, 226. This article was reprinted in a shortened form in Universities and Left Review 1:1, Spring 1957, p44-48, 46, 46, and is online hereArchived 16 February 2012 at the Wayback Machine, though only part of the second reference is reproduced.
^Childs, Peter; Storry, Mike, eds. (2002). "Anderson, Lindsay". Encyclopedia of Contemporary British Culture. London: Routledge. p. 23.
^Sterritt, David (Winter 2012). "Book Review: The British Film Institute, the Government and Film Culture, 1933–2000 by Geoffrey Nowell-Smith; Christophe Dupin". Film Quarterly. 66 (2): 56. doi:10.1525/fq.2012.66.2.55.
^Geoffrey Macnab "Malcolm McDowell: Lindsay Anderson and me", The Independent, 15 November 2006. Retrieved 11 May 2009. For Anderson's feelings about Richard Harris at the time This Sporting Life was in production during 1962, see Paul Sutton (ed) The Diaries: Lindsay Anderson, 2004, London: Methuen, Chapter 3, especially p77-80.
^Izod, John, et al. (2012) Lindsay Anderson: Cinema Authorship. (British Film Makers) Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hedling, Erik and Dupin, Christophe. (2016) Lindsay Anderson Revisited: Unknown Aspects of a Film Director. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Kitchen, Will. (2023) Film, Negation and Freedom: Capitalism and Romantic Critique. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.
