Call: Lindsay Anderson collection

Will Kitchen (Arts University Bournemouth)

Please note: this blog post on Lindsay Anderson is followed by a call for contributions to the edited collection Refocus: The Films of Lindsay Anderson: Edinburgh University Press.

2024 will mark the 30^th anniversary of Lindsay Anderson’s death in 1994. One of the most challenging and iconoclastic figures in twentieth century British cinema, Anderson directed some of the most significant films to come out of the British New Wave, including This Sporting Life (1963), If…. (1968), O Lucky Man! (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982). After co-founding the journal Sequence and the Free Cinema documentary movement in the 1950s alongside Lorenza Mazzetti, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, Anderson established himself over many decades as one of the most energetic figures in British culture. His work combined Brechtian aesthetics and other theatrical techniques with a potent critical attitude, attacking the culture of capitalist consumerism and refusing to pick sides in the ideological battle between Right and Left which raged during and after the political turbulence of the 1960s. The time is right to reassess Anderson’s cinematic heritage from a range of fresh critical perspectives, including class, feminist, postcolonial, disability, and LGBTQ+ approaches.  

An early practitioner of the auteurist approach, Anderson himself was a keen sceptic, and long held a negative opinion of Film Studies and the theoretical analysis of cinematic texts. Perhaps as a result of this hostility, scholarship has been slow to appreciate the force and complexity of his filmmaking, echoing the critical and commercial decline his work experienced in the later stages of his career. He and his collaborators turned their hands to many genres and styles, including musical documentary, Wham! in China: Foreign Skies (1986), nostalgic Hollywood drama, The Whales of August (1987), and autobiographical TV documentary, Is That All There Is? (1992). In today’s media culture, saturated with the idea of the marketable sequel, it speaks to Anderson’s contemporary relevance to learn that his final, unmade film project was a proposed sequel to If….  – If 2…. (c1994) – which would find the young Crusaders returning to school 25 years later for a reunion (Kitchen, 2023b). Topics such as gender, race and class were constant presences throughout his artistic collaborations, often playing vital roles within a broader and more expansive critical artistic worldview.  

Following his death, scholarship began to catch up with Anderson’s own prodigious publishing record. Erik Hedling’s monograph Lindsay Anderson: Maverick Film-Maker (Hedling, 1998) was one of the first sustained scholarly analysis of his cinematic canon, bolstered by the work of several industry contemporaries who wrote memoirs devoted almost entirely to their relationship with Anderson (Sherwin, 1996; Lambert, 2000). Some more recent scholarship has explored Anderson’s work from industrial, political and philosophical perspectives, addressing aspects of unproduction studies, critical theory and Romanticism (Magee, 2008; Kitchen, 2023a; Kitchen, 2023b). It was not until the new century that Anderson scholarship received another boost. The director’s diaries and collected works were published in 2004 (Anderson, 2004a; Anderson, 2004b), and in the 2010s, the curation of Anderson’s personal papers at the University of Stirling led to a new wave of academic publications (Izod et al., 2012; Hedling and Dupin, 2016). 

Following the Centenary celebrations in 2023, and in a fresh academic climate, a new edited collection proposes to return Anderson to the forefront of contemporary debate in Film Studies and address new aspects of his work and its contribution to British and international cinema culture. Many important areas of his work remain underexplored, particularly those which address issues of class, feminism, environmentalism, postcolonialism, race, disability, and LGBTQ+ topics. 

Contributions addressing these themes and related political issues are strongly encouraged, although chapters are also invited on a range of subjects, including, but by no means limited to:

• Music and sound in the films of Lindsay Anderson 
• Lindsay Anderson and the British Empire 
• George Michael, Wham! and Lindsay Anderson 
• Lindsay Anderson and the British film industry / film culture 
• Acting and performance in the films of Lindsay Anderson – Brechtian aesthetics 
• Lindsay Anderson’s collaborators – Malcolm McDowell, Rachel Roberts, David Sherwin, Arthur Lowe, Alan Price, Graham Crowden
• Lindsay Anderson and American cinema 
• Lindsay Anderson’s multimedia legacy – Malcolm McDowell’s Never Apologise 
• English Literature and the films of Lindsay Anderson 

Please send abstracts of 300 words and a short author biography to Will Kitchen wkitchen@aub.ac.uk on behalf of Edinburgh University Press. 

Deadline for abstracts Friday August 4^th 2023.