If...

Educational notes by Kate Domaille

These notes are intended to encourage film education officers to promote and teachers to incorporate the study of If... into various schemes of work in the English and Media/Film classrooms.

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Introduction

The re-release of Lindsay Anderson's film If... on 1 March 2002 attracted a great deal of positive newspaper response, welcoming what has been widely considered a classic of British Cinema back to the big screen.

Gavin Lambert in The Guardian suggested If... encapsulated the radical spirit of 1968 (15.2.02), while arguing that If... was quite an apolitical film, concerned with questions of individual liberty rather than larger questions of who holds power in a nation.

The director, Lindsay Anderson, was one of Britain's leading film-makers in the 1950s and 1960s, highly influential in the development of a distinctive filmmaking style. Starting out as a documentary filmmaker, Anderson, together with Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, formed a 'movement' of filmmakers bound by a philosophy of personal, immediate expression and observation. The collaboration between 'artists' from different sectors of cultural life - theatre, writing, documentary - informed a new style of filmmaking called 'the British New Wave'. The New Wave is widely believed to have lasted from 1958 to approximately 1965, though the legacy of the style has endured beyond this period. During this period filmmakers looked to the exigencies and vagaries of real life as subjects for cinematic expression. The development of work in this tradition in the 1960s drew its inspiration and sources from original contemporary writing and has been dubbed 'the kitchen-sink' tradition, so called because of the attention to authentic mise-en-scéne, working-class lives and social problems.

While the 'Free Cinema Movement' represents Anderson's beginnings as a British director, If... does not exist in this tradition of filmmaking. Rather it shows Anderson's developing interest in other styles of filmmaking, particularly from Europe, and in surrealist and anti-realist forms. If... uses the public school as metaphor for the state of Britain, a class-ridden, rule-laden society, where free expression and deviation from fixed rules were not only frowned upon, but actively punished and denounced. The enduring popularity of If... has been attributed to the ways in which the film specifically speaks to the powerlessness and frustrations of youth and in the ways it exposes the hypocrisies and self-interest of the society elders and 'betters'.

In 1968 a range of popular movements in Britain and worldwide were growing in response to aspects of domestic and foreign policy, like the Vietnam war. These movements erupted in well-documented protests on campuses and in cities across the US, Britain, Europe and elsewhere. On its release If... was perceived as a film of its time, a response to the mood of the nation. Its status was bolstered by winning the coveted Palme D'Or, and it acquired a cult following when Sixth Form Heads reportedly banned posters of the film in common rooms. In 1968 critics variously remarked that If... was:

"a hand grenade of a film" Evening News

and...

"A rich, complex, obscure metaphor of the way we live now" The Times