A Moment of Zen

David Rolinson, Communications, Media & Culture, University of Stirling

A good few years and a few feet from this exhibition, I held one of the most fun module cinema screenings ever: Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man!  I loved the ending, in which Anderson slaps Mick in the face with a/the script, prompting in Mick either a profound, even Zen, revelation or a realisation of what happens when you ask the director for your motivation. The confrontation, Mick’s smile, and the joyful dancing of the film’s cast to Alan Price’s title song as if the film is invaded by its own wrap party, combine to form one of my favourite cinema moments. Just as the Good Morning sequence makes me cry every time I see Singin’ in the Rain – at its perfection and the felt realisation that the film, though half over, has half left – the end of O Lucky Man! is perfect on its own terms and as the result or reward for following the three-hour journey. 

Most of all, I loved the moment when many students, under cover of the pause to change to the second part of this long film, walked out. I had encouraged students to stay to the end because we would study that in class. As they left, I broke into a smile as wide and mysterious as Mick’s. We were studying introductory theory, including (as John Izod put it) the way in which ‘Brecht sought to break from naturalist aesthetics to violate the identification of spectator with characters’. Not since I screened Riddles of the Sphinx, a feminist masterpiece which denies spectators everything they have learnt to expect from the patriarchal mechanisms of cinema, has hating that week’s film felt more like falling into my trap. I must emphasise for legal reasons that nobody was slapped in the face with the module booklet. 

(Images: Contact strips of photographs of making of O Lucky Man!, ref. LA 1/7/4/3; photographs of making of film, ref. LA 1/7/4/3; advertisement for London screenings of film, LA1/7/30; Polish cinema poster, ref. LA 1/7/5/32.)