Canton concert

Anderson’s Musicality in the Suppressed Film: If You Were There… 

John Izod, Emeritus Professor of Screen Analysis, University of Stirling

The Canton Concert is the climax of the film featuring the pop group Wham (George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley) in China. Anderson assembled it in rough cut as If You Were There…. and it has never been screened in public, having been suppressed for reasons its rights owners refused to discuss.

The concert starts with the band on stage performing a high-energy number and then cuts to the city streets at rush hour. People wash in the great Pearl River. Ferries move through the water and for some moments the sound track is occupied by river sounds. Barges pass across the screen, viewed through telephoto lenses, while the sailors (and on one boat small children playing) look back at us as if from another universe – a touching homage to Jean Vigo’s L’Atalante. Then, as the orange sun silhouettes people going home over a metal bridge, Anderson overdubs the long, elegiac saxophone introduction to ‘Careless Whisper’. With the sound of applause rippling as if in the distance, the lissom music courses over these relaxed images blending all in a momentary exquisite unity. When we cut back into the concert hall, George Michael, singled out by a spotlight pulls the energy which that prelude has built into a beautifully expressive solo. It is a superlative example of Anderson applying a technique that he learnt thirty-five years earlier from Humphrey Jennings to create an edit in which his art aspires to the condition of music.

With The White Bus and most of the films that follow, we often find Anderson’s authorial signature in footage that opposes document and lampoon, realism and imagination. This remains the case in much of If You Were There… with the emphasis on documenting people’s daily lives in Beijing and Guandong and lampoon reserved for the apparatchiks and their minions. But there is something else, that other element which recurs in several films including If You Were There …. It appears hard won and easily extinguished, consisting of rare, but distinctive lyric moments when characters are briefly at peace and, to our perception, Anderson too appears at ease. In these moments he sometimes salutes the directors he admired most (Jennings, Vigo or John Ford) and gives presence to a tenderness which he often found less difficult to express with music added to the scenes’ emotional tone. 

(Images: Photographs of filming of Wham! documentary in China, ref. LA/1/10/4; Anderson’s outline for the documentary If You Were There…, ref. LA/1/10/2/8.)