Teenage Kicks
Thomas Marsden, Lecturer in European History, University of Stirling In my teenage years I watched If.… repeatedly. As someone who went to private school, and who was not happy there, it seemed to speak directly to me, and a dream-like film itself, it merged with my daydreams of an alternate school life in which I […]
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 […]
Bette Davis Eyes
Karl Magee, University Archivist, University of Stirling It’s a rare creative occasion when someone gets the opportunity to direct one of their childhood heroes. It’s even more unusual when this opportunity provides the final act in a director’s filmmaking career. Lindsay Anderson’s Archive includes a selection of childhood scrapbooks and albums of Hollywood stars which […]
Southbank Show 1981
Stephen Sutcliffe, artist As a naive student on the MFA at Glasgow School of Art, I once approached Scottish Screen about funding for a new video. Whilst waiting in reception, there was a temptation to browse through some folders on display. One listed a collection of videotapes recorded from TV, so I enquired whether they […]
The Old Crowd: The film that never was
Erik Hedling, author Lindsay Anderson: Maverick Film-Maker, University of Lund, Sweden. When I was researching Lindsay Anderson’s career for my Swedish PhD thesis in the 1980s, I came to visit the director himself on many different occasions. Anderson was very kind to me, in spite of the theoretical film jargon in which I was trained, […]
An exotic idea
David Wood OBE, actor, played Johnny in If…., author of Filming If…. (2018) Lindsay had a very clever, almost epigrammatic way of explaining things. For example, in the scene in If…. where we clear stuff from under the stage, I had not realised, as we rehearsed the scene, that we were doing it as a […]
Shut up – or do something
Rosie Al-Mulla, Assistant Archivist, University of Stirling My first foray into Lindsay Anderson’s archive was to catalogue his work directing theatre. Of the many plays he directed, his first was The Waiting of Lester Abbs as part of a season of Sunday night productions for new writers and directors at the Royal Court Theatre. Writing for […]
If you were there…
Sarah Bromage, Head of University Collections, University of Stirling Wham!’s music was the soundtrack of my childhood, and I was aware, possibly through avid reading of Smash Hits magazine, that Wham! were the first western band to tour China after the Cultural Revolution. Discovering that Lindsay Anderson had filmed a now banned documentary about this […]
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 […]
Never Apologise: from the Lindsay Anderson archive
The University of Stirling’s 2023 Culture on Campus exhibition celebrates the life and work of one of the most distinctive British filmmakers of the twentieth century. Born in Bangalore, India, in 1923 Lindsay Anderson reflected British life and society through the lens of a series of remarkable films including This Sporting Life (1963), If…. (1969) […]
