Lindsay Anderson

A documentary about the history of the Free Cinema movement, made by one of it’s greatest proponents, Lindsay Anderson, to commemorate British Film Year in 1985.

Produced by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill.

Unlike Richard Attenborough’s celebratory episode of the same series, or Alan Parker’s more aggressive show, which was balanced between celebrating the greats and attacking Parker’s bugbears, Greenaway and Jarman and the BFI, Anderson’s show accentuates the negative, painting an image of a British cinema in terminal artistic decline and trashing the ambitions and approach of British Film Year itself. It’s mordantly funny and very savage.Read More »

Synopsis:
Narrated by Richard Burton, Thursday’s Children is a documentary about the Royal School for the Deaf in Margate, England. Filmed without sound and using narration sparingly, the documentary explores the silent world of these children (and their teachers) as they come to learn what sound is, even before they are able to articulate anything themselves. The narration explains that there can be no thought without words, only feelings, and that sounds must be taught visually, through pictures or example, or experienced through vibrations. The bulk of the film, however, concerns itself with the determination of the children and the joy they feel when their attempts at communication produce breakthroughs.Read More »

A film in three parts
Part One – The Ride of The Valkyrie

An opera singer must navigate through the busy city streets to get to the theater in time for his performance.Read More »

Lindsay Anderson and Shelagh Delaney’s The White Bus is a surrealistic film about a secretary who takes a strange trip, part of which takes place on the eponymous vehicle. The nameless girl has a seemingly dull life, which is interrupted by periodic flights of fantasy involving suicide, recreations of paintings, and pieces of meat that suddenly run blood-run. Between these fantasies are the details of her real life, especially as she begins a journey home to visit her family. She encounters a wide variety of people — a teen-ager exceedingly angry that his rubgy team has lost a match, a young man who proposes marriage, a lord mayor who enjoys feeling her leg — as she travels to locations ranging from a community center and a public library to a natural history museum and a civil defense demonstration. Read More »

Meet the Pioneers (1948), Anderson’s first film, a documentary short about a mining engineering firm.Read More »