Description: Erik Hedling explores Anderson's entire output to examine how he contributed to a broadening of film narrative in Britain towards more radical forms, prefiguring thus the internationally acclaimed British art cinema of the 1980s.

Lindsay Gordon Anderson (1923-1994) was a seminal figure in the post-war period for British film culture, first as a prominent critic in journals such as Sequence and Sight & Sound, and then as a director of documentary as well as feature films. His 'anger', fighting commitment and highly polemical style made him famous, even infamous. He was also, somewhat less famously, a sensitive film critic writing classic pieces on the cinema of John Ford and Humphrey Jennings, and an aesthetically refined artist who created some classic films. This book traces Anderson's aesthetics from the early writings in Sequence, through his engagement in the 'Free Cinema' movement and the British New Wave of the early 1960s, particularly his David Storey adaptation This Sporting Life (1963), culminating in studies of the radical style which he developed in the film trilogy If (1968), O Lucky Man! (1973) and Britannia Hospital (1982). Although Anderson also directed two theatrical adaptations for the screen - David Storey's In Celebration (1974) and David Berry's The Whales of August (1987) - it was particularly with the trilogy and the related works through which Anderson contributed to a self-reflexive mode of art cinema, incorporating Brechtian devices, theatrical stylization and self-conscious intertextuality. Drawing on extensive research and accessing previously unseen material from Lindsay Anderson's personal archive, Hedling explores Anderson's entire output to examine howhe contributed to a broadening of film narrative in Britain towards more radical forms, prefiguring thus the internationally acclaimed British art cinema of the 1980s.

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