Lindsay Gordon Anderson (April 17, 1923 — August 30, 1994) was an Indian-born English feature film, theatre and documentary director, film critic, and leading light of the Free Cinema movement and the British New Wave. He is most widely remembered for his 1968 film if...., which won the Palme d'Or. Of Scottish descent, the son of a British Army officer, he was born in Bangalore, South India, and educated at Cheltenham College, where he met his lifelong friend and biographer, the screenwriter and novelist Gavin Lambert; and later at Wadham College, Oxford, where he studied classics, and Magdalen College, Oxford where he studied English literature.
After graduating, Anderson worked for the final year of the Second World War as a cryptographer for the Intelligence Corps, at the Wireless Experimental Centre in Delhi.
Before going into film-making, Anderson was a prominent film critic writing for the influential Sequence magazine (1947-52), which he co-founded with Gavin Lambert and Karel Reisz; later writing for the British Film Institute's journal Sight and Sound and the left-wing political weekly the New Statesman. In one of his early and most well-known polemical pieces, Stand Up, Stand Up, he outlined his theories of what British cinema should become.
Anderson developed an acquaintance from 1950 with John Ford, which led to what has come to be regarded as one of the standard books on that director, Anderson's About John Ford (1983). Based on half a dozen meetings over more than two decades, and a lifetime's study of the man's work, the book has been described as "One of the best books published by a film-maker on a film-maker". As seen in his writings, another major influence was Humphrey Jennings, the great wartime documentary film maker.
Following a series of screenings which he organized at the National Film Theatre of independently-produced short films by himself, Karel Reisz and others, he developed a philosophy of cinema which found expression in what became known as the Free Cinema Movement in Britain by the late-1950s. This was the belief that the cinema must break away from its class-bound attitudes and that the working classes ought to be seen on Britain's screens.
Along with Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson, and others he secured funding from a variety of sources (including Ford of Britain) and they each made a series of socially challenging short documentaries on a variety of subjects.
These films, made in the tradition of British documentaries in the 1930s by such men as John Grierson, foreshadowed much of the social realism of British cinema which emerged in the 1960s with Anderson's own film This Sporting Life, Reisz's Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, and Richardson's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.
One of Anderson's early short films, Thursday's Child, won an Oscar for Best Documentary Short in 1954. Anderson reconnected with his roots as a documentary maker in 1985 when he was invited by producer Martin Lewis to chronicle the first-ever visit to China by Western pop artists Wham! resulting in Anderson's film Foreign Skies: Wham! In China.
Anderson is best remembered for his "Mick Travis" trilogy of feature films, all of which star Malcolm McDowell as Travis: If...., O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital.
As well as using Malcolm Mcdowell, Anderson would always insist on using the British character actor Arthur Lowe, famous for playing Captain Mainwaring in the popular BBC sitcom "Dad's Army". Lowe appeared in If...., O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital
Anderson was also a significant British theatre director. He was long associated with London's Royal Court Theatre, where he was Co-Artistic Director 1969-70, and Associate Artistic Director 1971-75, directing premiere productions of plays by David Storey, among others.
In 1992, as a close friend of actress Jill Bennett, Anderson included a touching episode in his autobiographical BBC film Is That All There Is?, with a boat trip down the River Thames (several of her professional colleagues and friends aboard) to scatter her ashes on the waters while musician Alan Price sang the song "Is That All There Is?."
Every year, International Documentary Festival in Amsterdam IDFA gives an acclaimed filmmaker the chance to screen his or her personal Top 10 favorite films. In 2007, Iranian filmmaker Maziar Bahari selected O Dreamland and Everyday Except Christmas for his top ten classics from the history of documentary.
All Royal Court, London, unless otherwise indicated:
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