Tuesday, 30 October 2012

if....(1968)


if.... is a 1968 British drama film produced and directed by Lindsay Anderson satirising English public school life. Famous for its depiction of a savage insurrection at a public school or boarding school, the film is associated with the 1960s counterculture movement because it was filmed by a long-standing cIounter-culture director at the time of the student uprisings in Paris in May 1968. It includes controversial statements, such as: "There's no such thing as a wrong war. Violence and revolution are the only pure acts". It features surrealist sequences throughout the film. Upon release in the UK, it received an X certificate. The film stars Malcolm McDowell in his first screen role and his first appearance as Anderson's "everyman" character Mick Travis. Richard Warwick, Christine Noonan, David Wood, and Robert Swann also star, and Rupert Webster is featured as the young boy Bobby Phillips. if.... won the Palme d'Or at the 1969 Cannes Film Festival. In 2004, the magazine Total Film named it the sixteenth greatest British film of all time. The Criterion Collection released the DVD on 19 June 2007.
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(Thanx Stephen!)

3 comments:

  1. Anderson was very good at confusing the post mods and the post structuralists - the black and white sequences were ripe for critique and semiotic analysis - he claimed he shot in b/w due to lack of funds....

    This inspired two others; 'O Lucky Man' and the excellent but rarely seen 'Britania Hospital' (shot round the corner from where I used to live in Friern Barnet at the incredibly cinemagenic Friern Barnet Mental Assylum, a beautiful Victorian assylum with a main corridor that was the longest in Britain (3 quarters of a mile or someting!). Thatcher's mob sold it off to one of their mates and it was turned into 'Luxury Apartments'. Bah.

    Fucking wicked film, though; as were all in that trilogy.
    Thanks for the associative memory.
    roy (budding ;))

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  2. 2rr/
    He was good at that and they are all seriously great films. I have been to Friern Barnet Asylum back in the 70's, had a friend who worked up there and I lived up in Muswell Hill so caught bus (134?) to meet up with her. I also was lucky enough to meet Lyndsey W a number of times. My g/f's brother (also Lyndsey) was his godson and he had worked with her dad on films.
    Regards/

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