Read Online The New Biographical Dictionary of Film: Completely Updated and Expanded by David Thomson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: David Thomson
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(d); A Hundred Thousand Children (d); The Children Upstairs (d); Green and Pleasant Land (d); Henry (d); £20 a Ton (d); Energy First (d). 1957: Every Day Except Christmas (d). 1959: March to Aldermaston (codirected) (d). 1962: This Sporting Life . 1966: The White Bus (s). 1967: Raz, Dwa, Trzy/The Singing Lesson . 1968: If.… 1972: O Lucky Man! . 1974: In Celebration . 1979: The Old Crowd (TV); Red White and Zero . 1982: Britannia Hospital . 1987: The Whales of August . 1989: Glory! Glory! (TV).
The contradictoriness in Anderson’s personality was vigorous enough to prevent him from a filmmaking career that had any continuity. And yet since the war he had been one of the more active and idiosyncratic figures in the British arts. Anderson had been so fiercely engaged with the problem of why it is so difficult to make good films in England, but his energies were unresolved and his rather prickly talent had never been fully expressed. England’s fault or Anderson’s? The question is crucial because Anderson was involved in some of the most thorough scrutiny of the British cinema. And just as there was never much doubt that he was more talented than his contemporaries—Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz—so he never allowed his solution to the questions to become tied to any noncinematic dogma. Briefly, in the mid-1950s, his sense of commitment fastened on that left-wing emotion that marched to Aldermaston. But Anderson was too good an artist to swallow politics whole. His need to be committed was itself the chief impulse of his career, and the catalogue of his causes is, by implication, the story of dissipation. His productions of David Storey’s stage plays have an earnestness and need for significance that might alarm an author and certainly expose the texts. In retrospect, he seems a lesser figure than, say, Robert Hamer or Seth Holt—if only because he made so few features.
Anderson was the son of an officer in the Indian army. He came back to England to go to Cheltenham and Oxford: which underlines the biographical elements of Kipling and public school in If.… His period at university was interrupted by war service. But, still at Oxford, in 1947, he was one of the founders of the magazine Sequence (Karel Reisz was the other). He edited it for five years, by which time he was involved in documentary filmmaking. The simultaneous criticism and creativity was vital to Sequence but sadly peripheral to filmmaking and appreciation in Britain. Anderson’s documentaries are no advance on the films of the 1930s and 1940s, while Sequence is an uneasy and inconsistent proponent of a director’s cinema. Anderson’s own taste was for what he called “poetic” cinema; but that led him to liking John Ford as much as Vigo. The beginnings of a proper appreciation of American cinema in Sequence were always evaded, perhaps through ultimate critical shortcomings, perhaps through distaste for America. In any event, Anderson missed the chance that Cahiers du Cinéma gobbled up, of a new movie aesthetic that took American sound films as its models.
But, even in 1958, Anderson seemed torn between irritation with Cahiers and the recognition that it had taken a rewarding path, above all in the way it led to actual, and marvelous, films: “Here you have a magazine like Cahiers du Cinéma , terribly erratic and over-personal in its criticism, which has been enraging us all for the last five years. But the great compensation is that its writers make films, that three or four of its critics are now making films independently. And this means that they have a kind of vitality which is perhaps finally more important than critical balance.” That comes from a Sight and Sound discussion with Paul Rotha, Basil Wright, and Penelope Houston in which Anderson alone seems disturbed by English inertia. Those films he saw coming made Free Cinema—the hopeful blanket description of British documentary in the mid-1950s—look dreadfully insipid.
In
The contradictoriness in Anderson’s personality was vigorous enough to prevent him from a filmmaking career that had any continuity. And yet since the war he had been one of the more active and idiosyncratic figures in the British arts. Anderson had been so fiercely engaged with the problem of why it is so difficult to make good films in England, but his energies were unresolved and his rather prickly talent had never been fully expressed. England’s fault or Anderson’s? The question is crucial because Anderson was involved in some of the most thorough scrutiny of the British cinema. And just as there was never much doubt that he was more talented than his contemporaries—Tony Richardson and Karel Reisz—so he never allowed his solution to the questions to become tied to any noncinematic dogma. Briefly, in the mid-1950s, his sense of commitment fastened on that left-wing emotion that marched to Aldermaston. But Anderson was too good an artist to swallow politics whole. His need to be committed was itself the chief impulse of his career, and the catalogue of his causes is, by implication, the story of dissipation. His productions of David Storey’s stage plays have an earnestness and need for significance that might alarm an author and certainly expose the texts. In retrospect, he seems a lesser figure than, say, Robert Hamer or Seth Holt—if only because he made so few features.
Anderson was the son of an officer in the Indian army. He came back to England to go to Cheltenham and Oxford: which underlines the biographical elements of Kipling and public school in If.… His period at university was interrupted by war service. But, still at Oxford, in 1947, he was one of the founders of the magazine Sequence (Karel Reisz was the other). He edited it for five years, by which time he was involved in documentary filmmaking. The simultaneous criticism and creativity was vital to Sequence but sadly peripheral to filmmaking and appreciation in Britain. Anderson’s documentaries are no advance on the films of the 1930s and 1940s, while Sequence is an uneasy and inconsistent proponent of a director’s cinema. Anderson’s own taste was for what he called “poetic” cinema; but that led him to liking John Ford as much as Vigo. The beginnings of a proper appreciation of American cinema in Sequence were always evaded, perhaps through ultimate critical shortcomings, perhaps through distaste for America. In any event, Anderson missed the chance that Cahiers du Cinéma gobbled up, of a new movie aesthetic that took American sound films as its models.
But, even in 1958, Anderson seemed torn between irritation with Cahiers and the recognition that it had taken a rewarding path, above all in the way it led to actual, and marvelous, films: “Here you have a magazine like Cahiers du Cinéma , terribly erratic and over-personal in its criticism, which has been enraging us all for the last five years. But the great compensation is that its writers make films, that three or four of its critics are now making films independently. And this means that they have a kind of vitality which is perhaps finally more important than critical balance.” That comes from a Sight and Sound discussion with Paul Rotha, Basil Wright, and Penelope Houston in which Anderson alone seems disturbed by English inertia. Those films he saw coming made Free Cinema—the hopeful blanket description of British documentary in the mid-1950s—look dreadfully insipid.
In
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