| Popis: |
Academic studies of Lindsay Anderson’s filmmaking that were published after his death tend to focus mainly on his fiction films, contextualising these works within authorship studies and a legacy of post-war British film often dubbed the ‘British New Wave.’ Where existing scholarship examines Anderson’s role in the Free Cinema movement – a short-lived documentary trend roughly spanning from 1948-1959 that directly opposed the Griersonian tradition of non-fiction cinema and espoused “a poetry of reality, and of the common man” (McLane, 2012) – it often does so in order to understand the director’s subsequent fiction work more fully (Hedling, 1998; Gourdin-Sangouard, et al., 2011). Studies offering a singular focus on Anderson and Free Cinema have focused on stylistic elements and its relationship to the modernist movement of 1950s Britain (Hedling, 2001; Cornelius and Rhein, 2020). This chapter will attempt to fill a gap in existing literature on Anderson and Free Cinema by approaching the films through an intersectional lens. Using Cho, Crenshaw and McCall’s formulation of intersectionality as a “term to focus attention on the vexed dynamics of difference and the solidarities of sameness in the context of antidiscrimination and social movement politics” (2013), the chapter interrogates examples of the often subtle ways that films like O Dreamland (1953), Thursday’s Children (1954), Every Day Except Christmas (1957) and March to Aldermaston (1959) depict coalitional identities that bridge gender, race, age, ability and class differences as a critique of political and structural inequalities in contemporary Britain. Indeed, although it was not yet labelled as such, an intersectional sensibility appears in the programme note when the first Free Cinema films were screened at the British Film Institute in 1958: “a belief in freedom, in the importance of people and in the significance of the everyday.” |
