Lindsay Anderson : Maverick Film-Maker

The present book will focus on Anderson’s career in the cinema, first as a prominent critic and then as a successful film director, trying to reconstruct, interpret and evaluate his contribution to the history of British cinema. Anderson’s work, as I will show, has been very important for the development of a self-reflexive mode of art cinema in Britain, using Brechtian devices, theatrical stylization and self-conscious intertextuality, thus ”prefiguring” postmodern cinematic styles and the internationally acclaimed British art cinema of the 1980s, with auteurs like Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman. Anderson’s films have indeed been among those works which have opened out film narrative in Britain towards more aesthetically radical forms.