Capital Celluloid 2024 — Day 141: Tue May 21

if.... (Anderson, 1968): BFI Southbank, NFT3, 6.10pm


This 35mm screening is part of the Lindsay Anderson season (full details here) at BFI Southbank. Information about other screenings of if.... on May6th, 24th and 28th throughout the season can be found here.

Chicago Reader review:
Lindsay Anderson indulges his taste for social allegory with a tale of a repressive boys’ school rocked by student revolutionaries who listen to African music. Though clearly about Mother England and her colonies, the film found its popular success, in that distant summer of 1969, in being taken quite literally. Anderson deserves credit for sniffing out the cryptofascist side of the student movement, and his presentation of oppression—sexual and social—is very forceful. Yet the film finally succumbs to its own abstraction with an ending that satisfies neither symbolism nor wish fulfillment.
Dave Kehr

Here (and above) is the trailer.

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