[Commlist] Call for Papers ReFocus: The Films of Lindsay Anderson

*_Call for Papers [extended] – /ReFocus://The Films of Lindsay 
Anderson/: Edinburgh University Press _*

  * *A new edited collection of original essays on the films of Lindsay
    Anderson *
  * *Focus on class, postcolonialism, environmentalism, race, feminism,
    disability and LGBTQ+ topics*
  * *Contributions welcome from academics, PGRs and ECRs*

2024 will mark the 30^th  anniversary of Lindsay Anderson’s death in 
1994. One of the most challenging and iconoclastic figures in twentieth 
century British cinema, Anderson directed some of the most significant 
films to come out of the British New Wave, including /This Sporting 
Life/ (1963), /If..../ (1968), /O Lucky Man! /(1973) and /Britannia 
Hospital/ (1982). After co-founding the journal /Sequence/ and the Free 
Cinema documentary movement in the 1950s alongside Lorenza Mazzetti, 
Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson, Anderson established himself over many 
decades as one of the most energetic figures in British culture. His 
work combined Brechtian aesthetics and other theatrical techniques with 
a potent critical attitude, attacking the culture of capitalist 
consumerism and refusing to pick sides in the ideological battle between 
Right and Left which raged during and after the political turbulence of 
the 1960s. The time is right to reassess Anderson’s cinematic heritage 
from a range of fresh critical perspectives, including class, feminist, 
postcolonial, disability, and LGBTQ+ approaches.


An early practitioner of the auteurist approach, Anderson himself was a 
keen sceptic, and long held a negative opinion of Film Studies and the 
theoretical analysis of cinematic texts. Perhaps as a result of this 
hostility, scholarship has been slow to appreciate the force and 
complexity of his filmmaking, echoing the critical and commercial 
decline his work experienced in the later stages of his career. He and 
his collaborators turned their hands to many genres and styles, 
including musical documentary, /Wham! in China: Foreign Skies/ (1986), 
nostalgic Hollywood drama, /The Whales of August/ (1987), and 
autobiographical TV documentary, /Is That All There Is?/ (1992). In 
today’s media culture, saturated with the idea of the marketable sequel, 
it speaks to Anderson’s contemporary relevance to learn that his final, 
unmade film project was a proposed sequel to /If..../  – /If 2.... 
/(c1994) – which would find the young Crusaders returning to school 25 
years later for a reunion (Kitchen, 2023b). Topics such as gender, race 
and class were constant presences throughout his artistic 
collaborations, often playing vital roles within a broader and more 
expansive critical artistic worldview.


Following his death, scholarship began to catch up with Anderson’s own 
prodigious publishing record. Erik Hedling’s monograph /Lindsay 
Anderson: Maverick Film-Maker/ (Hedling, 1998) was one of the first 
sustained scholarly analysis of his cinematic canon, bolstered by the 
work of several industry contemporaries who wrote memoirs devoted almost 
entirely to their relationship with Anderson (Sherwin, 1996; Lambert, 
2000). Some more recent scholarship has explored Anderson’s work from 
industrial, political and philosophical perspectives, addressing aspects 
of unproduction studies, critical theory and Romanticism (Magee, 2008; 
Kitchen, 2023a; Kitchen, 2023b). It was not until the new century that 
Anderson scholarship received another boost. The director’s diaries and 
collected works were published in 2004 (Anderson, 2004a; Anderson, 
2004b), and in the 2010s, the curation of Anderson’s personal papers at 
the University of Stirling led to a new wave of academic publications 
(Izod et al., 2012; Hedling and Dupin, 2016).


*Following the Centenary celebrations in 2023, and in a fresh academic 
climate, this new edited collection proposes to return Anderson to the 
forefront of contemporary debate in Film Studies and address new aspects 
of his work and its contribution to British and international cinema 
culture. Many important areas of his work remain underexplored, 
particularly those which address issues of class, feminism, 
postcolonialism, race, disability, and LGBTQ+ topics. *

*
*

Contributions addressing these themes and related political issues are 
strongly encouraged, although chapters are also invited on a range of 
subjects, including, but by no means limited to:**

  * Music and sound in the films of Lindsay Anderson
  * Lindsay Anderson and the British Empire
  * George Michael, Wham! and Lindsay Anderson
  * Lindsay Anderson and the British film industry / film culture
  * Acting and performance in the films of Lindsay Anderson – Brechtian
    aesthetics
  * Lindsay Anderson’s collaborators – Malcolm McDowell, Rachel Roberts,
    David Sherwin, Arthur Lowe, Alan Price, Graham Crowden
  * Lindsay Anderson and American cinema
  * Lindsay Anderson’s multimedia legacy – Malcolm McDowell’s /Never
    Apologise/
  * English Literature and the films of Lindsay Anderson
*Please send abstracts of 300 words and a short author biography to Will 
Kitchen (_wkitchen /at/ aub.ac).uk_ on behalf of Edinburgh University Press. *

*Deadline for abstracts Friday August 4^th  2023.*


*Bibliography *

*
*

Anderson, Lindsay. (2004a) /The Diaries/, ed. Paul Sutton (ed.) London: 
Methuen.

Anderson, Lindsay. (2004b) /The Collected Writings/, ed. Paul Ryan (ed.) 
London: Plexus.

Anderson, Lindsay. (1981) /About John Ford/. London: Plexus.

Hedling, Erik. (1998) /Lindsay Anderson: Maverick Film-Maker/. London 
and Washington: Cassell.

Hedling, Erik., Dupin, Christophe, (eds.) (2016) /Lindsay Anderson 
Revisited: Unknown Aspects of a Film Director/. London and New York: 
Palgrave Macmillan.

Izod, John., et al. (2012) /Lindsay Anderson: Cinema Authorship/. 
Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Kitchen, Will. (2023a) /Film, Negation and Freedom: Capitalism and 
Romantic Critique/. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic.

Kitchen, Will. (2023b) ‘The Lost Crusade: Lindsay Anderson’s Unmade 
Sequel to /If..../ (1968)’, in /Studying the Unmade, Unseen, Unreleased: 
Histories, Theories, Methods/, ed. James Fenwick and Kieran Foster. 
London: Intellect, 2023.

Lambert, Gavin. (2000) /Mainly About Lindsay Anderson: A Memoir/. 
London: Faber and Faber.

Magee, Karl. (2008) ‘Hooray for Hollywood? The Unmade Films of Lindsay 
Anderson’, in /Sights Unseen: Unfinished British Films/, ed. Dan North. 
Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Sherwin, David. (1997) /Going Mad in Hollywood and Life with Lindsay 
Anderson/. 1996. London: Penguin Books.


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