I wonder if it really happened?

August 5th, 2010 | POSTED BY Mark Jones

It’s difficult to decide which film(s) to discuss in a first post. It is, in a sense, like staring at a blank piece of paper. It feels like the first mark has to be a good one.

Thankfully, though, I’ve just finished watching Lindsay Anderson’s If…. (1968) and the picture is as good a place to start as any. While it’s the summer holidays for me at the moment, I’m still studying at university, making my way through full-time schooling in the UK. If…. explores British education, though its focus is on life not at university but instead at a grand (and anonymous) English public school.

We start at the beginning of a new term. Boys of various ages crowd the corridors, moving their luggage to their rooms, noting down their timetables, and soon – with much pushing, shoving and name calling – a new hierarchy of authority is established. The oldest boys (synecdochically named the ‘Whips’) have power over those in the lower years strengthened by physical punishment and whispered threats. We feel as lost, in these opening scenes, as Bobby Phillips (Rupert Webster), a young boy (one of the ‘Scum’) who’s new this term. The viewer is eventually drawn to Mick Travis (Malcolm McDowell), who first enters the film wearing a black scarf covering his nose and mouth, hiding, we learn later, a superb handlebar mustache. He and his two friends become the focus of the picture; they are oppressed by almost all levels of their small society, from the brutal older boys to apathetic teachers and their patronising headmaster.

The school is, then, an intimidating place. Anderson heightens this feeling in the early section by tightly cropping the frames and filling them with boys and noise. As the large spaces of the school – the playing fields, the chapel, the dining hall – are strangled by the edge of the frame, claustrophobia sets in. It does not last, however, and it is a relief, later in the picture, to see the hall empty, except for one or two people who are preparing the tables for dinner, quietly laying knives, forks and spoons.

It seems this expansion of the frame parallels Mick’s growing mental freedom: in a sense, aesthetics and psychology overlap. As Mick’s reactions against the place become stronger, the film deviates more violently from its realist beginnings. Yes, oddity is present early on (arguably represented even by the quirkiness of the hidden mustache) but it only really develops into surrealism later in the film. For example, in one scene in a roadside cafe, we see Mick and The Girl (Christine Noonan) roar and scratch each other (abruptly losing their clothes after a smash cut); later, as part of a bizarre spectacle, men in shining armour and elderly ladies fight school boys with machine guns.

Sometimes, though, apparently surreal images turn out to be closer to life than first thought. (To phrase this sentiment another way, life at these schools seems quite surreal, at times.) While a boy, with his head in a toilet but without trousers, tied by his shoes upside down, is both a hilarious and an uncomfortable image, such a sight could be seen regularly. While the drawn out brutality of the whip, smashed ten times on the backside of Mick (for which he says, ‘Thank you, Rowntree’!) is difficult to watch, it was nonetheless a regular occurrence. It’s true that there are stranger traditions maintained to this day than a man in armour appearing alongside parents during a school’s Founders’ Day. Anderson plays with his first-hand experience of a British public school to tread this (sur)realist divide carefully. The final scene is the climax of the dualism: while it feels both mad and nightmarish, real events like it are undeniably embedded in contemporary social consciousness. Throughout the film, the viewer is confronted with a difficult question: where has Anderson drawn the line?

That’s enough for now. If you’re interested, I’ve written elsewhere a short post exploring a similar dualism between dreamscape and reality in Inception (2010).

1960s, British, Education, If...., Lindsay Anderson