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If… (15)

Part of the Uprising! Spirit of ‘68 Season

Showing times:

• Tue 14 Aug: 7.30pm

Dir. Lindsay Anderson, 111 mins, 1968, UK

Uprising! Spirit of ’68

A UK-wide programme of screenings and events exploring the cinema and the legacy of 1968 when decade’s worth of news took place in one year, from the Prague spring to the Paris riots, from the Tet Offensive to the killings of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. The UK saw student protests flare up on campuses across the country and rising tension in the wake of Enoch Powell’s ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech, while in June a machinist’s strike at Dagenham’s Ford plant heralded a burgeoning women’s movement and paved the way for the Equal Pay Act.

If… (1968)

Lindsay Anderson’s If…. is a daringly anarchic vision of British society, set in a boarding school in late-sixties England. Before Kubrick made his mischief iconic in A Clockwork Orange, Malcolm McDowell made a hell of an impression as the insouciant Mick Travis, who, along with his school chums, trumps authority at every turn, finally emerging as a violent saviour in the vicious games of one-upmanship played by both students and masters. Mixing colour and black and white as audaciously as it mixes fantasy and reality, If…. remains one of cinema’s most unforgettable rebel yells.

‘A modern classic in which Anderson minutely captures both the particular ethos of a public school and the general flavour of any structured community.’
STEPHEN GARRETT, TIME OUT

‘Amongst the greatest British films of the post-war years.’
FILM4

‘A classic, a movie of real authority.’
PHILIP FRENCH, THE OBSERVER

‘A true British classic.’
BBC
 

 

Venue: Studio 74, Exeter Phoenix