Mark Sinker,
If….
London: British Film Institute, 2004.
ISBN: 1 84457 040 1
88 pp
£8.99 (pb)
(Review copy supplied by the British Film Institute)

In his review of new Godard books in Screening the Past Issue 10 (2000) Adrian Martin discusses “scanning”, an approach to writing about film which involves “‘running through’ a movie in writing, from start to end.” Departing from a thematic method in which a ready-made rationale is imposed upon the film, “scanning is about sensation and effect – the film as an object in motion acting upon the mind and body of the individual spectator or the mass audience.”

The BFI’s Classics series typifies this approach, and Mark Sinker’s book on Lindsay Anderson’s If…. could be a case study for scanning. It is of course difficult to write interestingly about any film without drawing upon perceived contexts and other knowledges. But few of the Bfi books that I have read blend imported wisdom with the fluid presence of the film as keenly as Sinker’s. If other contributors to this series wrote about the film, Sinker’s scene-by-scene analysis writes it out.

This effect suits a film which is steeped in the formative experience that it charts. Anderson’s public school chronicle drenches us in the rituals, conflicts and desires of an archetypal British experience. Perhaps his best work, If…. undoubtedly exorcised the resentments engendered by Anderson’s years at Cheltenham College. But if moments in this documentary-like record of classroom and corridor recall the verismo of Free Cinema, that liberationist ethos that rebelled against the calcified official stamp of postwar British cinema, Sinker is less interested in whatever autobiographical traces accrue to this modern public school story than in what it tells successive generations about their school days.

When Sinker does import other discourses he anchors them in the imagery and feelings which If…. throws up. He crisply charts the rise and fall of the English Public School story from the heyday of the imperial project in the 1850s, to the burgeoning critique of Kipling’s Stalky and co. in 1899, to the ludicrous apologia of Billy Bunter in the 1930s. The trajectory of Anderson’s film echoes in this literature, from the moment Empire asserts itself in Chief Whip Rowntree’s voice commanding the corridors on the first day back, to a Founders’ Day rout that recalls a Carry On comedy. Evoking a history of homosexuality underpinning the English Public School enclave until homosexuality became tabloid grist with the publication of the Wolfenden Report de-criminalizing covert practices in 1957, Sinker uncovers a tremulous relay of looks permeating Anderson’s film. Sinker’s excursus on Victorian Gothic architecture is recalled in the film’s beautiful images of Cheltenham College where If…. was partially filmed: “behind them soared this practical, crabbed, energetic monumentality, its civilizing mission world-historical, unique – barbarian and imperial, chaotic and orderly, organic and mathematical. Its very unclarity was central to its success” (27). Deploying such histories with proper regard for their place, Sinker calls up the various knowledges from which If…. draws life, while preserving something of a poetic barbarism owing most to Vigo and Buñuel.

If this story of public school rebellion in which Malcolm MacDowell’s senior and his rebels lay armed siege to staff and parents became a runaway hit in 1968, taken up in the year of the barricades and since as a clarion call to pop revolt, Sinker argues that its contradictions have been elided by misappropriation. When the Bfi re-released the film in 2002 publicists mobilized the same old hippy nostalgia for a brave new world. But the post-9/11 world is neither brave nor new. If…. now speaks to very different desires and longings.

To watch it now is to sit through a cruel, angry, ambivalent film which sees no end to the oppressive networks of power and privilege that shaped the English Public School and the Empire it served. It seems astonishing that, as recently as 1968, prefects in wing collars still flogged boys, and expected to shake hands afterwards. While the S+M master-slave dialectic that Sinker invokes for the thrashing scene, with its map of dependency, ripples out onto state school playing fields and into the terrorist/Establishment dynamic to this day, we are reminded of bacilli multiplying under a microscope accompanied by the nearby thwack of a cane, an image typical of the concatenation of resonances that spill over this film.

Sinker places If…. in the context of the Columbine massacre in which two American high school seniors shot and killed several classmates and a teacher in 1999. He argues that school bullying, terror and stratification serve to perpetuate systems of power and privilege in the world outside. Far from the utopian goal that the 1960s counterculture claimed for them, the oppressed, according to the logic of S+M, passive-aggressively affirm the oppressors. While Sinker draws a telling comparison between Travis’ dark-haired inamorata (Christine Noonan) in combat fatigues and touting machine gun, and Leila Khaled, the Palestinian freedom fighter and 1969’s poster girl for radical womanliness, when Travis and rebels stand above the milling school and gun them down, they are simply reproducing an oppressive system.

We like to be nostalgic about school, Sinker argues, supposedly the best days of our lives. But the reality is that society uses the experiences you had sooner forget to assist its struggle against enemies and outsiders. “Your ordeal – your play battles, your real pain – become the fables to lure and soothe those who come after” (78). Indeed, to have attended even a British state school in the postwar decades is to have no illusions about the ideology dinned into you. This book appeared as the British Establishment experiences another of its periodic wobbles over juvenile delinquency, and an embattled Blair government barricaded itself behind increasingly draconian anti-yob legislation. Meanwhile, London is rocked by home-made incendiary devices such that Binns Minor might have cooked up in the English Public School story. If mainstream society became disillusioned with the romance of terrorism decades ago, there is perhaps no more revealing a refutation of the countercultural cachet of Anderson’s film than Sinker’s point that preening Whips (prefects) like Robert Swann’s Rowntree became the bond trader backbone of Thatcherism, that yuppies, not freedom fighters, were the true legacy of the 1960s.

Richard Armstrong
UK.

Created on: Thursday, 2 March 2006 | Last Updated: 2-Mar-06