People watching on the last train home
PAGE 12
Lindsay Anderson (left) and Malcolm MacDowell
If . . . director's life laid
bare
Archives of the seminal British filmmaker Lindsay Anderson to be opened to the public at Stirling University. Words: Tim Abrahams
ne of the most complete public archives ol~ any
British lilmmaker will be unveiled next weekend
at the University of Stirling with a commemorative series of screenings. The Lindsay Anderson Collection is a unique record ol~ the working career and private life of one of the key ligures of British cinema. Anderson l'irst directed the quintessential ‘kitchen sink. drama This Sporting Life. starring Richard Harris. and then later the seminal depiction ol‘ armed insurrection If. . . . starring Malcolm MacDowell. which was released in 1968. days after the student riots in Paris. Although he was born in India and lived all of his life in England. he considered himself as Scottish as his parents. When he died suddenly in 1994. his papers were handed to the British Council. from where they migrated to Stirling University via Scottish Screen. Eighteen
months ago. archivist Karl Magee began the task of
sifting through a collection which contains correspondence with actors such as John Gielgud. Richard Harris and Rex Harrison. The archive also
contains his diaries from the mid-Hulls until 1992. as well as his ol’ten liery correspondence with producers and other ligures ol‘ authority. From the l‘)7()s onwards he kept carbon copies of his own letters. thereby giving a complete picture of how he antagonised the British establishment and how. according to Magee. “alter the release ol~ Britannia Hospital. he became so marginalised no-one would employ him‘. Britannia Hospital was a vitriolic state-oi-the-nation l'arce released at the height ol‘ the Falklands War. The collection also contains signilicant memorabilia: one of his signature leather jackets. the rule book for ('heltenham (‘ollege where he went to school (and where he later set If. . . l and a letter in which he relates how he was ol‘l'ered the part of the limperor in The limp/re Strikes Back. On the weekend of 8 April the MacRobert Arts (‘entre will screen If. . . . () [.m'ky Man.’ and Britannia Hospital to mark the opening ol’ an exhibition ol~ photographs and memorabilia from the (‘ollection in the l'niversity's Pathl‘oot building.
SCOTS DJS TO HIT NEW YORK
I Scottish DJs Silicone Soul, Harri & Domenic and Trendy Wendy have been drafted, along with a number of others, to visit New York as part of Tartan Week 2005. WsitScotland is taking the Battlefield Band, Aly McBain and Phil Cunningham, but the Scottish Executive is also funding four club nights from Monday 4 to Thursday 7 April. According to Neil Butler of U2 Events, ‘The Scottish Executive are being incredibly enlightened. The attitude of the promoters I have spoken to in New York has been, “What a fantastic place this is with a government that supports its DJs." According to Butler, the aim is to make Scotland ‘the first place you think about travelling to if you are aged 20 to 30 and you live in New York’. (TA)
I Spotted by a List contributor on the door of Defunkt records on the Great Western Road: ‘Graffiti writers are mean and cruel and have no respect for themselves or others. Endorsed by the Maryhill Anti-Graffiti Network.’ Attempts to track down these arbiters of taste failed, so we cannot explain why they have revived a 19805 campaign by the Mayor of Philadelphia to eradicate the practise in his city.
I Rankin's role as elder statesman of photography grows and grows. The co- iounder of Dazed and Confused contributes to an exhibition at the RSA on the Mound, which documents 21 stories of young people who have started up businesses with the Prince's Trust and the Prince's Scottish Youth Business Trust. He's also adjudicating the Beck's Futures Student Prize For Film and Video. along with filmmaker Lynne ‘Morvern Callar' Ramsay. More on the Visual Art pages.
I London has gone David Greig crazy. Not only has the new dramaturg of the Scottish National Theatre seen his quietly successful Pyrenees, produced by Paines Plough, transfer from the Tron in Glasgow to the Chocolate Menier Factory (where it will stay until 24 April), but The Cosmonaut’s Last Message to the Woman He Once Loved in the Former Soviet Union opens at the Donmar Warehouse on 12 April. Together with If Destroyed True by another Scot, writer Douglas Maxwell, it’s part of a Paines Plough series called ‘This Other England’. (TA)
‘ '.lr:'~‘-'~ ,>'<:,' 27,", THE LIST 7