Missa Luba: a mass sung in pure Congolese style, and native songs of the Congo sung by Les Troubadours du roi baudouin.
Directed by Father Guido Haazen.

Kyrie (2:30)
Gloria (2:40)
Credo (4:09)
Sanctus (1:37)
Benedictus (0:52)
Agnus Dei (1:54)

Native Songs

Dibwe Diambula Kabanda (Marriage Song) (3:03)
Lutuku Y a Bene Kanyoka (Emergence from Grief) (2:48)
Ebu Bwale Kemai (Marriage Ballad) (2:24)
Katumbo (Dance) (1:34)
Seya Wa Mama Ndalumba (Marital Celebration) (2:22)
Banana (Soldiers Song) (2:02)
Twai Tshinaminai (Work Song) (1:02)

_____________________________________________________

But think of this: it is the inner hymn of their revolt, yet its energy and beauty derives from a collision made possible by colonialism. "Les Troubadors du Roi": DO YOU SEE!!!

I am not saying "Yay Euro-Imperialism!", I am saying, this film is pro exactly the thing it thinks it's anti....

I agree with Mark! I cannot fathom why this film still has any kind of hipstah cachet. Is 'Oh Lucky Man!' any better?

To be young and good-looking = to be homo superior?

In the 1960s yes. Feelgood stuff for the target audience as well. Lindsay Anderson was probably an old cynic with an eye on the box office. I remember being shocked when I heard that he'd been rude to a fat boy from my school on a theatre trip who was inadvertently blocking his path in the foyer.

the chaplain gives a sermon on the evils of desertion; the headmaster waffles abt service to the nation; the general's slpeech is about how important tradition => seems to me that, given that vietnam had been fighting to repel invaders on and off for CENTURIES, that vietcong pep-rallies probably ran to exactly these themes now and then

lindsay's very parochial (middle class) obsession with a certain tranche of dowdy old england, fit only to be machine-gunned, morphs only too easily into the thrusting scything impatience of young right of the early 80s, mowing down the consensus and sneering at the elderly (the "angry young men" — john braine, john osborne, kingsley amis — almost all ended up as tremendous reactionaries: room at the top is total proto-thatcherism: there's a generational-emotional fit here with anderson, though i doubt they all voted the same way)

Alex Droog and his buddies machinegun and mortar the unarmed parents the moment they emerge from the chapel. The first swathe of death is totally random: not assault on the system so much as a narcissistic look-at-me attack on uninformed bystanders (why are these parents any more guilty than Alex Droog's parents? What if they're the parents of kids we see being bullied earlier on?). After a lot of fat old people mill around in utter panic (a panic played for laughs, which is a bully's trick if ever there was one), some of the other pupils begin to fight back, and in fact become a disciplined army, proving that the joke wargames shown earlier on are actually not a joke (and what's vicious about this fightback? ppl with machineguns are shooting ppl w/o any weapons at all: it's not as the rebels have made the slightest attempt to explain or recruit any of the OTHER pupils, all of whom are presumably exactly as victimised as Alex.) (except they're not byronically handsome poet-types with girlfriends and motorbikes and leather-jackets). "Rabid dogs" just as well describes the rebels. I don't see how power is seriously threatened here: who is being liberated? on whose behalf is this war being fought? It's not the masses vs oppression, its hipsters vs squares.

These films are of their time.

If...will always appeal, the idea of fighting yr teachers is always a good fantasy to indulge in.

cz w/o said dissection i think its politics actually fall somewhere between dunblane crackpot revenge-fantasy and pol pot nihilist exermination fantasy

shamefully i haf never seen a vigo film

i' m sure the fat old people ARE meant to be interpreted as the somnolent middle classes, as you suggest, david: hence it doesn't matter to anderson when they're driven into the killing fields => but since he is utterly confused when it comes to representing the colonially exploited (yes yes cute chick who works in a caff who boffs alex droog cz he's the LIBERATOR etc), but it's all shortcuts and bad assumptions, in the end

yes i'm micro-interpreting the details of the way that final battle is put together cz that's where anderson's deep politics must be: at the editing stage: he'd read eisenstein and godard, he'd even written about them, he knew exactly what was at stake => if's he's going to spend 30 years copping attitude about how he makes truer deeper films than hollywood ever could, he's requesting to be taken seriously on the same level

obviously the standard interpetation — young good has enough of old corruption and cleans out the temple with all despatch — has pop power also, and is the story anderson hoped he was making: but in a way that's the point i'm making, that people enthused by this film are as likely to be ollie north types as paul foot types, and that confusion is built into the movie at the molecular level

(cf also i guess my argt with the clash, as opposed to the pistols say)

By the way, do seek out Zero De Conduite and L'Atalante, Mark, they are as wonderful as their reputations.

'If...' though is a fantasy and a metaphor. We can see it as a relic of the golden age of 'us and them', a time when things were beautifully clear-cut and radicals -- the generation of 68 -- knew the future could only be theirs (even if their libertarianism did shade into Thatcherism in some cases).

But to me it's powerful because it's a vision of the outrageous license some few people give themselves to experience liberty. The exaggerated contrast between the archaic authoritarian world of the school and the rebels' excursions really sets up an atmosphere in which the boys' binges on Eros and Thanatos become, for the viewer, intense poems to the existential pleasure of freedom in defiance of social constraint.

It's appropriate to mention Byron, because this is pure Romanticism, of course. And you don't expect astute political analysis from Romantics. But you do expect cracking good poetry, and a strong case for the joy of irresponsible liberty.

the problem with the straight-up fantasy-metaphor reading of a picture like If.... is that it ISN'T The Matrix - the world in the film is unmistakeably THIS world and the sociopolitik concerns are at least semi-specific (ie not simply "the Man is pulling the wool over your eyes" but "the English public school system in 1968 is symptomatic of blahblah..."). the blank cheque is that if the politics work the filmmaker is a scathingly brilliant satirist but if they don't then they weren't supposed to - he is a surrealist poet not a political essayist etc.

(though to be completely fair: i have no more experience with British public-school circa 68 than i have with post-apocalypse subterranean USA so they are both fantasy worlds to me)

(NB cake-having-and-eating-too direction doesn't really bother me - or at least bothers me much less in the case of an Anderson than a Larry Clark, where morality tales are obscured by flashing neon signs questioning authorial intent and the pose is simultaneously vaguely political and specifically apolitical.)

i don't know if it *was* conceived as a three-parter, possibly not: i do know he ran out of money and had to improvise lots of stuff, hence the arbitrary switching between b/w and colour (which i like: randomness is always good) => if the climax was a bit thrown together that might explain why that section specifically — shot by shot — is basically mainstream shoot-em-up cliches posing as liberatory art (compare-contrast bonnie and clyde from a year or so earlier) (or battle of algiers, where the dilemma of the — necessary? — murder of bystanders is specifically addressed/acknowledged)

up to the point where they're digging stuff out from the lumber-room under the stage — where the pickled foetus handed between alex droog and the girl hangs as a genuine moment of surrealist poetry — it could have twisted in any number of rweally interesting directions: the (strapped-for-cash/hurried/botched/cynical/cop-out) end it actually gets is st trinians remade with kalashnikovs, by a grown-up who didn't get the joke (which is — at least partly — that the st trinians movies DO understand the relationship between conformist-restriction and carnival anarchy)

Yes!!! Think of it this way, the good thing about this film is that it brought LA and MM together, which led to filming of "Oh Lucky Man!" one of the best pieces of cinematic narratology known to man!!! But fate was not to smile upon them for the third installation--Brittanica Hospital--feel free to give that one a pass...

i keep forgetting to mention: UNMAN WITTERING and ZIGO? Who has seen this recently? I remember it as Stalky & Co meets Turn of the Screw, but it's a long time since I saw it.

Fairly normal teens are trapped in Victorian institution.

Teens do normal teen things: ride motorbikes, flirt.

Victorian institution punishes them severely.

Teens do more normal things.

Victorians punish them even more severely.

Same thing happens on a bigger scale. Audience's heart is in mouth, oh shit, they will be killed now, just for expressing normal teen desires! (Society always wins, no matter how wrongheaded.)

Mais voila, teens triumph totally in unlikely, apocalypic ending. Although stunned and disbelieving, audience is relieved, and leaves the cinema with the sense of having witnessed an optimistic fairy tale presaging the fall of all unjust, super-conservative social structures.

Nobody goes out to buy a machine gun after watching 'If...', but we do get an inkling (unlike late Freud) that the stuggle between society and instinct might sometimes be won by instinct, and that, given a slightly more flexible and forgiving environment, the perfectly normal young rebels could have ridden motorbikes and shagged waitresses without hurting society in the least.

Compare and contrast the maudlin and defeatist ending Lars Von Trier gave 'Dancer In The Dark', where the fairly normal factory dreamer Selma is executed, becoming a sort of Christ figure of victory through suffering and destruction. Message: 'the nail that sticks out must be hammered in. Handerchiefs for all film-goers! Religion and masochism for all radicals!'

Doesn't Monty Python's The Meaning of Life have a long-ish section burlesquing this movie?

Malcolm McDowell -- the British Jean-Pierre Léaud and the Sixties' Gary Oldman. And I mean that in every sense, good and horrible.

i don't think it DOES presage the fall of the unjust social structure: it's another cake-and-eat-it move, really

"slightly more flexible and forgiving environment" = what marcuse used to call "repressive tolerance", which i really really doubt is anderson's ideal (this suggestion is the same as my original "salvageable" caveat, but I just don't think it's the film I just watched)

daddino, i think yr right: i've actually veered around a bit on this thread — more in my head than in my posts — as i remember different bits and play with them, and so has momus actually (his second "repressive tolerance" version doesn't really accord with his earlier Yay Bataille position)

so ok, you could say "yes but ambivalence=art hurrah", but mmmm i'm really not convinced yet: "muddle" i can totally live with

part of the problem is that anderson's is totally a puritan in some ways — sex is dandy as long it's in in accord witgh the moral revolution underway — and he DISTRUSTS fantasy really, so that when he finally lifts off into one, it's actually quite sadistically weighted and unpleasant, as you watch it

(haha i think some of my dislike may come from the fact that i way prefer arthur lowe (= capt mainwaring in dad's army) to malcolm macdowell => ie anderson's idea of the overthrow of social conservatism includes the extermination of sad dowdy fubsy nitwits)

S'okay, s'called thinking, s'what we're here for, s'nit? ;-)

i way prefer arthur lowe (= capt mainwaring in dad's army) to malcolm macdowell => ie anderson's idea of the overthrow of social conservatism includes the extermination of sad dowdy fubsy nitwits)

S'your age showing, Mark. Sight and Sound'll like a Fogey-Blimpy-Fusbyist critique, though, s'forsure. (S'unless they all soixante-huitards, any rate.)

Start something like: 'Lyndsay Anderson (shot grouse with his father, blackguard) sets his Moronic-Byronic -- don't know they're born! -- whippersnappers amok in England's greenpleasant, riding motorcycles. Horsewhipping's too good... Youth and looks, as I was saying to my ghillie just the other day on the Spey, are wasted on the Homo Superior. Are you listening to me, boy?' 'Yes Captain Manwaring, sir, sorry sir...'

Which reminds me that I saw the ending of If.... as a dream sequence actually, something disconnected from the rest of the film and floating in id-land.

I love the S/T to 'O Lucky Man'.

the three heroes ARE stalky (alex droog), m'turk (moopy one) and beetle (knightley): i def think this is a fruitful line of comparison (the study scene which norman likes — i do too — is totally shaped by S&C, which Magnum war photography replacing Ruskin; ditto the mocking relationships with seniors)

Unman, Wittering and Zigo = worth a look but not relevant if you're looking at If.... or Public School Rebellions.

Arthur Lowe as Captain Mainwaring probably is preferable to Malcolm McD.

The setting of If.... may well be LA's old school when he was there. To me, it is reminiscent of George Orwell's schooldays rather than my own (1973 - 80, and not Orwell or Anderson's alma mater, IIRR).

Did LA put four dots in by mistake and then try to cover up by claiming it was deliberate?

Mark, your initial post suggests to me that a reading of the film in 1968 is not the same as a reading in 2002 - after the failure of the '68 rebels, etc. and Thatcher/Reagan in the '80s. 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote' and all that.

So what chance do we have of knowing what Shakespeare was going on about? Or Sophocles?

Sorry, am I wandering from the point?

The value of Shakespeare and Lindsay Anderson is the value of all art made in times of sudden economic growth and burgeoning liberalism. They make us confront our own conservatism and our own pessimism.

Andserson, being British rather than French, is naturally less humanist and more angry / satirical than Jean Vigo. He's making 'If...' in a time when bullets are flying in Vietnam on behalf of a frightened Western establishment. He turns the bullets, in his film, back against his own Western bete noir, the fusty British aristablishment. A lame duck anyway, you could argue, and it's here the link with Thatcherism is clearest; she also pissed off the royals and the aristos with her populist rightism.

In himself, the McDowell character with his harmless hedonism looks to us now about as radical as Noel Gallagher. He only becomes a C.O.G. (centre of goodness, as they say in film school) because he is victimised but refuses to capitulate. Take away the aristocratic overlords (headmaster, prefects) and you have a new tyrant just as bad as they were. The authoritarian tyrant is replaced by a hedonist tyrant who snorts coke and works in advertising.

The MM character grows up Richard Branson. And lurking on the roof, waiting for him to finish his speech, is...

sorry to all on this thread for my absence: I have been busy - I *do* have things to say on the subject (to answer one of Mark's points I never thought it was a literal invocation of a public school in 1968, always thought it was a grotesque form of fantasy, never believed that realism came into it, which I suppose weakens it if taken from a literal perspective) but I'll leave my more detailed comments until I'm less tired and more able to string coherent thoughts together.

I discovered it before I even went to the school in question; it's still one of my favourite films, for better or worse - I can't help still finding it richly evocative, compelling and somehow naughty.

As a weirdly coincidental aside, My mum went out with MM before he was famous...god the world's weird!

Mark's "populist new right sweeping in and creating a new dictatorship that is as unpleasant as what came before without the surface politeness" thing intrigues me though and DOES make me look at the film in a new light (it's more or less Ian MacDonald's argument = radicalised post-consensus right changed the world, "All You Need Is Love" et al were not the sign of how the future was going to be but the last great burst of communal togetherness in society before everyone started being all about themselves yada yada). my thought is: could anyone really have predicted that in 1968? did it not seem then as though it would be a straight authoritarian right versus radical left divide FOREVER, a brief (the last?) moment of simplicity? I do feel that pasting contemporary politics on to what happened in the 60s can go too far, and that the film should be seen in the context of the simplicity of its moment coupled with the deliberate grotesquerie of a semi-fantasy (I never imagined that public schools were like that in 1968 - more like an extension of Anderson's own worst nightmares from maybe 30 years earlier, but remember that the 1965 BBC film of Eton exposed the school using punishments for younger boys that had been banned from use in prisons in about 1906 or something).

ha the whole new-right-versus-old thing reminds me of what I always thought was the best part of the whole film, ie the ridicule of High Tories (ie the headmaster) posing as technocrats and somehow seeming WORSE, underlining their own obsolesence when if they hadn't had any pretensions to modernity they might just seem like a charming relic - ie the more they try to look of-the-moment the more they show how dangerously out of place and out of time they are (cf Party at the Palace, maybe? cf those who formed the Countryside Alliance shifting from shire Conservatism to brutalist Thatcherism, definitely.)

can you email me: i'm not sure what yr non-anti spam address is?

but I don't know many movie titles ending in periods, so here it's a mystery to me.

.

.

ts: …. vs ....

"Although David Sherwin and I went to (different) Englih Public Schools, If.... is not to be taken as an autobiographical film, at least not in a narrow or a literal sense

(....)

"We specially saw "Zéro de Conduite" again, before writing started, to give us courage. And we constantly thought of Brecht, and his definition of the "epic" style. David referred to Kleist from time to time. John Ford (old father, old artificer") and Humphrey Jennings (romantic-ironic conservative) were in the bloodstream"

The last part is (IMO) especially interesting:
"Essentially the heroes of "If...." are, without knowing it, old-fashioned boys. They are not anti-heroes, or drop-outs, or Marxist-Leninists or Maoists or readers of marcuse. Their revolt is inevitable, not because of what they think, but because of what they are. Mick plays a little at being an intellectual ('Violence and revolution are the only pure acts', etc.), but when he acts it is instictively, because of his outraged dignity, his frustrated passion, his vital energy, his sense of fair play if you like. If his story can be said to be "about" anything, it is about freedom.
In this sense Mick and Johnny and Wallace, and Bobby Phillips and the Girl are traditionalists. It is they, not their conformist elders nor their conformist contemporaries who speak the tongue that Shakespeare wrote ('We must be free or die'). 'England Awake,' Johnny cries in the gym. And Mick: 'We are not cotton-spinners all: some love England and her honour yet!' And Wallace, as he lunges, 'Death to tyrants!' They are very, I suppose fatally romantic. Theirs is still: 'The homely beauty of the good old cause.'
Far indeed from filling me with dread, I find the last sequence of the film exhilarating, funny (its violence is so plainly metaphorical) a bit shocking, magnificent (when the Headmaster isshot between the eyes) and finally sad. It doesn't look to me as though Mick can win. The world rallies as it always will, and brings its overwhelming fire-power to bear on the man who says 'no'.

Thee above Xtraxts written by Lindsay Anderson in Nov 1969. Quite possibly Anderson's words might back up MS' critique of the film, tho' I think it lifts it waaaay above bobbygillepieism (for BBBYz take on this theme see k-lame vid for "swastika eyes") What the hell, I don't care anyway, I love this film. I like Tarkovski's "Stalker" and "Solaris" more, and possibly "Pandora's Box" more. Possibly a few other silent movies as well. I can't think of anything else I like quite as much as "If...." I love the beautiful dreamlike atmosphere, the air of repressed sexuality, just the whole look of it.

whatever anyway, I am getting tired. Mark, email me w/ mail address or fax no. and I will photocopy thee intro and get it to you. Robin, if yer reading this, I found all the old copies of "ZigZag". Send me yer mail address if u still want them.

i watched it again last night: i still think it is super-flawed but yes hmmm

bobby gillespie-ism = making the link via clippings from sunday colour supps on their study wall to "revolutionaries of the decade" => LA is saying above "yes yes it's meant to be stick-on", but then his own shakespeare line is pure bobby-ism. as i said abovem the parodies of speechday bullshit are much funnier and better written, really, than the stuff the Crusaders come up with, which is echt teen self-importance — I was very like that aged that age, but then I kinda modelled myself on the ppl in it. I watched it cz my dad said it was a great film!!! He bought the missa luba for my mum (who in the 60s actually looked quite like the girl, though slighter...)

Actually I just remembered the best bit of dialogue in the film - the chaplain during army cadet manouvres:

"We are all corrupt. We are all sinful. we are all meet to be punished. If a soldier doesn't do his duty, he expects to be punished.

"There are failures great and small, and there are punishments great and small. But . . . there is oe failure, one crime. . .

". . .One betrayal - that can never be forgiven - and that betrayal is called desertion. The desteter in the face of the enemy must expect to be shot.

"Jesus Christ is our commanding officer, and if we desert him, we can expect no mercy!

"and . . . we are all - deserters!"

Great. We are all fucked then.

BTW Mark, on the off-chance that U can get access to the bio of Genesis by Armando Gallo, it is mentioned in there that Peter Gabriel, whilst at Charterhouse either auditioned for "If...." or was going to. His comment was that the film was a very accurate prtrayal of life in his school. especially the air of weird repressed sexuality. Lucky for you you are not an old Carthusian then perhaps.

haha i think i projected that kind of sexuality onto mine (i wasn't a boarder though)

Oh, I suppose it might be tempting fate to prompt Tom to thread?

http://www.bfi.org.uk/showing/nft/anderson/index.html

that is all.

1. Lindsay Anderson went to my school
2. The guys who wrote the script went to my school and set it in my school (it was filmed at a different school, however)
3. it was banned from my school til the '80s.
4. my mum used to go out with Malcolm McDowell
5. and he's got a son caleld Charlie.
6. ooh!

http://www.bfi.org.uk/images/bookvid/covers/books/if.jpg

ahh, I could watch this over and over. nsfw for like one second.

Great, great film. Taken aback by the hate for it at the top of the thread. (Then again, not really.)

I re-watched it a couple of months back, after about twenty years. This time through, I was struck by the fact that the pompous speechifying by the various masters could be cut into any party political broadcast today.