Why Arthur Penn and Lindsay Anderson?: An Introduction to "Film, Negation and Freedom: Capitalism and Romantic Critique"

That’s probably the most common question I hear about my last book, Film, Negation and Freedom: Capitalism and Romantic Critique (Bloomsbury Academic, 2023). Certainly, they’re a strange pair of filmmakers to place at the centre of a monograph about modern art theory and critical philosophy. And they’re hardly the most fashionable of directors, at the moment. (Despite the fact that 2023/2024 marks the Anderson centenary, including events at the University of Stirling last year and the BFI this spring).

However, you don’t have to dig very deep to start finding the connections between them…

For starters, Penn and Anderson were contemporaries at an important moment in cinema history. They were veterans of the post-war cultural renaissance; politically engaged, energetic collaborators, reaching their stride as filmmakers during the turbulent 1960’s counterculture. They also both came to mainstream cinema as outsiders, to some extent, having learned their craft in the theatre, experimental film, documentary and television production. As a result, their creative vision for what cinema could be was a hybrid of aesthetic forms and conventions.

At the end of the decade, both directors made their names with hit films that spoke to the politically engaged generation of May 1968: If…. (1968) starring Malcolm McDowell and Bonnie and Clyde (1967) starring Faye Dunaway and Warren Beatty. Although their films were critical of modern capitalism and social exploitation, they never wholeheartedly supported Marxism, and remained deeply ambivalent about the possibility and function of cultural and political revolution.

Along with their various collaborators, Penn and Anderson were also typically drawn to stories of passionate outsiders, small groups or wandering individuals - people striving to find a new home, or master an ultimately unpredictable and uncontrollable world.

If.... and Bonnie and Clyde were followed by works which develop their core themes, such as O Lucky Man! (1973), The Missouri Breaks (1976), Four Friends (1981) and Britannia Hospital (1982). These films offered stories of ambition and failure, proactivity and disappointment, utopia and apocalypse.

And here is where I take a long view...

All this, and more, they shared with the Romantics of the nineteenth century - the poets, composers, painters and philosophers who dreamt of an ultimate synthetic art, to explore humanity’s dirempted condition. An art which would heal the divide created by the French Revolution and Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic - the unbridgeable gulf between reason and reality, the individual and society, subject and object. It was an artform that Richard Wagner would prefigure with the Gesamtkunstwerk (‘total-work-of-art’), which the technological innovations of Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers would pioneer, and that Penn and Anderson would, in turn, employ for their own Romantic purposes to explore the desires and fears surrounding the idea of freedom in the modern world. In my book, this argument is constructed along the lines of a theory of film offered by the French cultural and political philosopher Jacques Rancière.

With the working hypothesis that cinema is a 'Romantic' medium, the films of Penn and Anderson provide case studies to explore whether certain films can be considered 'more Romantic' than others.

Overall, however, I suppose there are two answers to that initial question: (1) the conceptual and historical issues summarised above; and (2) I love the films.

Lecturers sometimes advise students to avoid writing about things that they love, because that often makes it harder to maintain a more objective and critical perspective. But I wanted to see if I could do it, and I'm very proud of the result. So maybe my advice to students will be different next time.

To find out more about Arthur Penn, Lindsay Anderson and their films, see Film, Negation and Freedom: Capitalism and Romantic Critique: Will Kitchen: Bloomsbury Academic