A Critical Conscience

Abstract

Revisiting Lindsay Anderson is a poignant concept for those of us who knew him, and it means revisiting other ghosts in the process. Much like W.B. Yeats in his poem, ‘The Municipal Library Revisited’, we are spurred into memories of personal encounters, of past pleasures and pains. Our hope is to reach, as Yeats did, a positive conclusion. I was reading Yeats’ poem again recently, not least because Lindsay once told David Storey that he would be pleased to have one of its lines, ‘A revolutionary soldier kneeling to be blessed’, as his epitaph. When I came across the lines about ‘We three alone in modern times’ who thought that ‘all that we did, all that we said or sang/must come from contact with the soil’, I thought not of Yeats, J. M. Synge, and Lady Gregory but of Lindsay, Karel Reisz, and Tony Richardson who, in the words of the Free Cinema manifesto, believed ‘in freedom, in the importance of people and in the significance of the everyday’. Casting our minds back, though, needs to occasion something richer than nostalgia; we need to understand the contradictions that cloud our backward gaze.