Was it the dogma of its day ask Bryony Dixon and Christophe Dupin?
FC’s Lorenza Mazzetti tells all. The day you abandon us, you’ll be bringing up the rear of a very long line. And if you don’t come back, perhaps one day you’ll write a book explaining why so many writers have left England for good over the last fifty years.” So Lindsay Anderson said to Gavin Lambert when he heard his friend, a former editor of this magazine, was leaving Britain to take up residence in Los Angeles. Lambert – who records the quote in his warm and insightful biography of the director, Mainly about Lindsay Anderson – doesn’t tell us if Anderson (who also wrote for Sight and Sound) meant this as a rebuke, but it’s hard not to read the comment without hearing the faint rattle of an accusation. That “abandon us”, for instance, speaks volumes. The exchange between the two men took place at the launch of Free Cinema at London’s National Film Theatre in February 1956. And it was here that former critic Anderson and a group of like-minded film-makers pledged collectively to dedic
