Is That All There Is?

Hour long piece made for TV.

A dark humored, wonderful, gently surreal self-portrait of the artist as a cranky old man.

Documentary in style, but clearly staged, it has some wonderful moments of dark wit, and sadness as it looks at old age and the brevity of life. As with all of Anderson's best work (and I do think this ranks among his best work) he has a skewed gaze all his own that invites us to examine how we see things - including, in this case, ourselves, our friendships, our accomplishments, our failures.

Anderson's ability to make his very personal point-of-view universal and entertaining at the same time is what makes him such a special film-maker, able to bridge the experimental and challenging, and the simply pleasurable.

This is great director Lindsay Anderson's mock documentary on his own daily life: a sort of "portrait of the artist". Of course we get to see the man himself, but along the way he satirises all the cliches of this genre of documentary - domestic disputes (appallingly enacted), parallel montage as political statement, and those "personal moments" such as the director in his bath surrounded by posters of his films and plays. There is naturally, despite his usual sharp-witted fun, a great chance to learn more about him. Particularly poignant is to see him in his last film describing the difficulties such a great director always had finding funding for his anarchic, surrealist visions. I've heard it was this constant struggle that killed him at the realtively young age of 73. It's a shame that the profit motive remains more important than the chance for us to have seen more films from such a wonderful filmmaker.

This final film from Lindsay Anderson, a self-portrait of the artist in old age, cannot help but draw comparisons, for me, with my recent viewing of Chantal Akerman's final film, also an autobiographical essay made in late-life, No Home Movie.

While Anderson lacks Akerman's aesthetic genius, this is a far bolder, more life-affirming work. Anderson conveys his simultaneous love of, and disappointment, with life through a series of semi-fictional encounters with real-life friends and family that are, nonetheless, clearly staged. The essay aspect comes from Anderson's juxtapositions of his own and confidant's "first-world problems" with those of the suffering masses of the Third World.

Akerman seems, by contrast, a more selfish, but also more honest artist. Her movie about watching her mother deteriorate and die is utterly self- focused, yet also mercilessly true. No one who watches it can think these are staged interactions. Akerman comes out compromised in one form or another too often for that to be the case.

Old Anderson has, perhaps, no one left to mourn. But he also clearly doesn't mourn himself so much as a world he was once a part of that is clearly headed in a very bad direction.

Hard to believe that Lindsay Anderson will have been gone 20 years in August of this year. I was unaware of the existence of this brief Valentine to life, movies, theater and actresses Jill Bennett and Rachel Roberts -- but thank you youtube! Very sweet film, initially following Lindsay (one becomes very familiar with him in this sequence) through his morning: waking up, listening to the BBC news, looking at the telly, sparring with his nephew, receiving visitors from his world of theater and film (David Sherwin sequence especially nice, and a pleasure to see Alan Price and hear him sing and play). A pleasant way to spend an hour, this last Anderson film (following on the wonderful "Whales of August").