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Lindsay Anderson - in his own words
In 1952 Anderson appeared in a short film directed by the American artist James Broughton called 'The Pleasure Garden.' The film was shot in the Crystal Palace Gardens and took the form of a series of fantasy vignettes. Anderson also assisted in the production of the film and wrote an account of his experiences on set. This is an edited version of Anderson's account of the making of the film (LA 1/1/5/2).
In the gardens heyday, when the band was playing, the fountains spurting, and my mother and her brother Fitzy (who was later to be killed at the age of 18 while flying as a pilot in the first World War) were chasing each other down the tidy gravel paths, the statues must have looked a little severe. Lumpish replicas of Classical and Renaissance celebrities: Empire territories extravagantly personified; Dante and Sophocles confronting each other with grim awareness of cultural responsibility; one can imagine how this monumental array intimidated the docile, and presented a naughty challenge to the rebellious and the perverse. But aprons are no longer starched; the lawns are no longer trim; and the statues have taken a bashing. Now they are on our side; and when we invaded their kingdom, it was not really with a sense of trespassing. The ragtag and bobtail of our unit seemed to go very well with the restrained abandon of this pleasure garden which has been closed to the public for over ten years.
Indeed, as nearly everyone who visited us remarked, what a perfect setting for a Broughton film! If ever there was a location designed for fantasy, for the free play of a whimsical and unorthodox imagination, here it was. Not that designed is quite the right word, for the whole charm of the Crystal Palace Gardens now springs from the fact that their disarray is the work of nature. No decorator in the world could have planned this series of effects with taste so unerring: the decrepit bandstand, floorboards rotted away, rusty gate swinging loosely by the hinges; shrubs bursting up through paving stones and marble stairways; urns full of earth and trailing weeds; the profusion of brambles; the silent fountains; and the statues, human or divine, which suffer so placidly the encroachments of ivy or moss over their smooth persons. Surveying the prospect, one was tempted to declare that you simply could not go wrong with it; but that would be to underestimate the problem. It is quite easy to go wrong among those overgrown gods and goddesses, those crumbling balustrades. One afternoon when we were in the middle of shooting, we observed a number of figures in black tights sporting gracefully among the urns; supposing that this must be a meeting of the Upper Norwood Eurhythmic Group, I hurried across to see if they could be enticed into our scene. Alas, they turned out to be merely a clutch of dancers from the New York City Ballet, posing for publicity stills in the currently favoured style - peering from beneath coronets of ivy leaves, arabesquing impassively against a background of dismembered statuary. The Pleasure Garden is not that kind of film at all.
What kind of film is it? That also was a question frequently remarked. Where is it going to be shown? Who is producing it? These are difficult questions to answer, because The Pleasure Garden is one of that relatively small category of films which are made for joy; as, in other arts, pictures are painted and stories written. Joy, too, is its theme. This will not surprise anyone who has seen the 16mm films which James Broughton brought with him at the bottom of his suitcase when he and Kermit Sheets arrived in Europe from California some fourteen months back. Since the films had been shot on substandard stock, they got no public showing; but at film clubs, the ICA, and numerous private viewings, their success was instantaneous. They gave pleasure even to the critics.
The first practical step towards a Broughton production in London seems to have been a propitious encounter between two of his fans - Basil Wright and Paul Dehn - in the foyer of the Odeon, Leicester Square. Joined by Denis Forman and Gavin Lambert of the Film Institute, they formed a committee ("Flights of Fancy") and launched an appeal for £500. It would be unduly acid, perhaps, to suggest that this was in itself something of a flight of fancy; for after all the film has been made. But it would be equally misleading to suggest that from then on the money came down in showers, and the enterprise pushed forward on a path of gold. Many people contributed generously; a surprising number on the other hand seemed to resent such attention being paid to a talent not British. Fortunately the Scottish Film Societies put their English confreres to shame, and a Los Angeles Flights of Fancy committee weighed in with a dollar contribution which tipped the scales. Anyway it would scarcely have been true to the traditions of avant-garde cinema if we had started shooting with enough cash in the account to finish the picture.
We started in the gardens of what had been the Crystal Palace until the disastrous fire of 1936, at the beginning of July. (We had aimed for the fourth for sentimental reasons, but missed it by two days.) It is a good thing we did not wait any longer, for the conception was growing every day. Firstly the film had to be shot on 35mm stock. It is all very well for Cocteau to preach the gospel of 16mm; but he after all has now made Orphee, and I should like to see him editing that on microscopic strips of reversal film - and resting content with a restricted distribution among film societies and cine clubs.
Then there was the scenario: a visit to the Players theatre pantomime had implanted Hattie Jacques' Fairy Queen in Broughton's mind as an obsessive image of liberation and goodwill, and a happy expedition to the Crystal Palace Gardens some weeks later had somehow linked up with that, and set germinating further ideas illustrative of his favourite theme - the pursuit of love. By the summer there was a formidably large and diverse crew of pursuers waiting to be assembled in the garden: waiting, that is, to be realised, which means also casting, and dressing, and feeding, and paying for their fares at least.
How the whole thing was ever done, I am not sure. By the usual, in fact the only means, I suppose: by other people's generosity and our readiness to exploit it, by enterprise, enthusiasm, and unreason. It was astonishing how many professionals proved ready to give their talents to the picture for nothing. Miss Jacques, of course, first and foremost, as Mrs Albion, liberator and fairy godmother to the world; and at her heels a wonderfully game troupe from the Players' theatre and elsewhere. As can be imagined scheduling was apt to present problems when one was dealing with a cast of professionals whose paid commitments had naturally to take priority over our requirements, and of amateurs with husbands to feed, or other jobs to attend to. Yet we were rarely held up for want of people to shoot on: and what a parade of new faces the film offers! Whatever the picture's total success, I am prepared to bet that no British film made this year will sport a livelier or more delightful cast.
Those summer days, when every morning for a month the 8.40 from Victoria set down on the platform of the Crystal Palace station at least four of us - Broughton and Sheets, Walter Lassally (indefatigable cameraman, operator and grips combined) and myself - are already far away. How much of the sunshine and pleasantness of that peculiarly sunny month has been captured, I wonder, in the four reels of film which are now being fine-cut, and have still to be dubbed and musicked? And - perhaps even more important - will The Pleasure Garden prove to have initiated any new phase in the British cinema, awakening by its example, our own, yet dormant free cineastes? For when people complain of preferential treatment having been accorded to a foreign talent, one can only wonder where exactly is the native genius which they might imagine to have been passed over. In any case matters of nationality cease to have much significance when we look at the thing itself: this Pleasure Garden, its people and its air, are certainly not American. They are not even primarily British. They belong rather to that no-man's land which is the country of the imagination; that is to say - everyman's land.
© University of Stirling 2004
