A film is a mercurial thing: its very nature changes, depending on where we see it, when we see it, and who we see it with.
This realisation came home to me strongly a few weeks ago in the fine city of Bordeaux. I'd been asked to take part in a short festival called Les Ecrivains Font Leur Cinema, in which writers were invited to introduce one of their favourite films. The invitation arrived shortly after the publication of Lindsay Anderson's collected writings under the title Never Apologise, and I'd been immersed in the book for days: invigorated by the way these essays, written over a period of 50 years, pulled off a rare and important feat - combining a passionate commitment to the ideal of a truly British cinema with an absolute lack of parochialism.
My head full of Lindsay Anderson, and knowing from French journalist friends that he was not as well known across the channel as he deserved to be (not nearly as well known as Ken Loach, for instance) I emailed the organisers of the festival to ask if they could arrange a screening of that edgy, picaresque masterpiece O Lucky Man! An apologetic reply came back within a couple of hours: there were no prints of the film in circulation in France, apparently: would it be OK to screen Britannia Hospital instead? At which point, I hesitated.
Britannia Hospital was the film that almost killed off Anderson's directorial career in the UK. Released in 1982, just as the Falklands War triggered an unexpected wave of British jingoism, this venomous state-of-the-nation movie ran counter to the mood of the times just as emphatically as If ... had caught it 14 years earlier. I have a vivid memory of seeing it at the ABC Shaftesbury Avenue during its (extremely short) London release. Sitting with my then-girlfriend in an almost empty auditorium, I realised after about 10 minutes that I had brought her to the date movie from hell.
The film spares nobody: neither the hospital management who will stop at nothing (even murder) to ensure the smooth running of a ludicrous royal visit, nor the petty, self-interested trade unionists who are bent on disrupting it. Private health care, the delusions of science, the complicity of the media and the fantasy of Empire are all comprehensively dumped upon. Coaxing Brechtian, anti-realist performances out of his cast - and using that cast to collapse the stifling distinction between high and low culture (Robin Askwith shares the screen with Joan Plowright) - Anderson produced a shockingly truthful caricature of Britain on the cusp of the Thatcher revolution.
Too truthful, I now realise, for the audiences of 1982. Like everyone else at the time, I was in no mood to have the political and moral ugliness of those days reflected back at me so unforgivingly. Reviewers thought the film insulting: and so did the two of us, huddled together in that echoing cinema. When Malcolm MacDowell, recreated as a modern Frankenstein monster, rises from the operating table, bites the hand that has created him and then gets his head torn off in bloody close-up during the ensuing struggle, we squirmed with revulsion. Twenty-three years later, watching the same scene in Bordeaux, in a lovingly-preserved art deco cinema packed to the roof with students and cinéphiles, the house rocked with laughter, and I joined in wholeheartedly.
What had changed in the meantime? Me, for one thing. And the mainstream audience's threshold for tolerating gross-out violence, I suppose. But there was more to it than that: Britannia Hospital was a triumph, as far as those French viewers were concerned. Here was a film which combined the off-the-wall, anti-establishment humour of Monty Python (which the French adore) with a deep moral seriousness, a fluid cinematic language and a real charge of poetry and ideas: a rare combination, one which you certainly won't find in the work of any other British director, living or dead.
As the discussion which followed the screening rolled on past midnight, the dominant feeling among the audience seemed to be incredulity that this director was not better known in France, and, more importantly, treasured as a national icon in his own country. And I have to say, reflecting on that occasion in the weeks since my return from Bordeaux, that it's a feeling I've come to share.
Last weekend I travelled down to Southend for a screening of three more of his films, and to attend a meeting of the committee of the Lindsay Anderson Memorial Foundation - set up by his lifelong friend Lois Smith in order "to promote his memory and to foster the spirit he represents". It was a joyous event, but the concluding film - Anderson's last production, Is That All There Is?, a television self-portrait of an artist in the winter of his life - left everyone in a melancholy frame of mind. It was a reminder that Anderson himself is gone, and the "spirit he represents" must fight an ever harder battle to survive in today's British film culture.
A few years ago I was sitting in a London taxi with an independent film producer. It was 1999, and between us we had concocted an idea for an elaborate, wide-ranging satirical film about the soullessness and hunger for spirituality in modern Britain. We were on our way to pitch it to a big-name British director with a track record in commercially successful movies. Mulling over our project, I said to my colleague: "I suppose what we really want to make here is a kind of O Lucky Man! for our time." She smiled her agreement- we were both fans of the film - and then thought about it for another few seconds, before turning to me and hissing: "But don't say that to him! Whatever you do in the meeting - don't say that."
To his friends and admirers, such as David Storey, Lindsay Anderson was "a large, expansive, celebratory, liberating spirit". But to too many of the key players in todays's market-driven British film industry, he remains a byword for the difficult, the uncomfortable, the uncommercial. What chance of making anything nowadays with his rigorous honesty, his political commitment, and his grand disdain for "story arcs", characters' "emotional journeys" and all the other clapped-out talismans of the mainstream cinema? A 21st-century Britannia Hospital? Most British film producers would shudder at the thought. Which is why I kept my mouth shut during that meeting. And we still never got the money to make our film.
· The Lindsay Anderson Memorial Foundation is at www.LindsayAnderson.com. Jonathan Coe appears at the Guardian Hay Festival on June 4 and 5. www.hayfestival.com
