Lindsay Anderson-O Dreamland (1953)

First shown in 1956, O Dreamland is a low budget 'solo' by Lindsay Anderson about a fun fair. It's the type of pop-culture subject that almost anyone can make a little film about. But Anderson turns Margate's gimcrack, fake world of scary Dreamland into a metaphor for the shabbiness of modern life. Rather than appearing frightened, Anderson's characters are caught off-guard, sheep-like and bewildered, assaulted by a barrage of coarse images of death and frivolity. Channel4




Without the money for sound-recording equipment Anderson shot the footage mute on a 16-mm camera. The sound was added later, enhancing the dream-like effect. It became one of the first films to be screened under the banner of 'Free Cinema'. Free Cinema was an idea - later to become a movement - invented by Anderson, Karel Reisz, Tony Richardson and Lorenza Mazzetti to break away from the entrenched Grierson school of commentary-led industrial documentary, and to get their more impressionistic films accepted as a new direction for documentary. Channel4




Lindsay Anderson's O Dreamland was made in 1953, around the same time as Anderson was making his Oscar-winning documentary Thursday's Children, co-directed with Guy Brenton. Anderson had just one assistant - John Fletcher, who was to be a mainstay of the Free Cinema films. Equipment was a single 16mm camera and an audiotape recorder. Screenonline




Once completed, the film was shelved, with little prospect of ever being shown. As Anderson said, "you don't do anything with a 10-minute, 16-millimetre film. It's just there, that's all." It wasn't until early 1956, when the idea for the first Free Cinema programme was born, that it occurred to Anderson to include O Dreamland. Screenonline




This is one of the most personal of the Free Cinema films. A 12-minute tour of the Margate funfair Dreamland (which still stands - in disrepair - today), the film features bleak and unattractive photography and a spare and impressionistic soundtrack. Despite the absence of a commentary, the film clearly conveys Anderson's critical view of Dreamland's 'attractions' - a 'Torture through the Ages' exhibit; bingo; penny arcades; bangers, beans and chips and seemingly endless mechanical puppets. Screenonline




The lack of commentary was a characteristic of the Free Cinema films, as was the absence of live sound. This was initially forced on the filmmakers by the costs involved in synchronised sound, but the financial constraints freed Anderson and his colleagues to be creative and to use sound in expressive ways: a feature of O Dreamland's soundtrack is the recurring laughter of the mechanical dummies, which takes on a sinister, mocking tone. Screenonline




The effect of O Dreamland is summed-up by Gavin Lambert in his article on Free Cinema: "Everything is ugly… It is almost too much. The nightmare is redeemed by the point of view, which, for all the unsparing candid camerawork and the harsh, inelegant photography, is emphatically humane. Pity, sadness, even poetry is infused into this drearily tawdry, aimlessly hungry world." Screenonline