1956O DREAMLAND

COMMENT

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. 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.