treywillwest Lindsay Anderson's earliest documentaries, Meet the Pioneers and this, reveal, collectively, a complex portrait of the mid-20th century, British working-class. Meet the Pioneers, was commissioned by the Wakefield Express industrial company in Yorkshire to demonstrate the efficient greatness of its process. But Anderson smuggles in subversively lively depictions of the workers, showing how the subjugated humans were the real personality and power behind the corporate-acknowledged accomplishments. Wakefield Express was commissioned by the British government to show off the industrial accomplishments of the title-company. This state sanctioned depiction does indeed present the working class as creative, but here, within an ideological abode more openly friendly to the workers, Anderson depicts both that class's best and worst qualities. Not a few of these white workers are attracted to fascist political tendencies.

lor_ There's a quaintness to Lindsay Anderson's early documentary about how a local newspaper works. The family business was already over 100 years old when he shot this, and now over six decades later000009 I was surprised to see it still alive and well on a website.The old Linotype methods and way of putting a newspaper together have changed radically, and I suspect even the weekly activities of a local beat reporter are different too. Film is so old that messages are still being sent by pneumatic tubes (resembles those gimmicks for sending deposits at a drive-thru bank).I worked for a newspaper throughout the '80s and we still had ancient ways of doing things -even at my desk I would get an outside line by not dialing but asking the switchboard for a line; I typed my stories on manual typewriter with carbon paper for copies, etc. Layout and group proof-reading at a table was also antiquated as shown in this movie made three decades earlier.Nostalgia apart, Anderson's film does show us the purpose of local reporting and the face-to-face style of gathering news, even of the trivial "local person's picture in the paper" variety and working with advertisers. One can easily surmise what is being lost, at a very rapid pace, by the shift to internet news and the unchecked "going viral" nature of today's media world, compared to a simpler but generally more conscientious era.