Free Room is a new artistic interpretation of “If”, a film portrait of society in which one of the great outsiders of British cinema, Lindsay Anderson, depicts the system of elite private schools in England.
For his video installation, Alex Morrison restages individual scenes from Anderson’s film and presents them to the audience in three parallel video projections. In this way he employs the film original, which was made at the time of student protests in 1968, to compare and contrast motifs of individual freedom and social order, role play and authenticity, idealism and subversion.
Anderson’s impressive images of one pupil’s revolt against the senselessness of school rules and rituals are thus used as a social metaphor and demonstrate Morrison’s main interest: an investigation into the delimitation between public and private spheres and a view of the conflicts that emerge from this kind of delimitation.
In Anderson’s film, the revolt turns into a rebellion that leads to armed resistance and throws the campus into anarchy and chaos. Alex Morrison separates these images from the context of 1968 and translates them into an altered artistic present.
