A gunshot pierces the dusty silence of a Gothic chapel. An image, a sound, an act that is both the starting point and the programmatic manifesto of “If...,” the earth-shattering work with which Lindsay Anderson, in 1968, did not merely film the youth rebellion, but distilled its purest, most caustic, and surrealist essence, consigning it to eternity. To understand the explosion of this film, it is necessary to immerse oneself in the year of its birth. 1968 is not just a date; it is a code, a cultural earthquake that shook the planet. While students in Paris erected barricades and the Prague Spring was crushed by tanks, in an English college, seemingly isolated from the world, a group of young people staged their own, very personal revolution. Anderson, one of the fathers of British Free Cinema, captured this spirit not with the eye of a documentary filmmaker, but with the visionary gaze of a poet and the acumen of a sociologist.

The college, with its centuries-old architecture, anachronistic rituals, and oppressive hierarchy, becomes a perfect microcosm of the British establishment and, by extension, of any rigid and authoritarian power structure. It is a world divided into castes: the “Whips” (the prefects), sadistic enforcers of a senseless order, guardians of a tradition emptied of meaning; and the “Scum” (the dregs), the freshmen destined to suffer bullying that oscillates between the farcical and the inhuman. In this system, discipline is a form of ritualized violence and tradition an alibi for abuse of power. Anderson orchestrates this representation with a wit reminiscent of the absurdism of Eugène Ionesco transferred to the cloisters of Eton. The rules are arbitrary, the punishments disproportionate, logic banned in favor of a custom that justifies itself by the mere fact that it has always existed.

At the center of this concentration camp universe stands the figure of Mick Travis, played by Malcolm McDowell in his dazzling debut, whose face is a mask of defiance and whose sardonic smile will become an icon of anti-authoritarian cinema. Mick is not an ideologue. He has not read Marx or Bakunin. His is an instinctive, existential, almost aesthetic rebellion. Together with his associates, the “Crusaders,” he does not plan a political overthrow; he simply refuses to play the game. Their sanctuary is a room covered with images cut out of magazines: guerrillas, ferocious animals, naked bodies. A visual collage that is their only true constitution, an altar to the imagination against the repressive prosaicness of college. Mick's rebellion is that of a Rimbaud wearing a college scarf, an insurrection born more out of disgust for the ugliness of power than out of a coherent revolutionary plan.

Anderson's greatness lies in translating this spirit into a radically free cinematic language. The film glides naturally from raw realism to unbridled surrealism, breaking down the wall between what is and what is dreamed. The alternation between black and white and color, born, as the production legend tells, out of budgetary necessity (lighting the vast chapel in color would have been prohibitive), becomes a brilliant stylistic choice. Black and white is not the past, but the oppressive monotony of the institutional present; color explodes in moments of escape, fantasy, and liberating violence. It is cinema itself that rebels against its own conventions, declaring its formal freedom in parallel with the struggle of its protagonists. When the headmaster, during a search, opens a drawer in Mick's desk and pulls out a miniature, smiling version of himself, we are not faced with an avant-garde quirk, but with the most lucid representation of power as a self-referential farce. Anderson draws heavily on the legacy of Jean Vigo and his “Zéro de conduite” (1933), the spiritual father of every story of school rebellion, but contaminates it with the irreverent poison of Luis Buñuel. The impromptu appearance of the girl (Christine Noonan) in the boys' dormitory, or the image of a tiger fetus preserved in a jar, are surrealist stabs in the side of British realism, gashes that reveal the pulsating subconscious beneath the surface of respectability.

The path of the “Crusaders” is a gradual and deliberate descent into illegality. It begins with small acts of insubordination—drinking vodka, smoking, listening to Missa Luba with its Congolese Sanctus mocking Anglican liturgy—and then intensifies: the escape from campus on a stolen motorcycle, the erotic and surreal encounter with the waitress in a café, until the act that marks the point of no return. The corporal punishment suffered by Mick and his companions is not the cause of their revolution, but only the catalyst. It is the confirmation that the system cannot be reformed, but only destroyed. The violence of power, however ritualized and “just” according to its own rules, generates a mirror image of violence, but anarchic and purifying.

The ending is one of the most powerful and ambiguous sequences in the history of cinema. During “Founders' Day,” the ceremony celebrating the college's tradition, Mick and his companions, barricaded on the roof, open fire on the crowd of parents, professors, and generals. Is it real? Is it a fantasy of revenge? Anderson masterfully refuses to give an answer. The camera lingers on McDowell's face, whose furious gaze pierces the screen as he fires relentlessly. It doesn't matter whether the massacre is really happening or only in the minds of the protagonists. What matters is the necessity of that image, its cathartic and terrible inevitability. It is the exclamation mark after the “If...” in the title. If you push an individual beyond the limit, if you deny their humanity in the name of an abstract order, their only possible response becomes the destruction of that order.

“If...” is the first chapter in the unofficial Mick Travis trilogy, which continues with the picaresque satires of “O Lucky Man!” (1973) and “Britannia Hospital” (1982), composing a corrosive fresco of the state of the British nation. But this first film retains a purity and anger that remain unsurpassed. It is not a political pamphlet; it is a visual poem about anarchy as an act of spiritual survival. It is Allen Ginsberg's “Howl” transposed into a classroom, an act of cultural sabotage that uses the grammar of cinema to dismantle the grammar of power. More than fifty years after its release, its iconoclastic charge has lost none of its effectiveness. It reminds us that before any ideology, before any political program, revolution is a state of mind, an irrepressible, desperate, and sometimes joyful desire to say “no.” And to take up arms, even if only those of the imagination.