What

If... by L. Anderson (1968)

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sometimes i wonder, if the all the "revolutions" that all the movies in the history of cinema represent, personal, differentiate revolutions, aren't the very same thing; if every and any author decided to challenge the mainstream culture, minds and tastes and habits of the world around him, both the critic and the user, by expressing in images and sounds his own zeigeist, his personal POV through the camera and the view of his protagonists, and in this case the idea driving this Anderson to his personal revolution could be dramatically summarized in a modern acronym: "wtf?". following, the heaven-sent arsenal, and the famous finale with the pupils on the roof shooting people as they leave the church. I'm particularly curious about that particular scene, since the church may be just a place where people gather, or that particular place where particular people gather to do particular things; I mean the catholic Herd, of course. And since we all agree that this is the right word for people like the Gentiles, after all my particular curiosity  doesn't really matter.

 I guess the answer is yes, of course, that is where anybody becomes "somebody" in the industry of entertainment, by providing a view of this very world from the farthest point; and the power of that vision often is such to create one or more "stars"in the making.. 

Often, not every time.

Whether because of the production budget or the light, some good black and white sequences by Ondrícek are here to remind us what b/w is, most of all:

different from color. Sometimes much better.

 Very English faces in here,

and TEETH!

 and a threatening nude of the seemingly most prudish "woman" on earth, which ended up in "the first instance of a full-frontal female nude passed by the British Board of Film Classification" (see):

they should have cut that off, lazy rotten sods!

Based on Vigo's Zero de conduit (See), which in turn seemed to be the summary of a motion picture, If... is even less than that, is just a young student's idea of a movie (then 26 y.o. writer Sherwin) filmed by a middle-aged documentarist (then 45 director Anderson); a film "against", crashing against the idea of success coming from the very ("middle-class") audience he would shoot at... not using a camera...
The same idea -hollywood-size- behind Targets, which happens to be produced the same year...
Nothing special; but it happened to come out at the same right moment -in "roaring" 1968- and that made it special. Italic. Sort of.
Not for the blogger, indeed.