This chapter will examine the artistic collaboration between director Lindsay Anderson and designer Jocelyn Herbert on the production design of the film If … (1968), offering a historical account that locates this partnership within a broader creative environment encompassing practice across film and theatre. My contention is that the writing of theatre and film histories is often constrained by ad hoc disciplinary boundaries, which preclude a fuller examination of practitioner experience. Whilst intermedial approaches have transformed our understanding of contemporary media forms in recent years, historical accounts of creative practitioners’ work remains largely media-specific and therefore not necessarily reflective of their professional and cultural experience or able to encompass the cross-fertilisation of practice that impacted on their work.

Intermediality as a term is used in this chapter to refer to a process within a broader historical framework, where the boundaries between media blur. Mueller's definition is useful in this respect:

Anderson and Herbert were only one example of creative practitioners who worked across theatre, film and television. As Geoff Brown has noted, because of the geographical proximity of the production centres for film and theatre in Britain, cross fertilisation between the two industries was already well established.Yet the influence of theatre on the development of cinema in this country has often been understood to be detrimental, tying film to an over-dependence on adaptation and literary material and limiting its cinematic potential as a result. ‘The history of cinema’, as Susan Sontag has suggested, ‘is often treated as the history of its emancipation from theatrical models’.

Whilst I have argued, alongside others, that the relationship between theatre and cinema can be understood in much more productive and positive terms, their shared identity as performance mediums has continued to be underemphasised and visual reciprocities between the two practices have been overlooked. For instance, one of the key influences in the 1960s across theatre and film was the German director and playwright Bertolt Brecht.