The Individual, the Community and the Impact of Touring Film: Interviews with Jim Hunter and Others

Abstract

The impact of the Highlands and Islands Film Guild is here explored through narrators interviewed in the 2010s about their experiences of touring film shows between the late 1940s and early 1970s. Centrally featured is the testimony of Jim Hunter, journalist, historian, erstwhile director of the Scottish Crofters’ Union and chairman of the Highlands and Islands Enterprise, whose testimony is analysed for six major narrative features – cultural and religious transformation, cinema as enchantment, sense of community, the sense of ‘the other’, social rescue for the Highland zone, and religion as social danger or social lifeboat for the Highlands. Other narrators, including Dr Finlay Macleod, are cited as foils in some of these narrative strands. The reception of the Guild in English and Gaelic-speaking areas is noted, as its place in the arrival of new broadcasting technologies.