Edinburgh International Research Articles

In search of Zen at the Edinburgh Book Festival

What does ‘consciousness’ mean? And what does it imply? Phew, in less than ten words I have articulated two enormous questions, which continue to defy absolute and definitive answers. So I was excited to hear that the renowned psychologist Susan Blackmore would be speaking and answering questions at last month's Edinburgh International Book Festival, and volunteered to interview her.

The 63rd Edinburgh International Film Festival

The 63rd Edinburgh International Film Festival

Taking care of public space

Through an examination of the public art project Garden Service, in this text we explore possibilities of and obstacles to practices of agency. The project was commissioned by the art institution The Common Guild in Edinburgh for the exhibition Jardins Publics, which took place in connection with the Edinburgh International Festival in summer 2007. It was based on the participation of a community and the communication between different actors, from institutions and associations to individual local residents, communication which included solving conflicts as well as building partnerships.

The Black Balloon. Directed by Elissa Down. produced by Tristram Miall, Icon Home Entertainment, 2008

Released September 2008, The Black Balloon , winner of the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival, had its UK debut at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June 2008. The writer and director Elissa Down was present to answer questions after the screening. The film explores the dynamics of

A picture of the contemporary combined arts festival landscape

The last 10–15 years has seen the rapid growth of festivals in Britain and overseas. This article examines the current situation of combined arts festivals in the UK in an effort to understand what the British festival environment looks like in the early years of the new millennium. A number of questions present themselves regarding the history and development of the current festival structure, the number of festivals, their size, distribution, audiences, geographical locations, programming content, duration, seasonality, influences, objectives, future plans and so forth. Combined arts festivals are defined as those containing more than one genre of arts, e.g., Edinburgh International Festival. Research methods include a survey questionnaire sent to 117 UK combined arts festivals (56 per cent response rate) to discern audience demographics, programming history, funding and future plans. In-depth interviews were also conducted with festival organizers. Based on survey data, it is argued that a homogeneous combined arts festival “type” is developing and replicating across the country. This argument is supported by the similarity in programming choices and festival format of a majority of the festivals surveyed. One of the main reasons for the increasing formulaic approach to festival programming and design is the increasing competition for funding as public and private funding sources expect combined arts festivals to achieve socio-economic targets and become more sustainable from one year to the next. This can be seen to be contributing to the increasing professionalism of combined arts festival organization, which has resulted in the majority of combined arts festival directors favouring “safe” content options that emulate the successes of several large, long-established festivals. Such an approach has had detrimental effects on the creativity of the arts festival landscape on the whole and may also be altering the symbolic meanings of festivals for communities and places.

News and Notes

News and Notes

Eurocorr 2008: 'Managing corrosion for sustainability' – Part 1

This year’s Eurocorr conference took place at the Edinburgh International Congress Centre (EICC) located somewhat to the west of the centre of the city, just beyond the castle. The EICC is a fantastic venue and the exceptionally professional staff ensured that everything ran very smoothly indeed. Under the title ‘Managing corrosion for sustainability’, the conference ran from 7 to 11 September. It was well organised by Dechema on behalf of EFC, together with a local organising committee headed up by Stuart Lyon. The local committee was led by the Institute of Corrosion under the auspices of the UK Corrosion Coordination Group with the welcome assistance of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining, the Institute of Metal Finishing and NACE UK.

News and Notes

News and Notes

News and Notes

News and Notes

Notes Toward a History of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, 196977

Notes Toward a History of the Edinburgh International Film Festival, 196977

News and Notes

News and Notes

Cannes Castoffs? The 62nd Edinburgh International Film Festival

‘Everyone's entitled to their own opinion, right?’ ‘Wrong.’ ‘He or she is entitled to their informed opinion.’ Five minutes into Dreams With Sharp Teeth , Erik Nelson's documentary profile of author, screenwriter, and critic Harlan Ellison, my black little heart swelled as America's most curmudgeonly man of letters articulated just why I do what I do. You see, like most critics, I'm a bit of a git; a smug know-it-all. I'm always right. And everyone who doesn't agree with me is wrong. Always. If you don't believe me, watch this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival's opening night film, John Maybury's The Edge Of Love , then try and tell me that Keira Knightley and Sienna Miller are actresses and not Thunderbird puppets. Go on, try. They may be exquisitely sculpted, but be honest; Gerry Anderson has more to do with their acting technique than Stanislavski or Strasberg. And the only thing worse than Keira's singing as Vera, '40s nightclub chanteuse and childhood sweetheart of Dylan Thomas, is Miller's horrendous Oirish accent as Dylan's wife Caitlin; more Bengal than Ballymeena. Had it been made in the '70s by Ken Russell, Maybury's po-faced account of the tangled love life of the Welsh poet could've been a delirious camp classic in the style of Russell's other gloriously over-the-top tales of artists' lives The Music Lovers or Lisztomania . And in Russell's hands the scene where Miller and Knightley share a bath would have been worth the price of admission alone. Unfortunately it's not the '70s and that's 104 minutes of my life that John Maybury has stolen from me. While The Edge Of Love may have been thinner and less tasty than Keira and Sienna's bathwater, at least it kicked off the 62nd Edinburgh International Film Festival, its 1st in its new June …

The Black Balloon

Released September 2008, The Black Balloon , winner of the 2008 Berlin International Film Festival, had its UK debut at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in June 2008. The writer and director Elissa Down was present to answer questions after the screening. The film explores the dynamics of

Sister Conferences ESSCIRC/ESSDERC Meet on 15–19 September, The 2008 European Forum for Solid-State Circuits is in Edinburgh, Scotland

2008 European Forum for Solid-State Circuits is in Edinburgh, Scotland This year's ESSCIRC/ESSDERC conferences on 15-19 September at the Edinburgh International Conference Centre (EICC) will share six keynote presentations and technical sessions on topics bridging both communities while keeping separate Technical Programs. In adddition to six workshops, ESSCIRC tutorials will cover CMOS at the "bleeding edge," nanoelectronics, and integrating CMOS with other technologies.

New appointments at the Edinburgh International Science Festival

New appointments at the Edinburgh International Science Festival

Troilus and Cressida (review)

Reviewed by: Troilus and Cressida Claire Altree Troilus and Cressida Presented by Edinburgh International Festival in association with the Royal Shakespeare Company at the King's Theatre, Edinburgh. August 14–26, 2006. Directed by Peter Stein. Set by Ferdinand Wögerbauer. Costumes by Anna Maria Heinreich. Lighting by Japhy Weideman. Sound by Fernando Nicci. Fights by Malcolm Ranson. With Henry Pettigrew (Troilus), Annabel Scholey (Cressida), Richard Clothier (Hector), Paul Jesson (Pandarus), Adam Levy (Paris), Vincent Regan (Achilles), Ian Hughes (Thersites), Simon Armstrong (Aeneas), John Franklin-Robbins (Nestor), David Yelland (Ulysses), Oliver Kieran-Jones (Patroclus), Richard Wills-Cotton (Diomedes), Ian Hogg (Agamemnon), Roger May (Margarelon), Arthur Cox (Calchas), John Kane (Menelaus), Julian Lewis Jones (Ajax), Jeffrey Wickham (Priam), Kate Miles (Cassandra), Rachel Pickup (Helen), and Charlotte Moore (Andromache). The year 2006 marked an ambitious re-appraisal of the Shakespeare's Complete Works by the Royal Shakespeare Company. With the casting of well-known stars, including Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, and Judi Dench, and the presence of major theatre companies such as the Berliner Ensemble and the Teatr Piesn Kozla from Poland, it promised to be a year of groundbreaking and memorable performances. This production of Troilus and Cressida began as an integral part of Sir Brian McMaster's final season in charge of the Edinburgh International Festival, and later took up residence at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-Upon-Avon as part of the company's Complete Works series. Peter Stein, who has a long association with the Edinburgh Festival, directed this production of Troilus and Cressida, one of Shakespeare's more problematic plays—it is both thematically and syntactically dense, combining sexual politics with an increasingly barbarous war until the audience can seemingly only conclude with Thersites, "lechery, lechery; still, wars and lechery; nothing else holds fashion." This new production contained a number of prominent achievements; most noteworthy were the effective and perceptive lighting effects, particularly during the procession of soldiers in 1.2. The vanity of war was illuminated by the strip of light beginning downstage right and traversing the stage to upstage left, upon which the warriors paraded. The scene resembled a fashion catwalk, a notion accentuated by the voyeurism of Pandarus and Cressida who stood downstage left admiring the armor-bedecked "models." Of equal [End Page 121] note were the costumes, which certainly contributed to this ever-present impression of personal conceit and narcissism. The warriors were, for the most part, dressed in short garments during the battle scenes, and the armor (helmets, shields) was ostentatious and flamboyant. The set was dominated by a large, movable metal wall that remained a backdrop for a majority of the play but during the final act flattened out to provide the warriors with a sloped surface on which to wage war. To both sides of the stage, Stein placed tents, which later moved to the center of the stage and connected together to provide a meeting place for Cressida and Diomedes. The obtrusive tents and the use of the auditorium boxes as hiding places for Thersites (stage right) and Ulysses and Troilus (stage left) as they watched Cressida and Diomedes, created a sense, as Shakespeare's plays often do, of presentation rather than illusion, of disturbing the boundary between actors and audience. The set did, however, create problems for the production during the run, as the backstage equipment dramatically failed in the first half on the first two nights. Although fully functional during the performance I saw, the moving metallic surface drew attention to the technology itself more than it provided an instrument for actors' play or, conversely, an illusion of place. Though undoubtedly clever it seemed a little superfluous. Stein assembled a fine and highly talented cast. Pettigrew, as Troilus, effectively created a sense of teenage angst and his transformation from forlorn lover to embittered, revengeful soldier was tragic. Clothier's Hector provided the heroic nobility while Ian Hughes as Thersites was his binary opposite, a cowardly comic who, nevertheless, remained the play's most perceptive commentator. The Greeks were equally well directed as older men plotting and scheming, inciting a war that is seemingly at a stalemate until the climactic confrontation of Achilles and Hector. Vincent Regan...

News and Notes

News and Notes

Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader (review)

Reviewed by: Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader Ryan Shand (bio) Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader Edited by Peter Todd and Benjamin CookLux, 2004; Columbia University Press, 2006 The films of Margaret Tait have been undergoing critical rehabilitation in Scotland since they were the focus of a retrospective at the 2004 Edinburgh International Film Festival. Not so much forgotten as never discovered by [End Page 107] Scottish critics, these short animations and documentaries impressed those who knew of her only as a poet, or as the director of the feature film Blue Black Permanent (1992). It was known that Tait had written other feature film scripts, but it was the short films that she left behind after she passed away in 1999 that took many by surprise. Ironically for an artist who spent most of her days on the island of Orkney (north of the Scottish mainland), she had a loyal following not in Glasgow or Edinburgh but in London. There she was embraced by figures from the avant-garde film community, who saw in her a kindred spirit. The efforts of these London filmmakers, programmers, and critics led to the 2004 retrospective and subsequent touring program around Britain and beyond that the films eventually came to light. These individuals raised the money to enable a full restoration of the films by the Scottish Screen archive that has resulted in impressive new viewing prints. In parallel to these restoration and exhibition activities came a beautifully designed book, Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader, published by the London film collective LUX. Edited by Peter Todd and Benjamin Cook, this collection aims to demonstrate the close ties between Tait's poetry and her film practice, as well as to encourage future research into these highly distinctive films. In this regard the book is an important contribution to critical and scholarly debates. There is an informative account by Janet McBain and Alan Russell (of the Scottish Screen archive) on the technical challenges in restoring films that were constantly being altered and changed right up until Tait's death. The archivists also encountered problems in discerning Tait's artistic intentions, which were sometimes not entirely clear due to the existence of multiple and varying copies of the same film. This problem of the artist's approach to her work also dominates the most entertaining section of the reader, in which excerpts from Margaret Tait's press and television interviews, selected by David Curtis, are published in a chapter entitled "In Her Own Words." Tait's insight, modesty, and humor are in full evidence when discussing her resistance to being labeled an avant-garde filmmaker: I don't see that it's a term one can use of oneself anyway. How can anyone say such a thing of themself (sic)? Besides that, there's something too limiting about the idea of the avant-garde—as if at all costs you must be making innovation. Cinema itself is an innovation of this century, and within the mainstream of it, the most astonishing things have been achieved. It bowls me over. It really does. But do you mind your films being called avant-garde by others? Oh, well, no! How could I mind that? It's not the only thing they've been called, though. (95) This is a constant theme in Tait's interviews—her desire to escape easy categorization at all costs. She is similarly critical of the documentary film movement, a tradition that is particularly strong in Scottish film culture (93). Her films, from reputation alone, seem to exist outside of all established canons and, moreover, are seen too rarely to correct such claims. While this collection aims to remedy this critical neglect, Tait's attitude (understandable for an artist constantly trying to challenge and outdo herself) is adopted by some of the essayists in the collection, with mixed results. Margaret Tait is sometimes depicted as a completely unique artist, outside of history and specific film movements, and this is where I have some reservations about the collection. It is that Margaret Tait's work is clearly valued greatly by editor Peter Todd, a filmmaker and programmer who knew her...

News and Notes

News and Notes

News and Notes

News and Notes