Scottish Cinema Research Articles

Isolated figures in a remote Scottish Landscape: place and identity in the films of Scott Graham

ABSTRACT The relationship between place and identity has had a very specific significance in the development of Scottish cinema. Until the 1980s Scotland tended to be depicted as an essentially rural and remote, a fantasy space characterised within the interlinked representational discourses of tartanry and kailyard by romantic and picturesque highland and island locations or parochial and backward villages and small towns. With the emergence of a New Scottish cinema in the 1990s, this was subsequently replaced by a focus on more realist narratives located in the urban centres of Glasgow and Edinburgh. In this essay, I will explore the work of Scott Graham, whose three features to date - Shell, Iona and Run – have provided a renewed engagement with a contemporary Scotland that (re)incorporates both the highland and island landscapes that provided the backdrop to the romantic tradition of tartanry, and the small-town setting familiar from the kailyard tradition. These settings are central to the identity and predicament of Graham’s protagonists, who are struggling with a sense of isolation, loneliness or lack of connection, alienated from place, community and even family. Consequently, Graham provides evidence for the continuing relevance of a distinctive Scottish cinematic tradition.

Scottish Cinema’s Understated Linguistic Diversity: A Brief Overview of the Scottish Film Industry

Scotland’s cultural revival of the last decades has been accompanied, in Scottish film, by an exponential increase in Scottish productions and co‑productions. However, the optimism with which we might greet this development is somewhat mitigated by a perceived lack of diversity.Researchers generally concur that the dominant discourses and representations of modern Scotland in film are of white urban working class heterosexual male experience (Sillars, 2009; Martin-Jones, 2009; Hill, 2000; Lea et Schoene, 2003; Morgan, 2003; Neely, 2008), despite the decline of the industries, growing unemployment and evolving demographics. Seldom noted but directly related and relevant is that the rich heterogeneity present in the set of language varieties known as Scots (whose status as a distinct language rather than as a ‘deviant’ variant of English has been steadily undermined since the Union of the Crowns) is also lacking, so that Scots is now a language that is often only spoken at the margins of Scottish films, and increasingly limited to stereotyped comical characters. Hence the multilingualism inherent throughout Scotland, where both Scots and English are widely spoken, is undervalued. However, this has not always been the case, as we will see with reference to the films of Douglas’s childhood trilogy (1972–1978), predominantly in Scots, and Radford’s Another Time, Another Place (1982), unique in Scottish film history as a bilingual film in Scots and non-subtitled Italian.Given the dominance of the three myths of Scotland (Tartanry, Kailyard and Clydesideism), coupled with the prevalence of English as a commercially viable and culturally dominant language of cinema, Scotland’s multilingualism is rarely showcased, but nevertheless a handful of filmmakers have brought either community languages (such as Urdu, Punjabi or Polish) or foreign languages (such as German, Italian or Arabic) to Scottish screens. In these films foreign languages are linked to the politics of power, and brought to rural Scottish communities as a consequence of war, whilst the presence of community languages are to be found in films that explore diasporic communities and syncretic ‘new’ ethnicities, particularly in the urban setting.The centrality of multilingualism in shaping and informing our evolving cultural identities and inter-cultural relations is often overlooked, to the extent that even when linguistic plurality is present in films, it is often passed over ‘in silence’. Accordingly, none of the Scots language films that will be discussed in this article are recognised as such in their technical production details in the industry. Similarly, the fact that filmmakers such as Douglas, Loach, Radford and Ramsay value foreign languages such as Arabic (Douglas), Italian (Radford), German (Douglas), Spanish (Ramsay), Urdu (Loach) has gone largely unnoticed. To understand and encourage further expression of multilingualism in Scotland, we might perhaps begin by admitting the linguistic diversity which already exists.

Performing the National? Scottish Cinema in the Time of Indyref

This article examines Scottish cinema during the period 2012–17, assessing the ways in which the nation's constitutional debate, Scottish–English relations and discourses of national identity were engaged with thematically by films produced in this period. It argues that Scottish cinema in this period ‘performs the national’, in that a number of films flag their national status and engage with discourses of national identity at a distance, unburdened by any serious demand for national representativeness, as might be the case with a ‘national cinema’. From a corpus of texts in the period which offer the possibility of being read through discourses of the nation, two genre films, White Settlers and Sunshine on Leith, are analysed in detail for their differing narrative takes on Scottish–English relations in the contemporary moment. The article concludes by surmising that while film criticism in Scottish cinema has historically been overly determined by an ideologically driven pursuit of national representativeness, perhaps the welcome emphasis which has been placed in contemporary criticism on broadening the scope of Scottish cinema studies beyond the national has implied a false dichotomy between the two, whereas it is more likely that we can locate Scottish cinema somewhere in between.

The Impact of the Talkies on Scottish Cinema Architecture

The consequences of the introduction of sound for the architecture of cinema buildings is considered with a focus upon examples in Scotland completed in the 1929–30 period. The influence of the building acoustics pioneer, Hope Bagenal, in the design of the New Victoria cinema in London and its consequences for subsequent cinemas in Scotland, designed by Alister G. MacDonald (1898–1993), David Stokes (1908–90) and James McKissack (1875–1940) is explained and contextualized. Their clean-lined and fashionable styling was not only more easily adapted for good sound reproduction but also signified that cinema as a medium was entering a new phase.

Jonathan Murray, The New Scottish Cinema

The cover of Jonathan Murray’s most recent book, examining the development of Scottish cinema from the 1990s to the 2000s, features a striking image from Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006). The actor Kate Dickie, who plays the lead character of Jackie, is rendered in dark profile against a bright yellow background, her identity obscured by the high-contrast lighting. The film, an apt choice for the book’s cover, was produced as part of the Advance Party initiative, led by Glasgow-based Sigma Films, and the Danish production company Zentropa, and is one of a number of films produced in Scotland in the 2000s that Murray describes as having demonstrated ‘the extent to which traditional ideas of a deliberate, dominant and didactic focus on the question of nation are not straightforwardly applicable to a significant proportion of contemporary Scottish filmmaking’ (p. 175). The image from Red Road was the key image used for the worldwide promotion of the film, serving to give a sense of the film’s narrative focus and Jackie’s literal position in the dark in her daily work as a CCTV operator, but also acting as an indicator of the film’s deliberate positioning as a transnational film. The image is notable for its lack of obvious identifiers with its Scottish context. The identity obscured is not only Jackie’s but Scotland’s; the film’s location, as its narrative image suggests, could be anywhere.1

(Micro)film Studies

(Micro)film Studies María Antonia Vélez-Serna (bio) I live and work far from the place where I was born, so the past I research is a country twice foreign. When people ask why I research Scottish cinema history rather than Colombian, I confess that the reason is not an intense passion for this rainy corner of Europe but because I am here. I wanted to do archive work, and so my topic would need to be local. It is easy to underestimate the degree to which simple availability and access can determine entire research paths. And therefore it is easy to misunderstand the significance of the transformations brought about by digitization and online access to sources. Like many people, I like archives. What I like even more is traveling to archives. They give you a hidden purpose, both in tourist-thronged cities and unprepossessing industrial outskirts. The quest takes you on slow train lines, gets you lost, makes you hitch rides and despair in snow blizzards—all much more enticing than spending another day in front of the computer. Having the choice speaks of privilege: I can travel easily (as long as no visa is required), and I have the right credentials—for now—to pass as a bona fide researcher in the eyes of the gatekeepers. These conditions are contingent on institutional status, political climate, physical mobility, and how society parses class and race markers. Whatever its limitations, the internet has removed barriers to curiosity and has challenged the geographical exclusivity of postcode-lottery access to knowledge. The online database and the archive reading room are different vectors of experience, but they are complementary rather than opposed. Any archive visit is preceded and followed by many more hours of looking at a screen. Remote access to archive catalogs motivates travel to an archive in the first place. We tend to take them for granted, but online catalogs are extraordinary resources. Aggregation portals that bring together the holdings of many different institutions, such as Scottish Archive Network1 and the Archives Hub,2 are astonishing achievements. This infrastructure enables new forms of discovery. For instance, in Australia, the Humanities Networked Infrastructure project allows researchers to document relationships between different archival entities, offering ways to represent and share the expertise involved in discovering these connections.3 It is really the ability to make these connections—as much as access to original materials—that facilitates good research. Carolyn Steedman, in Dust, articulates this archival passion. She writes that the historian's authority "comes from having been there (the train to the distant city, the call number, the bundle opened, the dust …)."4 While such "dirty," "dusty" archival work is seen as a professional rite of passage, this really annoys the archivists who work very hard at making archives clean, bright, easy to use, and accessible.5 It also installs a specific professional practice as a kind of moral imperative. And yet, archive work is not always necessary or morally superior. What it is, often, is moving and beautiful. There is the aura of the original as an emotional connection to the past but also as material evidence—not only about the moment of its creation but also about the unbroken series of events that have allowed this object to travel from the past to now, leaving traces all over it. The archival document, in Arlette Farge's words, "is a tear in [End Page 95] the fabric of time" that produces in the reader an "insistent and stubborn" feeling of being in contact with the real.6 In the spirit of generosity, let us believe that it is this feeling, rather than professional defensiveness and a Calvinist work ethic, that makes many historians wary of mechanical and electronic reproduction of sources. This is not new; Farge, for instance, writes that "an archival manuscript is a living document; microfilm reproduction, while sometimes unavoidable, can drain the life out of it."7 Microfilm: a technology that has been around since the 1920s. A reel of microfilm is the thing most similar to a movie reel and also the most alien to it. Like an exhibition print, the microfilm reel is an...

The Eclipse of Scottish Cinema

The 1990s marked the beginning of a period of unprecedented film production activity in Scotland, part of the wider outpouring of artistic expression – notably in literature, theatre and painting – that occurred in the aftermath of the 1979 Scottish Assembly debacle and which came to constitute a kind of cultural devolution in the absence of political self-determination. The ‘new Scottish cinema’ provided a steady stream of films like Rob Roy (1995), Trainspotting (1996), Small Faces (1996), Regeneration (1997), My Name is Joe (1998), Mrs Brown (1998), Orphans (1998) and Ratcatcher (1999). These were underpinned by a fledging infrastructure that included significant new sources of finance for feature development and production, short film schemes designed to develop new talent and encouragement and assistance for incoming international productions. Therefore, it is all the more disappointing that since the achievement of political devolution in 1999, this creative energy and excitement has largely dissipated with the result that there is now less funding available for Scottish film-making than in the period before the return of a parliament and executive to Edinburgh. This article explores the implications of this ‘cultural eclipse’, exploring the power of the moving image to contribute in powerful ways to national projection and identity and charting the ways in which cinematic representations of Scotland have changed and developed before considering some of the reasons why the creative energy of the 1990s was subsequently dissipated. This state of affairs is contrasted with the success of film and television in Denmark, another small European nation that has adopted a markedly more enlightened approach to policy-making and institution-building.

Give a dog a bone: representations of Scotland in the popular genre cinema of Neil Marshall

The best-known and most influential cinematic image of Scotland is that which constructs the country as the civilised modern world’s northern boundary and ideological antithesis. This historically venerable representational tradition incorporates Brigadoon (d. Vincente Minnelli, USA, 1954), Brave (d. Mark Andrews/Brenda Chapman/Steve Purcell, USA, 2012) and much else in between. The following essay examines what is perhaps the most explicit and extended twenty-first century manifestation to date of Scotland’s classic celluloid stereotype: the oeuvre of British popular genre filmmaker Neil Marshall. Analysis of this director’s Scottish trilogy – Dog Soldiers (GB/Lux/USA, 2002), Doomsday (GB/USA/SA/Ger, 2008), and Centurion (GB/Fr, 2010) – suggests not simply the historical persistence of a particular cultural representation of a particular national culture and identity, but also the varied, and often non-nationally specific, thematic uses to which Scottish cinematic stereotypes can be and are put. That conclusion suggests a number of possible future directions for Scottish cinema criticism more generally. First, the need for a more inclusive critical engagement with popular genre cinema, a hitherto under-examined area with the study of Scotland’s relationship with the moving image. Second, the extent to which critics might usefully approach Scottish-set and -themed cinema in a more multifaceted manner than has frequently been the case in historical terms. Neil Marshall’s oeuvre exemplifies the complex interplay of nationally and non-nationally specific images and ideas that exist within many popular filmic representations of Scotland.

Blurring Borders: Scottish Cinema in the Twenty-First Century

More and more often, to watch and think about twenty-first-century Scottish cinema is to be transported beyond a single set of territorial and cultural borders. Yet, from the late 1970s, academic discussion of Scottish film traditionally saw the representation and reformation of national identity by indigenously based film-making talent, the creation of ‘alternative discourses . . . adequate to the task of dealing with the reality of Scottish life’ (McArthur 1982: 3), as an evolving local production sector’s main raison d’etre. Such priorities undoubtedly cast helpful light upon the defining characteristics of earlier eras within Scottish film history. They also provide a valuable reminder of a vibrant national cinema’s capacity to engage domestic audiences in shared processes of discussion and self-definition. Yet with each passing year, the idea of a deliberate, dominant and didactic focus on the question of nation seems less and less applicable to more and more of the cinema which contemporary Scotland produces. This is not to say that belief in Scottish cinema’s capacity ‘to play an important role at the heart of a revitalised national culture in reflecting the diversity of contemporary Scottish experience’ (Petrie 2000a: 226) ought to be junked overnight. It is, though, to argue that criticism must be prepared to acknowledge and explore the full range of contemporary Scottish film-makers’ creative and cultural ambitions. The latter both include and extend beyond the desires of an inwardly focused celluloid commentariat.

‘Bill Douglas Symposium’, Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, University of Exeter, 23 September 2011

The Scottish film-maker Bill Douglas died young – aged 57 – on 18 June 1991. He had been suffering from cancer. On the twentieth anniversary of his death, an event was held in his honour at the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture, the research facility and museum at the University of Exeter which stands as a fitting and lasting memorial to this mercurial film-making talent and avid collector of books, memorabilia and artefacts related to cinema and pre-cinema. After a thought-provoking and at times emotional day, the Bill Douglas Centre curator, Phil Wickham, was warmly and deservedly thanked and congratulated for his organisation of this event by Peter Jewell, Bill’s lifelong friend, supporter and cocollector. Peter had first met Bill in 1955 while on National Service in Egypt and they remained close until Bill’s death. This was a day that allowed us to acknowledge the extraordinary talent of one film-maker, to reconsider his legacy for Scottish and British cinema, and to acknowledge his importance as a figure who – through his extraordinary collection – has left a wonderful legacy for anybody interested in the history of cinema and popular culture. Douglas’ films – the autobiographical trilogy My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978), and an epic film about the Tolpuddle Martyrs, Comrades (1987), were released by the British Film Institute on DVD and Blu-ray in 2008 and 2009, and it is pleasing to know that these extraordinary films will now reach a wider audience.

From the Rive Gauche to the New Scottish Cinema: Alexander Trocchi, David Mackenzie, and Young Adam

In addition to generating new work across a range of art forms, the Scottish cultural revival of the 1980s and 1990s prompted the reappraisal of previously overlooked or undervalued contributions to the national canon. One notable beneficiary was the controversial writer Alexander Trocchi, whose debut novel Young Adam, originally published in Paris in 1954, was reissued in 1996. Seven years later, this brooding existential tale of a rootless drifter working as a bargee in Scotland's heavily industrialized central belt during the 1950s was adapted for the big screen by David Mackenzie. Featuring a cast led by Ewan McGregor and Tilda Swinton, the production remains one of the most interesting, yet critically neglected, works of the new Scottish cinema.

Review: Scottish Cinema Now

Unlike, say, France, Poland or Sweden, Scotland has never had a national cinema, and yet for various reasons a whole constellation of films, starting from the silent era, could be considered distinctly Scottish films, moreover, not always necessarily of British origin. The fourteen essays, plus the Introduction by Jonathan Murray, in Scottish Cinema Now demonstrate, even in opposition to the standpoints of some of the contributors, that what makes some films 'Scottish' is their ambivalent relationship to often universally recognised notions of Scottish identity, and it is an ambivalence very much related to the fact that, to borrow David McCrone's useful concept, although Scotland is now more of an 'understated nation', for much of the history of cinema it was a 'stateless' one.

Review: Scotland in Global Cinema

In the past two decades, the cinematic representation of Scotland has inspired an impressive body of literature. Back in 1982, Colin McArthur's pioneering collection (Scotch Reels, BFI: London, 1982) still had to establish that there is a film tradition which may be called Scottish in a meaningful sense even if most of it was created not in Scotland, but in London and Los Angeles. In 2010, no one would doubt that 'Scotland' constitutes almost a cinematic genre. The ways in which film-makers on both sides of the Atlantic have imagined and visualised Scotland are examined in works such as Eddie Dick's collection From Limelight to Satellite (London: BFI, 1990), Forsyth Hardy's memoir Scotland in Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1990), David Bruce's Scotland the Movie (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996), Duncan Petrie's authoritative Screening Scotland (London: BFI, 2002), Colin McArthur's Brigadoon, Braveheart, and the Scots (London: Tauris, 2003) and, more recently, Richard Zumkhawala-Cook's Scotland as we know it (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008). Articles and chapters on Scottish cinema are numerous, too. Mel Gibson's medieval fantasy 'Braveheart' (1995) alone has provoked over a dozen essays, from Sally J. Morgan's T h e Ghost in the Luggage: Wallace and Braveheart, Post-colonial Pioneer Identities' (in European Journal of Cultural Studies 2:3, 1999) to William Luhr's 'Mutilating Mel: Martyrdom and Masculinity in Braveheart' (in Christopher Sharrett's Mythologies of Violence, Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1999).

"The Heads and Tails of the Kingdom": Mrs. Brown and Devolutionary Scotland

This paper takes as its subject the 1997 film Mrs. Brown, an indigenously produced Scottish film that was nominated for several major awards and found audiences around the world. Despite this popular success and critical acclaim, the film has yet to find an adequate place in histories of Scottish cinema. The paper argues that the film mobilizes the generic practices of the so-called heritage film to construct a national allegory about Scotland and its relationship to the United Kingdom. This reading of the film is then situated against the film's historical backdrop which saw the passage of the second devolution referendum in Scotland, a measure that would lead to the nation's political devolution from the United Kingdom. The paper then concludes by arguing that such an understanding of its relationship to these larger generic and historical contexts means that Mrs. Brown is indeed a very important Scottish film that deserves greater consideration within the emerging canon of Scottish cinema.

Greens of Glasgow: ‘We Want “U” In’

This short essay draws on research undertaken by the curator of the Scottish Screen Archive on the few surviving films credited to Greens Film Service of Glasgow in the teens and twenties. The research revealed a dynamic family business, born out of the travelling cinematograph shows of the late nineteenth century, growing to assume a dominant role in the Scottish cinema trade in the silent era, across exhibition, distribution and production. One small part of a lost film history waiting for rediscovery – early cinema in Scotland.

Stratégies populaires et savantes dans le cinéma écossais des années 80 et 90

The priority for Scottish filmmakers in the eighties consists mainly in exposing past stereotypes of Scotland on screen. Consequently, Scottish directors in the nineties are more committed to redefining Scottish identity through providing alternative images. Analysing Scottish cinema in sociological terms allows us to understand the role of high and low culture in redefining Scottish identity in films. For instance, a filmmaker’s definition of the Popular varies according to which pole of the field he/she belongs to. At one end of the field, independent filmmakers use a more intellectual discourse to provide a high culture vision of the Scottish working class, while at the other end, mainstream filmmakers use the argument of entertainment and popular culture to justify the conservatism of representations inherited from literature. However, the films of Danny Boyle prove that new cultural representations can emerge from a more mainstream cinema.

Review: Debatable Fictions: Scottish Cinema, Television and the Novel

Duncan Petrie's Contemporary Scottish Fictions largely succeeds in examining the novel, film and television drama in Scotland since 1980. He considers these three pervasive forms of art and entertainment as very much inter-related, and linked in significant ways to social and political developments in the context of devolution. Displaying in his approach something of George Davies's 'democratic intellect' at its best, Petrie describes his principal aim as follows: 'This book will explore the Scottish cultural renaissance of the 1980s and 1990s by focussing primarily on the novel, cinema and television drama', adding that '(t)hese are all narrativebased popular forms that provide the means by which the myths and realities, experiences and dreams of Scotland and its inhabitants have been reflected and asserted, imagined and re-imagined through a process of cultural transmission dating back to the bardic tradition of oral story-telling' (p.l).

Cinema in a Small Nation/Small National Cinemas in the World: The New Scottish Cinema Conference, Huston School of Film and Digital Media, National University of Ireland, Galway, 4–5 November 2005

Cinema in a Small Nation/Small National Cinemas in the World: The New Scottish Cinema Conference, Huston School of Film and Digital Media, National University of Ireland, Galway, 4–5 November 2005

Scottish cinema and scottish imaginings: Blue Black Permanent and Stella Does Tricks

Scottish cinema and scottish imaginings: Blue Black Permanent and Stella Does Tricks Get access Ian Goode Ian Goode Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 46, Issue 2, Summer 2005, Pages 235–240, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/46.2.235 Published: 01 July 2005

Scottish cinema and Scottish imaginings: Blue Black Permanent and Stella Does Tricks

Journal Article Scottish cinema and scottish imaginings: Blue Black Permanent and Stella Does Tricks Get access Ian Goode Ian Goode Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Screen, Volume 46, Issue 2, Summer 2005, Pages 235–240, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/46.2.235 Published: 01 July 2005