Scottish Cinema Now Scottish Cinema Now Edited by Jonathan Murray, Fidelma Farley and Rod Stoneman Scottish Cinema Now, Edited by Jonathan Murray, Fidelma Farley and Rod Stoneman This book first published 2009 Cambridge Scholars Publishing 12 Back Chapman Street, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2XX, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2009 by Jonathan Murray, Fidelma Farley and Rod Stoneman and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-4438-0331-6, ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-0331-1 (cid:3) TABLE OF CONTENTS Editors’ Introduction.................................................................................vii Jonathan Murray Acknowledgements...................................................................................xv Demons in the Machine: Experimental Film, Poetry and Modernism in Twentieth-Century Scotland....................................................................1 Sarah Neely and Alan Riach Reel 2 Real Cacophony: United Artists’ Twenty-First Century Pictures..20 Neil Mulholland Scotch Myths, Scottish Film Culture and the Suppression of Ludic Modernism..................................................................................39 Colin McArthur Nostophobia...............................................................................................56 Cairns Craig They Know Where They’re Going: Landscape and Place in Scottish Cinema.....................................................................................72 Marilyn Reizbaum ‘Bonnie Scotland, eh?’: Scottish Cinema, the Working Class and the Films of Ken Loach......................................................................88 John Hill Scotland’s Other Kingdoms: Considering Regional Identities in a Growing National Cinema................................................................105 David Martin-Jones Admitting the Kailyard............................................................................122 Jane Sillars (cid:3) vi Table of Contents New Scottish Cinema as Trans-nationalCinema....................................139 Sarah Street Screening Scotland: A Reassessment......................................................153 Duncan Petrie Not Made in Scotland: Images of the Nation from Furth of the Forth....171 David Stenhouse Chasing Crossover: Selling Scottish Cinema Abroad.............................188 Christopher Meir What’s the Point of Film School, or, What did Beaconsfield Studios ever do for the Scottish Film industry?....................................................206 Alistair Scott Shape-Shifters: Independent Producers in Scotland and the Journey from Cultural Entrepreneur to Entrepreneurial Culture...........................222 Robin MacPherson List of Contributors.................................................................................240 (cid:3) (cid:3) EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION JONATHAN MURRAY The past decade and a half was a period of unprecedented industrial expansion and creative achievement within Scottish film culture. Put in the simplest of terms, more films were made about and/or in Scotland, with more local and international production finance, involving and developing a wider range of indigenous creative talent, than at any previous point in cinema history. The essays in this volume, developed from the New Scottish Cinema symposium that took place in early November 2005 at the Huston School of Film & Digital Media, National University of Ireland, Galway, testify to and celebrate that fact. Yet as this introduction is written in early December 2008 the most recent public pronouncements on contemporary Scottish film culture’s health are less than optimistic. See, for instance, various comments made by the actor Robert Carlyle around the time of the 2008 British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) Scotland awards. Despite winning the Best Actor prize for his role in Summer (Glenaan, GB, 2008) Carlyle complained of Scotland that, We don't have a film industry here. I would argue that vehemently. An industry is something that feeds itself and grows. We make one film every 10 years that gets any kind of notice. You can’t call that an industry. Over the past 12 to 15 years I have probably had about five or six scripts that have been Scots films shooting here. Not one of them has fucking happened. I don't know the answer to that. It's got to the stage now with my agent, if something Scottish comes in it has to be financed, otherwise I'm not going to read it because it depresses me. (Scott 2008) Carlyle’s comments go some way to indicating the true complexity of Scottish cinema’s recent evolution. The decade or so since Shallow Grave (Boyle, GB, 1995) and Trainspotting (Boyle, GB, 1996) has delivered certain material and cultural advances while denying others, raising but also disappointing local expectations and aspirations at one and the same time. Carlyle’s words of caution indicate the necessity of a critical approach that interrogates the aesthetic, industrial and ideological aspects of filmmaking in contemporary Scotland, rather than one content merely (cid:3) viii Editors’ Introduction to celebrate the bald fact that such activity takes place more frequently and visibly than ever before, in however precarious a form. Although this volume is titled Scottish Cinema Now, many of its essays propose that new historical scholarship, or reconsideration of well- and lesser-known figures and films from the past, form a necessary precondition for understanding fully the challenges of the present. Consider again, for instance, Robert Carlyle’s above-quoted comments. Without wishing to dismiss or downplay the anxieties and reservations he voices, one can construct a historical “daisy chain” of such utterances in the Scottish context. As early as 1938, the documentary film producer and critic John Grierson could be found complaining that, “there is hardly a picture of Scotland but comes by grace of the alien and is false” (Hardy 1945, 145). In 1946, the BBC broadcaster Joseph Macleod was appointed Managing Director of a semi-voluntary organisation styling itself as the Scottish National Film Studios. This initiative aimed to finance and build a film studio in the Highlands, so that, in the words of promotional literature associated with the scheme, “young talent will be trained in the technical aspects of filmmaking and equipped to take their place later as creative artists and good Scots” (Bruce 1990, 77). The failure of such ambitions beyond the production of a single instructional short on road safety etiquette meant that in 1958, D. M. Elliot could still bemoan the fact that, “among the smaller nations of the world Scotland is almost alone in having no domestic film industry” (Elliot 1958, 41). Another decade on, John Grierson’s celebrity lecture at the 1968 Edinburgh International Film Festival argued that Scottish filmmakers’ shared predicament was one of endless wandering in a film industrial desert, forever “denied access to the means of production” (Grierson 1968). In 1976, Steve Clark-Hall, one of the first wave of aspirant Scottish independent producers to emerge in the late 1960s and early ’70s, observed that, “the Scottish film industry, in any meaningful sense has yet to swing into being” (Clark-Hall 1976, 11). In 1982, director Charlie Gormley’s debut feature Living Apart Together (GB, 1983) formed part of a then unprecedented wave of five Scottish features funded largely by the recently established Channel 4. Despite the euphoria surrounding this brief efflorescence, Gormley nonetheless cautioned that, “you can’t really call it an industry here… there are around half-a-dozen blokes who have been around for ten to fifteen years and who want to make features” (Vaines 1982, 11). In 1995, the annus mirabilis of the “New” Scottish cinema which forms this volume’s primary object of study, Eddie Dick, Chief Officer of the Scottish Film Production Fund, argued for the need to “normalise filmmaking,” still “an abnormal activity” (Macnab 1995, 24) in Scotland. In 2000, Paddy Higson, by then (cid:3) Scottish Cinema Now ix the country’s longest-standing and most experienced feature producer, grudgingly conceded that, “we’ve now got something which is almost a cottage industry… still not what you would call an industry” (Hamilton 2000, 15). Thus, if the received critical view of the history of the British film industry is one of perpetual rebirth—artistic renaissance and economic crisis succeeding each other with metronomic regularity—Scotland’s equivalent has always been understood by its constituents as stillborn or, at very best, in indefinite gestation: the late-’00s predicament bemoaned by Robert Carlyle is anything but new. What is also striking, however, about each of the comments quoted above—or at least those dating from the late ’60s onwards—is that the contemporary circumstances each observer finds similarly unpropitious would have seemed unlikely and promising to their historical forebears. Revisiting the past offers a way of recontextualising and better understanding the nuances of the present. A number of the essays in this volume demonstrate in different ways the extent to which this is so. Sarah Neely and Alan Riach’s work on the mid-twentieth-century careers of pioneering amateur filmmakers Margaret Tait and Enrico Cocozza uncovers instructive precedents for the contemporary artists’ film and video discussed by Neil Mulholland. Similarly, Marilyn Reizbaum forges new parallels between the creative and ideological uses to which Highland landscapes were put in certain seminal works of 1930s and ’40s British cinema and the late-’90s/early- ’00s Scottish films of Ken Loach. Colin McArthur revisits the early 1980s and Murray Grigor’s hitherto underappreciated Scotch Myths (GB, 1983) not simply to reclaim a “lost classic,” but also to highlight what he sees as the persistent marginalisation of non-classical feature filmmaking practices within more recent Scottish cinema. Conversely, Cairns Craig offers a provocative re-reading of a work widely acknowledged as seminal, Bill Douglas’ Childhood Trilogy (GB, 1972-1978). Craig argues that what is typically seen as an aesthetic and ideological paradigm for new Scottish filmmakers is in fact a deeply problematic work, offering up an alienated representation of national culture and identity that, while formally accomplished, is culturally reductive and unproductive in equal measure. Christopher Meir compares and contrasts the early ’80s and early ’00s, discussing the international marketing campaigns for Local Hero (Forsyth, GB, 1983) and Young Adam (Mackenzie, GB/Fr, 2003). His juxtaposition of two apparently very different films aims to uncover a range of persistent external pressures and demands which Scottish filmmakers and financiers have had to negotiate over the last three decades, in their attempt to secure some kind of international critical and (cid:3)