Ireland and Scotland: Colonial Legacies and National Identities || Contemporary Scottish Film

Contemporary Scottish FilmAuthor(s): Jonathan MurraySource: The Irish Review (1986-), No. 28, Ireland and Scotland: Colonial Legacies and NationalIdentities (Winter, 2001), pp. 75-88Published by: Cork University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/29736045 .

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Contempor^fy^^ttish Film

JONATHAN MURRAY

Unlike its Irish counterpart, Scottish cinema of the 1980s and 1990s has

remained relatively unburdened by sustained critical attention. The

publication of Duncan Petrie's Screening Scotland is, therefore, due cause for

celebration and response.1 P?trie identifies the enhanced critical and com?

mercial visibility of 1990s Scottish cinema with the emergence of'a number

of indigenous low budget features such as Shallow Grave (Boyle, UK, 1995), Small Faces (Mackinnon, UK, 1996), Trainspotting (Boyle, UK, 1996), My

Name is foe (Loach, UK, 1998), Orphans (Mullan, UK, 1999) and Ratcatcher

(Ramsay, UK, 1999)'.2 He argues that such films are best understood 'in

terms of a devolved British cinema rather than full "independence" [i.e., a

distinctively 'Scottish' national cinema]'.3 In this essay I shall examine some

of the terms in which this 'devolution' is held to work, situating Petrie's

position with regard to influential work on contemporary British cinema

as a whole, specifically that of John Hill and Andrew Higson.4 I shall exam?

ine the work of Peter Mullan, whom P?trie identifies along with Lynne

Ramsay as 'arguably the two most iconoclastic and exciting Scottish film?

makers since Bill Douglas and Bill Forsyth',5 exploring ways in which his

debut feature, Orphans, interrogates constructions of Scottish national iden?

tity and the extent to which it locates itself within an explicitly Scottish

frame of national reference, in terms of traditions of representation and

aesthetic strategies.

Both Hill and Higson agree on the contemporary significance in the

British context of a 'low-budget indigenous cinema', funded mainly by tele?

vision since the inception of Channel 4 in the early 1980s, and identified as

an 'art cinema' in its modes of finance, production, aesthetics and narrative.

In this regard, the expansion of Scottish cinema that P?trie documents is

MURRAY, 'Contemporary Scottish Film', Irish Review 28 (2001) 75



also firmly part of a wider British phenomenon over the last two decades.

Hill argues that 1980s and 1990s British art cinema strengthens the case for

arguing that British cinema should be conceived in national terms ?

'national' in the sense that the majority of funding sources and institutions

which make film production possible are created and regulated by state

apparatuses claiming jurisdiction within clearly demarcated territorial

boundaries. Moreover, British films of the 1980s and 1990s have increasing?

ly questioned homogenizing, consensual models of national identity. They have encouraged an increased plurality and complexity in the manner in

which British identities are represented and interrogated, highlighting 'the

possibilities for a national cinema to re-imagine the nation, or rather nations

within Britain, and also to address the specificities of a national culture in a

way which does not presume a homogeneous or "pure" national identity'.6 In direct contrast, Higson argues that we should not assume 'that cultural

specificity is best understood in solely national terms . . . [Hill] seems ... to

take national identity, and specifically Britishness, for granted. It seems to

gloss over too many other questions of community, culture, belonging and

identity that are often defiantly local or loosely transnational.'7 In Higson's work on British cinema, the discussion of film texts in terms of their articu?

lation of consensual images of community and aesthetic traditions which

the viewer is invited to interpret as nationally representative is seen as a his?

torical project: 'In the present climate I would rather call for a socialist

cinema, or a green cinema, or a feminist cinema than for the renewal of

British cinema.'8

Even this cursory summary indicates that these viewpoints on the

'national' dimension of British film production and British film culture tend

towards radically different conclusions. Their differing assumptions, however, share a regrettable tendency to subsume, or to fail to recognize, challenges

posed by emergent national cinemas within the British state-formation to

such critical constructions of'British cinema' and the form(s) of'British?

ness' such a cinema articulates. Higson's position ironically argues for a

'post-national' conception of British cinema at precisely the moment when

Scottish, Welsh and Northern Irish film cultures have, to varying degrees, laid claim precisely to 'national' status, in major part as a rhetorical and

political strategy for generating funds and creating production infrastruc?

tures that can facilitate continuity and diversity of audio-visual production, both as an industrial and a cultural priority within their national territories.9

Hill's conception and valorization of a 'national' British cinema raises

more complex issues from a Scottish perspective. He argues vigorously for a

critical and institutional model of British cinema capable of reflecting and

interrogating the complexities of the British national formation. A partially

76 MURRAY, 'Contemporary Scottish Film', Irish Review 28 (2001)



formed, or perhaps

more accurately,

a symbolic notion of'Scottish cinema'

plays a role in his arguments. For example, Hill ends his book on 1980s

British cinema by constructing an opposition between Gregory's Girl

(Forsyth, UK, 1981) and Chariots of Fire (Hudson, UK, 1981) which, as he

notes, were re-released as a 'Best of British' double bill in British cinemas

during the febrile post-Falklands summer of 1982. He argues that 'while

both are British films . . . they also represent very different kinds of British

cinema . . . while Chariots is very much an "English" film, Gregory's Girl is

decidedly "Scottish" . . . the Britishness of the British cinema in the 1980s . . .

depended upon a growing sense of the multiple national, regional and

ethnic identifications which characterised life in Britain in this period . . .

while Chariots of Fire is conventionally taken to be the landmark in the

revival of British cinema, it may in fact, have been Gregory's Girl which was

to prove the more reliable indicator of the way in which British filmmaking was moving.'10 It seems curious, then, that the Scottish dimension of the

narrative of Chariots is not mentioned, and that Gregory's Girl itself it is not

mentioned until page 242 of a 244-page study Elsewhere, Hill argues as evi?

dence for the multinational character of British cinema since the 1980s that

'two of the most successful British films of mid-1990s ? Shallow Grave

(1994) and Trainspotting (1995) ? were very clearly Scottish', explaining this

by the fact that 'the peculiar historical circumstances of Scotland and Wales . . .

provide an opening for a more complex negotiation of the discourses

around the "nation" than English/British cinema has traditionally provid? ed'.11 Again, however, the 'clear' nature of'Scottishness' referred to is not

elaborated, nor are the ways in which other British cinemas might interro?

gate more incisively the construct of'nation', which is still ultimately conceived in singular terms, despite the acknowledgement of a plurality of

national cinemas, and by extension cultures, within Britain.

The difficulty with Hill's position, seemingly sympathetic to the 'national'

claims of Scottish cinema, is that it conceives that cinema as a relatively untheorized Other, not only in terms of its industrial and institutional struc?

tures but equally in terms of its historical development and the constructions

of national identities that its texts collectively offer up. Hill utilizes the notion

of a Scottish cinema as a functional term which, by overtly hybridizing and

complicating 'British cinema' as a potentially homogeneous, monolithic

object of study, effectively facilitates the continuance of that object in defi?

ance of the 'national' challenges made to it by Scottish film. If British cinema

as industrial process and critical construct is capable of exhibiting isolated

efflorescences of national difference, then paradoxically we may safely pre? clude the possibility of reconceiving the object per se in radically different

terms ?

namely as a cluster of interrelated national cinemas. Such cinemas,




whether Scottish, Welsh, Irish or English, could accurately be described as

'devolved' in the sense that they share common funding, production struc?

tures and traditions of representation (though with markedly differential

levels of access to and agency over these), while at the same time possessing structures and traditions specific to the localized political and historical evo?

lutions of each.

Such symbolic antitheses between Scottish/English cinema, and the

extent to which they indicate the uncertain beginnings of British film

studies to negotiate what seems to be its fairly recent perception of Britain

and British cinema as multinational entities, became more common in the

latter half of the 1990s. John Caughie and Kevin Rockett's Companion to

British and Irish Cinema opens with Caughie noting the simultaneous the?

atrical release of both Trainspotting and Sense and Sensibility (Lee, USA,

1996) in the week he was writing, an opposition of the 'delightfully, if iron?

ically English' with the 'scabrously but comically Scottish'. Such

oppositions problematize the confident ascription of a single national ori?

gin to any individual film:'If it was ever easy to establish the criteria which

makes a film British or Irish or Scottish . . . the last few years seem to have

blurred a few more boundaries.'12 The notion of'blurring' seems a more

appropriate one than Hill's 'diversity' in at least one sense, namely that it

evokes the conflicting tendencies inherent in discussion of Britain's con?

temporary national cinemas. 'Blurring' might indicate a healthy diversity of

national identities and cultures that must continually renegotiate both the

terms of their own specific national formations and those of an overarching British one, formations necessarily provisional and fluid. It might also

point, however, to a partial-sightedness about where the cultural bound?

aries of national formations begin and end, an inability to pinpoint the

extent to which diverse film texts and production structures might be

described more or less usefully in terms of competing and fragmented national cultures of origin

? or, indeed, in terms altogether different from

those of the nation.

This is not simply an argument for an insertion of a more detailed aware?

ness of debates around Scottish cinema and culture into the wider sphere of

British cinema scholarship. This is undoubtedly desirable, yet the 'partial

sightedness' referred to above can function in two ways: firstly, a failure to

acknowledge fully the complex ways in which Scottish cinema interacts

with and interrogates structures of Scottish culture and identity; secondly, a

failure to explicate fully ways other than the national in which Scottish cinema

might also be understood. If, as Hill suggests, 'one of the achievements of

Gregory's Girl is its confidence to speak from within Scottish culture without

turning its "Scottishness" into an overt "issue",'13 it is unfortunate that he




performs precisely the opposite move in the context of his wider theoretical

argument about British national cinema.

Despite the kinds of exceptions noted by Hill above, it is nonetheless

unquestionable that a great deal of Scottish cinema has tended to turn its

'Scottishness' into an overt issue, recurrently centring individual narratives

on allegories of nation and national identity. The remainder of this essay will

briefly explore both the ways in which such national-allegorical images have developed over the last twenty years, and how the recurrent emphasis on allegorizing questions of national identity has affected the production of

other kinds of Scottish cinema.

Duncan P?trie identifies the representation of childhood, often autobio?

graphical, as a central thematic motif of contemporary Scottish cinema: 'a

particular interest in cinema as personal expression, marked by certain

recurring themes ... a pre-occupation with biographical and autobiograph? ical modes of narrative'.14 The extent to which such (auto)biography focuses

specifically on childhood is significant. A representative survey would

include Small Faces (1996), director Gillies Mackinnon's memoir of teenage

gang culture in 1968 Glasgow; Ratcatcher (1999), inspired by director Lynne

Ramsay's childhood memories of the 1973 Glasgow dustbinmen's strike; Venus Peter (1989), Ian Sellar s adaptation of Christopher Rush's autobio?

graphical childhood novel A Twelvemonth and a Day; Sellar 's Prague (1992), in

which a young Scottish man attempts to locate fifty-year-old traces of fami?

ly roots in the Czech capital; septuagenarian Margaret Tait's debut feature, Blue Black Permanent (1993), about a woman reliving the childhood trauma

of her mother's suicide; Silent Scream (1990), David Hayman's adaptation of

the poetry and prose of Larry Winters, an inmate at the Special Unit of

Glasgow's Barlinnie Prison; The Slab Boys (1997), playwright John Byrne's

adaptation of his theatrical trilogy, in part a comic memoir of growing up as

an aspirant artist in 1950s Paisley; /// Fares the Land (1982), where the final

depopulation of the remote St Kilda islands in the early 1930s is narrated

retrospectively through the eyes of a five-year-old islander; and Orphans

(1999), Peter Mullan 's autobiographical comic melodrama about four adult

siblings rendered childlike by the grief they experience on the death of

their mother.

The last two examples are symptomatic since they mark the chronologi? cal and discursive boundaries of the period

? indeed the cinema ? under

consideration here. /// Fares was released in 1982, one of a cluster of four

Scottish films made in the initial commissioning round of Channel Four's

'Film on Four' strand. This cluster, along with the success of Bill Forsyth's first two features, was seen at the time as heralding the emergence (or,

depending on the level of one's optimism, simply the possibility) of Scottish




cinema as a distinct entity within British film culture.15 Orphans, also funded

but not distributed by Channel 4, won four awards at the 1998 Venice Film

Festival before being distributed in UK cinemas in early 1999. The films

illustrate some major thematic continuities in Scottish cinema; more impor?

tantly, however, they illustrate some ways in which these continuities have

been re-inflected over a twenty-year period.

/// Fares the Land was written and directed by Bill Bryden, artistic director

of the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh and the National Theatre in London

during the 1970s. The film narrates the collective decision of the thirty-six

remaining islanders of St Kilda, the most remote group of islands in the UK, to evacuate their home for the Scottish mainland in 1930. According to the

text, it was a decision reached in large part through the connivance of cen?

tral government. Narrated primarily from the viewpoint of a five-year-old island boy, the film presents the tensions within the community produced

by the younger men who argue that their traditional way of life is unsus?

tainable and that evacuation to the mainland is inevitable. The final scene of

the film features bemused islanders arriving by boat on a mainland they have never seen, to be greeted by a welcoming party half-titillated by

curiosity, half-hostile to the arrival of such 'outsiders'. As the confused St

Kildans are ushered into taxis, an omniscient male voice-over intones many

of their names and subsequent fates, for the most part a rapid death from

tuberculosis. The final shot of the film, that of the young boy framed by a

car window as he is driven away from shore, is held in freeze frame under

the final credits.

Writing in 1990, John Caughie identified elements of the film and its

final scene as emblematic of dominant discursive and industrial aspects of

Scottish film culture:

Scotland is still more readily imagined, and the imaginings are more eas?

ily sold, along the predictable lines of the scenery, the small community,

and the post-industrial male angst. Most debilitating of all, loss still per?

vades Scottish feature films, still appearing as the characteristic mark of

really serious Scottishness . . . The backward look, epitomised by the

final shot of /// Fares the Land of the boy's last longing look out of the

back window of the taxi which is carrying him away from the natural

but impossible community into the modern world, still seems a charac?

teristic trope of'serious' Scottish film narrative.16

Caughie's analysis seems borne out by the comments of the director him?

self, Bryden arguing in a 1982 newspaper interview that:

the St Kilda people had a place in the romance of Scottish history

... I

think people are so moved by it because ... it shows the precise moment




when they are aware as an audience of something that has gone forever,

and the tragedy that represents for the people who did have it.17

Significantly, Bryden also argued that the historical experience of the very

localized, isolated community as represented by the film could be extrapo? lated into national terms:

. . . if you look at some of the industrial areas or the shipyards in Scot?

land at the moment . . . whole populations have had to go away. The

image of the deserted village at the end is a metaphor for the image of a

deserted town or shipyard

or industrial region which is the very depres?

sion we are faced with today . . .These people had their own way of life

and it was just denied them, utterly changed by the government of the

time ... it was a political tragedy that occurred.18

/// Fares the Land adopts discursive strategies often identified as common in

wider critical discussions of Scottish culture. Its narrative turns to historical

rather than contemporary events to construct a model of national identity

and experience. Narrative tone is elegiac, mourning the loss of Arcadian col?

lectivities whose continued existence in the modern world is rendered

impossible by the hostile intervention of outside forces. Such lost communi?

ties are held to express and embody an essentialized and idealized Scottish

identity: collective, egalitarian, non-materialistic, non-class-based and instinc

tually democratic. Such terms gain added force when placed in binary

opposition to their supposed English/British counterparts.19 While the film is

extremely specific historically and geographically, we are unproblematically invited to expand its boundaries as inclusively expressive of one overarching collective Scottish identity and a shared historical experience. The terms of a

single 'political tragedy' in 1930 are implicitly held to be equivalent to the

very different political situation in which the film was produced and circu?

lated ? the perceived assault of the first Thatcher administration on Scottish

(and British) industrial and manufacturing communities.

The ostensibly sympathetic and politically engaged national allegory con?

structed by the film shades, by its conclusion, from active political

engagement into the distant authority of the diagnostic. The omniscient

voice-over of the final shot, by identifying the imminent cause of death of

individual islanders, attempts to illustrate the scale of the individual and col?

lective trauma of the evacuees. What it emphasizes is the trope of loss which

structures the version of national identity proposed by the film: death of

community is echoed and confirmed by the subsequent death of its individual

members. What is effectively being constructed, however, is a version of

national history and identity in terms of post mortem. Historical instances of

communal/national loss, and the wider political forces which shape them, can




only be engaged with after the event. The root causes of communal/national

trauma cannot be diagnosed in order to be treated, cannot be combated

through historical awareness or political resistance by the Scottish audience

the film seeks to reach in the context of the early 1980s. What retrospective

diagnosis achieves as a mode of historical and national allegory is merely a

confirmation of the fatal nature, the unstoppable impact of the forces of

modernity and capital, the irresistible determinism of forces that attack the

body of the national community in historical waves.

The elegiac narrative model of national experience shaped by loss utilizes

the retrospective mode in two ways. Firstly, retrospective examination of the

national past provides the terms for understanding the traumas besetting the

national body in the present. Secondly, and more significantly, it also sup?

plies a retrospective narrative tense, applied as much to present as to past, in

which the possibilities of political understanding and intervention (whether conceived as individual, local or national) are severely circumscribed, being

possible only after the historical event is already complete. By implication, the condition of the industrial communities at the centre of contemporary

political conflict are held to parallel the historical one of the St Kildans and, as a consequence, are already as dead, as much consigned to history. The

shifting matrix of political and social conflicts of the present is experienced in the Scottish context as always already over. Instances of local and national

community, past and present, are valorized and reconstructed only to be dis?

sected critically in ways that mirror and confirm the repeated historical

dissection and dispersal of the 'authentic' national community by the forces

of modernity which the text and its creators ostensibly bemoan. The signif? icance of the trope of childhood in Scottish cinema is, in this instance, that

it is presented as a developmental stage inevitably left behind in the move to

adulthood: its associated qualities of innocence, immaturity and lack of

power seem disturbingly easy to map onto discourses of national identity in

an elegiac and politically self-defeating way. At first sight, Scottish cinema's repeated recourse to elegiac national alle?

gory seems to work in almost identical terms nearly twenty years later in

Peter Mullan's Orphans. Narrating four Glasgow siblings' experiences of

bereavement on the eve of their mother's funeral, the film quickly elevates

the terms of familial loss onto a national level. Mullan argues that, amongst other things, the film constructs an allegory of national experience shaped

by communal loss, interrogating'a general feeling that since Mother Welfare

State was no longer there, what happens to the Scottish working class; where do we go, who do we turn to . .. all that sort of business. So it started

off as part-personal, part-allegory.'20

Perhaps the most overtly national-allegorical scene in Orphans comes




when one brother, Michael, who has been stabbed in a pub brawl, attempts to fake his wounds the next morning as an industrial injury from the

derelict Clydeside shipyard in which he works. Delirious through loss of

blood, he accidentally projects himself into the River Clyde down a launch?

ing ramp, all the while screaming for compensation, both industrial and

personal: T want my mammy.'This instance of Orphans' allegorical strategies seems to work in very similar ways to those outlined above: the apparent

expression of a specific community's loss ? Clydeside shipbuilding

? as

unproblematically representative of the nation's experience as a whole, the

rendering of that national experience in terms of a male child's loss of

maternal plenitude, and the undercutting (in Michael's case) of a potentially

political anger by stressing its bogus and futile nature. This 'bogusness' is

explained by the text in terms of Michael's 'childishness' ? the bewilder?

ment of the working-class culture he allegorically represents in the face of

personal and political deprivation (loss of mother/loss of'Mother Welfare'). It is also explained in terms of the apparent impossibility and irrelevance of

collective political protest. Deindustrialization is presented as an already

accomplished historical trauma (the yard is full of refuse and shows no signs of any active industrial production) and the impossibility of reconstructing the heavy industries and the communities reliant on them seems to point

inevitably towards an atomized, individual scrabble for financial survival

which is fundamentally dishonest, selfish and self-defeating. Heavy industry and the communal social structures and ethos associated with it come to

seem, much like the communal Arcadia of St Kilda, as a childhood develop? mental stage, to be left behind in Scotland's seemingly endless, traumatic but

unavoidable journey into further stages of modernity, where both the

necessity of the journey and the terms under which it is conducted are dic?

tated from a relatively unspecified but hostile 'elsewhere'.

Both this sequence and the film as a whole have tended to be read criti?

cally in terms which, expanded to characterize much of Scottish cinema as

a whole, reveal it to be thematically preoccupied with elegiac longing for

departed communities that can function as microcosms of the nation.

'Nation' is conceived in this context as one whose historical experience and contemporary identity can only be located in, and narrated through, individual and communal experiences of loss. Atypically, one reviewer

described the sequence discussed above as 'an image of male vulnerability, but it also plays like an oblique elegy for the shipyards that once stood

there'.21 Significantly, however, Mullan himself proposes a reading dia?

metrically opposed to those representational and national-allegorical

strategies which propose such a linkage between individual childhood

memory and the experience of communal and national loss:




The image [of Michael launched into the Clyde] was there to show him

being rebaptised. He'd finally said the truth ? he'd finally said 'I want my

mammy' -

and then I launched him into the Clyde. I thought, now

you're really a man, because you admitted an emotional truth instead of

berating everyone else with your self-pity.22

Images of childhood memory and experience and their use as vehicles for

national allegory are significantly re-inflected. Orphans reveals the extent to

which the recurrent linkage between historical elegy and contemporary

allegory in the Scottish context is itself a compensatory discourse (literally so in the scene under discussion), childish rather than childlike, a discursive

and ideological, rather than historical and material, developmental stage that

the national culture has to attempt to outgrow.

Orphans is representative of an increasingly complex and progressive

engagement with some of the recurrent representational strategies of an

increasingly diverse body of work constituting Scottish cinema. Mullan 's

film reconceives the model of childhood experience as national-allegorical

trope as a nascent state, characterized to a degree by possibility and fluidity, not by a retrospective and elegiac acknowledgement of inevitable closure

and trauma. The childhood model here maps the potential developmental

processes of individual protagonists and therefore also of the national culture

which they are constructed to represent. As well, it locates responsibility for

the directions that such development will take within the creative and polit? ical agency of the national culture, making representation of the culture a

constituent part ofthat culture, rather than conceiving it as imposed wholly from elsewhere.

If much Scottish cinema of the last twenty years might justly be criticized

for producing allegorical representations of national identity and experience as historically traumatic and elegiac, conceiving the national community as

powerlessly subjected to historical and political forces located wholly out?

side its sphere of knowledge and influence, it must be said that much the

same criticism could also be made about the assumptions underlying aca?

demic work on that cinema itself. The dominant, though not blanket,

assumption has tended to be that 'we can put together a picture of a people

losing control of their film representation from the word go'.23 Colin

McArthur, the most vocal and prolific critic of Scottish cinema has argued since the landmark Scotch Reels collection of 1982 that to deconstruct dom?

inant film representations of Scotland 'is to peel away successive layers of

discursive hegemony exercised on Scotland . . . [what] joins the apparently diverse 'Scottish' discourses of Hollywood and Ealing is that they were both

articulated outside of Scotland itself'.24 The dramas of loss of agency at a

social and national level narrated in individual texts undergo an analogous




replay in critical conceptions of the historical development and discursive

functions of Scottish film culture for most of the twentieth century. While

this position has much to recommend it for understanding the historical

establishment and development of regressive images of Scotland in cinema, it is not sufficient on its own to interrogate an increasingly self-conscious

critical engagement with established cinematic images of nation and identi?

ty achieved by a large body of films produced and funded in large part from

within Scotland itself.

In conclusion, what is required is increased critical attention to Scottish

cinema that can consciously relate itself to wider debates about Scottish cul?

ture. While Scottish cinema is conceived within British film criticism

primarily in the kind of'devolved' terms identified by P?trie, Hill and Hig son ? in the latter two cases principally as satellite complicating factors in

wider conceptual framework of British cinema ? the extent to which Scottish

cinema can or cannot sustain a complexity and diversity of representations in

itself will not be wholly recognized. There is a danger that the current critical

diversification of British cinema entails only the homogenization of one of

its constituent national parts.

However, to insist on inserting a Scottish national/cultural context into a

discussion about national cinemas hitherto located mainly within the para? meters of Anglo-American film theory and cinema is not simply to

advocate either the primacy of 'nation'/'national identity' as the interpreta? tive framework from within which to approach those texts. Neither is it an

attempt to substitute one explanatory formation of nation ? Britain ? with

another ? Scotland. We should be aware of the extent to which recurrent

engagement with discourses of nation in Scottish cinema has often hidden

other lines of social plurality from view: sexuality, locality, race and, most

particularly, gender. Whatever the extent to which films like Orphans have

self-consciously critiqued and remodelled established allegories of nation

articulated in earlier texts such as /// Fares the Land, one cannot help but

note that both films unproblematically represent Scottish national identity

firmly in terms of masculine rite-of-passage narratives. The oft-noted mas

culinist bias present in much Scottish popular culture is equally evident in

Scottish cinema.25 Exactly the same strategy can be seen in a film like Bill

Forsyth 's Gregory's 2 Girls (GB, 1999) in which the gawky adolescent of

Gregorys Girl, twenty years on, is an English teacher in the school he origi?

nally attended. The lack of development that this represents explicitly links

its protagonist's personal immaturity and innocence with the same qualities

perceived in the national culture he inhabits. To reform one ? by inducting

Gregory into adult male heterosexuality ? is somehow also to reform the

other ? Greg's discovery of his 'subject' status under the British crown and




State, and his subsequent acts of direct action and sabotage against a corrupt multinational company located in his home town of Cumbernauld. The

kinds of anxieties that feminist critics were expressing in the early 1980s

about the emergent Scottish cinema still seem absolutely pertinent today.26 The task of Scottish film criticism, an even more emergent phenomenon

than the cinema it analyses, will be to apprehend the shifting, relative value

of Scottish cinema conceived in national terms. Nationally based produc? tion and funding infrastructures which facilitate the continuity and

expansion of the indigenous production base are to be welcomed; indeed

this forms the main thrust of Duncan Petrie's arguments.27 Also to be wel?

comed are the cultural fruits of such a material process, a body of films

which interrogate, make visible and seek to reform the terms in which con?

temporary Scottish society works. But criticism will need to demonstrate

awareness that the consolidation of a Scottish cinema, whether in industrial or textual terms, is neither solely a good, nor dead, end in itself To interro?

gate discourses of nation and identity, whether as film-maker or critic, necessitates giving voice to a plurality of social identities and experiences

which are emphatically not reducible to, or subsumable by, the national

dimension of the society they inhabit.

Notes and References

1 Duncan P?trie, Screening Scotland (London: BFI, 2000). See also his 'The New Scottish

Cinema', in Mette Hjort and Scott Mackenzie (eds.), Cinema & Nation (London: Rout

ledge, 2000), pp. 153?69. The only previous book-length study of Scottish cinema is

Forsyth Hardy's Scotland in Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990). Other

major publications have been collections of essays, not all strictly academic or cinema

oriented in intent: Colin McArthur (ed.), Scotch Reels: Scotland in Film and Television

(London: BFI, 1982); Ian Lockerbie (ed.), Image and Identity: Theatre and Cinema in Scot?

land and Quebec (Stirling: John Grierson Archive & Department of French, University of

Stirling, 1988); Eddie Dick (ed.), From Limelight to Satellite: A Scottish Film Book (London and Glasgow: BFI/SFC, 1990).

2 P?trie, 'The New Scottish Cinema', op. cit., pp. 154?55.

3 Ibid., p. 166, my insert.

4 For a representative survey, see John Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes

(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999); Hill, 'The Issue of National Cinema and British Film

Production', in Duncan P?trie (ed.), New Questions of British Cinema (London: BFI,

1992); Hill, 'British Cinema as National Cinema: Production, Audience and Represen?

tation', in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book (London: BFI, 1996); Andrew

Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1995); Higson, 'The Concept of National Cinema', Screen, vol. 30, 1989; Higson, 'The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema', in Hjort and MacKenzie, op. cit.

5 P?trie, Screening Scotland, op. cit., pp. 214?15.

6 Hill, 'British Cinema as National Cinema', op. cit., p. 252




7 Higson, 'Limiting Imagination', op. cit., p. 72.

8 Higson, Waving the Flag, op. cit., p. 279.

9 See, for example, the assertion by Scottish Screen Chief Executive John Archer that:

The thing I like about the new [Scottish] parliament is that it's rooted in reality; the

cultural devolution that has already taken place forms the bedrock of the new politi? cal government ... I think it will be a while before we can think in terms of Scotland

having a discrete film policy. We're certainly not going to get any special tax breaks

yet. Scotland is still considered a region, not a small country like Ireland, which

means that we don't get European funding. At the moment there's still a glut of

money down in London.

Quoted in Liese Spencer, 'Small Country, Big Ideas', the Independent, 29 April 1999,

Section Two, p. 11.

10 Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s, op. cit., pp. 242-44.

11 Hill in Murphy (ed.), op. cit., pp. 251-52.

12 John Caughie with Kevin Rockett, The Companion to British and Irish Cinema (London:

Cassell/BFI, 1996), p. iii.

13 Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s, op. cit., p. 243.

14 P?trie, Screening Scotland, op. cit., p. 151.

15 The other Channel 4-funded films were Hero (Platt-Mills, GB, 1982), Living Apart

Together (Gormley, GB, 1983) and Another Time, Another Place (Radford, GB, 1983). For

a representative account of the conflicting senses of elation and caution provoked by this

mini-burst of Scottish production, see the contemporary comments of director Charlie

Gormley: . . . 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. About

three of us have got a picture together ? with Mike Radford who's an honorary Scot,

there's four. And then there's a number of young Scots who went to film school and

are champing at the bit.

Quoted in Colin Vaines, 'Directing Debut on own Doorstep', Screen International, no.

371, 27 November 1982, p. 11.

Channel 4 commissioned only two further Scottish features during the 1980s: Heavenly Pursuits (Gormley, GB, 1986) and Conquest of the South Pole (Mackinnon, GB, 1990).

16 John Caughie, 'Representing Scotland: New Questions for Scottish Cinema', in Dick

(ed.), op. cit., p. 25.

17 Bill Bryden, cited in 'Land of Lost Dreams', the Guardian, 23 November 1982, p. 23.

18 Bryden, cited in Jo Commo, 'Memoirs of Survivors', City Limits, no. 83, 6 May 1983,

p. 13.

19 Again, the director's comments seem significant: 'There was a society in which all things were held in common, they had their own parliament, every decision was made by com?

mon consent, they never fought in any of the wars . . . now, of course, there's a missile

range on St Kilda' (ibid.). There seems to be a barely covert invoking of many of the

common issues of early 1980s Scottish and British politics: collectivity versus privatization

and atomization of property; communal security versus individual aspiration; unilateral?

ism/pacifism versus nuclear deterrent/populist militarism; Scottish democratic

independence and political self-sufficiency versus 'rule from Westminister'; Corporatist

social organization versus Thatcherite dismantling of Corporatist and Welfare political models. Bryden seems to place an implicit national-essentialist gloss on such oppositions,

identifying the former terms with 'Scottishness' and the latter with 'English/Britishness'. 20 Peter Mullan, cited in Derek O'Connor, 'Peter Mullan: Interview', Film West, no. 36,

May 1999, p. 41.




21 Edward Lawrenson, 'Orphans: Review', Sight and Sound, vol. 9, 5 May 1999, p. 54.

22 Mullan, cited in Liese Spencer, 'Tearing the Roof Off: Interview with Peter Mullan',

Sight and Sound, vol. 9, 4 April 1999, p. 14.

23 Alastair Michie, 'Scotland: Strategies of Centralisation', in Charles Barr (ed.), All Our

Yesterdays: Ninety Years of British Cinema (London: BFI, 1986), p. 253.

24 Colin McArthur, 'The Scottish Discursive Unconscious', in Alasdair Cameron and

Adrienne Scullion (eds.), Scottish Popular Theatre and Entertainment: Historical and Critical

Approaches to Theatre and Film in Scotland (Glasgow: Glasgow University Library, 1996),

pp. 82?83. It should be emphasized, however, that McArthur argues strongly that the

historical emergence of many of the representational discourses which he advocates have

decisively influenced cinematic images of Scotland can be located within Scottish cul?

ture itself.

25 For Scottish popular culture's (and cinema's) persistent privileging of images of mas?

culinity, and its consquent exclusion of the feminine, see Douglas Bain, Ouaine Bain

and Gillian Skirrow, 'Woman, Women and Scotland: 'Scotch Reels' and Political Per?

spectives', in Ccncrastus, no. 11, New Year 1983; Connie Balides, ''Another Time, Another

Place . . . Another Male View?', in Cencrastus, no. 16, Spring 1984; Eleanor Beitenbach,

'"Curiously Rare"?: Scottish Women of Interest or the Suppression of the Female in

the Construction of National Identity', in Scottish Affairs, no. 18, Winter 1997; Adrienne

Scullion, 'Feminine Pleasures and Masculine Indignities', in Christopher Whyte (ed.),

Gendering the Nation: Studies in Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University

Press, 1994).

26 I am thinking, for example, of the kind of qualification made by Connie Balides in her

discussion of Another Time, Another Place:

The problem is, I diink, the danger in welcoming any new representation of Scot?

land because there is so much a lack of such representations. However, even if one

wanted to see the film as progressive in national terms it still seems that the film deals

with Scotland at the expense of the woman.

Balides, op. cit., p. 41.

27 'What was required was a different kind of institutional intervention geared towards the

nurturing of a continuity of production . . . This is exactly what has happened in the

1990s with the emergence of a range of important indigenous institutional sources of

film finance that collectively were to transform the sector . . .', P?trie, in Hjort and

MacKenzie (eds.), op. cit., p. 158.




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