This is a re-edited essay I wrote as part of my Undergraduate History & Politics Degree.
The year 1979 saw the release of what has widely been considered Scotland’s first ‘home-grown major film’ in Bill Forsyth’s That Sinking Feeling (1979). Following that, the industry boomed through to the 21st Century with the arrival of new production funds and a new class of filmmakers focused on stories for Scotland in Scotland. This includes, but is by no means limited to, Bill Forsyth, Danny Boyle, Lynne Ramsay, Ken Loach and Peter Mullan.
The influences which drove them offer a fascinating insight into how the intersection of art, politics, culture, business, and nationalism forged a distinctive filmmaking voice for a nation whose cinematic identity had up to that point been defined by those outside its borders.
Their stories also offer a reminder of the vital role institutions play in creativity. In the case of Scotland, how it both expanded and later restricted what could be included on the Scottish screen.
Scotland is More Than Kilts and Cabbage Patches!!!
For decades, Scotland on film was defined by cinematic tropes coined by Scottish critic Colin McArthur as ‘Tartanry and Kailyard’. These conventions fixated on outdated Scottish iconography and romanticised the nation as rejecting modernity in favour of a rural world of kilts (Tartanry) and cabbage patches (Kailyards). They were also always contained in films produced outside of Scotland, including British Ealing Comedies like Whisky Galore (1949), Laxdale Hall (1952) and The Maggie (1953), or schmaltzy American films like the MGM musical Brigadoon (1954). McArthur and his fellow culturalists decried how these films ‘eschewed the problematic and contradictory’ and called for a cinematic movement which would reflect the true, modern, urban and sometimes depressing reality of Scottish life.
This was a demand taken up in force by Scotland’s emerging filmmakers including Bill Forsyth. That Thinking Feeling takes place against a backdrop of Glasgow’s industrial wastelands as a group of hard-done-by teenagers attempt to pull of a heist of kitchen sinks. The film was a stark departure from any Scotland that had been seen on screen before as it presented a nation struggling with de-industrialisation. Forsyth even dedicated the film “to the prowlers of my city, the pioneer town of the post-industrial revolution’. His follow up in Gregory’s Girl (1981) also showed a modern Scotland as it took place in a contemporary Secondary School, before 1984’s Comfort and Joy moved him back to Glasgow’s city streets.
Danny Boyle’s first two features in Shallow Grave (1994) and Trainspotting (1996) brought a similar aesthetic to the streets of Edinburgh imbuing them with energy and modernity. Shallow Grave’s opening quite literally zooms through Edinburgh’s New Town, bringing a sense of verve with it, and transforms Scotland’s rural landscape into a point of horror as its narrative follows three flatmates who disseminate and bury the body of their newest deceased flatmate in the woods. Likewise, in Trainspotting Renton and his friends’ visit to the countryside is portrayed not as pleasant but rather as grotesque and alien, with one character even remarking ‘this is not natural man’.
In her debut Ratcatcher (1999), now famed director Lynne Ramsay also opted for an urban setting as her film follows a young boy James around his Glasgow housing estate in the 1970s. In her own words, she wanted to show how the city was both ’very beautiful and very ugly in places’. Like Boyle, Ramsay even makes the estate’s one natural feature a point of tragedy, as the film’s stagnated canal sees James’ friend drown during its opening.
Nationalism, Politics, and Thatcherism
As this artistic nationalism was developing, so was a political one in the wake of Scotland’s failed 1979 devolution referendum and the adverse impact that Margaret Thatcher’s policies were having on Scotland. The conservative Prime Minister’s neo-liberal agenda delivered privatisation and cuts to public spending leading to a spike in unemployment, the closure of industries like the Ravenscraig Steelworks, and a housing crisis with just 34.7% of Scots owning a home compared to 58% in England & Wales The result was a bubbling up of anti-Westminster nationalist sentiment and by 1989 a poll revealed 77% of Scottish people believed they were treated as second class citizens.
While not Scottish, legendary English director Ken Loach de-camped up north in the 1990s believing it made the perfect setting to explore the ‘the appalling costs in human misery that aggressive Thatcherite politics had brought’. Carla’s Song (1996), which sees George Lennox help a Nicaraguan woman Carla track down her boyfriend, contains a damning indictment on the welfare-state under Thatcher. It emerges that Carla has PTSD and repeatedly attempted suicide but is offered no support or social care. His next film ‘My Name is Joe’ (1998) covers similar terrain as it follows Joe, an unemployed recovering alcoholic who is a victim of Scotland’s chronic unemployment. Like Carla, Joe is failed by social institutions and loses his benefits when he is photographed painting a friend’s flat and accused of secretly working. When he attempts to reconcile this mistake, he is mistreated by bureaucratic officials and at one point is even told ‘blah, blah, blah’.
‘My Name is Joe’ also starred Peter Mullan, a director in his own right whose film Orphans (1999) also exposed the failure of public institutions. The film follows four siblings on the eve of their mother’s funeral who embark on separate surrealist and tragic journeys. One sibling, for example, nearly kills himself attempting to pass off a stabbing injury as a work one to ensure he gets the injury pay he needs to survive. Meanwhile, his wheelchair bound sister struggles to get around a city not designed for her and at one point is even yelled at to get off someone’s ramp because it took the three years to convince the council to install it. Mullan actively linked all this to Thatcher’s neo-liberalism as he stated ‘Orphans was about the death of socialism in Scotland as we understood it’.
Even Bill Forsyth said his nominally comic films were influenced by a Scottish political sense of ‘being subservient to England’. This is clear in ‘That Sinking Feeling’ which deals with alienation of Scotland’s youth in the face of rising unemployment, and ‘Comfort and Joy’ which was a very deliberative metaphor for the ice-cream wars that were taking place between rival Glaswegian drug gangs and had gotten worse due to cuts in policing and community projects. Forsyth’s most beloved film Local Hero (1983) was also highly political as it saw an American Mac who travels to the village of Ferness to purchase it for the construction of an oil-refinery. After all, Thatcher-esque corporatism provides its narrative launching point and the film then subsequently deconstructs the myths upon which such capitalism lies. There is even a pointed reference to the Falklands war, which was taking place at the same time, when one priest points to a fighter jet and says ‘so long as they are bombing here, they can’t be bombing anywhere else’.
The European Avant-Garde
Scottish filmmaking was also heavily influenced by other national cinemas in America and on the continent. European influences were especially prominent in the arthouse community and Lynne Ramsay stated that with ‘Ratcatcher [she was] chasing the European art-house market’. The film contains a wandering narrative and moments of intense surrealism which reflect the works of Federico Fellini and Robert Bresson, including one scene when James attaches a rat to a balloon which flies to the moon. Ramsay even borrows the ending of Bresson’s ‘Mouchette’, which she declared ‘one of my most memorable [film] moments’, for Ratcatcher, which finishes with James’ drowning in an ambivalent sequence which could be either reality or fantasy.
Peter Mullan also stated that he came from ‘very un-British…expressionist cinema, Spanish cinema, and silent cinema’, and this comes through in Orphan’s moments of carnivalesque madness. These include a rooftop being lifted off a church and a character literally being chased through a carnival. Finally, Ken Loach was a mainstay of the European scene and ‘My Name is Joe’ won both the Palme d’Or and best actor prizes at Cannes.
Transatlantic Filmmaking
The importance of American cinema can also not be forgotten. Danny Boyle has cited Quentin Tarantino as an inspiration and declared ‘Tarantino is an absolute Trainspotter’. His stylings can be seen in Shallow Grave and Trainspotting’s frenetic pacing, rapid dialogue, and borderline gratuitous violence. The opening sequence of Trainspotting also directly quotes Martin Scorsese’s Mean Streets with a chase scene which ends with Renton being hit by a car as his name appears on screen. Moreover, Shallow Grave references Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard by opening with a shot of David’s (Christopher Ecclestone) face and revealing at the film’s end he is in fact lying dead on a slab. Boyle’s producer Andrew MacDonald also stated that Shallow Grave mimicked the production of Stephen Soderberg’s ‘Sex, Lies and Videotapes’, the film which redefined American Indie cinema, which overcame its budget constraints using a constrained plot and shooting locations.
Bill Forsyth also denied having any ‘strong British influences’ and the youthful and vibrant energy of ‘That Sinking Feeling’ and Gregory’s Girl is much closer to 1970s American coming-of-age film. Moreover, the confrontations between rival Italian ice-cream-vendors in Comfort and Joy feels like a pastiche of Italian American gangster films like The Godfather. Even Ramsay’s Ratcatcher borrows American cinematic techniques when James visits a housing estate and Ramsay attempts to portray his hope and optimism. Ramsay said she achieved this by giving the film a ‘wide open, almost Midwestern American feel’ as she photographed James staring out at and then running through wheat-fields as if he were a frontiersman.
Making Films People Want To Watch
This new wave of Scottish filmmakers were not simple wide-eyed idealists but shrewd commercial thinkers who, in the words of Danny Boyle, wanted above all ‘to get people into the cinema’. This can be seen in his fast-paced, frenetic, and pop-driven styling, which were done to appeal to audiences more than respond to artistic influences or express personal sentiments. This was the same reason they opted to go surrealist for the book’s notorious toilet scene as, in screenwriter John Hodge’s words, ‘to do it realistically would be unwatchable’. The hunger for popularity was also present in an arthouse director like Lynee Ramsay who stated ‘it’s a good thing to know a lot about your market’ rather than making films nobody sees ‘just…for the sake of it’.
This audience focus also meant that, despite the disdain for it, Tartanry and Kailyard could retain their prevalence in certain films during the 1980s and 1990s. Forsyth’s Local Hero had some very Ealing sensibilities to it and was rolled out in cinemas replete with lingering shots of Scotland’s highlands, its famed gloaming, and even the Northern-Lights. Forsyth even admitted to watching Whisky Galore for inspiration when producer David Putnam hired him to make the film. Similarly, Mrs Brown (1997) was one of the most successful ever Scottish-produced films and sported stereotypes without any semblance of subversion, including a kilt waving Billy Connolly.
The Willpower was Finally There
Scottish filmmaking also got off the ground because the 1980s and 1990s saw the development of the institutions and film bodies necessary to cohere its disparate filmmakers into a national cinema. The first major development for this was the creation of the Scottish Film Production Fund SFPF in 1979 which, despite its initially modest £80,000 budget, grew to successfully co-partner on Shallow Grave, Carla’s Song and Orphans, and man other projects including The Near Room (1996), Small Faces (1996), Silent Scream (1990)and Rob Roy (1995). The fund also co-created the ‘Tartan Shorts’ initiative where young directors could develop their skills, including Peter Capaldi who won an Oscar for ‘Franz Kafka’s It’s a wonderful Life’, and even Ramsay and Mullan who made the shorts ‘Fridge( 1995)’ and ‘Gasman (1997)’ before moving onto full features.
The other major indigenous institution was the Glasgow Film Fund( GFF) created by the Glasgow Development Agency, Glasgow City Council and Strathclyde Regional Council. It too proved a valuable producing partner for films including its first major success Shallow Grave, and other films like My Name is Joe, Orphans, The Slab Boys (1997), The Debt Collector( 1999) and The Acid House (1999). From 1995-2000 the fund invested a little over £1.92 million in Glasgow based projects and in 1999 helped get £11.5 million worth of productions off the ground.
These major shifts were also accompanied by numerous smaller entrepreneurial developments by private individuals including Paddy Higson who formed Antonine Pictures and Black Cat Studios, and Eddie Dick, who created the Movie Makars training initiative in 1992. These institutional developments all proved successful and led to 16 Scottish productions between 1980-1990 and 18 between 1995-2000.
An Ongoing Reliance on Outsiders
Sadly, a lack of funding meant these institutions could not solely sustain Scotland’s film industry and as it expanded the reliance on London-based and international partners ballooned. The SFPF and GFF required support and money from Channel Four, BBC and the European Regional Development Fund, meaning they could, in the words of former SFPF chief Ian Lockerbie, ‘never be more than a minor partner in projects that’ they took on. The SFPF’s first full-time director Penny Thompson even stated that its ‘priority was to develop scripts…so they could go to Channel 4 or perhaps the BBC’.
This meant that external bodies were still central to the development of Scottish films and this sometimes hindered their authenticity for as Lockerbie stated the special needs of Scotland cannot realistically be expected to be a major concern of a body located in London’. Scottish relations with these external bodies also became increasingly fraught above all with Channel 4. The global box-office of Trainspotting in 1996 led to Channel 4’s obsession with replicating its style and success in their quest, under head of Film David Aukin, to ‘build a global business’. The impact on Scottish directors was profoundly negative. Channel 4 even refused to distribute Orphans, despite co-financing it, according to Mullan because ‘it wasn’t trainspotting… [and wasn’t] going to make them rich…hip and cool’. He alleged they even hated its ‘incomprehensible Glaswegian accents’. Irvine Welsh, the author of Trainspotting, also complained while working on the adaptation of his short story collection The Acid House that at Channel 4 ‘it’s very difficult to do something a bit different, a bit less airbrushed’.
The desire to go global even infiltrated Scottish institutions between them and the filmmakers they were intended to support. The Scottish Film Lottery Panel, which was created in 1995, and doled out £12 million in production funds in its first two years alone, was soon accused of ‘corruption and cronyism’ with particular disdain being lobbied at a panel-member and ex-Hollywood screenwriter Alan Shiach. Similalry, Scottish Screen, which was formed, out of various institutions including the SFPF and Scottish Film Council, quickly became disconnected from local productions after it looked more internationally when Mel Gibson (coming off of Braveheart) advised then Secretary-of-State Michael Forsyth that Scotland needed a ‘“One-Stop-Shop”’ which would facilitate American penetration into Scotland’s film-market. Bill Forsyth even penned an open letter attacking the body’s ‘lack of accountability and accessibility’ to local directors.
Conclusion
Conclusion
The rise of indigenous Scottish filmmaking has granted us some of the most exciting cinematic voices of the 20th and 21st century. It’s development offers an unparalleled look at the crucial role cinema plays in shaping identity and providing an outlet for politics.
The story of the late 20th century Scottish film industry is a story of a nation taking hold of its identity and carving a new filmmaking frontier. The film’s it produced are a melting point of ideas, genres, and national film cultures. While the institutions which supported them are a cautionary tale of overreach and vanity.
Filmography
Boyle, Danny. Trainspotting. (1996)
Boyle, Danny. Shallow Grave. (1994)
Forsyth, Bill. Comfort & Joy.(1984)
Forsyth, Bill. Gregory’s Girl. (1981)
Forsyth, Bill. Local Hero. (1983)
Forsyth, Bill. That Sinking Feeling. (1979)
Loach, Ken. Carla’s Song. (1996)
Loach, Ken. My Name is Joe. (1998)
Mullan, Peter. Orphans. (1999)
Ramsay, Lynne. Ratcatcher. (1999)
Madden, John. Mrs Brown. (1997)
Primary Sources
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Behar, Henri.‘My Name is Joe press conference at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival’. Available at http://www.filmscouts.com/scripts/interview.cfm?File=my-name
Brooks, Xan. ‘Film: The Mouse That Roared’. The Independent, 12 November 1999. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/film-the-mouse-that-roared-1125310.html
Bennett, Ronan. ‘Lean, Mean, and Cruel: Interview with Danny Boyle’, in Sight & Sound, Vol 5. 1 (Jan1995) p.34-36
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Dick, Eddie, British Film Institute, and Scottish Film Council. From Limelight to Satellite: A Scottish Film Book / Edited by Eddie Dick. London: British Film Institute, 1990.
Forsyth, Bill.‘That Sinking Feeling: 1979 London Film Festival programme. (BFI Reading Room microfiche)
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Forsyth, Bill. ‘Letter’, in the Herald (17/5/97)
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Knight, Arthur. ‘Gregory’s Girl’. The Hollywood Reporter (Archive: 1930-2015) 271, no. 44 (14 May 1982)
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Accessed: 27th November 2021
McArthur, Colin. Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television / Edited by Colin McArthur. London: BFI Publishing, 1982.
Macanab, George. ‘The team that made Trainspotting: interview with Danny Boyle, John Hodge, and Andrew MacDonald’, in Sight & Sound, Vol.6.2 (Feb1996)p.8-11
Peary, Gerald. ‘Gerald Peary – Interviews – Bill Forsyth’. Accessed 16 November 2021. http://www.geraldpeary.com/interviews/def/forsyth.html.
Spencer, Lise. ‘Tearing the roof off: Interview with Peter Mullan’, in Sight & Sound,Vol 9.4 (Apr1999).pp.13-14
Williamson, Nigel. ‘Director’s Cut: Ken Loach’. Uncut (Archive: 1997-2000). London, United Kingdom: TI Media Limited, 1 December 1998.
Secondary Sources
Ashby, Justine, and Andrew Higson. British Cinema: Past and Present / Edited by Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson. London: Routledge, 2000..
Beck, Antony. ‘THE IMPACT OF THATCHERISM ON THE ARTS COUNCIL’. Parliamentary Affairs 42, no. 3 (1 July 1989): 362–79.
Cameron, Ewen A. Impaled upon a Thistle: Scotland since 1880 / Ewen A. Cameron. New Edinburgh History of Scotland ; Volume 10. Edinburgh: University Press, 2010.
Meir, Christopher. Scottish Cinema: Texts and Contexts. Manchester, UNITED KINGDOM: Manchester University Press, 2015. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/ed/detail.action?docID=4777266.
Murray, Jonathan. The New Scottish Cinema. Cinema and Society Series. London: IBTauris & Company, Limited, 2015.
Murray, Jonathan. ‘Kids in America? Narratives of Transatlantic Influence in 1990s Scottish Cinema’. Screen 46, no. 2 (Summer 2005): 217–25.
Murray, Jonathan. That Thinking Feeling: A Research Guide to Scottish Cinema, 1938-2004 / Jonathan Murray. Edinburgh: College of Art, 2005.
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