In Quest of a Film Culture

CINEMA, CULTURE, SCOTLAND: SELECTED ESSAYS BY COLIN McARTHUR, edited by Jonathan Murray, Edinburgh University Press (2024)

Colin McArthur is a leading scholar of mid-twentieth century Hollywood cinema, popular American film genres, filmmaking in Europe and British television, and a commentator on the representation of Scotland in film and the institutional culture of film production.  I remember avidly reading those of his articles that appeared in the international literature, arts and affairs magazine Cencrastus in the 1980s.

Jonathan Murray, Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Edinburgh, has provided a very valuable service by bringing together thirty-six essays by McArthur which appeared in a wide range of books and periodicals between 1966 and the present day. McArthur himself provides additional commentary and an Afterword.

Colin McArthur was a secondary school teacher before joining the British Film Institute (BFI) Education Department as a Teacher Adviser in 1968.  He was appointed Head of Film Availability Services in 1974, his title later changing to Head of the Distribution Division.  He remained with the BFI until 1984, later becoming a visiting professor at Glasgow Caledonian University and Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh.

The critical perspectives of French film theorists such as André Bazin in the magazine Cahiers de cinema were an important influence on his writing. Early essays in the book include an analysis of the Polish director Andrej Wajda’s film Ashes and Diamonds (1958) and works exploring the culture and history underlying the Western, film noir and gangster movie Hollywood genres. He was an early champion of the idea that Hollywood cinema was a legitimate object of study. In pieces written between 1995 and 2000 he highlighted the erasure of historical and political context from later readings of the cult movie Casablanca (1942) and the neglect of the class dimension in critical reviews of the films of Alfred Hitchcock.

McArthur first turned his attention to filmmaking in Scotland in his essay “Politicising Scottish Film Culture” published in New Edinburgh Review 34 in 1976.  Written in the period when the establishment of a Scottish Assembly and devolved government were anticipated, he employed the provocative mixture of polemic and academic analysis that was to become characteristic of his work, arguing that Scottish filmmakers needed to break free of the constraints on the range of their output imposed by the institutions of patronage, embracing challenging and critical perspectives on Scottish history, society and culture.  What was needed, he believed, was not just a change in the approach to film-making, but a radicalisation of Scotland’s film culture. The Scottish film scene, though small, appeared to McArthur to be fragmented, with little creative dialogue or debate between filmmakers, institutions such as Films of Scotland, the Scottish Film Council and the Edinburgh International Film Festival, BBC Scotland and Scottish Television, and film studies in schools, colleges and universities.  He called for ideological analysis of Scottish films and television programmes, and the production of alternatives which offered critiques of the dominant aesthetic forms and social, political and cultural assumptions encountered within them.

In “Scotland and Cinema: The Iniquity of the Fathers”, first published as a chapter in Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television, the book McArthur edited based on contributions to a three-day examination Scotland and film at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1982, he began an exploration of the representation of Scotland and Scots in film which he was to pursue and develop over more than 40 years.

Drawing on the influential Scotch Myths exhibition mounted by Barbara and Murray Grigor in 1981 and the critique set out in Malcolm Chapman’s The Gaelic Vision in Scottish Culture (1978), McArthur argued that representations of Scotland in film, and more widely in popular art, culture and entertainment, were dominated by a limited number of powerful discourses, notably ‘Tartanry’, ‘The Kailyard’ and ‘Clydesidism’.  [see The Traitors – Ed]

Tartanry has the longest pedigree, having its origins in the Ossian cult unleashed by James Macpherson in the 18th Century and receiving a further global boost in the context of Romanticism by Walter Scott and Lord Byron.  Kailyard literature, and popular representations of Scotland derived from it, provided a depoliticised, escapist vision of a 19th Century rural Scotland dominated by the strictures of the Kirk in its established and break-away variants.  Clydesidism, the most recent discourse, valorises the hard-drinking, self-consciously male culture of Scotland’s industrial working class.

McArthur draws on Chapman in arguing that ‘Tartanry’ is the product of a process of symbolic appropriation by which Enlightenment Europe defined, romanticised and tamed the Celtic ‘other’.  In the intervening period, he argues, Scots (including Gaels) have come to define their identities within the framework fashioned for them to a remarkable degree. The Scot in the discourse of ‘Tartanry’ has become Homo celticus, a character is somebody else’s story.  This helps to explain why many Scots have recognised and taken delight in even the most fanciful representations of their history and culture in British and Hollywood cinema. 

In an essay published in Cencrastus in 1983, McArthur sees The Maggie, an Ealing comedy directed by Alexander Mackendrick in 1954, as offering a congenial fantasy in which the fey, wily and essentially Celtic ‘Spirit of Scotland’ outwits and seduces hard-nosed American capitalism. He points out that the economic reality in post-War Scotland was rather different, commenting that:

“What we witness in the production and consumption of The Maggie in 1953-54 is a society with no native tradition of seriously interrogating popular art caving under an ideological onslaught to the grotesque extent of mistaking grapeshot for manna.”

For those readers inclined to object that things had improved in the intervening 30 years, he pointed out that Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (1983) had an almost indistinguishable plotline and received similar uncritical acclaim.

In expanding his critique of the representation of Scotland in film, McArthur developed the concept of the Scottish Discursive Unconscious (SDU), arguing that the dominant discourses of Scottish identity is now so powerful that anyone setting out to describe, comment on or make images of Scotland and the Scots, rather than producing a novel ‘personal’  take on the subject, switches to automatic pilot, slotting into a pre-existing and hegemonic bricolage of images, narratives, sub-narratives, tones and turns of phrase which have now become suspended in aspic.

McArthur lays much of the blame for failure to challenge this state of affairs at the door of the institutions established to support film production in Scotland.  In a series of essays critiquing the film culture these institutions have promoted, he excoriates their excessive emphasis on commercial success, their fetishisation of the form of storytelling favoured by American cinema, their pursuit of the mirage of a ‘Hollywood on Clyde’, and their marginalisation of culture.  He accuses the Scottish Film Council (1934-97)  and Scottish Film Production Fund (1982-97), and later Scottish Screen (1997-2010), of favouring high-budget, orthodox narrative film intended to command attention on the European or world stage at the expense of lower budget films of greater cultural merit; and being overly focused on springboarding a few individuals into international film production rather than nurturing a healthy and diverse indigenous film culture.

This approach was crystallised in 1997 with the establishment of Scottish Screen, born out of Secretary of State Michael Forsyth’s irritation that the superior package of incentives offered by Ireland had resulted in much of Randall Fraser’s Braveheart (1995) being filmed there rather than in Scotland.  More money was made available to fund Scottish filmmaking, but the model on which the new framework was to operate was to be an overtly neoliberal one, with culture subordinated to commercial imperatives.

As an alternative to this market-driven model, McArthur argued that there was a cultural necessity for what he called ‘Poor Cinema’, low-budget films which display cinematic literacy and engaged with the history or culture of the society from which they come.  In his essay ‘’Artists and Philistines: The Irish and Scottish Film Milieux” (1998) he makes a scathing comparison between the commercial agenda being pursued by Scottish Screen and the cultural emphasis of the framework which had been put in place for the support of film production in Ireland by Michael D. Higgins when he was Minister for Culture and the Gaeltacht.  He describes Scottish Screen’s policy guidelines and application forms during the thirteen years of its existence as a manual for crushing the life out of a creative project and warns Celtic filmmakers that: “The more your films are consciously aimed at an international market, the more their conditions of intelligibility will be bound up with regressive discourses about your own culture.”

McArthur argues that a healthy film culture requires both an awareness of both the process of filmmaking and ideology and discourse.    He laments the lack of intellectual challenge or scrutiny in Scotland, pointing out that Scottish Screen never aspired to produce a substantial journal on the model of the BFI’s Sight & Sound.  He sees Scotland’s media as having singularly failed to offer any serious cultural critique of cinema and filmmaking and is dismissive of most of what has passed for cultural criticism from the pens of Scottish journalists.

Two of McArthur’s later essays focus on the filmmaking of Murray Grigor, whose Scotch Myths exhibition was influential in the development of his own thinking on the hegemonic discourses of Scottish culture.  Grigor’s Scotch Myths film was commissioned by Channel 4 and broadcast on Hogmanay 1982 as a challenge to the New Year offerings of BBC Scotland and Scottish Television, which were constructed within the discourses of Tartanry and Kailyardism which it lampooned.  The film eschews a classical Hollywood narrative structure, makes extensive use of animation, and individual members of the cast migrate from playing one historical or mythical figure to another.  McArthur sees it as sitting alongside John McGrath and John Mackenzie’s The Cheviot, the Stag and the Black, Black Oil (1974) and Ian Pattison and Colin Gilbert’s television series Rab C. Nesbitt (1988-2014) as one of Scotland’s most important contributions to a ludic modernist tradition – simultaneously playful and politically serious – going back to the Surrealists, James Joyce and Samuel Beckett.

Grigor’s Scotch Myths film received remarkably little critical attention, though Julie Davidson described it as “possibly the most creative and discreetly bitter piece of self-analysis to come out of Scotland in years.”  It was received sourly by the Scottish film establishment.  Afterwards, Grigor was conspicuously unsuccessful in securing support from the funding institutions for film projects with a Scottish cultural focus and was obliged to turn to work in the United States.  McArthur claims that the shunning of Grigor’s work by the apparatchiks of Scottish film funding and broadcasting amounted to suppression, pointing out that the Scottish Film Council went so far as to ban the acquisition of Scotch Myths for its film library and the Scottish Film Archives.   He makes a robust case for the belated recognition of Grigor as an auteur of Scottish filmmaking and argues that by denying him production funding Scottish institutions missed the opportunity to develop with him a progressive take on Scotland’s history and culture.

In his Afterword, McArthur concludes, perhaps rather too morosely, that the arguments which recur throughout these essays are no longer in favour with film and cultural academics.  I believe that many of them are every bit of valid and relevant now as when they were originally made.  One of the propositions he makes in this important body of writing is that the film movements which have achieved international recognition have emerged from periods of profound social change through the efforts of cadres of intellectuals and artists concerned with issues of class and nation.  We appear to be in such a period.  Can Scotland build a film culture capable of engaging confidently and distinctively with the challenges of these times?  Do we have politicians, broadcasters and funders with the courage and imagination to support that?  And do our new media have the inclination, critical capacity and cultural literacy to nurture the endeavour?