The New Scottish Cinema 9780755697281, 9781845118617

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LIST OF FIGURES

1 2 3 1.1 1.2 1.3 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 6.1

Becoming ‘just like you’: Renton’s challenge to viewers at the end of Trainspotting 3 Here but I’m gone: the opening image of Morvern Callar 17 Britannia meets Marianne: the multiplication of identities in Charlotte Gray 18 This is a man’s world: masculine metaphors of nation in The Big Man 26 No quarter asked, no quarter given: eighteenth-century Anglo-Scottish relations as imagined in Rob Roy 36 Holyrood or Hollywood? Sunset Boulevard as metaphor for Edinburgh’s New Town in Shallow Grave 43 Nocturnal no man’s land: the after-hours working lives of characters in Late Night Shopping 60 I’m a native New Yorker: transatlantic fantasising runs rampant in Strictly Sinatra 63 Go West, young man: dreams of a new way of life in Ratcatcher 69 Prison movie: quoting Classical Hollywood in The Magdalene Sisters 74 Wish you were here? Crossing the border in The Last Great Wilderness 83 Touched by the hand of God: masculine primacy reasserts itself towards the end of Skagerrak 92 Light up my life: existential optimism in Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself) 97 Seeing red: colour exteriorises Jackie’s inner state in Red Road 102 Fancy dress: the iconography of elsewhere in Donkeys 107 Both sides now? The privileging of Casim’s perspective in Ae Fond Kiss… 117 My heart belongs to daddy: dutiful daughterhood in Nina’s Heavenly Delights 124 The descent of man: avian metaphor in Cargo 128 Get your story straight: True North comments on the dehumanisation of economic migrants 133 Swapping sartorial signifiers of post-Britishness: Garrigan and Amin’s first meeting in The Last King of Scotland 139 From Red Riding Hood to Big Bad Wolf: Kelly Ann’s climatic metamorphosis in Wild Country 151



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6.2 ‘Say what you want’: Outpost’s commercial exploitation of Nazi iconography 156 6.3 ‘Making the best of it’: landscape as film set in The Inheritance 161 6.4 Predatory capitalism: Alistair asserts ownership of Sean’s bloodied body in New Town Killers 167 6.5 Tolkien ’bout my generation: adolescence as fantasy roleplaying in GamerZ 170

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book has been an unconscionably long time in gestation. Perhaps the only upside to that process has been the chance I have had to accumulate a huge number of personal and professional debts along the way. Philippa Brewster at I.B.Tauris was supportive in accepting my initial book proposal and then extraordinarily patient in waiting for the actual book. Ted Cowan and John Caughie at the University of Glasgow supervised my doctoral thesis on 1990s Scottish cinema with skill and immense patience (a pattern starts to emerge here). Colin McArthur and Duncan Petrie became good friends as well as inspiring teachers around that time, and have provided invaluable friendship, support and intellectual stimulation over the last decade and more. The same is true of Rod Stoneman and Fidelma Farley, with whom I collaborated closely on a symposium and subsequent anthology publication on Scottish cinema. I also owe much to two postgraduate peers from Glasgow, David Martin-Jones and Sarah Neely, for their friendship and the fine example they set in their own published research on Scottish cinema. More generally, I want to express my deep gratitude to colleagues and students past and present at Edinburgh College of Art. They have made, and continue to make, ECA an inspiring place to think, teach and write about the moving image. I also owe thanks to staff in the ECA library and a range of similar institutions around the UK for making vital research sources available to me: the National Library of Scotland, the British Film Institute Reading Room and the Irish Film Centre Library. Certain arguments in this book have already been rehearsed elsewhere. I am grateful to a range of people and publishers for giving me the opportunity to research and reflect in print on contemporary Scottish cinema, and also for granting their permission for some of that material to be reproduced and reworked here. The work in question first appeared in the following places: ‘Convents or cowboys? Millennial Scottish and Irish film industries and imaginaries in The Magdalene Sisters’, in John Hill and Kevin Rockett (eds), Studies in Irish Film I: National Cinemas and Beyond (Dublin: Four Courts, 2004); ‘Kids in America? Narratives of transatlantic influence in 1990s Scottish cinema’, in Screen 46/2 (2005); ‘Scotland’, in Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (eds), The Cinema of Small Nations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007);

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‘Neds: review’, in Cineaste XXXVI/4 (2011); ‘Blurring borders: Scottish cinema in the twenty-first century’, in Journal of British Cinema and Television 9/3 (2012). If what follows is successful in convincing its reader of anything, it will be the enduring truth that there is far more to life than books (and even films). I’d like to offer sincere thanks to my mother Mary Frances, brothers David and Michael and close friends for constantly reminding me of that fact during the excruciatingly long period of time I spent chipping out this book and a number of related projects. Jeremy Donald, Barry Gornell, Claire Prentice, Carole Sheridan, David Stenhouse, Sue Turnbull, Rachel Welsh and many others have supported me through that process, whether they realised it or not. I began by putting on record the influence of several important academic mentors. It would be remiss not to conclude by foregrounding that of my first teacher. My late father Jim had comparatively little time for movies. He did, however, possess a deep love of reading. As I understand it, that passion stemmed from his conviction that everything in the world, whether we encounter it on the printed page or not, is given to us to read with curiosity and care. Or perhaps this is just an overblown way of acknowledging the fact that anything I am able to do as a student and teacher stems back to the gifts my father made sure to bestow upon me. This book is for him, with all possible gratitude and love. JM Edinburgh

GENERAL EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

For decades the cinematic image of Scotland has been created in England and in Hollywood. In two previous books from I.B.Tauris, both of which appeared in 2003, the noted film historian Colin McArthur examined the Ealing Studios view of Scotland in the British Film Guide to Whisky Galore! and The Maggie, and the American version in Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema. In this new book, Jonathan Murray switches the focus to Scotland itself and the phenomenon he calls ‘New Scottish Cinema’, that is, the Scottish cinema of the 1990s and subsequent decades up to the present. It is a very impressive piece of work; comprehensive, beautifully written, theoretically informed and intellectually stimulating. The discussion covers the circumstances and conditions of film production in Scotland. It traces outside influences (the United States, Scandinavia) on indigenous production. It also embraces all genres and gives equally serious consideration to low budget and high budget productions. Each individual film discussed receives thorough, sophisticated analysis and all are carefully located within the overarching framework of discussion. In the future, thanks to this book, an understanding of and engagement with the cinematic image of Scotland will be widened and deepened so that the likes of Trainspotting and Ratcatcher will take their place alongside Whisky Galore! and Braveheart. Jeffrey Richards

INTRODUCTION

Something strange happened to me in a Glaswegian cinema on an early January afternoon in 1995. Sitting among an unusually large audience, given the time of day, I watched Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle, GB, 1995), a film made in Scotland with substantial creative input from a broad range of Scottish artists. Despite being almost halfway through an undergraduate degree in Film and Television Studies at the University of Glasgow, no part of the course syllabus could have prepared me for a cinematic experience quite so exotic. After all, in the period between my studies commencing in 1993 and the theatrical release of director Danny Boyle’s debut feature, almost everything published on the subject of Scottish filmmaking bemoaned that activity’s seemingly irremediable rarity. Forsyth Hardy, a notably active figure within domestic film culture since the late 1920s, conceded that, ‘for better or worse… the picture of Scotland on the cinema screen has been painted in the main by producers outwith the country’.1 Other knowledgeable observers concurred with his analysis and identified a range of invidious consequences that stemmed from this historic lack. David Bruce, then Director of the Scottish Film Council, worried that ‘there can be no complete, coherent film culture without production’ in Scotland.2 John Caughie regretted ‘the failure of British cinema to invent and sustain… a possible British or Scottish art cinema equipped with enough edge to cut through… nationalist nostalgias and clever ironies’.3 Colin McArthur pulled no punches in outlining the gloomy prognosis that, ‘to put it bluntly, Scotland is, on the filmmaking front, a third world country’.4 Perhaps most damningly of all, the 1993 HMSO Charter for the Arts in Scotland could apprehend only ‘a massive hole at the centre of the [local] industry where feature film production should be’.5 The experience of the students I work with today at Edinburgh College of Art is markedly different from my own some two decades before. Where I was surprised even to see a new Scottish film, many of them fully expect to shoot such things after completing their studies. A handful of individual examples from the past 12 months (I write this introduction in late July 2012) illustrate the contrast. One former student premieres her first feature-length documentary, Future My Love (Maja Borg, GB/Swe, 2012), to critical acclaim at the 2012 Edinburgh International Film Festival. Another sees his audacious animated short The Making of Longbird

2 The New Scottish Cinema (Will Anderson, GB, 2011) win major awards at a range of prominent film festivals around Europe: Annecy, DOK Leipzig, Stuttgart and Warsaw, to name but a few. A third completes her undergraduate degree in Performance Costume and immediately proceeds to work on two high-budget international productions that were shot in Scotland during 2011: World War Z (Marc Forster, USA/Malta, 2013) and Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, GB, 2012). In the course of her professional duties on the latter, she finds herself unexpectedly called upon to act as a temporary stand-in for lead actor Scarlett Johansson. The above is a very personal way of advancing this book’s central contention: the landscape for feature filmmaking in Scotland changed remarkably between the early 1990s and the start of the 2010s. In what follows within these pages, I attempt to respond to that fact in two central ways. Firstly, by offering some possible explanations of the reasons why, and manner in which, the material conditions necessary to sustain a substantive indigenous production culture were established in late-twentieth- and early-twenty-first-century Scotland. Secondly, by critiquing many of the films and filmmakers that emerged from this process. In order to fulfil those aims, the present work is divided into five chapters. The first two tackle 1990s Scottish cinema in a broadly chronological fashion. They argue that a nascent feature production sector was first created, and then consolidated, by a self-conscious collective engagement with a diverse range of institutional, industrial and creative precedents drawn from American cinema past and present. Chapters 3, 4 and 5 then explore the 2000s in a different fashion. Rather than offering a chronological account of that period, these sections identify and analyse three prominent strands discernible within Scottish filmmaking in the decade after the millennium. That shift in approach contains within it a very specific argument. As we shall see, the 1990s were emphatically not without a wide range of commercial and cultural disappointments or missed opportunities in Scotland. But the critical mass of domestic talent, experience, money and infrastructure created at the very end of the twentieth century bequeathed a lasting legacy, unquestionably helping to facilitate a sustained diversification of local cinematic practice in the years since 2000. Granted, indigenous feature production levels in Scotland remain unusually low when compared to most other European or Anglophone film industries. But over the last two decades, they did become high enough to support two vital phenomena. During the 1990s, it was the emergence of a distinctive Scottish cinema of any kind whatsoever. During the 2000s, it has been the evolution of different kinds of Scottish cinema: Scotland today possesses a domestic production sector sturdy and sizeable enough to support ongoing and meaningful processes of film cultural and industrial variegation. In the remainder of this introduction, I set out my overarching view of the distinctive cinematic characters of the Scottish 1990s and 2000s. In doing so, I hope to offer some explanation of the what, why and how of this book: the films and filmmakers chosen for discussion within each of the five main chapters; the reasons for picking those artists and artworks instead of others; and the motivations behind subsequently picking those case study choices apart in very particular critical ways.

Introduction

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Becoming just like you: theorising 1990s Scottish cinema

Figure 1 Becoming ‘just like you’: Renton’s challenge to viewers at the end of Trainspotting ‘I’m going to be just like you.’ These are among the last words uttered by reformed Edinburgh junkie Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor) in the final scene of Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, GB, 1996), as he strides through central London armed with a holdall of stolen money and a newly unshakeable sense of self-belief. In retrospect, Renton’s fictional swagger can also be read as a real-life rallying cry. It expressed something of the giddy expectation that swept through the local film culture from which Mark’s character emerged. For a variety of reasons, 1995/96 felt like an annus mirabilis for Scottish cinema. Trainspotting was the world’s most profitable film of 1996, when original production costs – £1.7 million – are set against global boxoffice receipts – c. $72 million.6 Substantial amounts of National Lottery funding to subsidise indigenous feature production became available for the first time. The location shoots of two Hollywood-financed but Scottish-themed movies, Shallow Grave (Michael Caton-Jones, USA/GB, 1995) and Braveheart (Mel Gibson, USA, 1995), generated unprecedented levels of inward investment and international publicity. Little wonder that many observers proclaimed the twentieth century’s end to be ‘arguably the most dynamic period in one hundred years of Scottish film history’,7 a heady juncture characterised by the ‘unprecedented levels of confidence, achievement and ambition’8 that flash-flooded through domestic filmmaking circles. Bald production statistics bear such contentions out. Between 1972 and 2002, a mere 44 features with significant elements of Scottish narrative setting and creative and/or financial input were produced and distributed in British cinemas. This represents a paltry annual average of a film-and-a-half over a 30-year period.9 But matters looked better the closer one advanced towards the present. Sixteen Scottish

4 The New Scottish Cinema features and six shorts were produced and distributed domestically between 1980 and 1990; during the next five years, the equivalent figures were seven and nine. But significant acceleration then took place between 1995 and 2000, with 18 features and 45 shorts shot and shown across that brief period. The latter figures do not include, moreover, a range of high-profile mobile productions, including Breaking the Waves (Lars von Trier, Dk/Swe/Fr/Neth/Nor, 1996) and Mission Impossible (Brian De Palma, USA, 1996), which were filmed in Scotland during the late 1990s.10 This notable expansion of Scottish filmmaking during the 1990s was unforeseen – indeed, unforeseeable – when the decade began. As such, it cries out for empirical explanation as well as critical evaluation. Indeed, writing at the period’s outset, John Caughie already sought to steer collective attention towards ‘material and practical questions of the structures from which new forms and discourses will emerge’11 within Scottish cinema. Duncan Petrie adopted a similar position as the decade drew to a close, arguing that its central lesson had been that: the necessary conditions for a sustainable national cinema require more than the existence of a handful of films… certain structures and institutions [are needed] that can enable films to be produced on a relatively consistent and regular basis.12 These acute contemporary interventions pinpointed at the time the need to explore 1990s Scottish cinema in a way that integrates analysis of key films with an account of the evolving institutional and industrial contexts that allow such works to be produced in the first place. In the opening half of this introduction, I explain both how and why Chapters 1 and 2 of this book adopt the kind of bifurcated critical approach that Caughie and Petrie both advocate. Firstly, these sections of the work document the significant number of new or reconstituted film institutional structures which transformed the Scottish film cultural landscape during the 1990s. These catalytic initiatives are divided into two camps. On one hand, many new local institutions were created over the period with the express purpose of attracting increased amounts of mobile feature production activity to Scotland. Examples of this strategic thinking, many of which are discussed at further length in Chapters 1 and 2, include: Scottish Screen Locations (established 1990); the Glasgow Film Fund (1993); Scottish Screen (1997); and Glasgow District Council’s Film Charter (1998). As a result of such developments, the 1990s witnessed an unprecedented slew of US studio projects locating to Scotland, a process that began with Hamlet (Franco Zeffirelli, USA/GB/Fr, 1990) and most famously/notoriously encompassed Braveheart. In one such movie, Loch Ness (John Henderson, USA, 1995), an American scientist aims to (dis)prove the Loch Ness Monster legend once and for all. But Reason’s emissary runs up against a complex web of local schemes and scheming geared towards the maintenance of a lucrative flow of tourism-related inward investment into the Scottish economy. The sceptical visitor notes wryly that the development of service sectors finely calibrated to service/seduce mobile

Introduction

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capital ‘seems to be the national pastime’ in Scotland. Comic exaggeration aside, it is certainly true that outward-facing entrepreneurialism became much more than an occasional hobby within Scottish film culture as the 1990s progressed.13 Alongside attempts to attract more mobile production work to Scotland, the 1990s also saw the establishment of many new institutions and initiatives geared towards the stimulation of indigenous filmmaking. This aspect of local institutional evolution was deeply indebted to a range of film funding and development practices associated with mainstream American cinema. The screenwriting workshop Movie Makars (established 1992), the Glasgow Film Fund, the pan-European screenwriting and directing laboratory Moonstone International (1997) and Glasgow’s Film Charter, for example, were all explicitly modelled on pre-existing North American counterparts. Moonstone’s roots lay in the pioneering Scottish theatre, film and television producer/director/writer John McGrath’s accidental viewing of a British television interview with Robert Redford, founder in 1981 of the Sundance Institute, the annual film festival often credited as the midwife to 1980s American independent cinema.14 McGrath contacted Redford in order to discuss training needs and challenges confronting early-1990s Scottish and Irish cinemas. As a result, the American filmmaker agreed that Sundance would provide logistical and mentoring support for what McGrath termed ‘a combined Scots-Irish initiative’15 geared towards developing local filmmakers’ creative and commercial skills base. With initial funding from Scotland (Scottish Screen, the Scottish Arts Council), Ireland (Screen Training Ireland) and the European Union (MEDIA), Moonstone held an inaugural set of screenwriting and directing workshops in late 1997.16 For McGrath, filmmakers living and working in a country with a potential domestic audience of less than six million had to understand that, in order to achieve industrial sustainability, ‘you hope to show a film all over the world… the kind of filmmaking where anybody can see what it is about… but it’s terrifically locked into its own place and specificity’.17 In McGrath’s view, ‘nearly all the good [American] independent movies have come through Sundance’.18 He thus concluded that transplantation of the model offered by Redford’s initiative represented an enticing way of transforming Scottish cinema’s creative and industrial prospects. McGrath’s individual belief in the need to adopt/adapt institutional and creative precedents associated with American cinema was symptomatic of a dominant line of strategic thought within 1990s Scottish film culture more generally. Chapters 1 and 2 of this book identify a range of US cinematic influences at work in indigenous filmmaking of the period. These external reference points shaped both the manner in which many 1990s Scottish features were developed and the central aesthetic and thematic characteristics that such works displayed once complete. During the decade’s latter half especially, many (if not most) within Scottish film culture looked west in search of a blueprint for international commercial competitiveness. As a result, the present study takes Duncan Petrie’s famous suggestion that the 1990s saw the birth of a ‘devolved’19 Scottish cinema and argues that the latter entity defined itself with at least as much reference to an American cinematic centre as to any metropolitan British equivalent. As Chapters 1 and 2 show, the Scottish-American

6 The New Scottish Cinema filmic ferment of the 1990s involved a volatile mixture of intent and accident. In the final analysis, however, it did create the necessary material base on which a relatively sustainable and distinctive national cinema could be established. A critically neglected movie of the period, The Big Tease (Kevin Allen, GB/USA, 1999), illustrates the aspirational fascination with American cinema and popular culture that the early part of this book explores. Co-written by its lead actor, the stand-up comedian (and latterly, US chat show host) Craig Ferguson, The Big Tease is an unapologetically commercial proposition. Gay Glaswegian hairdresser Crawford Mackenzie (Ferguson) finds his life unexpectedly transformed by a brief trip across the Atlantic. Crawford swaps the middle-class environs of Glasgow’s West End for the glitzier ambience of America’s West Coast after mistaking an invitation to observe proceedings at the Hairdressers’ Guild of America’s annual Platinum Scissors World Championships as a request to compete. Accidental immersion in the high-powered world of Beverly Hills celebrity crimping cruelly exposes the parochial nature of his totemic tonsorial status back home. But in a delirious plucky underdog fantasy, Crawford engineers entry into the Platinum Scissors and is eventually crowned the world’s best hairdresser. He then returns to Glasgow a hero. Ironic self-consciousness suffuses all of this. Tongue firmly inserted in cheek, The Big Tease frames its utopian fiction as a Nick Broomfield-style documentary study of celebrity. Much of the ‘real’ footage seen by viewers is shot by an English documentarian accompanying Crawford on his transatlantic adventure. Equally premeditated is the movie’s arch juxtaposition of a very local identity (not Scottish, or even Glaswegian, but West End Glaswegian) with a universally recognised and resonant equivalent (the gaudy myth of Tinseltown). Scottish attraction to Americana is clearly visible in all this. At one point, a star-struck Crawford gazes at the nocturnal Los Angeles skyline and muses that ‘here’ is ‘where stories are’. The Big Tease takes those words at face value by casting itself as an adoring (if self-aware) Scottish variant on American popular cultural mythology. Craig Ferguson’s script recycles the venerable ‘Coming to America’ story of the indomitable immigrant driven by an unbreakable dream. In these ways, The Big Tease illustrates the extent to which many artists active in 1990s Scotland understood premeditated local adaptation of US cinematic and popular cultural precedent to be the most effective way of creating a commercially viable indigenous feature production sector from a near-standing start. Ferguson’s script tries to commodify the domestic identity that Crawford personifies (he claims at one point to be ‘representing Scotland’ in the Platinum Scissors) by combining that phenomenon with a much more widely recognised US counterpart. A similar argument can be made about many other 1990s Scottish films, including those critically pored, rather than passed, over. Take Trainspotting, easily the most lucrative and influential example of a contemporary Caledonian gaze across the Atlantic. While it is both possible and plausible to see this movie as a primarily ‘‘British’ cultural product’,20 the present study is far closer in approach to those accounts which foreground Trainspotting’s deliberate mixing of Scottish and American cultural identities and traditions. Martin McLoone, for example, sees late-1990s Celtic cinemas (i.e., Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland) as linked

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by their common depiction of a ‘cultural universe [and] an imagined community that is Anglo-American in a broad sense rather than specifically British’.21 Murray Smith views Trainspotting’s celebrated opening and closing sequences in just this light. In the former scene, the famous monologue delivered by actor Ewan McGregor in a Central Belt Scottish accent (‘Choose life; choose a job; choose a career’) is counterpointed by the iconic American drawl of Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust for Life’. This, for Smith, is evidence of the fact that, ‘for all its “Scottishness”, the impact and appeal of America – its glamour and vitality – is everywhere in Trainspotting’.22 He discerns a similar sense of cultural bifurcation in the movie’s final moments, arguing that Renton’s triumphantly amoral self-reinvention has ‘a deep resonance with the American dream’23 of success achieved through unapologetic self-reliance. Walking towards camera, the character’s image expands, and then distorts, just before the final credits roll. Renton’s voiceover narration renounces old ways and friends alike, ‘cleaning up… moving on’ in order to become ‘just like you: the job, the family, the fucking big television, the washing machine, the car’. The fact that Mark traverses an unidentified bridge over the River Thames as viewers hear him say such things only amplifies the (presumably intentional) sense of Rubicons crossed, whether within the text or without. In the wake of Trainspotting, director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Macdonald and screenwriter John Hodge spent the rest of the 1990s working on high-budget productions supported by Hollywood studio finance: A Life Less Ordinary (GB/USA, 1997) and The Beach (GB/USA, 2000). Trainspotting’s Scottish-American cultural identity is significant to this book’s first two chapters for several reasons. First, this movie helps to illustrate how, and explain why, transatlantic processes of cinematic adoption/adaptation played such a central role in Scottish cinema’s material expansion during the 1990s. Equally important, however, is the fact that Renton proves such a provocative central character: charismatic and callous in equal measure. His climactic triumph poses an ideological conundrum because it can be seen as a Pyrrhic victory. For all Mark’s self-satisfaction, it might be said that he does no more than swap frying pan for fire, ‘gliding into bourgeois-induced, rather than drug-initiated, oblivion’.24 In discussing the 1990s, this book applies questions like these not simply to Trainspotting, but also to the emergent Scottish cinema which that film spearheaded. If Renton wants to own a ‘fucking big’ screen in one sense, Danny Boyle, John Hodge and Andrew Macdonald were equally keen to do so in another. Their overriding aim was quite simply, in Boyle’s words, to ‘get a kid and his girlfriend or her boyfriend into the cinema on a Friday night’.25 Both Trainspotting’s lead character and his creators can thus be seen as enthusiastic local converts to a complex network of American ideological values, cinematic or otherwise. The job of assessing 1990s Scottish cinema involves judging just what it was that an enthusiastic and extensive collective embrace of US filmic working practices and institutional structures facilitated: a progressive process of cultural self-expression and expansion on one hand, or a regressive one of selfabnegation and uncritical mimicry on the other. If Renton’s vow to ‘become just like you’ really can be seen as a rallying call for Scottish filmmaking of the period, then it must be acknowledged that the character’s words can be read in radically different

8 The New Scottish Cinema ways: either as a challenge or a capitulation to established authority. In the end, this book’s first two chapters propose that, for a brief but vitally important period in the mid-to-late-1990s, the encounter between a traditionally peripheral national cinema and a globally pervasive US equivalent kick-started a substantial degree of economic and cultural transformation within the junior partner. But as we shall also see, that project’s commercial and national cultural impetus was spent by the decade’s end. As well as documenting and evaluating the fact of pervasive American film cultural and industrial influence within 1990s Scottish cinema, the early parts of this book also seek to pinpoint the specific generic and aesthetic forms which that influence took. Two overarching trends are key here. Firstly, the international commercial success of both Shallow Grave and Trainspotting provoked a strain of local filmmaking heavily indebted to the example of 1980s and early-1990s American independent cinema. Seven years after Shallow Grave’s domestic theatrical release, producer Andrew Macdonald remembered that: People used to say, ‘what are you trying to make [Shallow Grave] like?’… there was very little else around [in Britain] that was similar. We based it on American Independent films: sex, lies and videotape [Steven Soderburgh, USA, 1989]… the Coen Brothers’ work, Spike Lee’s work… reasonably smart but also entertaining, commercial, accessible for people to see. And I don’t think anybody in Britain… really cared about a broader audience… we cared about that and we tried to make a story that people would be interested to come and see and also that would have some relevance to their lives because it was set in a place that they recognised, rather than San Francisco.26 Many Scottish filmmakers who emerged in Macdonald’s wake tried to emulate his thinking. Other 1990s and early 2000s ‘Scottish independent’ movies – many discussed at length in the following two chapters – include: Soft Top, Hard Shoulder (Stefan Schwartz, GB, 1992), The Life of Stuff (Simon Donald, GB, 1997), The Acid House (Paul McGuigan, GB, 1998), Beautiful Creatures (Bill Eagles, GB, 2000) and Late Night Shopping (Saul Metzstein, GB/Ger, 2001). Meanwhile, a contemporaneous strand of local work took a range of Classical Hollywood genres as its central inspiration. The catalytic film here was Shallow Grave, which in 1995 was easily the most expensive feature project ever developed by Scottish creative personnel working on home soil. Producer Peter Broughan and screenwriter Alan Sharp sought to resuscitate the Classical Hollywood Western. They saw this as a way of rendering key individuals and processes within Scottish history (Robert Roy MacGregor and the complex prelude to the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion) intelligible to an international audience. Despite their manifest differences, therefore, Shallow Grave and Rob Roy both tried to develop American-influenced templates for a locally specific, yet internationally marketable, contemporary Scottish cinema. For Broughan, adoption of the Western form allowed his project to ‘take on a historical subject… a complicated political time… [and] compress all of this Rob Roy stuff into a two-hour screenplay’.27 Several other

Introduction

9

1990s/early 2000s Scottish films sought to emulate Rob Roy’s commercial success by essaying domestic variations on Classical genre templates. The list includes: The Big Man (David Leland, GB, 1990), The Near Room (David Hayman, GB, 1995), The Slab Boys (John Byrne, GB, 1997), The Debt Collector (Anthony Neilson, GB, 1999), Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, GB/Fr, 1999), Strictly Sinatra (Peter Capaldi, GB/USA, 2001) and The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, GB/Ire, 2001). Several of these works are explored more fully in Chapters 1 and 2. Of course, one cannot overlook the fact that many 1990s Scottish movies do not conform to either of the American-influenced modes outlined above. Indeed, the dominant critical approach has been to propose that ‘the kind of production that… epitomise[d] Scottish film-making in the 1990s… bears a strong affinity with the tradition of European Art Cinema’.28 Culturally significant and aesthetically accomplished filmmakers such as Lynne Ramsay [Ratcatcher], Peter Mullan [Orphans (GB, 1999)], Gillies Mackinnon [Small Faces (GB, 1996), Regeneration (GB/Can, 1997)] and Ken Loach [Carla’s Song (GB/Ger/Sp, 1997) and My Name is Joe (Sp/It/Fr/GB/ Ger, 1998)] are pointed to as examples of that phenomenon. But the present study questions this Eurocentric analysis in two major ways. Firstly, by demonstrating that local independent and classical filmmaking strands represented the most significant Scottish cinematic movements of the 1990s. This was so in numerical, cultural and industrial terms. Secondly, by suggesting that American cinematic reference points were so pervasive during the decade’s latter part that they helped define several contemporary movies frequently offered up as evidence of late-twentieth-century Scottish cinema’s purportedly Continental credentials. Chapter 2, for example, reads Ratcatcher and The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, GB/Ire, 2001) as premeditated and culturally progressive local appropriations of US cinematic precedents. At this stage, however, an introductory sense of both the extent and complexity of transatlantic influence within 1990s Scottish cinema can be provided through brief consideration of what, at first sight, looks like an explicitly anti-American local film of the period: screenwriter Paul Laverty and director Ken Loach’s Carla’s Song. Laverty worked as a human rights observer in Nicaragua during the mid 1980s, and thus witnessed first-hand the devastating civil war sponsored by successive Reagan and Bush administrations in their attempt to overthrow Nicaragua’s democratically elected Sandinista government. The narrative of Carla’s Song takes place in 1987 and is split between Scotland and Nicaragua. George (Robert Carlyle), a personally and politically immature Glaswegian bus driver, falls in love with Carla (Oyanka Cabezas), a Sandinista-supporting Nicaraguan refugee recently arrived in Scotland. When George accompanies Carla back to her home country, he is horrified – but also enlightened – by the poverty and military carnage that he witnesses there. Ultimately, however, George decides not to stay with Carla in Nicaragua to defend the embattled revolutionary settlement, and instead returns to Glasgow. Laverty presented Carla’s Song as an attempt to publicise the systematic (and systematically overlooked) illegal interference of successive US governments in Central American affairs. He argued that, ‘it’s quite surreal to see history rewritten before your eyes quite so crudely… despite the US’s creation of the Contras and

10 The New Scottish Cinema the billion-dollar investment in attacking Nicaragua, the Sandinistas still somehow caused the war’.29 Ken Loach also framed Carla’s Song as a microcosmic corrective to entrenched American political and popular cultural hegemony. He protested against ‘the irony… that the culture [Nicaraguans] get is Hollywood… the people who wrecked them are still sending their cultural exports to the country’.30 Key in communicating such perspectives within Carla’s Song is the character of Bradley (Scott Glenn), an American Sandinista supporter and friend of Carla’s. Bradley’s potted exposition, for George’s benefit, of a US plotted and prosecuted war of aggression against Nicaragua is crucial: ‘The CIA, kid, runs this whole show.’ Yet certain aspects of Carla’s Song complicate the film’s seemingly clear-cut critique of overbearing American political, economic and cultural muscle. Though the movie recoils from that phenomenon in some ways, it actively seeks to exploit it in others. For instance, the central locus of ideological authority and knowledge within Carla’s Song, one that actively seeks to deconstruct US military and political hegemony, is not a Scottish character (George is too naive about the war), nor a Nicaraguan (Carla is too numbed by it), but an American (Bradley). The source of the latter’s privileged status in this regard is revealed in the film’s final scene. Here, and with George about to return to Scotland, Bradley belatedly volunteers the terms of his hitherto mysterious personal background: ‘CIA; ’81–’84; Honduras.’ The American understands the brutality and illegitimacy of US covert operations in Central America because he has taken part within them. George’s only possible response is one of comic self-deprecation, satirising both his own limited political experience and his native country’s lack of global clout: ‘Bus driver; double-decker; number 72; Glasgow.’ Thus, while Carla’s Song protests against the historic extent and abuse of American international hegemony, the possibility of political reform and restitution stems at least as much from that corrupt political order’s lapsed representative as it does from any character or culture oppressed by it: the film’s ideological analysis is underpinned by Bradley’s story at least as much as by Carla’s song. It is also worth noting, moreover, that the American character’s palpable sense of authority is also extra-diegetic in nature: Bradley is played by a real-life Hollywood film star. Indeed, Ken Loach subsequently admitted to ‘second thoughts’31 about both Scott Glenn’s casting and the thematic role played by the latter’s character within the film. On one hand, Bradley is doubly authoritative because doubly American (US political insider played by US film star). But on the other, he uses his elevated status to inculcate an anti-American political consciousness within characters and viewers alike. Despite surface appearance, then, Carla’s Song is yet another 1990s Scottish movie that demonstrates the ubiquity and complexity of the US cinematic influences active within local filmmaking of the period. The work’s opening scene reveals George to be a talented caricaturist. In response to a colleague’s complaint about a scatological cartoon which George sketches of McGurk (Stewart Preston), an officious local bus inspector, George maintains that his drawing is ‘a work of art’. Positive and negative aspects of George’s character are swiftly established here: anti-authoritarian irreverence rubs shoulders with political immaturity. The pen-and-paper protest shows McGurk scratching his testes, rather than critiquing an office despot in any

Introduction

11

more substantive way. But the final scene of Carla’s Song then draws attention to George’s attentive drawings once more, as one example of an overarching structural pattern in which that character’s ‘actions in the first half of the film (in Glasgow) are clearly mirrored by his undertakings in Nicaragua’.32 Before leaving the latter country to return home, George presents Bradley with an affectionately exaggerated portrait of the American. A pessimistic reading of Carla’s Song might posit that this caricature of Bradley is in fact a damning self-portrait of both the image’s creator and his native country, a symptomatic expression of their ‘fail[ure] to become fully involved’33 in an American-dominated and -directed world of ferocious ideological and material struggle. George, it could be argued, settles for (mis)representing that domain in wilfully facile strokes from the safe distance of his definitively sidelined native sod. Yet an optimistic interpretation of the same sequence stresses instead the evidence of the character’s significant personal growth as a result of all that he sees and does in Nicaragua. An ex-CIA operative supplants a Glasgow Corporation bus inspector as the target of George’s satire. Equally important is the fact that this valedictory gesture is rooted in the person George already was before coming to Carla’s country. It does not suggest an unbelievable (because absolute) rebirth as a doubt- and fear-free radical firebrand. Though George cannot singlehandedly put the wider world to rights, he is far less ignorant of its problems and conflicts than previously. If I prefer the positive reading of the central protagonist’s journey within Carla’s Song, one which stresses an idea of maturation that convinces precisely because it is incomplete, this is because that notion chimes with the way in which Chapters 1 and 2 of this book view Scottish cinema’s evolution during the 1990s. Rather than representing a naively self-defeating local caricature of enduring American film cultural and industrial power, collective local engagement with a range of US cinematic precedents and reference points throughout that period allowed Scottish cinema to finally start overcoming the crippling terms of its historic marginality. Becoming less like me: theorising 2000s Scottish cinema As noted above, the 1990s was a decade dominated by concerted local attempts to work through (and around) the numerous problems posed by Scottish cinema’s longterm industrial underdevelopment. Although that project proved equally prominent in the years after 2000, it took radically different (and far more diverse) forms. Scottish-American cinematic modes, ubiquitous between 1993 and 2001, proved far less prominent in the decade after American Cousins (Don Coutts, GB, 2002), a culture-clash comedy that parachutes East Coast American Mafioso into the ambit of unsuspecting Scots-Italian relatives who run a Glaswegian fish-and-chip shop.34 As a result, the critical tools this study uses to discuss late-twentieth-century Scottish cinema must be replaced by other ways of exploring Scottish cinema produced during the early twenty-first. The remainder of this introduction explains both how and why 2000s Scottish cinema proved markedly different to that of the previous decade. It also outlines the ways in which this book’s last three chapters respond to that fact.

12 The New Scottish Cinema To achieve those goals, I briefly discuss here two early-2000s features that may at first sight seem more different than alike – even to the extent that many observers might not define one as ‘Scottish’ at all. The first of the works in question is writer/ director Lynne Ramsay’s second feature, Morvern Callar (GB/Can, 2002), a c.£3m collaboration involving several financiers intimately associated with the emergent local institutional landscape of the 1990s: the Scottish National Lottery Fund, Scottish Screen and the Glasgow Film Fund.35 Ramsay’s film has been canonised as one of the new century’s most artistically accomplished and culturally significant Scottish (and/or British) movies, ‘as serious and demanding an expression of pure art as a Carl Dreyer film or a Camus novel’.36 As a result, it also features prominently within existing analyses of 2000s Scottish cinema.37 But the second film, Charlotte Gray (GB/Aus/Ger, 2001), Australian director Gillian Armstrong’s c. $25m38 star vehicle for her compatriot Cate Blanchett, is routinely dismissed as a critical and commercial disaster, ‘seen as the film which floored’39 the project’s major British financier, FilmFour. Moreover, no critic has yet attempted – to the best of my knowledge – to frame and examine this movie as an example of 2000s Scottish cinema. Yet despite their contrasting reputations, suggestive affinities between Morvern Callar and Charlotte Gray abound. Both films are directed by prominent female artists. Both are intimately associated with figures whose international reputations were established during the late-1990s upsurge in Scottish filmmaking, Lynne Ramsay in the case of Morvern Callar, producer Douglas Rae in that of Charlotte Gray. Both adapt (and share titles with) prominent examples of the contemporary British novel, Scottish writer Alan Warner’s 1995 debut and English author Sebastian Faulks’ 1999 work respectively. Both narrate stories in which eponymous female protagonists leave Scotland for the European continent. Both frame that destination as physical and psychological in equal measure: Morvern and Charlotte each assume new identities (and as a result, explore new ways of existing in the world) during their time overseas. In Ramsay’s work, Morvern (Samantha Morton) escapes a mundane life of weekday supermarket shelf-stacking and weekend pill-popping in an unnamed Highland Scottish port town (Oban in Warner’s original novel) after her boyfriend commits suicide. Morvern’s reaction is to dispose of her dead partner’s corpse and impose herself on his corpus. She claims authorship of a novel he completed just before his death, signs a lucrative deal with a London publisher, and then heads off on holiday in Spain with her best friend Lanna (Kathleen McDermott). Lanna is in the end happy to return home, believing that one encounters in Spain ‘the same crap there is everywhere’. But Morvern’s desire, as inchoate as it is urgent, to find, in her own words, ‘somewhere beautiful’, sees her sever ties with Scotland and return to the Iberian Peninsula, this time alone and indefinitely. In Armstrong’s movie, Charlotte Gray (Cate Blanchett) is an inexperienced young Scotswoman recruited as a secret agent by Special Operations Executive in World War II London. Charlotte accepts a perilous posting in occupied France for a number of reasons, chief among them a desire to locate her lover Peter (Rupert Penry Jones), a Royal Air Force Pilot shot down while flying a mission over the Continent. But while working in France under

Introduction

13

the assumed identity of ‘Dominique Guilbert’, Charlotte becomes increasingly attached to Julien (Billy Cudrup), a local Resistance leader. Briefly reunited with Peter back in Britain after the war ends, she tells him that she now loves someone else, and then returns to France to be with Julien. Morvern Callar and Charlotte Gray exemplify many of the major industrial and representational directions in which Scottish cinema developed over the course of the 2000s. First of all, these movies can be seen as harbingers of certain key institutional developments across the decade. Both were associated with funders highly active in late-1990s Scotland, but then dissolved or reconstituted at some point in the next ten years: Scottish Screen in the case of Ramsay’s movie, FilmFour in that of Armstrong’s. FilmFour was one of the major financers of Scottish filmmaking from 1995 to 2000: the company backed no fewer than nine of the 18 local features released in British cinemas between those dates. But if FilmFour had a profound impact on 1990s Scottish cinema, it might also be argued that 1990s Scottish cinema had a comparable effect on FilmFour. Encouraged by Trainspotting’s worldwide box-office success, the company attempted during the late 1990s and early 2000s to refashion itself as something approaching a ‘mini-major’. Part of that project involved FilmFour directing an increasing proportion of its available funding resources into medium-to-high budget feature projects explicitly designed to compete in the international commercial mainstream.40 Charlotte Gray was an especially notable example of this strategy. This was so in terms of budgetary scale, but also because the film was slated to be the first joint venture in an ambitious long-term production deal agreed between FilmFour and Warner Bros in mid-2000.41 Gillian Armstrong’s movie was originally developed, however, by Scottish producer Douglas Rae and his London-based independent production company, Ecosse Films. A mid-1990s Ecosse project, Mrs Brown (John Madden, GB/Ire/USA, 1997), had transcended comparatively modest roots as a BBC Scotland television commission to become an Oscar-winning international commercial success picked up for North American theatrical distribution by Miramax Films. Charlotte Gray, a substantially more expensive project than Mrs Brown, tried (but conspicuously failed) to replicate its predecessor’s lucrative exploitation of period melodrama. Unable to sustain significant losses on this film and a string of other ambitiously budgeted features, FilmFour was wound up by parent company Channel 4 in July 2002, less than six months after Charlotte Gray’s global theatrical release.42 FilmFour was subsequently reconstituted on a more modest scale by Channel 4 and resumed intermittent support of Scottish feature production from 2005 on. The company invested in projects such as Festival (Annie Griffin, GB, 2005) and two films discussed at length in Chapter 4, Cargo (Clive Gordon, Sp/GB/Swe, 2006) and The Last King of Scotland (Kevin Macdonald, GB, 2006). That said, however, its notable prominence North of the border throughout the late 1990s was not fully sustained during the 2000s. A similar pattern can be discerned in the case of Morvern Callar and Scottish Screen. The latter was a non-departmental public body established by the British government in 1997 as a single umbrella organisation with responsibility for

14 The New Scottish Cinema supporting all aspects of Scottish moving image culture and production. In its early years, boosting levels of feature filmmaking, whether indigenous or visiting, seemed like the most important part of Scottish Screen’s remit. But that situation changed in the 2000s, a period during which the organisation’s potency and prominence as a key financial patron of local feature work was called into serious question. This was so for several reasons. Firstly, successive Scottish Screen Chief Executives sought to recalibrate the body’s rationale and activities. In September 2001, only two months into his tenure, Steve McIntyre argued that Scottish Screen had ‘to move away from being a film-centred organisation’.43 He signalled one year later that substantial Lottery funding awards of the kind enjoyed by Morvern Callar (i.e., £0.5m and above) would become far rarer occurrences in future, ‘given the limited production resources available to us’.44 McInytre’s successor, Ken Hay, adopted a similar position when he took over the reins at Scottish Screen in late 2004. Hay advertised his determination that the institution demonstrate an enabling role ‘across all the creative industries… it would be very easy to just focus on [feature film] production… but if all we viewed ourselves as was a production agency, then why have anything else?’45 He instigated a wide-ranging internal review in early 2006, putting all production funding activities on temporary hold, and justified that move by arguing that the Scottish Screen’s remit could not be ‘purely about production’.46 Indeed, by mid 2010 Scottish Screen no longer existed at all. A lengthy review of national cultural policy started in 2003 saw the Scottish government announce three years later its intention to merge Scottish Screen and the Scottish Arts Council into Creative Scotland, a single body responsible for all public arts funding in the country. Protests from the Scottish filmmaking community were immediate and organised in nature. Forty-five prominent directors, writers and producers signed a June 2006 letter asserting their ‘considered opinion that it is essential to retain an independent film development and production agency which will serve the nation by serving the film industry’.47 But Scottish Screen was formally dissolved on 1 July 2010, the date on which Creative Scotland began its operations. Across the 2000s, therefore, Scottish Screen was less financially and politically powerful and engaged in relation to indigenous feature production than many had envisaged when the organisation was first established. Director Paul McGuigan, for example, proposed that the internationalisation of his oeuvre – Gangster No. 1 (GB/Ger/Ire, 2000), The Reckoning (GB/Sp, 2003), Wicker Park (USA, 2004), Lucky Number Slevin (Ger/USA, 2006), Push (USA/Can, 2009) – in the decade after his Edinburgh-set debut feature, The Acid House (GB, 1999), was a symptom of local institutional failure, not success. For McGuigan, key public bodies like Scottish Screen ‘decimated’ a fledgling indigenous production culture during the 2000s, signally failing, in the director’s view, to foster an ‘industry that creates home-grown entertainment and at the same time makes money and creates jobs in Scotland’.48 The respective fates of Scottish Screen and FilmFour illustrate an important difference between the 1990s and 2000s in Scotland. While the earlier period was in large part defined by a process of local institutional expansion, the latter was comparably marked by one of local institutional fragmentation and revision. Necessity

Introduction

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being the mother of invention, 2000s Scottish filmmakers looked to a far wider range of potential funders (and funding models) than had been the case at the twentieth century’s very end. Chapters 3 and 5 of the present work take cognisance of that fact by identifying and analysing two equally prominent, but substantially different, strands of post-2000 Scottish feature production. Chapter 3 documents a decadelong process of strategic collaboration between local filmmakers and Scandinavian peers. A great deal of the discussion here explores the output of Sigma Films, a Glasgow-based independent production company set up in 1997 by producer Gillian Berrie, actor Alastair Mackenzie and director David Mackenzie. In the years since the company’s feature-length debut, The Last Great Wilderness (David Mackenzie, GB/ Den, 2002), Sigma has acted as lead or co-producer on no fewer than 17 further feature projects, a record unmatched by any other Scottish independent. Elsewhere, Chapter 5 explores the local rise of low-budget genre production, a determinedly populist Scottish cinematic strain created by filmmakers who frequently chose (or were compelled) to forgo the kind of medium-budget production opportunities regularly made available by funders such as Scottish Screen and FilmFour during the late 1990s and very early 2000s. The twenty-first-century Scottish cinema of films like Wild Country (Craig Strachan, GB, 2005) and Outcast (Colm McCarthy, GB/Ire, 2010) subjects council estate teenagers to all manner of unlikely lycanthropic travails, while the Outpost (Steve Barker, GB, 2008) franchise produces unapologetically outré fantasies of undead Nazi Einsatzgruppen lurking in abandoned central European World War II bunkers. As well as illustrating certain key industrial trends within 2000s Scottish cinema, Charlotte Gray and Morvern Callar also anticipate a range of representational trends that became increasingly prominent as the period progressed. Specifically, these two films were part of the early stage of a collective move away from cinematic representations of national culture and identity conceived in the singular. Much Scottish filmmaking of the 2000s was instead characterised by artists’ exploration of a variegated range of possible national identities and cultures. More radically yet, a large number of contemporary features actively chose to depict identities and cultures which, while encountered within a Scottish setting, refuse to be confined or defined by a single set of territorial borders. John Caughie approaches Morvern Callar in just these terms, lauding Lynne Ramsay’s film as a work that purposefully ‘confuses the desire for a national identity expressed through cinema… put[ting] into play subjectivities which resist any attempt to contain them within the familiar contours of a national identity’.49 Sarah Neely outlines a similar view of 2000s Scottish cinema per se. During this period, she argues, ‘Scottish film-makers g[o]t on with the business of making films that challenge the relevance of debates around [national] representation or, on occasion, side-step them altogether’.50 Morvern Callar and Charlotte Gray can be used to indicate several ways in which (and reasons why) this was so. We might start with something as simple as the shared female gender of director and central character in both movies. The three 1990s works discussed in this introduction’s first half, The Big Tease, Carla’s Song and Trainspotting, all narrate stories of masculine self-transformation and -becoming. In

16 The New Scottish Cinema this, as much as in their conscious engagement with American cinematic influence, they were representative of their decade of production. A mere three – Blue Black Permanent (Margaret Tait, GB, 1992), Stella Does Tricks (Coky Giedroyc, GB, 1996) and Ratcatcher – of the 25 indigenous features made in 1990s Scotland were written and directed by female artists. As Jane Sillars and Myra Macdonald note,51 this marked imbalance perhaps reflects the fact that in twentieth-century Scottish cinema, and across twentieth-century Scottish culture more generally, ‘unstable masculine identities… have acted as rich metaphors for the dilemma of the stateless nation, haunted by anxieties about identity and a secure “place” in the world’. But this situation shifts somewhat during the 2000s. Four of the 16 films discussed in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 – Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself) (Lone Scherfig, Den/GB/Swe/Fr, 2002), Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Pratibha Parmar, GB, 2006), Red Road (Andrea Arnold, GB/Den, 2006) and Donkeys (Morag McKinnon, GB/Den, 2010) – are written and/ or directed by women. Seven of the same number – Aberdeen (Hans Petter Moland, GB/Nor/Swe, 2000), Wilbur…, Skagerrak (Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, Den/Swe/GB/ Sp/Ger/Fr/Swi, 2003), Wild Country (Craig Strachan, GB, 2005), Nina’s…, Red Road and Donkeys – feature female central protagonists. Elsewhere, numerous other 2000s features – Charlotte Gray, Morvern Callar, Afterlife (Alison Peebles, GB, 2003), Beautiful Creatures (Bill Eagles, GB, 2000), Blinded (Eleanor Yule, GB, 2004), The Dead Outside (Kerry Anne Mullaney), Dear Frankie (Shona Auerbach, GB, 2004), Festival, One Life Stand (May Miles Thomas, GB, 2000) and Yasmin (Kenny Glenaan, Ger/GB, 2004) – contributed to ‘a growing body of films focused on women and made in Scotland, in some cases by women… [where] ‘psychic spaces’ of female identities are explored’.52 Granted, an intimate association between representations of masculine identity and a national equivalent persisted as a thread within 2000s Scottish cinema: discussions of films such as True North (Steve Hudson, Ger/Ire/GB, 2006) in Chapter 4 and The Inheritance (Charles Henri Belleville, GB, 2007) in Chapter 5 make that much quite clear. But Scottish cinema’s traditionally one-sided engagement with gender issues was qualified significantly in the years after 2000. Sillars and Macdonalds’ suggestion that cinematic depictions of Scottish masculinity have frequently carried monolithic assertions of national identity in tow is worth bearing in mind when considering Charlotte Gray and Morvern Callar’s shared determination to explore female experiences of subjectivity. Both films’ central protagonists discover, and then actively develop, constructed – and therefore contingent – forms of personal identity. Through action and aspiration alike, Morvern and Charlotte refute the argument that people are essentially or primarily defined by place of birth or long-term domicile. Indeed, early in her directorial career Lynne Ramsay explicitly flagged ‘the question, “how do you escape your environment?”’ as ‘a theme in my work’.53 She thus conceived of Morvern as a protagonist who is ‘a product of a time’, in that ‘she doesn’t have much background… a foster kid, a loner and a drifter… quite a modern character’.54 Meanwhile, Gillian Armstrong imagined Charlotte Gray as ‘someone who’s been through a journey that changed her’.55 To Armstrong’s mind, Charlotte understands with unusual acuity both the positive and negative potential inherent in becoming someone or something else, of

Introduction

17

‘truly los[ing] your identity’ (Ecosse Films, 2002). Actress Cate Blanchett offered an analogous reading (and one which could easily be applied to Morvern Callar), painting Charlotte as a protagonist whose complexity lies in the fact that she is more than one woman at once, an individual who ‘finds herself by assuming another identity’.56

Figure 2 Here but I’m gone: the opening image of Morvern Callar Armstrong and Ramsay use a diverse array of formal strategies to convey this idea of identity as multiple, and therefore mutable, in nature. Take, for instance, the distinctive design of Morvern Callar’s opening titles. In the film’s first shot, slowly strobing Christmas tree lights construct Morvern as simultaneously present and absent. A close-up of the character’s face appears, but then fades to black no fewer than ten times successively. Morvern’s first name then emerges in capital letters on the screen’s left-hand side, before being replaced by her surname impressed on the right. The consequent (and entirely accurate) impression created is that the viewer’s access to, and understanding of, Morvern’s character will be contingent, rather than consistent and comprehensive, in nature. Moreover, the fragmented appearance of the movie’s title/Morvern’s name physically underscores the etymological inference of identity’s intrinsic fluidity and hybridity contained within those two words. As Linda Ruth Williams notes, ‘callar’ is both a Scots Gaelic word meaning ‘fresh’ or ‘cool’ and the Spanish verb ‘to be quiet’.57 In linking the character to both countries she temporarily inhabits during the narrative’s course, Morvern’s name thus succeeds in ‘muddying the question of identification and belonging even further’.58 The opening scene of Charlotte Gray works to achieve a comparable end. Charlotte’s view from the window of a train speeding towards an unspecified destination is one of rural flora blurring into a semi-abstract purple swell. A highly stylised profile shot then showcases the character’s alabaster-white skin, blood-red millinery and sky-blue

18 The New Scottish Cinema eyes. At the same time, Charlotte reflects, in an interior monologue, on how, ‘looking back, it all seemed so simple: we were at war, the Nazis were the enemy. And, because good must triumph over evil, so we would triumph over them.’ Here, it appears, is an intensely seductive (not least because clear-cut) image of national identity and identification. Charlotte’s red, white and blue appearance, her Scottish accent and the absolutist us/them, good/evil binary through which she casts the war seems to cast her as a Blitz-era Britannia. But the tricolour scheme does not in fact speak solely of the character’s innate allegiance to her country of birth (Scotland/Britain). Instead (or as well), it indicates Charlotte’s intense identification with a foreign culture (France) within which she finds herself psychologically reborn. The purple backdrop to private psychodrama is lavender, not heather; Charlotte does not speed North home to Scotland, but South through France to begin a new life with Julien. Charlotte Gray’s opening moments thus self-consciously construct the film as one which ‘suggests that identity can shift in accordance with our clothes, hairstyle and make-up… assuming a new identity through clothes seems a powerful and effective tool in a woman’s search for love and self-fulfilment’.59

Figure 3 Britannia meets Marianne: the multiplication of identities in Charlotte Gray Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of this work demonstrate the extent to which Morvern Callar and Charlotte Gray’s preoccupation with complicating the nature, and downplaying the importance, of national identity discourses became an increasingly important collective artistic concern within Scottish cinema as the 2000s progressed. Of the six Scottish–Scandinavian co-productions discussed in Chapter 3, for instance, only two (The Last Great Wilderness and Donkeys) were written and directed by artists Scottish through birth or long-term residence. Chapter 4 is dedicated to the analysis of a range of post-2000 features – Ae Fond Kiss… (Ken Loach, GB/Bel/Ger/

Introduction

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It/Sp, 2004), Nina’s Heavenly Delights, Cargo, True North, The Last King of Scotland – that either explore the increasingly multinational character of present-day Scottish society (Ae Fond Kiss…, Nina’s Heavenly Delights) or depict Scottish protagonists’ troubled involvement in overseas instances of racial diversity, inequality and conflict (Cargo, True North, The Last King of Scotland). Chapter 5’s account of low-budget genre production incorporates both works which conspicuously circumnavigate questions of national identity (Outpost) or that surprise in their imaginative use of popular forms to interrogate key socio-political issues confronting twenty-first-century Scotland – New Town Killers (Richard Jobson, GB, 2008), Wild Country. In looking beyond the nation’s borders for the means to self-realisation, the fictional characters of Morvern and Charlotte set a precedent subsequently followed by many Scottish filmmakers during the 2000s. There is one final way in which Charlotte Gray and Morvern Callar anticipated what was to come within 2000s Scottish cinema. This is the fact that both movies’ markedly transnational character relates as much to their respective production histories as it does to their plots. Lynne Ramsay’s film was a co-production involving Canadian distributor Alliance Atlantis, while Gillian Armstrong’s movie was, as Ginette Vincendeau notes,60 a more international undertaking yet: a British/ Australian/American/German co-production largely shot in France, directed by an Australian, produced by a Scot, based on the work of an English novelist and starring Australian, American and British lead actors, all of whom play characters of other nationalities. Cross-border funding arrangements and creative collaborations like those underpinning Charlotte Gray and Morvern Callar were comparatively rare occurrences in late-twentieth-century Scotland. Of the 28 Scottish features identified by Duncan Petrie61 as supported by indigenous sources of public finance between 1983 and 2000, less than half (ten) were international co-productions; the narratives of 20 were exclusively Scottish-set; and 18 were directed by native artists. But equivalent statistics for the 16 post-2000 features discussed at length in Chapters 3, 4 and 5 of this book tell a different story: eight were international co-productions; five have narratives that take place within both Scotland and another country, or outwith Scotland completely; ten were directed by filmmakers not Scottish by birth or long-term residence. Academic criticism has already started to respond to the increasingly cosmopolitan character of 2000s Scottish cinema. Early in the decade, Duncan Petrie stressed ‘the crucial dialectical interplay of the indigenous and the international, the specific and the general, the local and the global’62 which he saw at work within an ever-wider range of contemporary Scottish features. Elsewhere, David Martin-Jones begins his tellingly titled monograph Scotland: Global Cinema by professing a desire to ‘not focus solely on films made by Scots, about Scots, for Scots’ within his analysis.63 Indeed, of the 22 post-1990 movies which Martin-Jones discusses, more than one-third are mobile, rather than indigenous, productions, and more than half are directed by non-resident overseas filmmakers. Most recently of all, Simon Brown64 suggests that ‘transnationalism… offers a broader, more inclusive approach to New Scottish Cinema, [one which] encompasses, rather than eclipses, the national’.

20 The New Scottish Cinema The final three chapters of this study echo and extend this collective critical lead in various ways. In addition to the three broad themes (Scandinavian collaboration, questions of race and ethnicity, low-budget genre work) which organise those sections of the book, many of the 2000s features chosen for critical attention there are picked precisely because they illustrate the extent to which Scottish cinema is today a phenomenon dependent on – indeed, actively open to – processes of cultural, financial and ideological exchange that traverse multiple national borders. This is a substantially different state of affairs from that which held sway during the 1990s. The 20-year period discussed by this book saw an infant Scottish cinema first try to find its feet with near-exclusive reference to two fixed poles: the mainstream American and British metropolitan film industries. But since 2000, a more mature and diverse entity has proved less dependent on its original parental influences. Over the past two decades, an emergent Scottish cinema became increasingly like the characters of Morvern Callar and Charlotte Gray within it: a multifaceted and mutable entity embarked on an unpredictable journey of self-definition. Writing in 2012, therefore, the best any critic can do is to tell one story about, rather than the story of, Scottish cinema. I hope that the narrative presented in these pages helps the reader in the task of constructing their own.

1 METAMORPHOSIS: SCOTTISH CINEMA, 1990–95

27 March 1995: a Scottish filmmaker enjoys what at that time was an unaccustomed moment in the sun. In Los Angeles, writer/director Peter Capaldi wins the Best Short Film Oscar for his 25-minute drama Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life (GB, 1993). Capaldi’s film was one of the first projects produced through the then recently launched Tartan Shorts scheme, a collaborative initiative between the Scottish Film Production Fund and BBC Scotland. The work cross-pollinates the eponymous Czech writer’s travails as he strives to start writing his 1915 novella Metamorphosis with the cathartic crisis endured by George Bailey (James Stewart), the hero of the canonical Classical Hollywood movie It’s a Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, USA, 1946). The cohabitants of Kafka’s Prague garret rally round the troubled and isolated writer on Christmas Eve, and their support enables him to begin work on his masterpiece. This individual success proved symptomatic of a wider upturn in Scottish cinema’s fortunes during the early 1990s. This is because the unlikely choice of cultural reference points juxtaposed within the title of Capaldi’s work indicates the terms of a film industrial metamorphosis which took root in Scotland during the years in question. If the history and practice of European Modernism structures Franz Kafka’s… narrative premise, it is the legacy of Hollywood populism that endows the film’s climax with comedic and emotional impact. Analogously, the story of a rapidly evolving Scottish film culture between 1990 and 1995 was one of industrial and aesthetic practices associated with traditions of European Art Cinema (formally innovative, subsidy-dependent, non-commercial) giving ground to successors derived from mainstream American counterparts. In Capaldi’s short, Kafka’s Metamorphosis is an as-yet-unwritten literary classic in the very earliest stages of composition. As such, that book is used to communicate one possible vision of artistic production, that of a fundamentally isolated and precarious experience, one to be endured, rather than enjoyed. Kafka’s downstairs neighbour, for instance, notes

22 The New Scottish Cinema that ‘Mr K’ is ‘frail – like many of the artistic disposition’. Yet the film’s simultaneous references to It’s a Wonderful Life set out a very different conception of the creative act: an individual moment of transcendence made possible only by the development and maintenance of a wider enabling infrastructure of support. Some contemporary observers understood the state of early-1990s Scottish cinema in a similar light: piecemeal local engagements with European Art cinema models supplanted by a more systematic and entrepreneurial attempt to weave local variants into the weft of various popular American cinematic practices past and present. Writing in the same year as Franz Kafka’s… Oscar, John Brown argued that: The new generation of Scottish filmmakers shows little sign of being interested in arthouse fare. Their sights are set on making the Scottish equivalents of El Mariachi [Robert Rodriguez, Mex/USA, 1992], Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. [Leslie Harris, USA, 1992] and Reservoir Dogs [Quentin Tarantino, USA, 1992]… and getting them into the multiplexes.1 This proved a remarkably accurate prediction of Scottish cinema’s developmental trajectory during the early 1990s and beyond. This chapter’s discussion of four case studies from the period – The Big Man (David Leland, GB, 1990), Soft Top, Hard Shoulder (Stefan Schwartz, GB, 1993), Rob Roy (Michael Caton-Jones, USA/ GB, 1995) and Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle, GB, 1995) – illustrates and explains the contemporary rise of two key indigenous production templates: the Scottish independent film (Soft Top…, Shallow Grave) and the Scottish Classical movie (The Big Man, Rob Roy). After being established between 1990 and 1995, this diptych went on to structure much of the indigenous feature work produced in Scotland between 1995 and 2001, as Chapter 2 will go on to show. Any comprehensive account of 1990s Scottish cinema must acknowledge the deep pessimism that dominated the period’s early part, dispiriting years when observers bemoaned Scottish film culture’s seemingly intractable industrial underdevelopment. In 1990, the documentary filmmaker Murray Grigor complained that, ‘if film-making were an industry [here in Scotland] it would have investors and a proper production structure… new talent takes a bow before heading for more rewarding territory’.2 Gillies Mackinnon, one of the very few indigenous feature filmmakers to emerge during the late 1980s and early 1990s, regretted in 1992 the fact that, ‘after Bill Forsyth’ a decade before, Scotland had produced ‘nothing of any great significance’.3 That same year, Peter Meech and Richard Kilborn wondered if it were ‘really possible to look forward to the growth of a national cinema when the number of indigenous films produced… in the last five years has averaged just under two a year?’4 Parlous infrastructural fragility explains this contemporary collective gloom. Scotland’s largest public funder, the Scottish Film Production Fund, had seen its annual investment pot grow from £80,000 in 1982 to £214,000 by 1990. But Ian Lockerbie, the Fund’s outgoing chairman, conceded that the latter figure remained



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‘puny when set against the actual costs of film production’.5 Meanwhile, what little production infrastructure did exist in Scotland was contracting at a frightening rate. Rank, the only film processing laboratory in the country, and Blackcat, Scotland’s only permanent studio space, both closed their doors in early 1991.6 Channel 4, peremptorily acclaimed in the early 1980s as ‘a radically new source of money and an outlet for Scottish filmmaking’,7 was seen to have disappointed such hopes ten years on. Film and television commissions dispensed year-on-year by the broadcaster to Scottish independent producers amounted to only c. 10 per cent of the annual levy Channel 4 extracted from advertising revenues raised by Scottish commercial broadcasters.8 Indeed, in 1989 Channel 4’s outgoing Chief Executive, Jeremy Isaacs, admitted regret that the company had not ‘done enough for Scotland’9 in commissioning terms. Against this depressing backdrop, the obvious conclusion to draw was that ‘we have struggled to establish a distinctive moving screen culture simply because there just aren’t enough opportunities to do this kind of work on home soil’.10 But Franz Kafka’s… Oscar success proved the first in a series of brighter signs seen in Scotland between 1993 and 1997. Independent producer Peter Broughan secured c. £16m of funding from Hollywood studio United Artists to make Rob Roy. BBC Scotland and London-based independent producer Ecosse Films brokered a North American theatrical distribution deal with Miramax Films for Mrs Brown (John Madden, GB/Ire, USA, 1997), turning a modestly budgeted domestic television film into an Oscar-nominated international theatrical success.11 Formed in 1990 to encourage enhanced levels of mobile production activity in Scotland, Scottish Screen Locations helped inject c. £50 million of production spend into the national economy by 1996; some £23 million of that figure was generated in 1994/95 alone.12 Meanwhile, the low-budget Shallow Grave and Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, GB, 1996) each performed exceptionally well at both domestic and global box offices. Recently baleful, the representative tenor of local assessments of Scottish cinema’s industrial prospects instead became bullish. Allan Shiach, Chair of the soon-to-be-established Scottish Screen, confidently proclaimed at the 1996 Edinburgh International Film Festival that ‘film is potentially a massive business for us which has too long been seen as an artsy little enclave’.13 The first stirrings of the significant, if unexpected, industrial expansion witnessed in early-1990s Scotland can be detected in two relatively neglected movies from the period, Soft Top, Hard Shoulder and The Big Man. Both films self-consciously attempt to adapt different American film genres to the cultural and film industrial circumstances of contemporary Scotland. If such a strategy seemed novel at the decade’s outset, it became second nature for many Scottish filmmakers by the period’s end.

The Big Man The Big Man, an adaptation of William McIlvanney’s 1985 novel of the same name, narrates the devastation of Thornbank, a fictional Scottish mining community, in the aftermath of the 1984/85 miners’ strike. Central protagonist Danny Scoular

24 The New Scottish Cinema (Liam Neeson) is an unemployed ex-miner who has served a prison sentence for his part in picket line violence during that bitter industrial dispute. Danny’s wife Beth (Joanne Whalley) has thus become the family breadwinner. Unable to accept this reversal of traditional gender roles, Danny ill-advisedly accepts a commission from a corrupt local businessman, Mason (Ian Bannen), to take part in an illegal bare-knuckle boxing match. He convinces himself that victory in that contest will somehow restore his personal pride and that of Thornbank. But such self-serving folly puts strain on Danny’s marriage: Beth leaves him and starts seeing young middle-class doctor Gordon (Hugh Grant) instead. Danny’s torment deepens when he discovers that Mason is a drug dealer. He rebels against the latter’s control and is saved from the villain’s retribution only by an unexpected physical show of strength led by Beth and the other Thornbank villagers. The Big Man’s screenwriter, Don McPherson, actively applied the iconography and narrative structure of the Classical Hollywood Western to a story set in 1980s Scotland. McPherson explained that creative decision by making reference to the ‘things that make’ the Western genre, most important among them, a recurrent thematic ‘concern about community, about historical change’.14 Similarly, director David Leland noted a desire to achieve ‘that epic quality’15 which he associated with the Western. The Big Man’s £3.1m production budget – unusually large for late-1980s/early-1990s British cinema – was financed through a long-term working partnership between American producer Miramax and London-based independent Palace Pictures. But Leland’s film performed disastrously at the British box office: eventual receipts (£0.268m), failed even to cover the cost of domestic film prints and advertising (£0.35m).16 Lacking the financial reserves to sustain losses on this and a string of other commercially ambitious American co-productions, Palace went into receivership in May 1992.17 Academic criticism typically sees The Big Man as an ideologically problematic work. Douglas Gifford, for example, argues that the movie’s attempt to link ‘Hollywood film to West of Scotland shabby post-industrial hinterland’ is ‘a too-slick and forced cultural paralleling [that] no longer discusses Scottish issues for themselves’.18 While there is much to recommend that view, The Big Man is worthy of note because it initiated the Scottish Classical production cycle that went on to account for a significant proportion of the feature work produced in 1990s Scotland. Like Rob Roy and several other later films, The Big Man deliberately conflates Scottish national identity with a more exclusive gendered equivalent: a heroic form of working-class masculinity that seeks to sideline potential feminine (and/or feminised) alternatives to it. In this sense, Leland’s work draws on the Western genre’s typical foregrounding of masculine identities and concerns, ‘function[ing] precisely to privilege, examine and celebrate the body of the male’.19 The Big Man’s producer, Steven Woolley, argued that application of classic Western tropes to contemporary Scottish sociopolitical questions represented a progressive ideological act, an attempt to show and celebrate ‘[how a] community came together under the worst strain of the Thatcher years’.20 But that theoretically laudable project is compromised by the borderline



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misogynistic gender discourses to which creative reliance on the Western’s narrative and iconographic structures opens The Big Man up. Only one character within The Big Man echoes Woolley in drawing explicit cultural parallels between Scotland and America. Tellingly, that protagonist proves to be untrustworthy in the extreme. Danny’s childhood friend Frankie (Billy Connolly) is now one of criminal kingpin Mason’s minions, acting as a go-between during Danny’s arduous training for the bare-knuckle boxing match. Although born and raised in Thornbank, Frankie has spent several years living in the US. Recently returned to Scotland, he claims that Glasgow ‘reminds me of New York’, and proclaims Danny to be ‘Thornbank’s answer to Rocky Marciano’. These overblown assertions come to seem as unreliable as everything else that Frankie says and does. He conceals the fact of Mason’s drug-dealing activities from Danny and privately despises the Thornbank locals while assiduously courting them in public. If both Frankie and his creators propose the idea of a profitable dialogue between Scottish and American cultures and identities, the latter figures’ position in this regard is called into question through its association with such a slippery fictional fellow traveller. Ultimately, The Big Man’s overeager attempt at transatlantic dialogue – Danny ‘answering’ Rocky, Clydeside recalling Lower East Side, Scottish social realism mixing with Western mythology – proves ideologically problematic from a local perspective. The film reinforces the reductive, regressive and stereotypical idea of Scottish identity personified by the (over-)familiar figure of the Glasgow Hard Man. Symptomatically, Danny’s first words within the movie, the opening of the speech he gives at his wedding to Beth, subsume his wife’s subjectivity and agency within his own. Falling back on cultural convention, he presumes (quite literally) to speak for her: ‘My wife and I would like to….’ More generally, although The Big Man represents a selective range of different Scottish identities – working-class heroism (Danny), traitorous postclass entrepreneurialism (Mason/Frankie), middle-class ineffectuality (Gordon) – all of these subject positions are coded as masculine. Ostensible differences between central male characters mask the extent to which the film depicts contemporary Scottish culture and identity as phenomena wholly definable by phallocentric metaphors of masculine identity, authority and conflict. Even though Gordon seems to be Danny’s opposite in class, sexual and professional terms, both subscribe to an unspoken ideal of nationality-cum-masculinity enshrined within particularly revered (and traditionally masculine) forms of occupational status. In this sense at least, there is little to choose between a career in mining and one in medicine. The rivals for Beth’s affections each believe that virility, honour and a stable sense of self are secured through masculine agency and primacy in the workplace. For these reasons, The Big Man’s portrayal of Danny’s bare-knuckle boxing match as an aberrant event, an illegal and immoral bloodbath that takes place separate and hidden from ‘normal’ Scottish society, fails to convince. The contest represents, after all, an apotheosis for the film’s preferred idea of Scotland as a culture personified, propagated and policed by pugilistic male figureheads.

26 The New Scottish Cinema

Figure 1.1 This is a man’s world: masculine metaphors of nation in The Big Man This phallocentricism cripples The Big Man’s would-be radical take on workingclass Scottish experience of state-sponsored deindustrialisation during the 1980s. In pointed contrast to the Thatcherite ruthlessness of Mason and his gang, a Thornbank local reassures Danny that ‘the community is behind you’ as the latter prepares for the bare-knuckle fight. That prediction comes literally true at the film’s end. When Danny is belatedly forced to acknowledge the limits of his own individual agency, Thornbank’s climactic show of solidarity saves the village gunslinger from the wrath of Mason’s goons. This plot resolution seems to champion indigenous socialist values over the cold calculation of Mason and Frankie, men prepared to leave Scotland behind, both physically and politically speaking, in the remorseless pursuit of personal gain. Yet because The Big Man endlessly equates individual masculinity with national identity, Thornbank proves to be ‘behind’ Danny in problematic, as well as obviously positive, ways. The community’s social workings and shared values are rarely discernible other than as personified by Danny’s words and deeds. The Big Man’s Western-inspired concentration on a (wilfully) isolated male hero precludes any detailed exploration of the ways in which Thornbank (and by extension, urban industrial Scotland) supposedly endures, let alone overcomes, the social, economic and political adversity experienced during the Thatcher era. In this sense, it is Frankie’s contemptuous dismissal of the villagers as ‘the living dead’ that ironically carries most weight within the film. The locals possess mechanical agency at the level of plot, acting as a deus ex machina that successfully resolves Danny’s conflict with Mason. But at the same time, they are rendered almost completely incapable of voicing a variety of individual or collective identities throughout the narrative’s course. Tellingly, their final protest against Mason’s corrupt power draws its power from being silent in nature.



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All of this entails that a considerable leap of faith is necessary if one is to accept The Big Man’s refutation of the notorious Thatcherite credo that there is no such thing as society. Attempting to justify his film’s extensive exploitation of the Western form, director David Leland argued that the problem with identifiably Scottish and/or British cinematic traditions of social realism was that the latter were aesthetically and politically circumspect in nature, ‘approach[ing] the working-class territory within a low key, small frame’.21 Yet The Big Man’s consequent decision to represent contemporary Scotland through the refracting lens of the Western means that viewers are never in a position to reconnoitre the ‘territory’ of the local working class through lengthy observation of their lives and shared culture. As Duncan Petrie notes, The Big Man’s transatlantic quality, a characteristic dictated as much by producer Palace Pictures’ international commercial ambitions as by the political project of the film’s makers, ‘undermines [the movie’s] ability to engage with the specificities of the subject matter and to speak to and for a particular kind of social experience’.22 As noted above, both Frankie and his creators link American and Scottish cultures and identities. But this is because both parties are driven by a desire for individual financial advancement that sits uneasily with their respective public professions of communitarian politics and identity. The Big Man’s attempted ‘translation of a bleak, dissident social vision into distributable, hence profitable, cinema’23 through calculated (and calculating) appropriation of the Western genre anticipates the emergence proper of the 1990s Scottish Classical cycle with Rob Roy. Leland’s film also highlights many of the ideological complexities associated with that prominent school of indigenous feature work. By contrast, Soft Top, Hard Shoulder illustrates the contemporaneous emergence of a parallel strain of Scottish independent filmmaking. Like the Classical cycle, independent-inspired feature work became an increasingly important trend within Scottish cinema as the 1990s progressed. And like the Classical cycle, the independent strain of indigenous production activity carried a complex (because often self-contradictory) range of industrial and representational consequences in tow.

Soft Top, Hard Shoulder Soft Top, Hard Shoulder stars and was scripted by Peter Capaldi, the maker of Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life. Central protagonist Gavin Bellini is a disaffected, thirdgeneration Scots-Italian children’s book illustrator. Gavin has spent years attempting to start a career in London, and has become estranged from his family back home in Scotland in the process. He is informed by an uncle that he has 36 hours to travel the length of the United Kingdom back to Glasgow for his father’s surprise sixtieth birthday party. If the prodigal son fails to show face, he will be cut out of the substantial fortune amassed from the Bellini family’s local ice-cream-making empire. But Gavin is so poor that his car, the only available means of transport home, is unreliable in the extreme. The film follows its frustrated hero’s continually thwarted (but ultimately successful) attempt to reach home by the specified deadline.

28 The New Scottish Cinema Peter Capaldi self-consciously borrowed elements of the American road movie in order to structure his Soft Top, Hard Shoulder script. He presented this decision as one both commercial and creative in nature, an attempt to write a film that ‘was commercially viable. A road movie seemed a good bet.’24 But like The Big Man, Soft Top, Hard Shoulder is critically unloved, generally seen as an ‘amusing but empty’ work.25 Unfavourable comparisons with Bill Forsyth were rife within contemporary press responses to the movie, perhaps aggravated by Soft Top…’s arch quotation of images from that director’s famous oeuvre.26 At the same time, however, Capaldi’s script represents a far more complex and self-reflexive local engagement with US cinematic precedent than was the case with The Big Man. Soft Top, Hard Shoulder is worthy of note because it was the first film to explicitly identify the example of American independent cinema as a possible financial and aesthetic model for Scottish feature production in the sorely testing local circumstances of the early 1990s. The following discussion of Soft Top… examines the film’s representation of contemporary Scottish identity before turning to the work’s significance as a model for subsequent indigenous feature production during the 1990s. The presence of American cinematic and popular cultural reference points is keenly felt from the very outset of Soft Top, Hard Shoulder. The film’s opening sequence essays a sepia-tinted pastiche: an unseen reader leafs through the pages of an oldfashioned family photo album containing (amongst other things) postcard images of the Empire State Building and a kilted Highland soldier. Gavin’s simultaneous voiceover relates these sights to his own family history. Grandfather Bellini, we are told, emigrated from Italy to New York, from where he sent postcards back home to his family. But Gavin immediately reveals that the family patriarch was in fact ‘never in America – he was in Scotland… he was conned, [and] pretended he was in America so as not to appear stupid’. Recalling Frankie’s self-serving protestations in The Big Man, Grandfather Bellini (and by extension, Capaldi) propose that, even when starting from a Scottish geographical and cultural location, one can still choose to embed oneself within American equivalents in ways that convince a wider audience of that fact. Such sleight of hand is achievable through strategic and selective transplantation of American cultural iconography into a Scottish context: New York postcards in the case of Gavin’s ancestor, the road movie’s narrative structure and central themes in that of the character’s creator. But unlike The Big Man, Soft Top, Hard Shoulder presents processes of ScottishAmerican cross-cultural exchange as extremely complex forms of international dialogue. This is so not least because such conversations do not take place on anything like equal terms when viewed from a Scottish perspective. As a result, the links forged between Scottish West Coast and American East in Soft Top…’s opening sequence are deliberately bathetic in nature. By stressing the filthy weather and the fact that everyone speaks English, Grandfather Bellini’s postcards home manage to mislead by omission. In this way, Soft Top… pokes fun at what Benedict Anderson sees as national identities’ typical (and typically suspect) claims to ‘irredeem[able] particularity’.27 Yet at the same time, the film also questions opposing notions, namely, ideas that stress the easy inter-changeability of historically and culturally



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distinct forms of national experience. Soft Top… does not, for example, try to present the encounter between the historically dominant Anglophone cinema and a traditionally marginal counterpart as one that takes place on studiously equal terms. The film generates comic effect by suggesting that the very idea of a British road movie is intrinsically incongruous.28 For one thing, the small landmass of the UK, compared to that of the US, offers little room for physical travel or psychological transformation. Indigenous popular cultural icons are systematically belittled throughout Soft Top…, presented as miniature equivalents of more resonant American counterparts. Many of the movie’s comic set pieces take the form of ‘thrilling moments from American movies [reproduced] on a reduced scale that makes them almost undetectable’.29 Thus, at one point the malevolent long-distance truck of Duel (Steven Spielberg, USA, 1971) is invoked by a cheerfully ridiculous chase sequence involving a Volkswagen Polo. The deliberately self-mocking quality to Soft Top, Hard Shoulder’s appropriation of the road movie proposes that Scottish culture and cinema’s relationship with American counterparts is vulnerable above all else. Uncritical local aspiration towards the Other is matched only by uncritical denigration of the Self. The view of Gavin’s grandfather is that Scotland is simply where one ends up in after failing to make it to/in the US. Indeed, so much more glamorous and vibrant do the States seem in comparison with a Scottish berth that a man spends years writing and sending postcards which project himself ‘there’, rather than wishing his recipients ‘here’. A similarly one-sided longing surfaces briefly in Gillies Mackinnon’s Small Faces (GB, 1996), when the adolescent narrator notes that his mother’s second marriage to an American uncle is ‘just my luck: the only American who ever emigrated to Scotland’, rather than the other way round. Yet although Grandfather Bellini’s duplicitous conflation of Scotland and America represents an attempt to avoid personal ridicule, his determined pretence in fact renders him ridiculous in the viewer’s eyes. The character is seen, for example, mimicking Charlie Chaplin in faded fragments of home movie footage. Chaplin is, of course, a remarkably vivid real-life example of the seamless incorporation of locally specific cultural traditions and identities into the ostensibly universal body of American film. The great comedian’s career trajectory exemplifies a move from periphery to centre which Grandfather Bellini feels he has been cruelly cheated out of. While Capaldi openly acknowledges his own aspirational relationship towards American cinematic forms (the road movie), various aspects of his script pointedly remind the viewer that total erasure of indigenous identity and history represents a dishonest (and essentially self-defeating) basis on which to make an individual film or build a national cinema. On one hand, then, Grandfather Bellini’s hybrid identity is, like that of Soft Top, Hard Shoulder as a whole, predicated on the idea of deception of both self and others. Yet on the other, such lies contain more than a grain of truth, not least because the film so openly acknowledges and mocks them. It is too simplistic to dismiss Soft Top… as ‘almost parasitic on the cinematic tradition it is not part of: Hollywood’.30 Although Capaldi emphasised a sense of creative distance from indigenous cinematic traditions – ‘I didn’t really look to any British models’31 – he also rejected the notion

30 The New Scottish Cinema of his film as a deliberately deracinated work. Soft Top…, in its writer and star’s view, was a self-consciously hybrid entity, ‘something unashamedly British – a road movie which wasn’t pretending to be American’.32 What the movie’s opening sequence in fact proposes is that imagined (but self-aware) emigration to the world of American popular culture is a crucible within which local art can be forged. Soft Top…’s plot plays this notion out in quite literal terms: the story of Grandfather Bellini’s mistake is also that of Gavin’s procreation. The former marries locally; in time, his grandson then comes to define himself as a creative individual. As Gavin’s opening voiceover puts it, ‘I always knew I was different from them… I was an artist and they knew nothing about art’. Crucial distinctions between US-influenced early-1990s Scottish projects like The Big Man and Soft Top, Hard Shoulder were industrial as well as representational in nature. The former movie, budgeted at over £3 million and bankrolled by local (Scottish Television), British metropolitan (British Screen, Palace Pictures) and international (Miramax) financiers, was typical of what Steve McIntyre33 saw as the dominant, but misguided, feature production mode within late-1980s/early1990s British cinema: ‘medium budget films which attempt to cross over from a fairly specialised… market towards a more general [international] appeal’. In stark contrast, the entire production budget (£0.2 million) for Soft Top… was equivalent to the cost of commissioning Ennio Morricone’s score for The Big Man (that act itself another deferential local nod to the American Western tradition).34 Capaldi’s film thus recalled in some ways a contemporary low-budget tradition of independent filmmaking in the USA, ‘the chamber pieces of Hal Hartley… the work of Gus van Sant, films like Slacker [Richard Linklater, USA, 1991], Poison [Todd Haynes, USA, 1991], etc’.35 The minimal costs of a project like Soft Top…, McIntyre argued, made the film much more likely to achieve economic self-sufficiency in the domestic marketplace, given typical early-1990s revenue levels (c. £0.8 million) which an indigenous feature might realistically expect to accrue from UK cinema, video and television sales.36 He concluded that a cost-effective American independent model represented a realistic developmental strategy for early-1990s Scottish cinema: ‘a slate of low-low-budget movies might just support a real industry’.37 Soft Top…’s economic modesty allowed the film significant leeway in negotiating the extent of any recourse made to stereotypical (and therefore potentially marketable) images of Scottish culture and identity. By contrast, a far more expensive movie like The Big Man became bogged down in the well-trodden territory of masculine rites of passage played out against a drab backcloth of tight-lipped working-class decency. In this way, Capaldi’s work suggested one possible way of ‘dissolv[ing] the distinction between “commercial filmmaking” and “cultural filmmaking”’38 within a chronically underdeveloped Scottish production sector barely kept alive by the occasional interventions of London-based public or quasi-public funders such as Channel 4 and the British Film Institute. The Scottish independent model outlined by McIntyre was subsequently given an imprimatur of local industrial authority by the mid-1990s global box office success of Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. That period also saw the mid-to-high-budget



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Scottish Classical template exemplified by The Big Man extended and entrenched by Rob Roy. But before detailed discussion of Shallow Grave and Rob Roy begins, certain crucial differences between those movies and their early-1990s predecessors should be acknowledged. Large parts of the creative and entrepreneurial agendas that shaped Soft Top… and The Big Man, not to mention the finance which allowed both movies to be made, originated outside Scotland. Shallow Grave and Rob Roy were also majority-financed by external sources, London-based broadcaster Channel 4 and Hollywood studio United Artists respectively. But the later films also clearly owed their existence, and a significant proportion of their cinematic identities, to a diverse range of new institutional initiatives which emerged in early-1990s Scotland. Notable box office success aside, Shallow Grave and Rob Roy are significant because they mark the point in time at which it started to become plausible to think and speak of Scottish cinema in terms other than as a fragmented trickle of films and filmmakers intermittently bankrolled by London-based public funders. From around 1993 on, the local infrastructure of Scottish filmmaking expanded, diversified and become better capitalised at a rate not previously experienced North of the border. That process underwrote Scotland’s ability to sustain a marked rise in indigenous feature production levels as the 1990s progressed. The following discussion of Rob Roy and Shallow Grave therefore examines both the ways in which these films depict Scottish culture and identity and the evolving local institutional context from which such representations emerged. On one hand, Rob Roy and Shallow Grave were indisputably products of their creators’ individual imagination, agency and energy. But on the other, these movies were also vehicles through which a range of new or reformed local institutions defined their preferred vision of an emergent Scottish cinema.

Rob Roy As this chapter has already made clear, the early 1990s was not a propitious time to be an independent Scottish film producer. Nevertheless, in 1991 Peter Broughan left a full-time producing post in the Drama Department at BBC Scotland in order to set up his own production company, Bronco Films.39 By 1995, Rob Roy, a c. £16 million project originated and produced by Broughan, had become the largest ever collaboration between home-based Scottish creative personnel and the vast resources of a major Hollywood studio (United Artists).40 Broughan’s key collaborator in Rob Roy’s development was the expatriate Scottish novelist and screenwriter Alan Sharp. Among a range of acclaimed literary and filmic works, Sharp had written the script for the classic Western Ulzana’s Raid (Robert Aldrich, USA, 1972). In Broughan’s view, Sharp’s successful Hollywood track record made the latter ‘the only choice’ to write Rob Roy: ‘there was no one else [in Scotland] who had… ultimately the potential confidence of a [Hollywood] studio’.41 For his own part, Sharp matterof-factly described his script for the project as ‘a Western with a relatively simple plot structure containing well-defined motives and dynamics’.42 Rob Roy’s director, Michael Caton-Jones, was, like Sharp, an expatriate Scot with extensive experience

32 The New Scottish Cinema of working within the mainstream American industry. He concurred with his screenwriter’s view of presenting Rob Roy in contemporary promotional interviews as an attempt to tell ‘a true Scottish story in the manner of a sweeping Western’.43 Historiographical, literary and mythological accounts of the life of Robert Roy MacGregor (1671–1734) abound. But Alan Sharp singled out W.H. Murray’s biography as the dominant influence on his script: ‘Rob Roy revealed by Murray was the one I wished to portray.’44 Sharp’s narrative draws its substance from Murray’s detailed account of the troubled relations between MacGregor and the Duke of Montrose in the period immediately preceding the 1715 Jacobite Rebellion. In the film’s fictionalised version of events, Rob (Liam Neeson) accepts a £1,000 loan from Montrose (John Hurt) in order to co-finance a speculative cattle droving venture. But Rob does not desire to partake in, and profit by, the new mercantile individualism associated with the post-1707 British state and identity personified by the Duke. He is instead motivated by a wish to honour traditional patriarchal obligations by providing for the collective security of his clan unit, a community he terms ‘the two hundred souls under my protection’. This high-minded, quasi-socialistic project is sabotaged by Montrose’s treacherous retainers, Cunningham (Tim Roth) and Killearn (Brian Cox). They steal the money loaned to Rob, killing and framing the latter’s trusted lieutenant, would-be emigrant McDonald (Eric Stoltz), for the crime. The ensuing feud between Rob and Montrose sees the extirpation of the MacGregors and the rape of Rob’s wife Mary (Jessica Lange) by Cunningham. Matters are resolved according to contemporary notions of honour when Rob kills Cunningham in a duel sponsored by the Duke of Argyll (Andrew Keir), Montrose’s implacable political opponent. To some extent, Rob Roy did no more than extend an already-established strand of Scottish audiovisual production, one in which the country is ‘called upon to revive the values of the… Western, rediscovered yet again… as a frontier territory perched on the edge of Europe’.45 That tradition encompassed London-based productions such as The Big Man, indigenous features like Ill Fares the Land (Bill Bryden, GB, 1983), a John Ford-inspired account of the forced early-1930s evacuation of the St Kilda Islands,46 and the television drama work of writer/director John Byrne. Indeed, Peter Broughan had produced Byrne’s country-and-western-inspired Your Cheatin’ Heart (1990) while still at BBC Scotland.47 Much critical reaction to the Westernderived aspects of Rob Roy proved as sceptical as the response which greeted The Big Man’s analogous attempt to transplant the genre to Scottish soil. Pat Kane argued that strategic ‘replac[ement] of Native America with Native Scotia’48 was an act unacceptable in ideological terms, even if successful in film industrial equivalents. James R. Keller saw the movie as one which spoke primarily to the anxieties and interests of an American, rather than Scottish, cinema audience: ostensible signs of local cultural history and specificity were flimsy pretexts that allowed Rob Roy to recycle ideologies of ‘American family values and traditional masculinity’.49 Brian Woolland seemed at first sight more sympathetic,50 proposing that the movie is a ‘reworked Western that uses the genre to examine resistance to colonialism’. He



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concludes, however, that Rob Roy ultimately descends into little more than ‘a grand romantic fantasy that is given a historical setting’.51 But Rob Roy’s Scottish-American identity involves more than just the film’s engagement with the Western genre. The project’s painstaking attempt to package Scottish history and identity for international consumption was also influenced by an enthusiastic early-1990s local engagement with industrially orthodox models of script structure and scriptwriting derived from mainstream American cinematic practice. For Alan Sharp, the process of developing Rob Roy was intensely pragmatic in nature, ‘work[ing] through the script… dr[iving] it steadily towards commercialism in the sense that it had to be something somebody would be interested in funding’.52 Similarly, Peter Broughan argued that: The most exciting and rewarding stage of the producing process is when you have the idea… engage a writer, and spend time bringing that idea into script reality… things become relatively less interesting [once] the project has moved into production.53 In Sharp and Broughan’s respective accounts, watertight distinctions between creative and commercial forms of activity become difficult to discern or preserve. Both men strove to develop a mode of Scottish filmmaking practice in which a producer and a writer collaborated at length in order to pre-emptively satisfy the demands of mainstream international financiers. Perhaps this is why it was not just the size of Rob Roy’s eventual production budget that proved unprecedented within the Scottish context. Equally unheard-of was the length and cost – four years and c. £0.1 million54 – of the script development process preceding actual production. The cost of this was partly underwritten by indigenous public funders. A 1992 Scottish Film Production Fund grant of £15,000 was at the time the largest ever single award made by the organisation in support of script development work.55 Travel costs associated with Broughan’s journey to meet Alan Sharp for the first time (the screenwriter was then based in New Zealand) was part-financed by the Scottish Export Assistance Scheme, an international marketing body that supported the activities of local industrialists rather than artists.56 Broughan and Sharp’s entrepreneurial interest in understanding and exploiting commercially sanctioned models of screenwriting practice found numerous echoes within early-1990s Scotland. Ideas of ‘script’ and ‘story’ came to refer less to unique creative artefacts and more to economic units of exchange in possession of relatively stable (because consensually agreed) amounts of financial value. In 1994, for instance, the Scottish Film Production Fund’s Chief Officer, Eddie Dick, outlined a conception of screenwriting in which literary concerns gave way to monetary ones: ‘a script is the… precondition of a film… the means by which the value of a film not yet made can be estimated’.57 In 1997, John McGrath explained the motivation behind his Irish-Scottish screenwriting initiative Moonstone International by arguing that ‘a lot of people in Scotland… are cut off from mainstream filmmaking…

34 The New Scottish Cinema there is an international dimension to filmmaking that can be studied’.58 Rob Roy’s budgetary scale and commercial success both emerged from, and gave additional impetus to, these contemporary beliefs. In 1990, Ian Lockerbie, the Scottish Film Production Fund’s outgoing chairman, offered a borderline apologetic explanation of the reasons why the organisation channelled much of its available grant monies into script development. Given the paucity of financial resources at the Fund’s disposal, Lockerbie conceded that it was ‘difficult to play a pro-active rather than a reactive role in commissioning work’.59 Script development, in other words, was better than nothing. But by 1995, the tone of local institutional justification of systematic support for this aspect of local filmmaking activity had changed radically. Script development was increasingly understood as the ‘fundamental bedrock to subsequent film activities’60 rather than an impoverished cousin to the real business of making movies. Angus Finney explained the American cinema’s global commercial hegemony by pointing out that the US industry invested in script development more generously (c. 7 per cent of total capital resources) than its European counterparts (c. 1–2 per cent), and invited a Scottish filmmaking audience to draw their own conclusions.61 Having sketched in some of the institutional background to Rob Roy, textual analysis of the film now turns to two central concerns. Firstly, the extent to which enthusiastic local recourse to commercially orthodox models of scriptwriting practice influenced the work’s depiction of Scottish history and identity. Secondly, I also wish to argue that Rob Roy’s extensive appropriation/adaptation of the Western genre is not, as the critics quoted above argue, problematic per se. What is troubling, however, are the notable lengths to which the film goes in order to downplay, or even disavow, this defining aspect of its cinematic identity. Rob Roy is a paradoxical beast. At the level of plot, it vigorously denies the desirability of indigenous attraction to all things American. Yet this movie is itself a material product of just these local cultural tastes and allegiances. In blatant contradiction of its own hybrid nature, Rob Roy constructs and valorises a Scottish national identity which maintains an unyielding sense of purity and authenticity by seeming to reject all forms of extended intercourse with alien cultural traditions and influences. The centrality of script structure (the word as written) within the development and production of Rob Roy carries over into the narrative of the finished film. Key in this regard is the work’s obvious concern with the concept of the pledge (the word as both spoken and given). Written words – script structure and content – must remain malleable in order to meet the exacting commercial requirements of the US studio capital bankrolling ‘a Scottish-created, but Hollywood-backed, historical epic’.62 Yet the Rob Roy that emerges from this intensely pragmatic process is a man for whom the spoken word is utterly inflexible. The irony is that Rob’s local creators assiduously wooed external funding institutions by developing a fictionalised hero characterised by his thrawn refusal to bend the knee to any form of non-native dictate whatsoever. For Rob, ‘a man’s word’ represents the fundamental marker of both personal and national identity. Both phenomena are defined by the hero’s principled refusal to compromise what director Michael Caton-Jones termed ‘certain inviolable beliefs’:63



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most notably of all, the ‘socialist work ethic’ which, the director claims, ‘we… all grew up with in this country’.64 But as Liz Lochhead notes,65 the problem with Rob Roy’s uncompromisingly anti-modern, anti-capitalist image of Scottish identity is that it tends towards lachrymose self-congratulation and -deception, ‘lying about the past’ in order to conceal the ‘truths about the present [which] we are hiding from ourselves’. Consider, for instance, the precise terms in which Rob and Montrose seal their loan. These suggest the extent to which enthusiastic local engagement with industrially orthodox scriptwriting models dictates a reductive approach to the representation of national history and identity within Rob Roy. Rob refuses to offer Montrose surety for the money lent, arguing that ‘when my word is given it is good’. In choosing that path, he fails to listen to and learn from his wife’s misgivings (she accuses him of becoming ‘business partner with Montrose’) or the Duke’s mockery (‘a man of property intent on growing richer: we have more in common than I thought’). Rob cannot countenance the idea that he has entered into an imported form of socioeconomic contract, modern and impersonal in nature, as opposed to a traditional native bond defined by notions of personal honour. The character’s wilful blindness proves convenient for his creators. Rob’s refusal to confront the historical complexity unleashed during the early stages of Scotland’s gradual post-1707 political, economic and ideological absorption into a wider British state formation and national identity allows Rob Roy, a ‘not-very-burdened-with-history Historical Movie’,66 to ignore the same phenomenon. For instance, the first meeting between Argyll and Montrose sees the latter try to goad the former with ‘news from court’: the succession crisis swirling around childless, dying Queen Anne (1665– 1714) and the looming spectre of Jacobite rebellion. Argyll’s response is dismissive: ‘you talk too much, man: attend to your wager’. Narrative attention immediately re-focuses on the bet Argyll refers to, a duel between the two aristocrats’ respective retainers, Cunningham and Guthrie, in which swordplay replaces the traditional Western shootout. The sheer amount of expository dialogue necessary to produce a relatively detailed account of early-eighteenth-century social change and political conflict represents ‘too much talk’ for Rob Roy because it would complicate the film’s overriding desire to replicate the streamlined narrative form of Classical Hollywood cinema. Montrose, and the consideration of local historical context which he invites, are thus peremptorily silenced. Rob Roy instead ‘attends’ to Scotland and England’s fraught historical relationship via reductive recourse to Western-derived notions of ritual man-to-man combat. The duel between Argyll’s and Montrose’s servants (not to mention the climactic one between Rob and Cunningham) pits rugged Scottish heterosexuality against slippery English effeminacy, a regressive personification of the allegedly antipathetic nature of transactions between the two national cultures.67 The duel motif ’s use of rhetorical and physical combat between individual men as a vehicle through which antipathetic national identities are defined finds numerous echoes throughout Rob Roy. Rob and Montrose oppose in their persons two very different forms of Scottishness. Rob’s is authentic, feudal, communal, socialist, Highland and Scottish; the Duke’s is alien, modern, individualistic, capitalist, Lowland

36 The New Scottish Cinema

Figure 1.2 No quarter asked, no quarter given: eighteenth-century Anglo-Scottish relations as imagined in Rob Roy and British. Similarly, despite marked differences in their social class, Argyll and Rob jointly personify an ethnically and geographically secure form of Scottish identity, one resistant to the possibilities of cultural incorporation and/or hybridisation set in train by the 1707 Act of Union with England. This is set against the physically and ideologically mobile alternative represented by Montrose and McDonald, two men who in very different ways actively seek out the global financial opportunities which Union was designed to unleash. Such binary oppositions between characters are dramatically convenient, because clear; they do little, however, to foster any substantive sense of historical nuance or complexity. The result, as Alan Sharp blithely admitted, is a Rob Roy ‘no more accurate than Walter Scott’s version… or [Walt] Disney’s for that matter’.68 Rob Roy’s engagement with a range of American cinematic precedents relating to genre and script structure impacts problematically on the film’s representation of national history and identity. Equally important in this regard, however, is the extent to which the film’s plot workings look to conceal the very existence, let alone the complex cultural consequences, of long-term processes of Scottish-American cultural exchange. This is so despite the fact that Rob Roy is itself a material result of just such interactions. A significant number of characters within the film harbour economic and cultural aspirations comparable to those of the work’s creators, namely, a desire for entrepreneurial mobility and a consequent attraction to America



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as a symbol of possibility. Equally salutary, however, is the fact that such protagonists are typically punished for the complicating critique which their desires imply of the staid, static (and therefore internationally marketable) ‘particularly Scottish’69 identity that Michael Caton-Jones believed Rob to embody. When Rob Roy acknowledges the presence of dynamic, transformative or just plain contrary elements within its imagined Scotland, it does so only so that such things might be destroyed and delegitimised. For instance, the metropolitan mercenary Cunningham’s Anglophone individualism leads him to conclude that Scotland is a country which ‘does not agree with me’. But Montrose’s unscrupulous steward Killearn opines that this view represents less an imported imposition and more the mindset of ‘a great many of us’ in Scotland. As Rob Roy’s narrative progresses, these ‘great many’ individual rogue elements are ritually purged from the body of the nation in order to strengthen the purportedly essential and universal Scottish identity which Rob represents. As Kim Newman notes, ‘any action or motive that might make [Rob] flawed (or even interesting) is displaced onto stooges like the luckless Alasdair [Rob’s younger brother] and the cheery McDonald’.70 Alasdair, drowns Killearn; Bessie, Cunningham’s pregnant servant lover, and a woman who begs him to take her ‘anywhere away from here’, hangs herself; Rob kills Cunningham in the climactic duel; Montrose, an unpatriotic North Briton who bets in ‘English pounds’ as opposed to Argyll’s ‘Scotch guineas’, is bereaved when the dead mercenary is belatedly revealed to be his illegitimate son. But the most interesting example of this recurring motif is Rob Roy’s treatment of a much more sympathetic character: McDonald, Rob’s trusted lieutenant and a would-be emigrant across the Atlantic. Like his creators, McDonald’s enterprising nature leads him, in Killearn’s words, to be always ‘dreaming of the Americas’, consumed by the idea of a speculative local engagement with the economic opportunities which the ocean’s other side opens up. Rob Roy wastes little time in making clear the fact that McDonald is intent upon emigration to America, a course he urges Rob and the entire MacGregor clan to follow. Yet the former’s desire for cross-cultural experience and exchange is systematically thwarted. Rob Roy needs to erase the potential for transformation and hybridisation symbolised by McDonald so that the film can instead privilege Rob’s monotone and monolithic version of static Scottishness. One implied explanation for McDonald’s aberrant desire to fly the native nest relates to the fact that he was always something of an ethnic cuckoo within it. Despite enjoying Rob’s perfect trust, McDonald is from the outset partially excluded from the mono-ethnic community which the former leads: as his name suggests, he is not a MacGregor by birth. Even more telling is the formal excess of the sequence in which McDonald dies at Cunningham’s hands. The latter’s nocturnal ambush of his unsuspecting prey is intercut with a clan ceilidh staged by Rob in order to celebrate the successful conclusion of his loan with Montrose. Ostensibly, McDonald’s fatal separation from the clan’s collective body (he is travelling alone when murdered, bearing the loaned money back to Rob) is a combination of bad luck and the treachery of others. Yet the danger always inherent in McDonald’s

38 The New Scottish Cinema willingness to strike out on his own is underscored by increasingly rapid crosscutting between images of his perilous solitude and the communal security of Rob and the clan, the very thing that McDonald is prepared to transform or throw off in the act of emigration. Just before he is attacked by Cunningham, McDonald pauses at a crossroads that indicates one route back to the MacGregors and another to the port of Greenock, his proposed point of embarkation for the Americas. This device indicates in a pointedly literal way the divergent path which this character has already chosen to tread. That route, were he allowed to traverse it, would lead McDonald far away from established structures of clan and national community. In a richly symbolic form of punishment for harbouring such unnatural (because un-national) aspirations, his death comes about when Cunningham skewers him to the tree inside which the unfortunate victim has vainly tried to hide Rob’s money. A would-be American Scot is pinned, both literally and ideologically, to the native land which he, like his murderous assailant, ‘cannot wait to leave’. Rob Roy might thus be seen as a semi-closeted work. It cannot decide whether to exemplify or try to erase hybrid strains of Scottish-American cultural identity and cinematic practice.

Shallow Grave Unlikely though it might at first seem, a comparable problematising and punishment of protagonists defined by their desire to escape the constraints of a national culture inhabited only under sufferance is also to the fore within the other seminal ScottishAmerican film of the early 1990s. The roots of Shallow Grave, like those of Rob Roy, lie in a speculative collaboration between a Scottish screenwriter (John Hodge) and producer (Andrew Macdonald) who shared a keen awareness of, and enthusiasm for, particular forms of American cinematic practice. In this case, however, the central point of reference was contemporary US independent cinema, rather than a genre associated with the Classical Studio era. Macdonald explained the creative rationale behind, and debts incurred by, his debut feature thus: Take a film like sex, lies and videotape [Steven Soderburgh, USA, 1989]. The entire film really only involves three people and three locations. Soderburgh used that to his advantage to create a style… That was the reason for setting almost the entire [narrative of Shallow Grave] in one location. We knew we only had £1m, so we had to work it so that we could have good production values and a good style.71 As with Rob Roy, a director was attached to the project only after writer and producer had successfully developed and financed a shooting script. Hodge first showed an early draft when the two men met at the 1991 Edinburgh International Film Festival. The pair subsequently secured £1 million of production finance from Channel 4 and the Glasgow Film Fund (GFF), established in 1993 to dispense annual grant funding of £0.15 million to feature projects shooting in the city and its immediate environs.72 Once involved with the film, director Danny Boyle proved wholeheartedly



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supportive of his creative colleagues’ transatlantic cultural allegiances. He opined that for domestic filmmakers and audiences ‘fed on a diet of American or international landscapes… Britain feels slightly mundane by comparison’.73 Shallow Grave must be counted an unalloyed commercial success. The film attracted around 1.5 million admissions and took £5.1 million at the UK box office alone, thus becoming the most domestically successful British film of 1995.74 In 1997, Macdonald complained that he and his colleagues ‘don’t… get enough recognition for’ their conscious decision with Shallow Grave and Trainspotting to produce lowbudget ‘films… made for the British market… the only way you’ll ever have any kind of British film industry’.75 Shallow Grave’s major financial patron, David Aukin, the Commissioning Editor for Drama at Channel 4, concurred with that analysis. He reflected in 1995 that ‘probably the most significant film [Channel 4] commissioned [during the early 1990s] was Shallow Grave, which was shown first in the UK and recovered its production costs within the UK. That is the basis of a healthy film industry.’76 Shallow Grave’s narrative focuses, after the example set by sex, lies and videotape, on three characters and one location. Arrogant young professionals Alex (Ewan McGregor), David (Christopher Eccleston) and Juliet (Kerry Fox) share a luxurious and spacious top-floor flat in Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town. The flatmates are united not only by their privileged socio-economic status, but also by a shared disdain for the workaday world existing below their rarefied ambit. Viewers first see the trio not so much interviewing as ritually humiliating unfortunate applicants for the flat’s spare room. The latter is eventually leased to Hugo (Keith Allen), a mysterious, affluent and self-confident English writer. But soon after he moves in, Hugo overdoses on drugs. His naked corpse is found by the central trio. The deceased leaves behind him a large bag of money, but no contact details for friends or family. Overcome by greed, Alex, David and Juliet decide to steal the cash. They brutally mutilate Hugo’s corpse in an attempt to remove all its identifying features and bury the cadaver in nearby woods. But the plan unravels when Hugo’s criminal accomplices and the local police somehow manage to trace both body and booty back to the flatmates’ abode. Mutual guilt, mistrust – and in David’s case, psychosis – destroy whatever tenuous bonds of loyalty and affection existed between the hapless conspirators. Juliet murders the now-deranged David and pins Alex to the kitchen floor with a large kitchen knife before trying to flee the country with the money. As the police arrive at the flat, viewers discover that Alex has in fact hidden the loot under the same stripped pine floorboards he now finds himself violently skewered to. Unlike Rob Roy, neither the size nor the provenance of Shallow Grave’s production budget proved unusual within a contemporary Scottish context. But what many did see as unprecedented, however, was the sheer depth of the film’s determination to circumvent expectations that a Scottish movie must concern itself overtly and extensively with the depiction of indigenous culture and identity. Duncan Petrie, for instance, felt that Shallow Grave’s ‘images of contemporary Scotland had little direct connections with established cinematic and televisual traditions, rejecting both

40 The New Scottish Cinema Celtic romanticism and naturalistic grit’.77 Indeed, the film’s now-famous bravura opening title sequence goes out of its way to proclaim as much. Here, as Carl Neville notes, the movie makes ‘a plea/apologia for its own mid-Atlantic style’.78 As the introductory credits roll, viewers are taken on a high-speed, low-angle journey round the distinctive architectural topography of Edinburgh’s New Town. An unseen narrator, subsequently revealed to be David, offers the deadpan assertion that: ‘This could be any city – they’re all the same.’ Some took the character at his word, and wondered whether it made sense to talk about Shallow Grave as a Scottish film at all. Robert McCall, for instance, complained that the movie conspicuously lacked ‘a degree of Scottishness to its character’ and proposed that: Unless a film… at least reflects a genuine aspect of Scotland’s character, culture, people and aspirations, then its long-term future effect upon, and benefits for, Scottish film culture, are likely to be severely limited.79 Others, however, were unconcerned by such misgivings, or saw actual commercial benefits as outweighing possible cultural drawbacks. For Eddie Dick, ‘the complaint about Shallow Grave’s lack of Scottishness’ was ‘precisely to miss the point about the film and to impose inappropriate criteria on’ a work which ‘deliberately eschew[s] parochial specifics’.80 Brian Pendreigh went further still, arguing that Shallow Grave proved to be both a conspicuous individual success and a vital catalyst: by ‘creat[ing] Any City in Scotland’, Boyle, Hodge and Macdonald had ‘kick-started the Scottish film industry’81 in the years that followed. On one hand, then, Shallow Grave demonstrated the material possibility of local filmmakers working closely with metropolitan financiers in order to successfully penetrate the domestic theatrical market. But on the other, the movie caused some to worry that mainstream commercial success and local cultural engagement might prove mutually incompatible goals for an infant Scottish cinema. Like Rob Roy, Shallow Grave was a film defined by two central factors. Firstly, its creators’ enthusiasm for particular American cinematic forms; secondly, the early1990s emergence of a range of new Scottish film institutions that looked to US film industrial precedents for the means through which to establish a commercially sustainable indigenous production sector. Consider, for instance, the remit of and rationale behind the Glasgow Film Fund, an organisation set up in 1993 and Shallow Grave’s other major production funder alongside Channel 4. The GFF was established in January 1993 by the European Union Regional Development Fund, Glasgow Development Agency, Glasgow District Council and Strathclyde Regional Council as a six-month pilot scheme. The fledgling body quickly committed the whole of its first annual production funding pot (£0.15 million) to Shallow Grave.82 The GFF represented a local attempt to ape American local government initiatives like the New York Film Office. Following the lead of transatlantic counterparts, the Fund was intended to operate as ‘a true industry office’,83 unfettered by any local cultural agenda or obligation. For that reason, the GFF announced in advance that it would



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make funding decisions with reference to two key criteria: projects applying to the Fund had to shoot in Glasgow and be budgeted at over £0.5 million. The GFF would consider funding such applicants up to a level of 30 per cent of total budget. Any funding applications not involving a Glasgow-based producer had to guarantee that local production-related spend would be at least twice the size of any GFF award. The theory was that projects budgeted at £0.5 million or more would inject sums of production-related spend into the Glaswegian economy far in excess of any GFF outlay made to entice such films to the city in the first place. The Fund viewed feature filmmaking as a contributing agent to post-industrial urban regeneration, rather than as a valuable aspect of contemporary Scottish cultural production. The GFF’s Kevin Kane talked publicly about shepherding local filmmakers away from the territory of ‘beautifully shot films for art-house cinemas’ and closer towards the example set by Shallow Grave, that of a ‘commercially successful’ Scottish cinema ‘cater[ing] to an international market’.84 Eddie Dick noted that such hard-nosed fiscal calculation was important because the Fund’s long-term aim was that the ‘small amount of money’ (£0.15 million) the organisation was originally granted should become ‘extended, reinvested… a rolling fund’85 available to support feature work shot in Glasgow. Shallow Grave set the precedent in this regard, generating a healthy return on the GFF’s £0.15 million investment. The movie brought £0.5 million of productionrelated spend to Glasgow, a figure that represented about 56 per cent of the project’s overall budget and which was 333 per cent the size of the GFF’s original financial commitment. The Fund’s second beneficiary, The Near Room (David Hayman, GB, 1995), saw the organisation break its notional £0.15 million funding cap. The GFF committed £0.25 million to David Hayman’s feature after the project’s main private investor, Australian distributor Smart Egg, withdrew financing one day into a summer 1995 location shoot.86 £0.7 million of local production-related spend associated with this film represented a capital injection into the Glasgow economy some 280 per cent the size of the GFF’s exceptional budgetary contribution.87 This pattern was then repeated across the spread of the Fund’s early investments. Small Faces, for instance, spent £0.74 million in the city (54 per cent of the film’s production budget and 493 per cent of the GFF’s investment).88 Between 1995 and 2000, the Fund invested c. £1.92 million in 12 domestic and international features shot on location in Glasgow. By the organisation’s own estimate, such public subsidy helped to stimulate local production-related spend of £11.5 million in 1999 alone.89 While hard questions can be asked about the GFF’s lack of interest in cultural rationales for its activities, the Fund did fulfil the commercial remit which it set itself. In so doing, it made an important contribution to growing levels of indigenous feature production during the mid-to-late 1990s. But Shallow Grave was also linked to other important Scottish institutional developments over and above the creation of the GFF. Like Rob Roy, Boyle, Hodge and Macdonald’s debut feature benefited from (and, through its international commercial success, further buttressed) a pronounced contemporary local interest in commercially orthodox processes of script structure and development. As noted above, the concept of ‘script’ became seen increasingly as the bedrock on which an

42 The New Scottish Cinema industrially sustainable Scottish cinema would be built. In 1996, Andrea Calderwood, then Head of Drama at BBC Scotland, suggested that ‘a picture of something which can be called an industry begins to emerge’90 in mid-1990s Scotland precisely because local film institutions now systematically sought to provide indigenous creative talent with ‘the ability to finance properly the development of their projects to the stage where the strength of their script could… allow [Scottish filmmakers] to create a viable production package’.91 Shallow Grave director Danny Boyle presented that film’s successful development process in closely related terms. He remembered how ‘narrative became the principal ingredient… narrative was our God’92 during production and all pre- and post- stages alike. This worshipful respect dated back at least as far as 1992, when a £5,000 Scottish Film Production Fund script development grant enabled John Hodge and Andrew Macdonald to present an early draft of Shallow Grave’s script to David Aukin at Channel 4. Equally symptomatic of escalating early-1990s Scottish interest in all things script- and story-related was the establishment of Movie Makars, an annual script development event at which Aukin, Hodge and Macdonald first crossed paths. The Scottish Film Production Fund’s Eddie Dick set up Movie Makars in 1992 as a regular training and networking opportunity for Scottish filmmakers and prospective funders.93 Seven years later, he explained how that initiative had been inspired – like so much else within early-1990s Scotland – by local exposure to suggestive North American precedent: I’d visited Norman Jewison’s Canadian Institute for Advanced Film Studies and what was clear was that a country next to a very powerful neighbour, needing to look south for investment in the industry, had to carve out for themselves an area for the development of writers and producers.94 Impressed by Hodge and Macdonald’s draft script, Aukin personally guaranteed a near-unprecedented budgetary contribution (£0.8 million/80 per cent of total budget) by Channel 4 to Shallow Grave.95 Hodge and Macdonald’s unapologetically commercial agenda chimed well with the increasingly hardnosed funding priorities of a broadcaster which, from 1993 on, became responsible for selling its own advertising revenues and operating within those financial means. Like Rob Roy, then, Shallow Grave was quite clearly a project largely defined by the collective early-1990s attempt to establish a sustainable feature production culture in Scotland through strategic adaptation of a wide range of American cinematic practices and institutional structures. Indeed, at a textual level, Shallow Grave starts to accumulate and acknowledge creative debts to US film right from the work’s opening images. David’s introductory and closing voiceover narration works as a bookending device which introduces key narrative events and characters from a recently deceased man’s perspective. While David seems to be resting open-eyed in bed at the beginning of Shallow Grave’s opening titles, the film’s final scene reveals that what viewers see at this point is in fact his corpse laid out on a mortuary slab. This, as Philip Kemp points out, is an obvious transplantation of the celebrated opening sequence of



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Figure 1.3 Holyrood or Hollywood? Sunset Boulevard as metaphor for Edinburgh’s New Town in Shallow Grave Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard (Wilder, USA, 1950)96 to a contemporary Scottish context. The attendant sense of a powerful local fascination with American cinema is deepened yet further when one considers the metatextual character of the Wilder movie that is quoted: Sunset Boulevard is, after all, a Hollywood film that explores the perverse glamour which Hollywood films exert. But Shallow Grave is ultimately far closer to the Scottish independent filmmaking template established by Soft Top, Hard Shoulder than it is to the Scottish Classical model essayed by The Big Man and Rob Roy. This is because the film archly foregrounds and comments on the ways in (and degree to) which its image of Scotland is determined by the numerous American cinematic precedents, both artistic and institutional, that the work owes its existence to in the first place. For instance, the flatmates’ cold-blooded mutilation of Hugo’s cadaver offers a grisly echo of the way in which Shallow Grave systematically divests itself of as many signifiers of Scottishness as the film’s makers deemed necessary in the pursuit of significant box office success. Hugo and the movie which contains him are both entities robbed of the tell-tale marks of identity by calculating triumvirates focused on substantial financial gain. Shallow Grave thus explores, albeit with ironic archness, the possible negative consequences of attempts to renounce all meaningful forms of personal and collective bond, not to mention the sense of social obligation and belonging that such ties carry with them. Of course, many critics would reject that reading. Carl Neville, for example, argues that Alex, David and Juliet’s sociopathic actions are essentially left uncritiqued, in order that the viewer may remain disengaged enough to indulge in ‘the guiltless enjoyment of that which… is socially or morally unacceptable on the basis that you know it’s wrong and are therefore not fully participating in its wrongness’.97 Similarly,

44 The New Scottish Cinema Claire Monk bemoans Shallow Grave as ‘a film bred of cynical times… its appeal rested substantially on its gleeful, self-conscious surface celebration of greed’.98 But the analysis presented here suggests that such views are perhaps overly censorious. Granted, Shallow Grave is too commercially focused to prioritise above all else the potential of its central characters to act as a collective metaphor for socio-political malaise in mid-1990s Scotland/Britain. Yet at the same time, the movie never tries to deny the extent to which Alex, David and Juliet’s lack of public-minded values mutilates them psychically as well as Hugo physically. Another way in which Shallow Grave depicts contemporary metropolitan mores in a deeply sceptical fashion involves having the film’s central trio comment ironically on such phenomena. Recalling Rob Roy’s depiction of Scottish identity through the motif of ritualised duelling, David and Alex are at one point seen engaged in the modern-day form of hyper-masculine hand-to-hand combat par excellence: a game of squash. The glass walls of the court at the pair’s private health club quite literally cut them off from the outside world. This is but one of the numerous arch visual suggestions throughout the work of the near-absolute extent to which Alex, David and Juliet cohabit a socio-cultural cocoon of their own making, utterly alienated from the wider social surroundings of Edinburgh and Scotland alike. At the end of their contest, Alex taunts the beaten David with the hard fact of ‘defeat: sporting, personal, financial, professional, sexual, and everything’. These overblown terms simultaneously exemplify, but also draw attention to, the determinedly economical way in which the film sketches the respective backgrounds of its main characters, and the local/national culture they inhabit, with as few pen strokes as possible. Alex’s insensitive and over-competitive instinct is to make something trivial (an amateur sporting contest) stand for something significantly bigger (the power dynamics that characterise his relationship with David). A similar way of thinking characterises Shallow Grave’s parsimonious depiction of Scottish cultural specificity. The country is self-consciously reduced to little more than a fleeting shot of Edinburgh’s North Bridge here, a brief excursion to an excruciating charity ceilidh there. Similarly, despite his occupation (tabloid journalist), Alex displays no discernible personal or professional curiosity about the workings of the city (Edinburgh) or country (Scotland) that he is paid to investigate and illuminate for his readership’s benefit. This utter disinterest in anything which exists beyond the claustrophobic arena of Alex’s private needs and desires is neatly paraphrased by the final resting place of Shallow Grave’s ostentatious post-opening credits tracking shot. This snakes up a tenement building’s spiral staircase towards the flatmates’ top-floor eyrie, finally stopping once confronted with a welcome mat emblazoned with a tersely dismissive stock phrase (‘Not today, thank you’). Throughout the succeeding narrative, Alex’s interest in ‘today’ proves tenuous at best. He glibly rejects one promising journalistic assignment by claiming that he ‘can’t find a human angle’ on it, and greets the grisly discovery of Hugo’s corpse with schadenfreude, rather than shock, sneering that, ‘it’s not every day I find a story in my own flat’. As well as underscoring the character’s fatal lack of human warmth or curiosity, Alex’s remark also draws attention to the complex relationship between budgetary constraints and commercial ambition that



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drove Shallow Grave’s attempt to essay a speculative Scottish variant on American independent cinematic practice. A culturally abstracted, and consequently costeffective, location such as Alex, David and Juliet’s flat is in fact just the kind of place in which ‘a story’ (and a conveniently lurid one at that) has to be sought by local filmmakers challenged by a relative lack of money and a small domestic theatrical audience. Elsewhere in the film, David and Juliet’s words and actions also advertise Shallow Grave’s steadfast determination to avoid lengthy engagement with the local sociocultural contexts within which the film’s story might plausibly be grounded. David, for instance, is less sure than Alex or Juliet about stealing Hugo’s money and identity alike. He is convinced to take part in the crime, however, by a phrase uttered in passing at his place of work. David has made an impeccably middle-class choice of profession, working as a junior partner in a firm of Edinburgh accountants. But a colleague’s words – ‘there’s a whole world to be accounted for’ – accidentally crystallise the underlying horror of a seemingly innocuous career choice. Hugo’s cash suddenly exerts a decisive pull over David because it appears to offer instant, no-strings-attached escape from a decades-long existence of unremitting day-to-day drudgery into a life of money-no-object atomised hedonism. He thus renounces the idea of personal accountability in order to release himself from the boredom of professional accountancy: the prospect of overnight wealth seems to transcend all frustrating notions of social responsibility or restraint. Indeed, all of the flatmates resent the idea of accounting (in all possible senses of the word) for the wider world. They systematically neglect the intimate ties that most people crave. David repeatedly fails to open letters from his mother, while Juliet endlessly refuses to take phone calls from a jilted lover. On first meeting Hugo, David condenses the flatmates’ antisocial credo into a self-fulfilling solipsistic prophecy: ‘I don’t usually meet people unless I know them.’ Such aspects of Shallow Grave suggest that critical worries about the film’s perceived deracination overlook the extent to which the work is concerned to depict (and implicitly denigrate) the terms of a deracinated worldview. On one hand, the movie’s ironically exaggerated disavowal of any possible Scottish identity was unquestionably part of an entrepreneurial attempt to render the work as universally legible (and therefore sellable) as possible within international image markets. But on the other, Shallow Grave also uses its central characters’ remarkable selfishness as a vehicle through which the perturbing consequences of self-serving secession from all forms of shared identity and community can be identified and examined. During the film’s most ostentatiously Scottish scene, that in which the flatmates attend a charity ceilidh, Alex sneeringly enquires of the tartan-clad master of ceremonies: ‘where did they dig him up?’ But while he and his co-conspirators unthinkingly reject and ridicule the historic repertoire of traditions, images and social practices through which the nation creates and sustains its multiple senses of mutual belonging, it is harder to accuse Shallow Grave of exactly the same thing. After all, the film meticulously details the neo-Jacobean consequences – or, to use David’s words, the ‘what then’ – of its central protagonists’ deliberate severing of all

46 The New Scottish Cinema social ties, identifiably Scottish or otherwise, in their misguided attempt to fashion an obligation-free anyplace, a seductive but ultimately soul-destroying dystopia within which you ‘can’t trust your friends’, much less another fellow citizen. One of the main reasons why many contemporary observers thought that Shallow Grave offered an attractive template for future low-budget indigenous feature production related to the suppleness of the film’s engagement with questions of national representation. But while the film’s creators were at pains to demonstrate that a Scottish movie need not automatically take extended exploration of Scottishness as its central thematic preoccupation, they also showed that international commercial appeal and strategic engagement with issues of national identity need not be mutually exclusive concerns. Conclusion The Big Man, Soft Top, Hard Shoulder, Rob Roy and Shallow Grave illustrate a range of key early-1990s creative and institutional responses to contemporary Scottish cinema’s crippling industrial underdevelopment. By 1995, the year of Rob Roy’s and Shallow Grave’s international theatrical release, it had become clear that a marked shift of artistic and institutional emphasis had occurred within Scotland. An emergent generation of local filmmakers and film workers increasingly looked to the example of American cinema past and present for the means through which a sustainable indigenous production sector might be established and then expanded. This phenomenon allowed an unprecedentedly large number of Scottish features to be made during the decade’s second half. The international commercial success of both Rob Roy and Shallow Grave confirmed the absolutely central role that Scottish Classical and Scottish independent production models would play within that process. But these hegemonic developmental strategies had a complex range of consequences during the years in question. While they allowed for more indigenous features to be produced than ever before, they also – a few conspicuous individual exceptions aside – yielded steadily diminishing commercial and national cultural returns as the 1990s drew towards a close. The story of that decade offers, therefore, a local variant on what John Caughie sees as a recurrent narrative within historically inflected analyses of film industrial and institutional change rooted in a particular time and place. For Caughie, such scholarly work frequently finds itself compelled to ‘piece together the steps by which [creative and institutional] practices become routines… working assumptions which persist long after the conditions which legitimated them have withered away’.99 As the next chapter shows, there is much to recommend this idea in the case of late-1990s Scotland.

2 ‘IT’S BEEN GREAT WORKING WITH YOU’: SCOTTISH CINEMA, 1995–2001

Mid-1996: a Scottish filmmaker’s brief moment in the sun comes to an abrupt end. In the aftermath of his 1993 Best Short Film Oscar for Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, Peter Capaldi is momentarily inundated with, in the writer/director’s own words, ‘a lot of American interest’1 in his writing and directing a debut feature. Several years later, Capaldi rued the inflated sense of creative excitement and ambition – ‘after the Oscar… I wrote script after script, with each project getting bigger and bigger’2 – which he experienced at that time: none of the ‘bigger and bigger’ projects in question came to fruition. Most painfully of all, the filmmaker spent much of 1995 and 1996 embarking on serial redrafts of a script for a proposed feature, Moon Man, developed in collaboration with the American producer Miramax.3 This abortive individual Scottish encounter with the mainstream US industry’s economic might culminated in a stark reminder of the imbalance of power that inevitably characterised the working relationship between an artist from a traditionally marginal national cinema and financiers who operated at the heart of the world’s most historically powerful: Tribeca Building. Bob [Weinstein]’s office… he looks at me and says… ‘As distributors, which is what we’re known as, we don’t know how to sell this… All the doubts I had originally about the script are still there. The problems with the material have not been resolved… But I gotta tell you, you’re one of the family here. And we love you. We love what you do. It’s been great working with you’.4 Capaldi’s unhappy individual story, that of a cross-cultural encounter which ended almost as quickly as it had begun, offers one possible way of understanding Scottish cinema’s wider narrative during the late 1990s. If this filmmaker’s early-1990s Oscar success was symptomatic of a more general upturn in local cinematic fortunes

48 The New Scottish Cinema during that period, his subsequent trajectory – inflated expectation giving way to eventual disappointment – proved comparably representative of the experience of many contemporaries in late-1990s Scotland. That, at least, is the story which bald box-office statistics for the period seem to tell. The late 1990s witnessed a clear continuation (indeed, expansion) of the Scottish Classical and Scottish independent filmmaking templates developed earlier in the decade. Although those two production strands certainly do not account for the entirety of indigenous movies made between 1995 and 2001, they do represent the most numerically (and, I would argue, culturally) significant clusters of work within that collective corpus. Late-1990s/very early-2000s Scottish independent movies included: The Life of Stuff (Simon Donald, GB, 1997), The Acid House (Paul McGuigan, GB, 1998), Beautiful Creatures (Bill Eagles, GB, 2000) and Late Night Shopping (Saul Metzstein, GB/Ger, 2001). Such work was clearly indebted to a range of contemporary American cinematic and popular cultural reference points, a fact often publicly underscored by the filmmakers responsible. Paul McGuigan, director of The Acid House, stated a desire that his film would ‘make Edinburgh look like South LA, unlike the dull way it usually is’,5 while Late Night Shopping was, in director Saul Metzstein’s words, ‘certainly more influenced by American independent cinema that anything else’.6 Meanwhile, contemporaneous films that drew on the Scottish Classical model to a greater or lesser degree were: The Near Room (David Hayman, GB, 1995); The Slab Boys (John Byrne, GB, 1997); The Debt Collector (Anthony Neilson, GB, 1999); Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, GB/Fr, 1999); Strictly Sinatra (Peter Capaldi, GB/USA, 2001); and The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, GB/Ire, 2001). Again, US influence was very much to the fore within this strand of late-1990s Scottish filmmaking. The Near Room screenwriter Robert Murphy presented his work as a local attempt to follow in the footsteps of canonical film noirs such as Chinatown (Roman Polanski, USA, 1974), ‘films that take you into dark areas… the Chandleresque’,7 while director David Hayman voiced his ambition to make ‘an international film that happened to take place in Glasgow… I wanted to make Glasgow look like New York’.8 Writer/ director John Byrne noted of The Slab Boys, a film adaptation of his seminal 1970s Slab Boys theatrical trilogy, that ‘we all agreed that it was a “studio” picture, i.e., to get the “look” and feel of 1957 Paisley – a sort of “mythic” Paisley’.9 Elsewhere, playwright Anthony Neilson positioned The Debt Collector, his debut feature as writer/ director, as a modern-day Tartan Western that explored tortured local experiences of collective identity – ‘a country that feels itself oppressed… divided against itself on one level’ – and masculinity – ‘do[ing] for the Scottish hard man what Unforgiven [Clint Eastwood, USA, 1992] did for the Western’.10 Almost without exception, however, these Scottish-American films failed to replicate the international commercial and/or critical success enjoyed by their illustrious predecessors, Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle, GB, 1995), Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, GB, 1996) and Rob Roy (Michael Caton-Jones, USA/GB, 1995). Their typical domestic box office performance ranged from underwhelming to catastrophic. Costing c. £0.8 million to make, The Near Room grossed only £29,135 from a seven-day



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run on a handful of Scottish cinema screens before disappearing from the theatrical market altogether.11 But that performance looks positively stellar when compared with Peter Capaldi’s eventual feature debut as writer/director, the £4 million project Strictly Sinatra, which took a mere £18,000 in British cinemas.12 Beautiful Creatures, also budgeted around the £4 million mark, fared somewhat better, achieving £0.2 million of UK ticket sales.13 But director Bill Eagles’ film attracted such an acute degree of domestic critical opprobrium that Julian Petley identified it as ‘the best example to date of a [British] film which appears to have been condemned largely on account of its public funding’.14 Elsewhere, UK theatrical gross for Late Night Shopping (production budget c. £1.5 million) was a disappointing £100,040.15 The Debt Collector (UK theatrical gross £107,970), The Slab Boys (£15,911) and, most depressingly of all, The Life of Stuff (£4,438) all reiterated this same unwelcome pattern.16 There were a few notable exceptions to the depressing general rule. My Name is Joe (Ken Loach, Sp/It/Fr/GB/Ger, 2008), director Ken Loach’s second feature collaboration with Scottish screenwriter Paul Laverty, won the Best Actor award and Palme d’Or at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival and also performed strongly at European box offices. Comparably impressive success was also achieved by two of the late-1990s/early-2000s Scottish-American films noted above. Writer/director Lynne Ramsay’s feature debut Ratcatcher saw her lauded as one of the most significant and distinctive talents to have emerged within late-twentieth-century British cinema.17 Academic interest in Ramsay’s movie, whether rooted in a Scottish18 or a non-nationally specific19 critical agenda, has also proved strong. Writer/director Peter Mullan’s second feature, The Magdalene Sisters, was similarly lauded, winning the 2002 Golden Lion award at Venice and achieving a genuine degree of commercial crossover. In Ireland (where the film’s mid-1960s narrative is set), The Magdalene Sisters had passed the €1 million mark at the domestic box office by the end of November 2002; it would go on to become the highest-earning film at the Irish box office that year.20 Elsewhere, Mullan’s movie grossed £2,138,934 in the British theatrical market by the close of 200321 and also performed well in countries such as Italy. But an overarching sense of expectations raised without being fully satisfied perhaps explains why the representative tenor of local pronouncements on Scottish cinema’s health and prospects changed markedly during the late 1990s. In 1995, Allan Shiach, the chairman of the Scottish Film Production Fund, proclaimed that ‘the success of Shallow Grave… proves that here in Scotland we are [now making…] films of real international standing’.22 Yet by early 2001, one dyspeptic journalist implored his readership to ‘imagine if we made – using public money – whisky so bad the Americans wouldn’t drink it’,23 before arguing that this was precisely what had happened with the Scottish film industry in the six years since Trainspotting. Even some of the actors involved with that seminal movie seemed to concede this point. In 2004, Kevin McKidd reflected that Trainspotting ‘did a lot of damage, not just to the Scottish film industry but the whole British movie scene… it gave everyone this big, false sense of bravado’.24 Elsewhere, McKidd’s co-star Peter Mullan reached the same conclusion as early as 1998, arguing that:

50 The New Scottish Cinema Trainspotting… changed the whole nature of independent cinema in Britain: the great thing about it was that it gave huge interest to [the former] but the worst thing about it was that for less than a £2 million investment [by sole funder Channel 4] there was a £90 million return. Not even the maddest Hollywood mogul would expect that percentage of profit, but [British public and private film funders now] do.25 For many, then, Trainspotting’s talismanic status changed beyond recognition as the 1990s gave way to the 2000s. Once seen as a success soon to be repeated, ‘the hallowed touchstone of the Scottish film industry’, the movie morphed into an achievement never matched: ‘a spectre we just cannot seem to shake’.26 This complex contemporary backdrop perhaps explains why Martin McLoone saw the main challenge facing recently expanded small Anglophone cinemas such as those of Scotland and Ireland at the twentieth century’s end to be that of ‘trying to work through difference critically – trying to live with Hollywood rather than trying to mimic it’.27 This chapter’s account of the period between 1995 and 2001 explores various ways in which late-1990s/very early-2000s Scottish filmmakers grappled with that conundrum. Two films – Late Night Shopping and Strictly Sinatra – are discussed as representative examples of a widespread local ‘mimicry’ of American cinematic forms. That collective strategy misinterpreted the lessons offered by important earlier works such as Shallow Grave, Rob Roy and Trainspotting. Its sustained lack of commercial or cultural benefit led to Scottish-American developmental agendas losing most of their impetus and authority by the time the 2000s dawned. But extended analysis of two other contemporary works, Ratcatcher and The Magdalene Sisters, seeks to acknowledge just how enabling those agendas were, for a brief but crucial time. Writer/directors Lynne Ramsay and Peter Mullan use a range of American cinematic precedents and reference points to develop unsparing, yet also commercially accessible, accounts of mid-to-late-twentieth century Scottish and Irish social experience. While its significant limitations need to be identified and accounted for, the Scottish-American cinematic project of the 1990s did create an indigenous production sector strong enough to survive into, and evolve in different ways during, the 2000s. But discussion of the different ways in which individual late-1990s/early-2000s Scottish filmmakers adapted US cinematic forms must also be contextualised by a broader understanding of continuing institutional change during the period in question. Therefore, before exploring the four movies noted above, this chapter first examines three local institutional developments that emerged as a direct response to the ferment of the early-to-mid 1990s. All three had notable (and notably complex) consequences for late-1990s Scottish filmmaking. Firstly, there was the UK government-sponsored creation in 1997 of Scottish Screen, a single public body responsible for overseeing all aspects of moving image production and culture in Scotland. Secondly, we consider the manner in which National Lottery funding for feature work was distributed in Scotland after becoming available in 1995. And thirdly, we look at Channel 4’s greatly enhanced profile, post-Trainspotting, as a



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financial patron of Scottish filmmaking. Each of these developments profoundly affected both the number, and also the nature, of Scottish films produced between 1995 and 2001. On one hand, Scottish Screen, the National Lottery and Channel 4 all boosted local feature production levels over those years. But on the other, all three were critiqued by significant numbers of local filmmakers who feared that these contemporarily powerful sources of patronage carried in tow undesirable and/or unsustainable institutional agendas for the future development of Scottish cinema. The most wide-ranging and significant institutional development in late-1990s Scotland was the rationalisation in 1997 of the country’s existing public film bodies into a single umbrella organisation, Scottish Screen. In keeping with the remarkable influence of American cinematic reference points within 1990s Scotland, the bestknown explanation for Scottish Screen’s creation foregrounds an ardent local desire to accommodate the mainstream US film industry’s practical needs. Celia Stevenson puts it more pithily, arguing that the advent of Scottish Screen should be seen as ‘a direct result of the Braveheart [Mel Gibson, USA, 1995] factor’.28 At a British government-hosted Edinburgh Castle reception for that film’s producers, Michael Forsyth, then-Secretary of State for Scotland, asked star and director Mel Gibson what local politicians might do in order to attract greater amounts of mobile production activity to Scotland (the majority of Braveheart’s location shoot, for instance, took place in the Republic of Ireland). According to Stevenson, ‘[Gibson] said, “a one-stop shop”, and the idea of Scottish Screen was born’.29 Within a year or so of this meeting, a visibly enthused Forsyth had commissioned a feasibility study into establishing major production studio facilities in Scotland, pledged an additional £3 million of UK government funding in support of Scottish audiovisual industry initiatives and instigated another report, 1996’s Scotland on Screen, to explore the economic potential of the local screen industries.30 Once published, the latter document noted that the terms of the investigatory brief handed down by government, ‘film and television as commercial opportunities’, represented ‘a shift of emphasis from the traditional “cultural” approach’31 which had hitherto underwritten limited state funding of film production and culture in Scotland. That shift was also discernible when Forsyth addressed an audience of American tourism executives in New York prior to a preview screening of Loch Ness (John Henderson, GB/USA, 1996), another mobile Hollywood production shot in Scotland during 1995/96. Forsyth noted that he would ‘be looking to’ the soon-to-be established Scottish Screen ‘to free up some of its existing [financial] resources to reflect the more commercial rather than cultural emphasis which is now important’32 within Scottish film culture. Scottish Screen thus owed its existence to a range of complex, and questionable, ideological assertions. Sketchy notions of ‘commerce’ and ‘culture’ were defined in UK government thinking as potentially incompatible objectives, with the former to be definitively privileged over the latter. A sense of the pressures which Scottish Screen laboured under from birth can be gleaned from the changing rhetoric of Steve McIntyre, one of the organisation’s key officers during the late 1990s and early 2000s and its Chief Executive between 2001 and 2004. In the years leading up to

52 The New Scottish Cinema Scottish Screen’s creation, McIntyre had argued that ‘naive “productivism”’ was an institutional malady hampering the indigenous production sector’s capacity to grow and diversify: Production, any production [author’s original emphasis] has become the guiding principle of policy… Without… a cultural programme, precious arts funding could end up doing little more than propping up (inadequately) commercial filmmaking.33 Yet by 2000, McIntyre, now Scottish Screen’s Head of Production, seemed to echo Michael Forsyth’s view that cultural questions should be of limited significance to Scottish Screen’s activities and aspirations, proposing that: I don’t think it is up to us [i.e., Scottish Screen] to take any kind of substantial editorial line… Our view has to be culturally neutral, technologically neutral, genre-neutral. If it turns out that a group of filmmakers emerge in that kind of environment and work in a particular way then that’s fine. But it’s not up to us to dictate that.34 Two years further on, and by now Scottish Screen’s Chief Executive, McIntyre continued to defend the idea that institutional policy could and should be culturally neutral, noting of features which received financial backing from Scottish Screen that, ‘whether these are films which illuminate Scottish society… or reflect Scotland back to itself is down to the passions and aspirations of filmmakers themselves’.35 Yet the idea of a genuinely neutral, commonsensical, industry-centred developmental agenda was arguably chimerical. Scottish Screen’s institutional priorities and activities during the late 1990s and early 2000s were clearly geared towards fostering a very particular kind of Scottish cinema. Nowhere is that fact more visible than in the controversy surrounding the most financially significant institutional development witnessed in late-1990s Scotland, the advent of National Lottery funding for indigenous feature production. The Westminster Major administration created the National Lottery in 1994. A year later, the government legislated for a portion of Lottery revenues to be allocated to film production funds administered by the UK’s various national Arts Councils (England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales). This unlooked-for new public funding stream proved to be a significant contributing factor to the unprecedented upsurge in Scottish feature production levels during the late 1990s.36 The newly created Scottish Arts Council National Lottery Fund became the most significant single patron of indigenous filmmaking during the period. By 1998, the Fund had already made production grants worth a total of £13.5 million, with a further £12.75 million forecast between that year and early 2003.37 Ultimately, Lottery funds contributed just over £9.43 million of public monies to 15 wholly or partially Scottish-funded features made between 1995 and the middle of 2000.38



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Yet the Lottery Fund’s status in many local filmmakers’ eyes was a controversial one. After briefly serving as a member of the Fund’s advisory panel in late 1996, writer/director Bill Forsyth abruptly resigned his position. Forsyth complained that the Fund was dispensing production monies in a nepotistic way, favouring funding applications associated with advisory panel members: £1 million each to The Life of Stuff – producer Lynda Myles – Regeneration (Gillies Mackinnon, GB/Can, 1997) – screenwriter Allan Shiach – and The Silver Darlings – producer John McGrath. In June 1997, Forsyth, fellow director Charlie Gormley, and producers Christopher Young and Peter Broughan formed Scottish Stand, a local filmmakers’ pressure group set up to express collective anxieties about the new public institutional direction shaping Scottish cinema.39 Scottish Stand’s central charge was that disproportionate concentration on bringing more mobile production to Scotland was hampering the development of publicly funded support for indigenous production companies and personnel. Peter Broughan complained that Lottery awards frequently went to nonScottish-based production companies and feature projects: ‘very little’ of the vital new Lottery cash was, in Broughan’s view, ‘feeding into the Scottish film economy’,40 other than as a service sector for visiting filmmakers. In September 1997, the Scottish Arts Council was forced to respond to such misgivings by setting up a Film Production Committee to assess the processing of applications to the Lottery Panel. This acknowledged Scottish Stand’s distrust of the Scottish Film Production Fund’s sole administration of the body hitherto.41 Indeed, in 2000 John Archer, Scottish Screen’s first Chief Executive, conceded that the original Lottery funding structures made it ‘quite easy for others to come in and cherry pick [funding] and for it not to benefit indigenous productions’.42 Alternatively, other observers proposed that the most problematic aspect of the new Lottery funding process related to the fact that the global success of Trainspotting had left the panel (and many applicants to it) in thrall to unrealistic visions of international commercial profit. It is certainly the case that late-1990s Lottery funding awards frequently privileged feature projects that typically multiplied the budget levels of Shallow Grave and Trainspotting several times over: Regeneration (£3.9 million), The Winter Guest (Alan Rickman, GB/USA, 1997) (£5 million) and Complicity (Gavin Millar, GB, 2000) (£4.6 million) were symptomatic of a widespread rapid inflation in indigenous feature production budget levels between 1995 and the very early 2000s.43 But the commercial performance of late-1990s Scottish cinema emphatically failed to keep pace with that cinema’s rising costs: UK box office receipts for the first wave of Lottery-funded local films – Regeneration (£0.206m), The Winter Guest (£0.25 million), Complicity (£93 506), The Life of Stuff (£4,438), The Slab Boys (£15,991)44 – were manifestly disappointing. Between 1995 and 2001, only 9.05 per cent of the Lottery Fund’s cumulative investment was recouped through the supported films’ takings at the domestic box office and other ancillary markets.45 On one hand, then, concentration of Lottery awards in a relatively small number of £1 million grants to mid-to-high-budget (by British standards) features quickly started to look like a commercially dubious institutional strategy. And on the other, many argued that such institutional priorities actively inhibited the expansion of low-

54 The New Scottish Cinema budget opportunities for indigenous would-be filmmakers. Producer Jim Hickey, for instance, complained that a Fund with a predilection for six-figure awards ‘probably would not use that money to give £150,000 each to six new filmmakers and let them make a low budget feature’.46 In response to such pressures, maximum Lottery Fund awards were reduced from £1 million to £0.5 million in February 1998; at the same time, the Scottish Arts Council proposed to ring-fence 20 per cent of available Lottery monies for support of feature projects deemed culturally important but commercially risky. In June 1999, the SAC and Scottish Screen announced the launch of Twenty First Films, a funding scheme aiming to provide up to 75 per cent of production budgets, or a maximum award of £0.3 million, for features costing no more than £0.6 million.47 Indeed, by 2001 Scottish Screen’s John Archer argued that Scottish Lottery awards now worked primarily to ‘develop… indigenous talent… essentially a cultural subsidy approach with hopes of an economic development spin-off ’.48 This represented a reversal of the institutional priorities that many local filmmakers had complained bitterly about during the late 1990s. Finally, the pattern of late-1990s Lottery awards also represented a questionable attempt to further develop the local interest in questions of script development and structure which had gathered pace and borne fruit in Scotland between 1990 and 1995. One of the key figures in that process, Moonstone International founder John McGrath, was one of the original members of the advisory panel to the Lottery Fund. In late 2000, he reiterated his passionate belief that ‘it’s the writers who will lead Scotland’s cinematic renaissance. Writing good screenplays should be priority number one.’49 Curiously, however, the 15 Lottery-funded Scottish features produced between 1995 and 2000 demonstrated the panel’s recurrent attraction to projects associated with non-cinematic writers and/or texts. While Rob Roy and Shallow Grave, the most significant local successes of the early 1990s, were made from scripts written specifically for the big screen, eight of the Lottery Fund’s first 15 production grants supported literary adaptations: The Slab Boys (trilogy of plays by John Byrne); Regeneration (novel by Pat Barker); The Winter Guest (play by Sharman Macdonald); The Life of Stuff (play by Simon Donald); The Acid House (short stories by Irvine Welsh); My Life So Far (Hugh Hudson, GB/USA, 1999) (autobiography by Denis Forman); Complicity (novel by Iain Banks); and House of Mirth (Terence Davies, GB/USA, 2000) (novel by Edith Wharton). Moreover, five of the 15 films in question – The Winter Guest (Sharman Macdonald/Alan Rickman), The Life of Stuff (Simon Donald), Stella Does Tricks (Coky Giedroyc, GB, 1998) (A.L. Kennedy), The Acid House (Irvine Welsh), My Life So Far (Simon Donald) – were scripted by writers whose literary reputations were primarily as novelists or playwrights, rather than screenwriters. Despite the contemporary local ubiquity of a belief in script as the cornerstone of all other production activities, only 41 per cent of the £9.43 million of Lottery monies awarded to successfully produced Scottish features between 1995 and 2000 supported projects developed from original screenplays written by dedicated screenwriters.50 What replaced the highly nuanced approach to script development in projects like Shallow Grave and Rob Roy was an over-optimistic assumption that the prior cultural reputation and/or commercial popularity of a



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range of literary texts and figures would impart readymade commercial potential to the initial tranche of late-1990s Lottery-funded Scottish features. Little wonder, then, that some observers bemoaned the Lottery Panel’s ‘preference for adaptations of novels or plays… as if this were a safer [commercial] option’.51 Between 1995 and 2001, box office statistics proved repeatedly that it was not. The final major development within the late-1990s Scottish institutional landscape involves the escalating local influence of London-based British broadcaster Channel 4. Channel 4 had provided some 90 per cent of the funding for Shallow Grave and bankrolled Trainspotting’s £1.7 million production budget in full, the company’s largest ever investment in a feature film to that point in time.52 Encouraged by the worldwide commercial success of both movies, Channel 4 became a major patron of late-1990s Scottish filmmaking: nine of the 18 Scottish-produced and -themed films released in British cinemas between 1995 and 2000 – Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, Carla’s Song (Ken Loach, GB/Sp/Ger, 1996), The Slab Boys, My Name is Joe, The Winter Guest, The Acid House, The Debt Collector, Orphans (Peter Mullan, GB, 1999) and Gregory’s 2 Girls (Bill Forsyth, GB/Ger, 1999) – were part-financed by the broadcaster. But Shallow Grave and Trainspotting changed the reasons behind, as well as the regularity of, Channel 4’s financial investment in Scottish talent during the late 1990s. Post-Trainspotting, Channel 4 sought to reinvent FilmFour, the broadcaster’s film production and distribution arm, as an international ‘mini-studio’ along the lines of US producer Miramax. The new FilmFour would aim to repeat and extend Shallow Grave and Trainspotting’s success, producing medium-to-high-budget British films specifically designed to cross over from art-house exhibition circuits into the international commercial mainstream. Compare, for instance, the institutional priorities articulated by FilmFour Head David Aukin in the mid 1990s with those of his successor, Paul Webster, in the early 2000s. In 1996, Aukin argued that the ‘significance’ of Shallow Grave lay: not so much in its good performance abroad… but in the fact that it was able to recoup its costs within the UK without its success here being powered by an initial success in the USA… The conclusion I draw is that we can make films for ourselves… we need no longer feel overwhelmingly dependent on overseas markets to finance our films.53 By contrast, Webster, who succeeded Aukin in 1998 and then oversaw FilmFour’s reformation as a quasi-independent ‘mini-studio’, proposed in 2002 that: In maturing the [British film] industry what was needed was more of a corporate structure. We worked on the notion of creating a mini-studio, or a microcosm of a studio… a bigger plan to make movies globally and build a global business… you can’t build a vibrant film business in the UK alone. It’s impossible… from the point of view of a proper business you have to work internationally.54

56 The New Scottish Cinema Shallow Grave and Trainspotting were important precipitants of FilmFour’s radical late-1990s/early-2000s evolution. Yet while FilmFour supported more Scottish features than ever before during that time, the company’s transformed self-image meant that many local filmmakers found their working relationship with it frequently uncomfortable. Specifically, many late-1990s Scottish recipients of FilmFour funding complained about two things: firstly, what they saw as the financier’s increasingly commercial and internationally focused institutional agenda; and secondly, their suspicion that metropolitan stereotypes of a Caledonian Other underpinned many of FilmFour’s post-Trainspotting funding interventions in Scotland. Writer/director John Byrne, for instance, complained about FilmFour’s decision not to support full UK theatrical distribution for his 1997 feature The Slab Boys. He argued that the company was less interested in fostering an emergent Scottish cinema than in milking revenue from a myopic idea of what a ‘Scottish film’ should be: ‘[The Slab Boys] is not slick or American or violent enough… [FilmFour] expected Trainspotting. They should have known – they had the script.’55 Even Irvine Welsh, author of the original Trainspotting novel, expressed similar misgivings. Although FilmFour funded The Acid House, a 1999 portmanteau feature adaptation of three Welsh short stories, the writer conceded that Trainspotting had perhaps established a restrictive regional template into which the funder expected its late-1990s Scottish beneficiaries to shoehorn their work. With reference to The Acid House, Welsh painted himself as the literal author of his own misfortune, noting that ‘after Trainspotting… it’s very difficult to do something… a bit less airbrushed, a bit less for the mass market. We wanted the actors to be rougher and to speak roughly. It’s very difficult after that, to just do our own wee daft film.’56 Perhaps most notoriously/controversially of all, FilmFour decided not to support UK theatrical distribution of writer/director Peter Mullan’s debut feature Orphans, despite having contributed £0.55 million to the project’s production budget. After winning three major prizes (including Best Film) at the 1998 Venice Film Festival, Mullan’s movie was eventually picked up for domestic distribution by the independent company Downtown. The director’s response was to echo John Byrne’s complaint that FilmFour was obsessed with the idea of compelling Scottish filmmakers to remake Trainspotting ad infinitum. For Mullan, the funder could (or would) not ‘see past the fact that [Orphans] was a Scottish film, thus it should be another Trainspotting’.57 His consequent view was that, although late-1990s Scottish filmmakers were better-funded than ever before, metropolitan monies came with too many strings attached. Mullan argued that ‘the pressure now on Scottish filmmakers especially, is how do they break away from a new stereotype?’58 The latter caricature had, in his view, swiftly come to dominate the post-Trainspotting era. Thus, by the end of the 1990s, the relationship between FilmFour and Scottish filmmakers was one frequently characterised by mutual frustration and misunderstanding. Indeed, when Channel 4 announced in July 2002 that the expanded, semi-autonomous FilmFour mini-studio set-up established in 1998 was to close, after sustaining operational losses of £8.4 million in 2000/01,59 Scottish



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Screen Chief Executive Steve McIntyre felt able to respond to that news with something approaching equanimity: Scottish film producers’ relationship with Channel 4/FilmFour was built on low-budget productions… the sort of work FilmFour had moved away from in a quest for international hits. Perhaps our companies will in the future be able to connect more with that original low-budget framework which Channel 4 seems keen to re-establish.60 As with the establishment of Scottish Screen and the advent of National Lottery funding, FilmFour’s intervention within late-1990s Scottish film culture was driven by a form of commercial aspiration which many observers saw as unattractive and/or unsustainable, both culturally and industrially, by the time the decade drew to a close. On one hand, the key institutional developments of the 1990s boosted indigenous feature production to levels never previously seen. In so doing, they created the embryonic base for a distinctive Scottish cinema. But what they did or could not do, however, was to provide a secure blueprint for ongoing industrial and cultural vitality and sustainability as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first. Analysis of Late Night Shopping and Strictly Sinatra, two commercially and critically unsuccessful Scottish-American features developed and produced during the late 1990s and early 2000s, provides another way of understanding the extent to which this was so.

Late Night Shopping The narrative of Late Night Shopping centres around four underachieving but attractive 20-something friends who live and work in an unspecified British city. Sean (Luke de Woolfson), Vincent (James Lance), Lenny (Enzo Cilenti) and Jody (Kate Ashfield) are all trapped in low-wage, semi-skilled night jobs: hospital porter, supermarket shelf stacker, call centre operator and microelectronics assembly line worker respectively. The quartet spends nocturnal work breaks and infrequent leisure hours idly chatting in an all-night coffee bar. This, however, fails to salve their respective feelings of isolation and alienation. Despite the fact that they live together, Sean has not seen his girlfriend, Madeline (Heike Makatsch), for several weeks. He is thus unclear as to whether or not their relationship is over. Vincent is a compulsive gigolo who breaks all contact with lovers after sleeping with them for the third time. Lenny has spent years grafting as a professional writer of pornographic fiction; his emotional and sexual maturation is so compromised as a result that he is unable to make romantic advances towards any woman he finds himself attracted to. Jody’s habitually melancholic demeanour casts a pall over her fellow assembly line workers’ spirits, and she is fired as a result. Having reached rock bottom, Late Night Shopping’s central characters attempt to bring their individual and collective states of anomie and immaturity to an end. Vincent deliberately sleeps with Madeline, but then confesses to Sean and vows to mend his ways. Sean is also unfaithful, but ultimately salvages his relationship with Madeline. Lenny overcomes his inhibitions

58 The New Scottish Cinema and asks a colleague out on a date. Jody confesses her deep loneliness and need for companionship to her three male friends. All these plot strands are resolved during a climactic daytrip to an anonymous seaside resort, a literal and symbolic journey from night into day. Madeline and Sean are reunited; Jody, Lenny, Sean and Vincent re-establish the bond between them on the basis of genuine emotional commitment, rather than easy convenience. Late Night Shopping’s makers were unabashed in admitting their desire to replicate the Scottish independent production template established by Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. Screenwriter Jack Lothian presented his first encounter with the former film as a Damascene moment, recalling that when: I went to see Shallow Grave in the cinema it blew me away… a Scottish film which is modern and contemporary and it’s not about being Scottish, it’s just actually about a story, it just happens to be set in Scotland… to me, when I look at filmmakers, I always tend to look at American models because America is the home of Scottish cinema. I love films… which are set in anyplace.61 Director Saul Metzstein also acknowledged Shallow Grave as ‘the film that was very important to me’.62 Following that movie’s lead, he consciously developed his debut feature as a work that was ‘plush low-budget… keeping the action contained, keeping it all on a small scale’.63 Late Night Shopping’s all-night diner thus replaces Shallow Grave’s Edinburgh New Town flat as a cost-effective central narrative location within which a relatively cheap, but potentially box office-friendly, aesthetic is constructed. Additionally, Late Night Shopping’s relatively low production budget (£1.5 million made up of contributions from FilmFour, German distributor Senator Films, the Scottish National Lottery Fund and the Glasgow Film Office) also looked like an attempt to reconnect with Shallow Grave’s low-budget ethos after a half-decade during which significantly more expensive indigenous filmmaking practices had held sway. And finally, like Shallow Grave, Late Night Shopping deliberately aligned itself with, in Metzstein’s words, ‘a mostly American tradition of dialogue-heavy, youth-orientated films’.64 More specifically, Andy Richards65 dubbed this film ‘a British Slacker movie’, a work heavily indebted to the example of key 1990s US independent writer/ directors such as Kevin Smith – Clerks (USA, 1994), Mallrats (USA, 1995) – and Richard Linklater – Slacker (USA, 1991), Dazed and Confused (USA, 1993). Late Night Shopping certainly displays many of the Slacker genre’s distinguishing characteristics: an apolitical emphasis on contemporary youth subcultures; strategic use of shooting locations few in number and found in nature; an enthusiastic privileging of extensive and ornately crafted set-pieces of comedic dialogue. Scottish Screen Chief Executive John Archer argued that Late Night Shopping’s deliberate attempt to replicate Shallow Grave’s mid-1990s Scottish independent formula, ‘low budget features with stories that capture what it means to be living now’, indicated the direction in which ‘real scope for success’66 lay for Scottish cinema at the twenty-first century’s start. But this film failed to entice British or



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international audiences to any significant degree. This was perhaps in part because Late Night Shopping was less sophisticated and self-aware than its illustrious predecessor in developing a locally specific engagement with the example set by American independent filmmaking practice. A symptomatic late-1990s/early-2000s over-simplification of the lessons offered by Shallow Grave and Trainspotting can be discerned within two central facets of Late Night Shopping: the project’s determined cultivation of a culturally anonymous narrative setting and its attempt to identify and apply commercially competitive models of Scottish scriptwriting practice. With regard to the deliberately ambiguous sense of place that suffuses Late Night Shopping, writer Jack Lothian noted that one major lesson he took from Shallow Grave involved an alleged need ‘for Scottish films to lose a lot of their regionality’.67 ‘In Britain more than anywhere else’, Lothian complained, ‘people are obsessed with how regional a film is. Who cares?’68 Similarly, director Saul Metzstein saw Late Night Shopping’s capacity to be identified as a ‘Scottish’ film to be problematic, both creatively and commercially speaking: ‘if you set a film in Glasgow, people come to it with so many assumptions and prejudices which wouldn’t fit into a film like this’.69 As a direct result of this collective authorial position, many (if not most) scenes within Late Night Shopping begin with establishing shots that quite deliberately fail to establish anything (or perhaps better, anywhere). Generic long shots of multi-storey steel-and-glass office buildings at night predominate. So, too, do tightly cropped images of the exterior facades of central narrative locations (the all-night diner, the supermarket where Vincent works). Calculatedly claustrophobic framing works to divorce the latter spaces from any sense of their wider physical and social milieu. Similarly, Late Night Shopping’s central narrative premise, the essentially crepuscular existence imposed on an entire generation, cleverly rationalises (because it naturalises) Lothian and Metzstein’s decision not to specify or explore their film’s narrative setting in any meaningful way. After all, when large sections of the native population slumber through the wee small hours, the distinctive identity of any metropolis is arguably at its most attenuated. The premeditated result is a movie that unfolds in ‘a Glasgow apparently empty of Glaswegians’,70 or, as Lothian put matters, Late Night Shopping is ‘not actually set anywhere, which was a deliberate move’.71 But this creative/commercial strategising, while efficiently prosecuted, represents a qualitatively different approach to that employed within Trainspotting and Shallow Grave. Like Late Night Shopping, those two films enthusiastically sought to develop local variants on a range of internationally familiar (and therefore legible) generic, aesthetic and narrative characteristics associated with contemporary American independent cinema. But unlike Lothian and Metzstein’s work, Shallow Grave and Trainspotting also take as a central theme the dubious feasibility and/or desirability of individuals severing themselves completely from any sense of national cultural identity and allegiance. The question of whether it is, in the celebrated words of Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), ‘shite being Scottish’, and if so, how locals might react to that sad state of affairs, resonates obliquely but insistently throughout Shallow Grave and Trainspotting. Alex, David and Juliet (Shallow Grave) and Renton (Trainspotting) in different ways personify and play out a complex dialectic between

60 The New Scottish Cinema

Figure 2.1 Nocturnal no man’s land: the after-hours working lives of characters in Late Night Shopping parochial anchoring and cosmopolitan alienation. But Late Night Shopping’s central characters engage with the latter pole of human experience only. Metzstein and Lothian were not alone in overlooking this crucial aspect of Shallow Grave and Trainspotting while striving to repeat those films’ transatlantic box office success. Many late-1990s/early-2000s Scottish independent filmmakers expressed a belief that the more an indigenous feature could confuse, or even erase, all markers of local specificity, the better. Irvine Welsh, writer of The Acid House, asserted that, ‘a lot of the things that go on in the black housing projects are the same as what goes on in the schemes in Scotland’.72 Writer/director Simon Donald emphasised how The Life of Stuff ’s torrent of narcotic self-abuse and random Grand Guignol violence avoided ‘root[ing] our location in the Nineties in a precise city of Scotland’.73 Donald’s film was accordingly set and shot in a derelict warehouse located on a barren expanse of postindustrial wasteland: this found set serves as a surreal criminal den-cum-nightclub which the movie’s characters never leave. Such late-1990s Scottish independent work offered audiences far fewer opportunities to recognise and engage with local cultural specificity than Shallow Grave and Trainspotting did. Late Night Shopping, for instance, conspicuously refuses any equivalent of the former film’s charity ceilidh or the latter’s excruciatingly unhappy daytrip to the Highlands. Late Night Shopping’s approach to questions of script structure and content also illustrates another late-1990s/early-2000s local misinterpretation of potentially valuable lessons learned between 1990 and 1995. Shallow Grave adopts Americaninfluenced models of story in a manner that directs the viewer’s attention towards the ways in which this entrepreneurial decision influences the film’s representation of contemporary national culture and identity. But in Late Night Shopping’s script,



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commercial concerns obliterate cultural counterparts, rather than interacting complexly with them. Lothian’s work is more concerned to naturalise its studiedly anonymous character than it is to ironise it. Late Night Shopping implies that lowskilled, low-pay night jobs and unsocial working hours constitute all-too-common living conditions within a globalised post-industrial service economy. But while this may well be true, the film does not wholeheartedly advance the thesis that millennial capitalism works to debar people from extended forms of personal contact with those surrounding them – friends, colleagues, and even (in Sean’s case) lovers – with any substantive socio-political agenda in mind. Rather, that argument provides Late Night Shopping with a convenient excuse to ignore the possible existence of wider social networks to which its protagonists might belong, whether by choice or necessity. As Paul Dave notes, ‘actual friendship’ between the central characters ‘would be a social arrangement which exceeds or challenges the coincidences provided by their jobs’. 74 Conveniently enough, the film’s protagonists only achieve that state as the final credits are about to roll. Saul Metzstein justified structuring absences such as these by arguing that Late Night Shopping’s central characters ‘have no concept of politics. They are totally in a vacuum, and I think that’s very modern’.75 The extent to which that state of being gels perfectly with the film’s commercially motivated desire to avoid socio-cultural specificity at all costs is crystallised in one character’s passing (and strikingly passive) observation that, ‘we’re friends: the rest is just details’. Disagreeing with this analysis, Jody challenges Lenny and Vincent to answer three questions about her: occupation, surname and favourite colour. Less telling than the number of correct responses given (one) is the nature of the only query successfully answered (favourite colour). This, after all, is the only one of the three pieces of background information about Jody which neither necessitates nor provokes her creators to elaborate further on the social identity and history (class, socio-economic status, ethnicity, regional and/ or national identity, etc.) of her character. Elsewhere, an attractive girl encountered by Sean in the course of his hospital night portering duties explains the terms of Late Night Shopping’s preferred engagement with questions of script structure and content archly and at considerable length: ‘Do you know what I feel like doing? Not having that conversation where two people bore each other with their life stories. A guy who works nights in a hospital: I think I can fill in the blanks.’ At such moments, Late Night Shopping’s refusal to develop at length the respective backgrounds of its characters, or the culture they inhabit, feels more like a self-exculpatory marketing tool than an acute commentary on millennial urban alienation. Viewers are invited to engage with characters as offhandedly as characters engage with each other: being quotable matters; being curious doesn’t. Socially abstracted but aphoristically accomplished comic dialogue exchanges therefore dominate Late Night Shopping’s script. The first time Vincent is seen drinking coffee with the other members of the central quartet, he helpfully explains that he is ‘trying to be as one-dimensional as possible’. Andy Richards’ complaint that ‘there’s no indication either from their social environment or personal history why [Late Night Shopping’s central characters] should be so aimless’76 represents authorial intention, rather than oversight.

62 The New Scottish Cinema Of course, any critical categorisation of Late Night Shopping as a creatively and culturally problematic work is inevitably subjective in nature. What is a matter of objective fact, however, is the conspicuous failure of this and all other late-1990s/ early-2000s Scottish independent films to achieve their self-set central objective, that of strategically plotted international box office success. By the end of the 1990s, this recurrent underperformance threatened adverse material consequences for a still-fragile indigenous feature production sector’s ongoing expansion. The poor UK box office performance of Late Night Shopping, for example, forced Ideal World, the film’s Glasgow-based independent producer, to abandon plans for a long-term move from television into feature film work. Of the company’s 2001 pre-tax losses of £274,000, £246,000 related directly to debts incurred by an infant film production arm. Announcing a cessation of feature development and production activities in November 2002, Ideal World’s Managing Director explained that, ‘we don’t think we are big enough to make films work. Without a doubt, our focus has slipped from film to [television] drama’.77 The case of Late Night Shopping demonstrates the extent to which many late-1990s Scottish filmmakers believed themselves to be building directly on the Scottish-American creative and institutional agendas first developed in the decade’s earlier half. But this film also suggests the extent to which, and reasons why, those blueprints failed to provide a long-term way forward for an infant national cinema. The same lessons are clear when attention turns from a representative example of late-1990s/early-2000s Scottish independent cinema to a typical instance of Scottish Classical filmmaking from the same period: Peter Capaldi’s debut as a feature film director, Strictly Sinatra.

Strictly Sinatra Understandably bruised by his unsuccessful mid-1990s attempt to work with US mini-major Miramax, writer/director Peter Capaldi tried to turn personal misfortune into creative advantage. He presented Strictly Sinatra, his second feature as screenwriter and first as director, as ‘my reaction to all the stuff that went on in America… [something] that was about an area that I understood’.78 This film takes its maker’s real-life experience of powerlessness when trying to engage with the mainstream American film industry and reifies this into an allegorical representation of an endemically marginalised, deficient and self-loathing contemporary Scottish culture and identity. The present-day urban Scotland depicted in Strictly Sinatra is haunted by crippling local inability on two fronts. Firstly, the nation seems all-too-aware of its failure to replicate the popular cultural and commercial achievements of an intensely glamorous and ubiquitous American Other. Secondly, it is equally chastened by the non-emergence of distinctive and self-sufficient indigenous alternatives to the twin transatlantic talismans of Classical Hollywood Cinema and the Great American Songbook. These anxieties are personified by central protagonist Tony Cocozza (Ian Hart), a mediocre Glaswegian nightclub crooner. Tony’s threadbare nightly act involves taking lushly orchestrated standards made famous by Frank Sinatra and rearranging them for solo Casio keyboard and a considerably less supple vocal range.



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His performances are painful because they represent a technically underwhelming, naive Scottish attempt to emulate the historic substance and swing of mid-twentiethcentury American popular culture. Unaccountably taken with Tony’s meagre set, a coterie of Glaswegian gangsters, who are themselves pale indigenous imitations of resonant figures from US cultural mythology, take the singer under their wing. Tony idealises his new patrons due to his misguided belief that they have successfully fashioned a microcosmic transplanted version of the 1960s Vegas razzmatazz which he so longs to capture himself. But his artistic abilities are so limited that not even mob money and threats of violence can propel him to limited stardom within local cabaret circles. Instead, Tony is reduced to working as a drugs mule. But he belatedly discovers self-respect and -knowledge in an extravagantly melodramatic denouement. Realising that his status as Glaswegian organised crime’s house act of choice is both morally and creatively bankrupt, Tony puts his own life in danger by sabotaging a lucrative drug deal. He then gives a final barnstorming performance of Sinatra’s ‘My Way’ at a mob-owned nightclub before escaping to New York in order to start a new life across the Atlantic.

Figure 2.2 I’m a native New Yorker: transatlantic fantasising runs rampant in Strictly Sinatra Strictly Sinatra depicts a contemporary Scottish culture, and exemplifies a contemporary Scottish cinema, utterly in thrall to American exemplars that threaten to remain forever out of reach. Tony’s performances invariably strain to erase all signs of local particularity. His accent and phrasing are attempted facsimiles of Sinatra’s, and he will, as a matter of principle, only sing songs drawn from the great man’s repertoire. Equally symptomatic is the irony that Tony utters the film’s final words (‘Let’s go home’) to his girlfriend Irene (Kelly Macdonald) as the pair walk

64 The New Scottish Cinema along a central Manhattan thoroughfare. The sentiment of a man now physically, as well as psychologically, separated from any sustaining sense of native cultural heritage or identity is mirrored by many of Strictly Sinatra’s secondary characters. One prominent Glasgow mobster inspires local awe because he is reputed to have worked in Las Vegas, and crossed paths with Sinatra, during the 1960s. The city’s criminal fraternity more generally comes across as a weirdly displaced after-echo of the Rat Pack scene. Elsewhere, central narrative locations – the Scots-Italian café in which Tony drinks coffee, the casino patronised by the local mafia – are decked out as altars to Americana. Both spaces are dominated by huge murals of the New York skyline, graven images that allow local supplicants to temporarily swap a Glaswegian vale of tears for the heaven of Manhattan. Capaldi even recycles the joke with which he opened his script for Soft Top, Hard Shoulder (Stefan Schwartz, GB, 1992). Tony tells Irene that the café both characters frequent is run by an Italian immigrant who couldn’t afford to get to America and had to settle for Scotland instead: hence, the elaborate compensatory masquerade which the New York mural embodies. Rather than using the condition of imagined American-ness as a way to distinguish between characters – sympathetic or antagonistic, central or peripheral – Strictly Sinatra proposes (and itself exemplifies the idea of) that state as coterminous with contemporary Scottish identity. Tony’s self-regarding climactic protestation, pace Sinatra, that he ‘did it my way’ stands in ironic counterpoint to the character’s near-complete internalisation of an idealised myth of American art and identity. Because it shares this cultural condition, Strictly Sinatra can diagnose it as nationally characteristic. Strictly Sinatra’s underwhelming box office performance, not to mention the disastrous long-term track record of its major local financier, only contributed to the gloom inherent in the movie’s self-flagellating plot premise. Although it benefited from minority funding by US financier The Samuel Goldwyn Co., the majority of Strictly Sinatra’s c. £4 million production budget was provided by DNA Films. DNA was one of three production franchises set up by the 1997 Blair administration in an attempt to strategically direct a significant proportion of the feature production monies derived from National Lottery receipts. The ambitious hope behind the franchise scheme was that ‘these conglomerates would come to resemble ministudios, working towards that all-important critical mass’79 of strategically developed indigenous feature product able to compete consistently and profitably in both domestic and international theatrical markets. Little accident, then, that DNA was spearheaded by the two British producers who had most conspicuously achieved worldwide commercial success during the mid-1990s: Duncan Kenworthy – Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, GB, 1994) – and Andrew Macdonald – Shallow Grave and Trainspotting.80 Ultimately, however, DNA’s commercial performance proved disappointing in the extreme. The franchise was granted £29 million of Lottery funding in order to finance a slate of 16 British features over a six-year period. But some £15 million of that sum remained unspent by November 2003, the point in time at which DNA announced that it was entering into partnership with the News Corporation-owned Hollywood studio Fox Searchlight. This development



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prompted bitter complaints that public funding that ‘should long ago have been invested in British film production’ was instead being ‘use[d]… as a dowry’81 to court just the kind of globally dominant US commercial forces which the Lottery franchises were supposed to help the British industry compete against more vigorously. Perceptions that DNA had under-produced in numerical terms did not represent the only contentious aspect of the franchise’s activities during the late 1990s and early 2000s. The commercial and critical performance of DNA-produced films released between 1997 and 2003 also proved controversial. Perhaps due to Andrew Macdonald’s local roots, Scottish projects and creative personnel were disproportionately prominent within DNA’s output during this period. The poor domestic performance of Strictly Sinatra and Beautiful Creatures was noted towards this chapter’s start, while The Final Curtain (Patrick Harkins, USA/GB, 2002), a black comedy written by Macdonald’s Shallow Grave and Trainspotting collaborator John Hodge, was never deemed satisfactory enough for theatrical release. By 2001, the year of Strictly Sinatra’s fleeting appearance in British cinemas, Andrew Macdonald complained that concerted British press hostility towards DNA’s activities had prompted him to consider – rather like the browbeaten Tony Cocozza – the prospect of recuperating escape to America. Macdonald presented British film culture as a dysfunctional entity crippled by self-hatred: ‘it’s an irony, but for small films requiring specialist handling, America is easier. The British market is currently the most difficult in the world.’82 It is perhaps instructive to compare Strictly Sinatra to Rob Roy, its far more successful and well-known early-1990s Scottish Classical progenitor. As discussed in the previous chapter, Rob Roy systematically evacuates what the film perceives as foreign elements and agents from the ethnically and ideologically ‘pure’ Scottish socio-cultural sphere which the film strives to construct. Remember, for instance, the notably mannered way in which would-be American emigrant McDonald (Eric Stoltz) dies: pinned, literally as well as figuratively, to the native land that he so longs to leave behind. Strictly Sinatra propagates an inverted form of the same homogenising representational logic, constructing a present-day Scottish culture within which the non-native (represented by the intertwined myths of Sinatra and Vegas) has completely subsumed the indigenous. Despite its substantial debts to the American Western, Rob Roy refuses, at plot level, to countenance the legitimacy of actual or imagined emigration to the Americas; in stark contrast, Strictly Sinatra presents any other fate as unendurable. In this sense, Tony’s last-minute escape to the heart of the Eastern Seaboard, ‘safely ending up in good ol’ pre-September 11 New York, New York’,83 might be seen as anything but a happy plot resolution. One man’s good fortune only underscores the grim fate of the whole nation he leaves behind: a woefully peripheral culture subjugated by, yet shut off for the most part from direct experience of, an autocratic American master. Strictly Sinatra most clearly displays its credentials as a 1990s Scottish Classical film during various scenes in which the work goes out of its way to reference or replicate seminal images from Hollywood history. Thus, in a fleeting moment of self-conscious transcendence and multilayered cultural quotation, Tony lights a cigarette for a

66 The New Scottish Cinema passing sailor decked in 1940s US Navy whites and at the same time watches Irene drink coffee alone at a café counter on the other side of the street. Though physically marooned in Glasgow, character and viewer alike are for a moment rapturously transported, suddenly out On the Town (Gene Kelly/Stanley Donen, USA, 1949) with Kelly and Sinatra. At the same time, the framing and mise-en-scène of the point-ofview shot in which Tony sees Irene inside the café self-consciously mimics what is perhaps the American painter Edward Hopper’s most famous work, Nighthawks (1942), and/or the Austrian artist Gottfried Helnwein’s 1987 parody of Hopper’s original, Boulevard of Broken Dreams (1987). Helnwein replaces Hopper’s anonymous night-time barflies with Elvis Presley, Humphrey Bogart and Marilyn Monroe. In doing so, the artist displays a characteristic which he shares with Strictly Sinatra’s writer/director and central character: an outsider’s ambiguous fascination with the glamour of mid-twentieth-century American culture and identity. More bathetically, Tony’s one and only television appearance – performing in a New Faces-style amateur talent contest – is engineered when his local mafia backers blackmail a television producer. This minor plotline deliberately recalls urban legends surrounding the foundations of Sinatra’s Hollywood acting career. Such rumours, moreover, are deeply indebted to an exceptionally well-known cinematic portrayal of this murky episode within the Sinatra story: the horse’s head sequence of The Godfather (Francis Ford Coppola, USA, 1972). But in an apologetic reminder of Tony’s and Strictly Sinatra’s self-lacerating sense of cultural marginality and mediocrity, blood-soaked silk sheets and defenestrated thoroughbreds are replaced by a quiet word at the urinals of an unspecified Glasgow boozer. This sequence, like Strictly Sinatra as a whole, materially reproduces the terms of Tony’s fictional misfortune: a purportedly characteristic Scottish inability to do anything other than bowdlerise American popular cultural traditions and achievements unimaginatively and on the cheap. Indeed, cultural self-abnegation continues uninterrupted even during Strictly Sinatra’s closing titles. Here, the critically admired white British soul singer Lewis Taylor performs ‘New York, New York’, as Tony and Irene, walking through the heart of the eponymous metropolis, celebrate being ‘home’ for perhaps the first time in their lives. Song heard and skyscrapers seen combine to exemplify the deep fascination with American cinema and culture which defined so many 1990s Scottish movies: ‘Start spreading the news/ I’m leaving today/ I want to be a part of it/ New York, New York.’ The motif of present-day pilgrimage central to Fred Ebb and John Kander’s modern standard illustrates the extent to which the mythical version of US identity conjured by this piece is resonant enough to exert an otherworldly lure even on inhabitants of that culture itself: America is a place one must first ‘leave’ in order to ultimately become ‘a part of ’. Within Strictly Sinatra’s diegesis, Tony actively and consciously internalises this utopian myth of American identity, quite literally escaping the ‘little town blues’ associated with the unfortunate fact of having been born and raised in Scotland. But most late-1990s Scottish filmmakers found it impossible to emulate Tony’s fictional journey in real life, no matter how fervently they wished to do so.



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Late Night Shopping and Strictly Sinatra suggest the extent to which the beneficial aspects of an enthusiastic local embrace of multiple American cinematic forms had essentially exhausted themselves by the new century’s start. But a one-sided preoccupation with listing critical and commercial disappointments, missed opportunities and passing hubris would not provide anything like a full account of the 1990s in Scotland. Analysis of two particularly acclaimed features from the very end of the period, Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters, indicates the extent to which this is so. Ramsay and Mullan’s films offer a useful reminder of the multifaceted (and fundamentally enabling) character of contemporary attempts to appropriate US working precedents as a way of creating the necessary base on which to consolidate an industrially sustainable and culturally significant Scottish cinema. For one thing, were it not for the significantly expanded range of home-based career opportunities which the US-inspired ferment of the 1990s created, these internationally admired artists might never have begun filmmaking careers at all. For another, their work successfully achieves the goals that many in late-1990s Scotland found easier to identify than to realise. Ratcatcher and The Magdalene Sisters were the most comprehensively successful examples of contemporary Scottish engagement with US cinematic precedent. Both films strike a notably even-handed and elegant balance between international commercial aspiration on one hand and national cultural ambition on the other.

Ratcatcher At first sight, Ratcatcher seems an odd choice of case study for an analysis that foregrounds the influence of American cinema within 1990s Scottish filmmaking. The critical orthodoxy surrounding Lynne Ramsay’s debut feature constructs it as a clearly Continental work, ‘squarely in the traditions of the European art film’,84 proof positive that ‘in the best of Scottish cinema, the European influence is never far away’.85 Indeed, at the time of Ratcatcher’s British theatrical release Ramsay herself argued that, ‘if I come from any tradition, it’s a European cinema as opposed to an American one’.86 More specifically, she identified the final scene of Robert Bresson’s Mouchette (Fr, 1966) as ‘one of my most memorable moments’87 in cinema. Bresson’s film climaxes in a dialogue-free sequence that may or may not be fantasy, and in which a pre-adult central protagonist drowns. In these ways, the movie’s ending closely resembles that of Ratcatcher. But as the following discussion shows, Ramsay’s film also uses carefully chosen US cinematic reference points to successfully negotiate competing demands: the need for international commercial viability on one hand and the goal of speaking to (and of) domestic social experience on the other. Ratcatcher’s narrative fuses history, autobiography and fiction. Set in inner-city Glasgow during the notorious refuse collectors’ strike of 1973, the film incorporates some of its creator’s childhood memories of that event and period.88 Central character James Gillespie (William Eadie) is a prepubescent boy living with his family on a rapidly degenerating inner-city public housing scheme. The Gillespies’ fervent wish is to be re-housed in one of the many new estates and towns built

68 The New Scottish Cinema on greenfield sites around the perimeter of Glasgow from the late 1940s onwards, a response by successive generations of local and national politicians to the city’s endemic problems of overcrowding and social deprivation. The film begins with James’ accidental involvement in the death of Ryan (Thomas McTaggart), a boy his own age and the son of a neighbouring family. A game played by the two lads at the edge of the local canal gets out of hand: James pushes Ryan into the filthy water, where the latter drowns. At three subsequent points, James fleetingly escapes from the dual pressures of urban squalor and private guilt, roaming an unfinished housing scheme of the kind to which he hopes municipal authorities will relocate his family. But a combination of bureaucratic intransigence and personal remorse seems to thwart that wish. Ratcatcher’s final moments are purposefully ambiguous. James appears to commit suicide by jumping into the same stretch of water where Ryan earlier drowned. Underwater shots of James sinking are intercut with images of his family finally taking possession of one of the new homes that the boy earlier visited. A climactic sequence described by Ramsay as ‘really ambiguous’89 could indeed be interpreted in any number of different ways: an overarching dream on James’ part; the boy’s dying hallucination; an actual (and unexpectedly optimistic) narrative epilogue. Ratcatcher’s premeditated use of iconography drawn from the myth of the American West is especially relevant to the present discussion. This aspect of the film communicates something of the nature and importance of a socio-political phenomenon that formed a central component of post-World War II experience for many Scots: the massive state-directed programme of urban relocation in and around the Greater Glasgow conurbation. The first two of the three visits James makes to the unfinished estate on the city’s outskirts are solitary and unambiguously real in nature. But the status of the third, where the Gillespies arrive en masse at their new home, is far less clear. In James’ solo explorations of the new housing scheme, Ramsay depicts less the space itself and more the boy’s physical and psychological experience of it. At such moments, the estate is (re)figured as a utopian playground. Construction tools and scaffolding become conveniently unsupervised toys and climbing frames that wait patiently for James to put them to ludic use. Unfinished homes without doors, locks or windowpanes morph into personal playpens. Municipal architecture becomes magically Arcadian. The paradise James discovers is one in which a single bound through an empty window frame unites urban modernity’s civilised comforts (a pristine enamel bath, the kind of amenity which the Gillespies’ dilapidated innercity flat lacks) with Nature’s untrammelled freedom (seemingly endless fields of ripe wheat in which the boy frolics). In these ways, the new estate seems to hold out the possibility of a paneless/ painless new habitat for a traumatised boy and the wider urban community he represents. On one hand, the new houses offer a set of living conditions antithetical to those that the Gillespies are seen enduring earlier in the movie. But on the other, the estate and the wheat fields surrounding it also entice because they appear detached from any concrete form of lived experience whatsoever. The new community’s semifinished, uninhabited quality makes it ‘an abstraction looking for validation by human



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occupancy’.90 Ramsay proposes that the wheat field in which James plays ‘could have been a patch of grass… but in his mind it’s Utopia, it’s Heaven, it’s the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen’.91 A prelapsarian ambience also suffuses the touching vignette in which the boy eases himself, with a sigh of unabashed delight, into the as-yet-unused, bone-dry bath waiting to be plumbed in on the upper floor of one new home. This tub, like the estate’s exterior facades and interior fittings more generally, is cocooned by an inorganic womb of plastic sheeting. But James’ subsequent decision to urinate into a toilet bowl still-unconnected to water or sewage systems could be seen as the moment at which an Edenic interlude ends, not least because Ratcatcher repeatedly associates the motif of water with ideas of physical corruption and death. The new estate’s initially idyllic appearance therefore conceals a bitter irony: the space’s ability to symbolise the possibility of a perfect life is dependent on the fact that no individual lives have yet been lived within it at all.

Figure 2.3 Go West, young man: dreams of a new way of life in Ratcatcher When Ratcatcher was released in British cinemas, Ramsay went to significant lengths to pre-empt critical association of her work with discourses of national identity. The director protested that: ‘I don’t want to become the person who makes films about ‘gritty Glasgow’… [or] called the next Scottish filmmaker.’92 Perhaps as a result, many admiring notices focused attention on Ratcatcher’s perceived ability to transfigure locally specific individual and communal histories into phenomena capable of speaking directly to an international audience. In Ramsay’s hands, Anthony Quinn (1999) argued, images and stories of early-1970s Glasgow, ‘a particular time and place’, were imbued with ‘a poetic and universal resonance’.93 This alchemical effect can in large part be traced to Ratcatcher’s ostentatious use of iconography derived from the myth of the American West. Key here is the depiction of the wheat fields

70 The New Scottish Cinema adjacent to the new estate. Playing in an unfinished kitchen during his first visit to the space, James is suddenly transfixed by the otherworldly glow that emanates from a sea of ripe wheat visible through the room’s paneless window. A bravura slow track then follows the boy through the empty window frame and into fields as much Elysian as staple agricultural in nature. Ramsay notes how her central reference point for this sequence’s construction was a transatlantic one: ‘James’ first visit to this empty house is also probably the first time he’s seen a field, so I wanted to give this field a wide-open, almost Midwestern American feel.’94 As in so many other 1990s Scottish films, images of local history and culture are here refracted through the prism of American cinematic and popular cultural mythology. The importance of this particular moment for Ratcatcher’s thematic project as a whole is also suggested by the film’s cinematographer, Alwin Kuchler. He comments on Ramsay’s preference for minimal camera movement within individual shots and scenes throughout her debut feature. Kuchler also notes that when the director does decide to move her camera to any significant degree, she privileges discreet handheld motion over more ostentatious track or panning effects. The one glaring exception to this, however, is the window-and-wheat sequence described above. In Kuchler’s words: There’s a straightforward track onto a window through which the boy first sees a field… because there are so few of these moves in the film, that one shot gains power – you’re not expecting it… you feel you’re being drawn out, or that you’re flying with the boy through the window.95 On one hand, this scene’s aesthetic excess seems readily explicable as an attempt to intensify audience identification with James’ transient euphoria. But in order for that to happen, a wide range of locally specific socio-political discourses – both those which explain the new scheme’s creation and those which explain James’ joyous reaction to it – must be rendered legible for a non-Scottish audience. Ramsay achieves this by ‘framing’ Scottish cultural detail through the ‘window’ of preexisting American cinematic mythology. Ratcatcher invokes the plenitude of the new frontier and the hope of the pioneering individuals and communities who made the courageous leap of faith necessary to settle it. But when James returns to the estate for a second time, the weather has changed from sunshine to rain and the window he previously passed through is now glassed over. Though the camera position from which the boy previously flew out into the wheat fields is studiedly replicated, James is now placed outside, not inside, the newly secured building. He looks wistfully into the house, rather than leaping wonderstruck out from it. The earlier ecstatic communion between spectator and character perspective is forcibly severed. James’ inability, both material and psychological, to properly escape his traumatising social background is clearly foregrounded. Ramsay argues that the chastening formal rhyme described above also ‘shows [James’] loss of innocence’.96 One way of understanding Ratcatcher’s achievement



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more widely is to argue that the film ‘shows’ a parallel national ‘loss of innocence’ in a way that is universally accessible, rather than locally exclusive. Several Scottish commentators read Ramsay’s work in this way, seeing it as a moving rumination on the blighted hopes placed by successive generations in the British state’s sweeping post-World War II programme of urban relocation and reformation. Andrew O’Hagan, for instance, proposes that: James’ changing life… refer[s] to some larger change… in the country beyond: the tenement life is coming to an end… [as communities move] to the Green Belt outside Glasgow – a place like Cumbernauld or East Kilbride… new white houses and their inside toilets: the stuff young dreams are made of. And this was a hope for many families – to escape over the fields to somewhere clean, new and out of the dark. Ramsay’s film is the first to put that amazing bit of life on screen.97 The dialectical relationship between local and international audience address clearly visible during Ratcatcher’s final scene gives credence to O’Hagan’s reading. James’ dream, dying fantasy or actual escape casts the boy and his family as latter-day settlers, trooping in single file through the fields towards their new dream home, each carrying an item of household furniture. At moments such as this, American cinematic and popular cultural reference points make Ratcatcher legible for (and thus marketable to) a non-Scottish audience while simultaneously creating a resonant act of cultural memory and critique for many domestic viewers. Ramsay’s calculated evocation of the US pioneer myth acknowledges and anatomises the vertiginous scale of the hopes which government planners and urban communities placed in state-sponsored mass relocation as a panacea for entrenched social ills. Articulating locally specific experience through an epic mythological filter also creates a telling sense of retrospective incongruity. How many new frontiers are discovered through an exodus of little more than ten or 20 miles? In this way, Ratcatcher articulates a historical fact all-too-familiar to many local viewers. The postWorld War II panoply of new towns and estates frequently became new loci of social deprivation, a further evolution of Scotland’s social problems rather than the hoped-for solution to them. Deborah Orr argues that Ratcatcher is an important film because it unsparingly shows: The flipside of the new beginning we wanted so much to believe in when it was spread out before us in Gregory’s Girl [Bill Forsyth, GB, 1981] with its neat, polite New Town children stretching up their hands in gleaming classrooms… Ramsay… offer[s] a corrective to this, reacting back to the childhoods we never saw represented and setting the record straight. It was Ramsay’s, not Forsyth’s, foundations that Thatcherism was built on; Ramsay’s, not Forsyth’s, foundations that Blairism seeks to reclad, like so many of the brand-new slums of the 1970s have been reclad.98

72 The New Scottish Cinema Ratcatcher is, then, another film that demonstrates the material centrality of American cinematic and popular cultural influence within the rapidly expanding Scottish cinema of the 1990s. Ramsay’s debut feature also indicates the extent to which strategic engagement with transatlantic precedents enabled some local filmmakers of the period to make politically progressive and aesthetically accomplished interventions within the domestic sphere even as they produced work potentially marketable well beyond it. Consideration of another internationally acclaimed late-1990s/early2000s Scottish film, writer/director Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters, reiterates these points, while simultaneously suggesting some of the reasons why many critics have been reluctant to fully acknowledge or engage with them.

The Magdalene Sisters The story of late-twentieth-century Irish cinema recalls that of its Scottish counterpart in many ways.99 Having endured exceptionally low indigenous feature production levels throughout the 1980s and very early 1990s, both countries witnessed rapid and unexpected expansion from the middle of the latter decade. In words equally applicable to Scotland during the same period, Kevin Rockett looked back on the Irish 1990s and concluded that it was ‘hard to imagine… how complete the transformation of the institutional and cultural landscapes for film… has been’.100 Writer/director Peter Mullan’s second feature, The Magdalene Sisters, was the first bona fide Scottish/ Irish feature co-production and a notable symbol of the post-1990 cinematic gains made on either side of the Irish Sea. Originally financed at c. €4.5/c. £3.1 million, Mullan’s movie was a collaboration between two independent producers, Glasgowbased PFP and Dublin-based Element Films. Within five weeks of its Irish theatrical release, commentators estimated that The Magdalene Sisters had already been seen by something like one in 20 of the nation’s population.101 Local audience interest was further piqued by the film’s international critical success: among many other awards, Mullan’s film won the Golden Lion at the 2002 Venice Film Festival. The Magdalene Sisters is set in County Dublin between 1964 and 1968. The film’s narrative explores a particularly traumatic aspect of modern Irish history: the mass incarceration, in laundries-cum-prisons overseen by the Roman Catholic Church, of women deemed morally lax by their families and/or wider communities. Unmarried mothers, sexually active single females and rape victims, amongst others, were effectively imprisoned for their ‘crimes’. These unfortunate individuals were systematically exploited as slave labour, physically and psychologically brutalised for the duration of a sentence of unspecified length, which on occasion ended only with the victim’s death. Widely quoted estimates state that some 30,000 women passed through the Magdalene laundry system before the last asylum closed its doors in 1996.102 Peter Mullan was initially inspired by, and subsequently based his film on, extensive video testimonies recorded for a range of television documentaries on the Magdalene laundry system. He structured his script around the imprisonment of four real-life victims, transposing their stories onto a central quartet of fictional teenage protagonists.103 The Magdalene Sisters’ opening scenes provide short back-



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stories for three of the main characters’ misfortune. The family of Margaret (AnneMarie Duff), acting on their priest’s advice, send her away after she is raped by a cousin at a family wedding. Rose (Dorothy Duffy) is ostracised by her parents after giving birth to a child outside of wedlock. Bernadette (Nora-Jane Noone) is removed from the orphanage where she lives simply for being deemed a possible temptation to local men. For four years, the young women are trapped and abused within a Magdalene laundry run by the sadistic Sister Bridget (Geraldine McEwan). Margaret’s brother secures his sister’s release, while Bernadette and Rose later make a forcible escape. End titles sketch the trajectories of the women’s subsequent lives. Although The Magdalene Sisters was symptomatic of Scottish and Irish cinemas’ rapid expansion as the twentieth century gave way to the twenty-first, the film also illustrates the deep critical unease which that growth provoked in some observers. Writing in 2000, Lance Pettitt observed that ‘contemporary Irish film is imbued with, yet gives localised inflection to, US film genres’.104 More judgementally, Kevin Rockett argued around the same time that although more Irish films were now being made than ever before, many ‘at best offer[ed]’ domestic viewers ‘a type of Hollywood regionalism’.105 Indeed, stern warnings about ‘the futility of applying… Californian templates… without modification to local cultures’106 abounded within late-1990s/early-2000s film criticism in Ireland and Scotland alike. It should perhaps come as no surprise, then, that bullish assertions of The Magdalene Sisters’ non- (or even anti-)American cinematic identity formed a recurring keynote within supportive local notices for the film. Allan Hunter boasted that Mullan’s work possessed ‘an emotional complexity and lasting impact that knocks spots off your average Hollywood production’,107 while Hannah McGill praised Peter Mullan for ‘point[ing] Scottish cinema in an inspiring new direction that owes more to popular European cinema than to… America’.108 Even critics who reached a less positive view of The Magdalene Sisters did so with reference to the criterion invoked by Hunter and McGill, arguing that the film was problematic because it was too American in its cinematic identity and approach. For Fintan O’Toole, Mullan pulled his political punches by choosing to align The Magdalene Sisters with ‘the Hollywood prison drama… the conventions of a familiar genre dull the pain a little’.109 Tom Dunne discerned within Mullan’s work a ‘failure to deal adequately with the core question of the social and theological attitudes to sexuality that underpinned the Magdalen system’.110 He traced this back to what he termed The Magdalene Sisters’ ‘reli[ance]… on well-tried cinematic formulae… a mixture of “buddy movie” and “prison movie”… the film degenerates finally into a banal take-off of The Great Escape [John Sturges, USA, 1963]’.111 The present discussion takes a different approach to that of critics whose ideas are summarised above. It argues that The Magdalene Sisters’ judicious use of American cinematic influences and reference points works in a way reminiscent of Lynne Ramsay’s use of the same strategy within Ratcatcher. On one hand, local exploitation of Hollywood tradition and mythology confers a degree of cross-cultural legibility (and therefore marketability) on the highly specific milieu which The Magdalene Sisters depicts. But on the other, Mullan also references Classical Hollywood Cinema in order to suggest the mutually supportive existence of parallel (and equally oppressive)

74 The New Scottish Cinema mid-twentieth-century idealisations of Catholic feminine identity on either side of the Atlantic Ocean. This strategic act allows a complex acknowledgement and exploration of possible historical reasons for the Magdalene system’s existence to take place. The Magdalene Sisters proposes that a complex knot of identity discourses (gender, religious denomination and nation) legitimised the laundries’ place within Irish society. But at the same time, the film takes care not to mystify or reify the history it depicts into an exclusively Irish form of collective neurosis. In contemporary interviews, Peter Mullan freely acknowledged the debt The Magdalene Sisters owed to Classical Hollywood Cinema. He presented his work as a Celtic transposition of the American prison movie, a film squarely (and selfconsciously) ‘in the tradition of [One Flew Over the] Cuckoo’s Nest (Milos Forman, USA, 1975) and [The] Shawshank [Redemption] (Frank Darabont, USA, 1994) – an oldfashioned drama’.112 While The Magdalene Sisters’ overarching narrative and individual character trajectories were drawn from documentary testimony, this material is carefully moulded to fit the prison movie’s generic archetypes. The laundry becomes a local variant on the universal trope of the corrupt (and corrupting) detention centre/prison camp. Inmates are summarily removed from their homes in unmarked cars at break of dawn; Sister Bridget assumes the familiar role of sadistic Head Warden, taunting the central trio of wronged young women with the punitive terms of their sentence; the laundry’s victims are systematically dehumanised, stripped of their prior names and histories (Rose, for instance, becomes not a number, but ‘Patricia’); minor characters instigate the prison movie’s standard sub-plots – Una (Mary Murray) is associated with the motif of the difficulty but necessity of escape – and instantiate its classic character types – Katy (Britta Smith) exemplifies the figure of the psychically broken collaborator.

Figure 2.4 Prison movie: quoting Classical Hollywood in The Magdalene Sisters



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That Mullan’s ends in exploiting the prison genre were simultaneously cultural and commercial in nature can be clearly seen in a set-piece scene near The Magdalene Sisters’ conclusion. On Christmas Day, the laundry inmates are given a brief respite from their backbreaking labours. Standing in front of the assembled internees and a smattering of local dignitaries, Sister Bridget confesses ‘a secret love… since I have been 13 years old, I have been in love with the films’. These unexpected words introduce a similarly unlooked-for event: a 16mm screening of the 1940s Hollywood movie The Bells of St Mary’s (Leo McCarey, USA, 1945). In that work, Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman play a worldly priest and devout nun at loggerheads over the running of an urban American parish school threatened with imminent closure. But Father and Sister are not so preoccupied by personal differences and dilemmas that they cannot save both the school’s dilapidated premises and the vulnerable young souls housed therein. The bitterly ironic contrast between American fiction of beatific Catholic institutional charity and horrific Irish experience of the same thing is painfully obvious to the laundry inmates. Sister Bridget, however, is blissfully oblivious to cultural incongruity and personal hypocrisy alike, weeping copiously as Sister Benedict (Bergman) pleads with God to ‘help me see Thy Holy Will in all things’. Reaction shots of Rose, Margaret and Bernadette emphasise the girls’ despairing alienation from their religious persecutors, whether onscreen or seated in the room. On first viewing, the sequence described above appears to suggest ‘Hollywood collu[sion] in the promotion of the inviolate sanctity of priests and nuns’,113 an act of cultural collaboration-cum-domination which ensures that the laundry’s psychological torture continues unabated even as its physical equivalent momentarily stops. It is certainly the case that the comparison drawn between Sisters Bridget and Benedict underscores the individual and institutional hypocrisy which allows the former to abuse her power and justify such actions through self-serving claims of sanctity and sexual purity. Indeed, Sister Bridget’s screening introduction includes the revelation that her personal affection for the moving image peaks in relation to the Western, that American cinematic genre par excellence. She recalls ‘the look on my dear mother’s face the day I told her that if I didn’t get into the convent and give my life to God, then I’d be a cowboy instead’. Listening to these words, it seems as if childhood exposure to a foreign popular cultural mythology frequently characterised by self-justifying, black-and-white, them-and-us moral binaries is the rock on which the adult woman’s enthusiastic embrace of misogynistic institutionalised religion has been built. Yet The Magdalene Sisters takes care not to present the influential presence of American popular culture and ideology within mid-twentieth-century Irish society as an exclusive, or even primary, explanation for the remarkable extent of local collusion within the laundry system’s nationwide structures of social and sexual oppression. The reactionary impact of The Bells of St Mary’s lies not simply within that film or the identity and values of the national culture from which it originates: it is also a consequence of the uses to which a foreign audience chooses to put that text. It is the local Archbishop who chooses Bells… as a work suitable for the

76 The New Scottish Cinema laundry inmates to see, while the film print itself is screened on projection equipment donated, as Sister Bridget informs the women, by ‘one of Dublin’s most respected businessmen’. Native inequalities and hypocrisies that determine the (im)balance of material and spiritual power within the nation legitimate the prisoners’ incarceration and demonisation in tandem with cinematic discourses of ideal Catholic femininity imported from outside Ireland’s borders. The Magdalene Sisters self-consciously illustrates the repressive uses to which American cinematic and popular cultural reference points can be put within a small Anglophone nation labouring under the historical lack of a securely established indigenous film industry and culture. But Peter Mullan’s movie also seeks to exemplify the progressive potential inherent within encounters between traditionally marginal national cinemas (Scotland, Ireland) and their commercially and culturally dominant counterparts (mainstream Hollywood). If The Magdalene Sisters’ use of the prison genre helps to commodify historically important but commercially challenging subject matter, the movie’s careful foregrounding of interlocking native and non-native discourses of religious and gender identity also allows it to develop a highly nuanced reading of traumatic mid-twentieth-century Irish experience. This much becomes clear when we consider the way in which The Bells of St Mary’s sequence deliberately echoes the narrative content and import of The Magdalene Sisters’ opening scene. As the film begins, viewers witness native, pre-cinematic cultural traditions (rather than imported modern-day Hollywood equivalents) interpellating a local audience in profoundly misogynist fashion. A priest performs the traditional ballad ‘The Well below the Valley’ at the family wedding during which Margaret is ‘disgraced’ by the fact of her rape. The song in question is one of the canonical texts (n. 21) collected in the foundational work of British Ballad Studies, F.J. Child’s edited collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads, published in five volumes between 1882 and 1898. ‘The Well below the Valley’ is a folk re-telling of the account in John’s Gospel (4: 1–42) of the meeting between Christ and the Woman of Samaria. In the song’s version of the story, a male stranger meets a woman at a well and begs a drink from her. That The Magdalene Sisters should begin with an uninterrupted performance of this particular ballad hardly seems accidental. ‘The Well below the Valley’ articulates the kind of patriarchal ideology that sanctions the wholesale sexual and social abuse of women, the very phenomenon which is about to change Margaret’s life with abrupt and unexpected force. In the song, the male stranger’s pitiless response to a woman’s experience of incest (‘For six young children you had born/…There’s two of them by your Uncle Dan’) and infanticide (‘There’s two buried ’neath the stable door’) is to predict her damnation for having endured the sins of others (‘You’ll be seven years a-ringing the bell/ You’ll be seven more burning in Hell’). These lyrics anticipate perfectly the reaction of the man who performs them to the news of Margaret’s rape. The priest advises the girl’s family that she should be removed to a Magdalene laundry, and even transports her there himself. Genuine, if profoundly misguided, belief in the woman at the well’s response to the man who condemns her (‘I’ll be seven years a-ringing the bell/ But the Lord above may save my soul/ From burning in Hell’) offers the only possible explanation for the cleric’s grotesque



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behaviour. The twisted logic of female salvation achieved through traumatic and extended atonement for the crimes of men dominates the moral worldviews of singer and song alike. Ultimately, then, The Magdalene Sisters understands the existence of the Magdalene laundry system in Ireland as the result of a diverse range of reactionary discourses of gender and religious identity, beliefs fashioned within both Irish and American cultures at different times and across different narrative media. Read in this way, The Magdalene Sisters illustrates some of the central points made by the first two chapters of this book. The manner in which Scottish cinema evolved during the 1990s entails that critical assessment of the influence of imported cultural traditions within that process cannot fall back on comfortingly clear-cut progressive/regressive binary oppositions. After all, The Magdalene Sisters does not signal Sister Bridget’s moral unreliability by associating her with an intrinsically reactionary American cinema. Rather, the film foregrounds the aging Irish nun’s inflexible determination to engage with this (or any other) form of cultural difference in Manichean terms. Bridget deifies The Bells of St Mary’s, but demonises every Western produced since the advent of synchronised sound, ‘gone’, in the aging nun’s words, ‘the way of the Devil like so much of the modern world’. Nothing is left in-between, a trap which any account of 1990s Scotland must strive to avoid at all costs. American cinematic influence played an undeniably central role in Scottish cinema’s rapid expansion at the very end of the twentieth century. As this book’s first two chapters have shown, some local films and filmmakers proved capable of engaging with that influence in commercially, creatively and culturally productive ways, while others did not. Overall, however, the Scottish-American ferment of the 1990s improved material conditions for domestic feature production to the extent that the 2000s witnessed continued growth on two fronts: the number of Scottish films made and the diversification of domestic filmmaking practices. The next three chapters analyse twenty-first-century Scottish cinema in more detail.

3 DOGMAC: 2000s SCOTTISH– SCANDINAVIAN CINEMA

In both representational and industrial terms, 2000s Scottish cinema executed a systematic move beyond national borders. Nowhere was that phenomenon more apparent than in the rapid expansion of collaborative working relationships between a range of individuals and institutions based in Scotland and Scandinavia respectively. As Ian Goode notes, these links constituted ‘the most prominent contemporary manifestation of pan-European filmmaking involving Scotland’ in the years after the millennium.1 Early Scottish–Scandinavian co-productions such as Aberdeen (Hans Petter Moland, GB/Nor/Swe, 2000) and The Last Great Wilderness (David Mackenzie, GB/Den, 2002) proved to be anything but one-off ventures. Something like 20 per cent of the features produced with significant Scottish financial and/or creative input during the 2000s emerged from what Mette Hjort terms a strategic process of ‘milieu-developing transnationalism’ coordinated from either side of the North Sea.2 Robin MacPherson points out that the cornerstone of 2000s Scottish– Scandinavian collaboration to date has been a long-term working relationship forged between two independent producers,3 Glasgow-based Sigma Films and Copenhagen’s Zentropa Entertainments. Four of the five films discussed at length in this chapter – The Last Great Wilderness, Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself) (Lone Scherfig, Den/GB/Swe/Fr, 2002), Red Road (Andrea Arnold, GB/Den, 2006) and Donkeys (Morag McKinnon, GB/Den, 2010) – were Sigma/Zentropa co-productions. The remaining movie, Skagerrak (Søren Kragh-Jacobsen, Den/Swe/GB/Sp/Ger/Fr/ Swi, 2003), saw the Danish producer cooperate with a range of other British and European funders. Moreover, during the 2000s, Sigma participated in a further eight non-Scottish-set co-productions with Zentropa: Dogville (Lars von Trier, Den/ Swe/GB/Fr/Ger/Neth/Nor/Fin, 2003); Brothers (Susanne Bier, Den/GB/Swe/ Nor, 2004); The Judge (Gert Fredholm, Den/GB, 2005); Manderlay (Lars von Trier, Den/Swe/Neth/Fr/Ger/GB/It, 2005); Zozo (Josef Fares, Swe/Cze/GB/Den/



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Neth, 2005); 1:1 (Annette Olesen, Den/GB, 2006); After the Wedding (Susanne Bier, Den/Swe/GB/Nor, 2006); and When Children Play in the Sky (Lorenzo Hendel, It/ Den/Ice/GB/Ire, 2006). Such extensive experience of international co-production offers one explanation for the Glasgow company’s striking success in maintaining a continuously rolling production slate since the new century’s start. In addition to Sigma’s involvement with the 12 transnationally financed projects listed above, it also produced or co-produced another six Scottish-set features during the 2000s: Young Adam (David Mackenzie, GB/Fr, 2003); Dear Frankie (Shona Auerbach, GB, 2004); Hallam Foe (David Mackenzie, GB, 2007); Perfect Sense (David Mackenzie, Ger/GB/Swe/Den, 2011); You Instead (David Mackenzie, GB, 2011); and Citadel (Ciaran Foy, GB/Ire, 2011). No other contemporary Scottish independent producer comes anywhere close to matching the numerical scale of this achievement. The connections which Sigma cultivated with Scandinavia created a local company with the international experience and profile necessary to undertake a broad range of feature production activities, whether involving Scandinavian partners or not. The industrial centrality of 2000s Scottish cinema’s Scandinavian strain offers one compelling reason for discussing it at length. Indeed, two of Sigma’s cofounders, producer Gillian Berrie and writer/director David Mackenzie, repeatedly cited Zentropa specifically, and Danish cinema more generally, as key sources of inspiration and instruction for their own attempt to help consolidate Scottish cinema’s fragile place within the domestic and international marketplaces. Mackenzie noted that while Scotland was also ‘a small country making movies… you only have to look at Denmark producing a hell of a lot of world-class films to know we can do better’.4 Similarly, in August 2000, as Sigma and Zentropa announced an initiative to co-produce three Scottish-set features annually,5 Berrie argued that: ‘we have the writing talent, the script editors, and the actors in Scotland. And Denmark leads the field in digital film-making… we want to be at the cutting edge of this revolution’.6 Around that time, the producer first visited Zentropa’s Film City complex, a former military base outside Copenhagen converted to house a diverse range of office, production and post-production facilities. She later remembered how: I thought it was wonderful and felt we should have this in Glasgow, where the independent film community was very fragmented… I felt Scotland would benefit from having a central space that would engender cross-fertilisation and ideas and talent.7 Berrie accordingly spent the rest of the 2000s raising some £3.5 million of public money – initial funders included Scottish Enterprise Glasgow, Glasgow City Council and the European Regional Development Fund8 – in order to convert Govan’s former Town Hall into Film City Glasgow, a large-scale facilities hub officially opened in June 2009. The enthusiasm displayed by Sigma and other local peers for all things Danish is easy to understand. In the decade after Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg’s

80 The New Scottish Cinema Dogme 95 manifesto, Danish cinema became something of ‘a cause celebre for those who believed [in] the increased exportability of regional cinemas’9 as a way of fostering cultural diversity and creative innovation within the global marketplace. Between 2000 and 2008, Danish filmmakers and/or finance were involved with 279 feature films. This body of work grossed €297 million at the nation’s box office, 25.7 per cent of total ticket sales within the domestic theatrical market over the period in question. In Scotland, the corresponding figures were 33 (films produced), €5.2 million (domestic box office gross) and 0.5 per cent (proportion of total Scottish box office receipts for those years).10 It is little wonder, then, that 2000s Scottish filmmakers proved eager to emulate and associate with their Danish peers. The most systematic attempts to do so were the Advance Party and Advance Party II initiatives co-developed by Sigma and Zentropa. Launched in February 2004, Advance Party aimed to produce three c. £1 million digital features, all made by first-time directors and producers, set in Scotland and sharing the same cast of nine central characters developed by Danish filmmakers Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen, the co-writers of Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself).11 Less strict in terms of self-imposed creative restrictions than Dogme 95, Scherfig and Jensen’s ground rules for Advance Party proposed that: The scripts can take their starting point in one or more characters or they may be subjected to an external drama… The films take place in Scotland but apart from that the writers are free to place them anywhere according to geography, social setting or ethnic background… The interpersonal relationships of the characters differ from film to film and [those protagonists] may be weighted differently as major or minor characters. The development of the characters in each story or genre does not affect the other scripts.12 Ultimately, however, only two features – Red Road and Donkeys – were produced under the Advance Party banner. Andrea Arnold was invited to develop Red Road after Sigma and Zentropa staff saw her Oscar-winning short Wasp (GB, 2003) at the 2004 Edinburgh International Film Festival.13 Meanwhile, Donkeys director Morag McKinnon was invited to join Advance Party after submitting an unsolicited script to Sigma for consideration.14 Advance Party II launched in February 2009, with Irish independent producer Subotica joining Sigma and Zentropa in order to develop a rule-based slate of eight features by new British and Irish filmmakers, including Scottish directors Paul Wright and Adrian McDowall.15 But the above only tells one half of the story about Scottish–Scandinavian collaboration during the 2000s. That cooperative venture had powerful attractions for its Nordic participants as well as for their Scottish counterparts. As Gillian Berrie observed near the start of Sigma’s working relationship with Zentropa, a Danish move into Anglophone production and theatrical markets represented a logical next stage of industrial consolidation after the initial Dogme 95 boom: ‘having done very well with their Danish-language films, [the Danes] know that for more international



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appeal, especially in America, more of their films will have to be in English’.16 In Neil Young’s words, Scotland thus represented ‘a handy point-of-entry to the Anglo-speaking world for Scandinavian talent’.17 Indeed, one of the main reasons why producer Peter Aalbæk Jensen, co-founder of Zentropa along with Lars von Trier, originally began to look for Anglophone co-production partners was his fear of Danish cinema’s vulnerability to a fiscal pincer movement at the new century’s start. On one hand, the Danish Film Institute had a policy of not funding Englishlanguage feature projects budgeted over 3 million Kroner (c. $363,000).18 But on the other, international investors were reluctant to commit substantial sums of money to Danish-language projects. Aalbæk Jensen complained in late 2002 that, ‘today it is impossible to package a film with a budget exceeding $3m, if you insist in shooting it with Danish dialogue… we would have made [Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself)] in Danish, had the costs not been so high’.19 Working with a Scottish partner like Sigma offered one possible route towards creating the conditions necessary for mid-to-high budget English-language Danish filmmaking to flourish. Some 30 per cent of the c. $4 million production budget for Wilbur…, for example, was raised from Scottish sources (Scottish Screen, the Glasgow Film Office).20 In this way, a project that, in Aalbæk Jensen’s words, ‘was originally intended as a mid-range Danish feature’ could be expanded in budgetary terms so as to allow co-writer/director Lone Scherfig ‘to try her skills on a larger scale’.21 A film like Wilbur… also indicates the extent to which co-productions with Scandinavia exerted significant influence over 2000s Scottish cinema in representational, as well as industrial, terms. The films in question contributed to a wider contemporary qualification or circumnavigation of national identity’s traditional pre-eminence within Scottish filmmaking. This was so not least because so many Scottish–Scandinavian co-productions – Aberdeen, Frozen (Juliet McKoen, GB, 2005), One Last Chance (Stewart Svaasand, GB/Nor, 2004), Red Road, Skagerrak, Valhalla Rising (Nicolas Winding Refn, Den/GB, 2009), Wilbur… – were written and/or directed by visiting non-native filmmakers. Such artists’ understandably limited knowledge of local cultural minutiae entailed that questions of national identity were, for the most part, not prioritised within the work which they produced on Scottish soil. Of the five case studies discussed below, for example, only two – The Last Great Wilderness and Donkeys – were made by writers and directors based permanently in Scotland. The latter movies, moreover, also treat the representation of nation as a secondary thematic concern. David Martin-Jones draws a suggestive comparison in this regard between two Sigma-produced features: Young Adam, an adaptation made without Scandinavian participation of the Scottish Beat novelist Alexander Trocchi’s 1954 novel of the same name, and Red Road, probably the bestknown Scottish–Scandinavian collaboration of the 2000s. For Martin-Jones, Young Adam ‘displays a sense of Scottish character and heritage in its period-set narrative’; Red Road, by contrast, ‘deliberately avoids… recognisable markers of Scotland or Scottishness’.22 He concludes that the latter strategy was indicative of the dominant direction of travel within 2000s Scottish cinema, ‘tipping away from the nationally specific… towards the universally understood and globally applicable’.23 The five

82 The New Scottish Cinema DOGMAC films analysed below suggest that the shift Martin-Jones discerns did indeed take place.

The Last Great Wilderness The Last Great Wilderness was shot on two digital cameras and with a c. £0.75 million production budget, 75 per cent of which was committed by Scottish Screen, with a further 10 per cent coming from Zentropa.24 Director David Mackenzie’s film tells the story of two English accidental travelling companions who share an intended destination but little else. Vincent (Jonny Phillips) is a professional gigolo in flight from a wrathful cuckold: he has slept with a criminal’s wife in the course of his work, and now fears (quite correctly) for his life. Charlie (Alastair Mackenzie) is a cuckold pursuing revenge: he means to torch the Hebridean love nest shared by his ex-wife and her unnamed pop star lover. The pair meets in a motorway service station, where Charlie offers Vincent a lift north to Scotland. When Charlie’s car runs out of petrol in a remote part of the Highlands, the men are forced to seek shelter at Moor Lodge, the only building for miles around. There, they stumble upon a micro-community engaged in unusual processes of group and individual therapy. Originally set up by the now-dying Ellie (Sheila Donald), Moor Lodge is currently run by Ruaridh (David Hayman), a latter-day R.D. Laing figure who ministers in nonjudgemental and unorthodox fashion to a small group of patients: nymphomaniac Morag (Louise Irwin), paedophile priest Paul (John Comerford), agoraphobic Eric (Ford Kiernan) and runaway mother Claire (Victoria Smurfit). Disorientation leads Charlie and Vincent to mistake preparations for Ellie’s New Age funeral as the rituals of a bloodthirsty pagan cult. But fear is swiftly replaced by fascination. Charlie begins a sexual relationship with Claire, and thus starts to overcome the trauma inflicted by his broken marriage. Vincent is haunted by visions of a beautiful young woman, latterly revealed to be the ghost of Flora (Jane Stenson), the deceased daughter of Magnus (Ewan Stewart), a local deerstalker. Flora was a suicidal young woman who Ruaridh tried to treat; loss of his daughter has left Magnus as deeply wounded as any of Moor Lodge’s full-time residents. Specifically, a grieving parent is consumed by guilt: for her own safety, Magnus locked his sick child inside a house which subsequently burnt down with Flora trapped inside. Collective catharsis is achieved by bloody means. Vincent is hunted down, castrated and blinded by henchmen of the man he cuckolded. Arriving on the scene too late to save their friend, Charlie and Magnus nonetheless shoot and kill his two assassins. The Last Great Wilderness then concludes with multiple acts of reconciliation, whether with self or others. Magnus and Ruaridh repair their relationship and begin at last to clear the burnt-out ruins of the croft in which Flora died. Charlie and Claire continue their short-term journey of mutual sexual healing. Although Charlie eventually leaves Moor Lodge alone, he is visibly happier than when he first arrived there. Journeys unpredictable, interrupted and/or redirected lie at the heart of The Last Great Wilderness. It is somewhat ironic, then, that the movie should offer such a remarkably accurate roadmap of the route which 2000s Scottish–Scandinavian



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filmmaking went on to take. To identify important themes and formal strategies within The Last Great Wilderness is also to establish several of the defining characteristics of DOGMAC cinema more generally. Firstly, there is the way in which the film foregrounds external perceptions of (and preconceptions about) Scotland. Early scenes emphasise just how second-hand and sketchy Charlie and Vincent’s knowledge of the country they are about to visit actually is. Charlie recognises his intended destination from a crumpled photograph only, and tries to navigate his way there with a much-thumbed Visitor’s Map. His Scotland is a sparse collection of images made by others, rather than a place known directly. Meanwhile, Vincent proclaims the journey North to be ‘a bit of an adventure’, and advises Charlie ‘to act like a tourist: enjoy the hospitality’. In this regard The Last Great Wilderness knowingly recycles a scenario familiar from countless Scottish-set, but London- or Hollywoodproduced, works: foreign visitors cross the border into Scotland and find themselves radically changed there, immersed within a quasi-magical national sphere where metamorphoses seem almost mundane.25 This cinematic Scotland is a place where apparently stable identities and entrenched cultural divisions between self and other are destabilised, a law-free locale within which, as Ruaridh observes of Moor Lodge, ‘normal rules don’t apply’.

Figure 3.1 Wish you were here? Crossing the border in The Last Great Wilderness Yet The Last Great Wilderness is also at pains to complicate the heady romanticism commonly associated with this well-established screen stereotype. Early in the film, Charlie’s car crosses the border. At this point, the sight of a graffiti-daubed ‘Welcome to Scotland’ road sign is matched by the sound of a tacky local radio phone-in programme. Respectable and ridiculous ways of signifying nation jostle for pre-eminence: what is seen (the St Andrew’s Cross emblazoned on the road sign) and what is heard (the intemperate words of an irate local, the cross Andrew who complains over the airwaves about a work colleague’s closet transvestism). The first engagement The Last Great Wilderness makes with the traditional cinematic idea of Scotland is one which highlights the trope’s scabrous comic potential as much as any

84 The New Scottish Cinema sanitised and sentimental equivalent. This is symptomatic of the multifaceted nature of the movie’s relationship with national stereotype: obviously sarcastic at some points, apparently sincere at others. Although the introductory image of Scotland as a site of transformation (the verbal description of a local refuse collector wearing his wife’s underwear) may be quirky, The Last Great Wilderness eventually accedes to it in literal terms. The film’s ‘Scotland’ proves capable, as in so many earlier movies, of redeeming the fictional foreign visitor who stumbles upon it. Thus, Charlie, Vincent and the Moor Lodge residents end up cross-dressing themselves, in order to fulfil the stipulations left behind by Ellie for the conduct of her wake. This, moreover, is perhaps not a completely outré gesture in a country already well known for the occasional practice of men wearing skirts. More seriously, Charlie and Vincent undergo emotional epiphanies of the kind experienced by countless earlier travellers to celluloid Scotland. Exploring the burntout ruins of the croft in which Flora died, a visibly moved Vincent thanks Charlie ‘for bringing me here’. Similarly, Scotland heals Charlie’s deep-seated sense of loss and desire for revenge. A symbol of personal transformation foregrounded in the film’s final scene (the purple toy butterfly hatched from a chocolate egg earlier gifted by Vincent to his travelling companion) crystallises The Last Great Wilderness’s simultaneous sincerity and sarcasm regarding cinematic stereotypes of Scotland. While the trinket is plastic, to/about Charlie it means something profound. Massmanufactured origins do not preclude the toy from connoting something authentic. Perhaps this is why David Martin-Jones interprets David Mackenzie’s film as a postdevolution allegory, one in which: The Englishman [central protagonist Charlie] firstly comes to terms with the separate identity of the Scottish, and then accepts his own status as part of a newly independent nation [i.e., England] … the knowledge that he takes with him on departure [from Scotland is] of England’s ability to function independently of Britain.26 While Martin-Jones’ analysis possibly overstates the importance of national identity as a theme within The Last Great Wilderness, it is undeniably true that the movie wants simultaneously to examine and exploit hegemonic images of Scotland and Scottishness. This is because it understands the latter to be ridiculous yet resonant at one and the same time. The ideological flexibility (or fickleness) of The Last Great Wilderness in this regard stems from the fact that the film is, in the final analysis, more interested in questions psychological (understanding the changing identities of its central protagonists) than ones national (understanding the place within which those individual transformations unfold). This ordering of priorities also defines the Scottish– Scandinavian DOGMAC cinema that emerged in wake of David Mackenzie’s feature debut. Consider, for instance, the evolving resonance of the movie’s title. For most of the narrative, successive acts of cinematic quotation seem to leave



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little doubt that the titular wilderness is nationally specific in nature. The idea of an envisaged Hebridean island destination that an English visitor is all the better for never reaching links Charlie to the character of Joan Webster (Wendy Hillier) in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going! (GB, 1945). Vincent and Charlie’s misplaced fear that the Lodge inhabitants mean to ritually sacrifice them suggests a more than passing acquaintance with The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, GB, 1973), the ‘obvious intertext’ for David Mackenzie’s film, in one critic’s view.27 Flora’s beauty, elemental name and profound influence over the incoming Vincent recall the characters of Stella (Jennifer Black) and Marina (Jenny Seagrove) within Bill Forsyth’s Local Hero (GB, 1983). The stubborn alienation of Magnus from the northern utopia which Ruaridh and his patients attempt to create recalls the isolated antipathy of Harry Beaton (Hugh Laing) towards the flawless Highland hamlet that is Brigadoon (Vincente Minnelli, USA, 1954). But as The Last Great Wilderness draws towards a close, Ruaridh proposes a very different interpretation of the work’s title. Pointing towards his own heart, the psychotherapist observes for Charlie’s benefit that, ‘the last great wilderness is not out there… it’s in here’, and issues an invitation immediately after: ‘Why don’t you stay around for a bit?’ The suggestion here is that it is Charlie’s psychological hinterlands, rather than Scotland’s physical Highlands, which really ought to be explored further. This chimes with David Mackenzie’s publicly stated desire that The Last Great Wilderness be, in the director’s words, ‘about a spiritual landscape rather than a physical one’.28 Mackenzie presented this choice as in part a pragmatic response to the difficulty of setting a road movie within a country as physically small as the United Kingdom: ‘the challenge of a British road movie [is that] the middle of nowhere isn’t far from anywhere. So you make the wilderness a place in the head and the heart.’29 Similarly, co-writer and lead actor Alastair Mackenzie saw The Last Great Wilderness as a film which was ‘geographically Scottish, but… not specifically Scotland’.30 This careful distinction glosses nicely the consciously circumspect approach that subsequent DOGMAC movies typically take towards questions of national representation. Indeed, several of the works in question (for example, Skagerrak and Red Road) even have titles that invoke place names in the same deliberately misleading way as The Last Great Wilderness does. Instead of delivering the pleasures of intricately rooted location within a specific physical and cultural milieu, these films instead transport viewers to fragile interior spaces, the displaced and distressed psyches of notably alienated central protagonists. Take the Norwegian director Hans Petter Moland’s Aberdeen, a Scottish–Scandinavian co-production that predated The Last Great Wilderness by some two years. Kaisa (Lena Headey), a promiscuous, cocaine-addicted worker in the City of London, is unwillingly reunited with Tomas (Stellan Skarsgård), her estranged alcoholic Norwegian father. The pair endure a constantly interrupted and diverted journey from Norway to the northern Scottish city of Aberdeen, where Helen (Charlotte Rampling), Tomas’ ex-wife and Kaisa’s mother, lies dying of cancer. At first sight, the nature of Aberdeen’s plot and Kaisa’s regular outbursts about the importance of reaching the eponymous metropolis seem to signify the thematic centrality of place within the work. But as David Martin-

86 The New Scottish Cinema Jones notes, Aberdeen is a road movie in which ‘many scenes take place in unidentified or anonymous locations, including airports, a caravan park, a cathedral ruin… no attempt [is] made to integrate characters and locations’.31 More fundamentally yet, the film frames Kaisa’s desperate need to return home in emotional, rather than literal, terms. Aberdeen opens with archive Super-8 footage documenting happier times within a family later broken. Infant Kaisa joyfully welcomes Tomas home from an offshore stint on a North Sea oil rig while Chet Baker’s reading of the Hoagy Carmichael standard ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well’ is heard on the soundtrack. The same images briefly reappear some 20 minutes further into the narrative, by which point the extent of now-middle-aged Tomas’s addictive selfdegradation has been made painfully clear. As a result of that fact, both the physical presence and thematic significance of a detail easy to overlook during the Super-8 shots’ first appearance becomes pointedly apparent. An Aberdeen place name sign hangs in the middle distance behind the embracing father and daughter. The practical difficulties precipitated by Kaisa and Tomas as they try to reach the hospital where Helen lies dying perform several narrative functions, therefore. As well as generating suspense, they illustrate the elusive (and therefore seductive) nature of the place that Kaisa truly yearns to revisit. This is ‘home’ in the sense of a functioning family unit, rather than a particular Scottish city where three people once shared a roof: ‘less a granite city on a coast, than a state of mind’.32 Returning to The Last Great Wilderness, another of the film’s main preoccupations, masculine impotence (literal or otherwise), also proved to be a key theme within 2000s DOGMAC cinema as a whole. An abundance of performance anxiety metaphors underscores the brittle nature of the male identities that The Last Great Wilderness puts on display. Most obvious and lurid of all is the grisly fate of Vincent. His genitals (and the male heterosexual potency and proficiency which those organs guarantee) are, in Charlie’s words, ‘the tools’ of Vincent’s ‘trade’ as a gigolo. But Vincent ends up being ritually castrated and blinded while dressed in women’s clothes. He dies a moaning, helpless animal, mercifully put out of his misery by Charlie and Magnus. This unenviable state makes physically visible the semi-concealed psychological anguish of other male protagonists, people emasculated by fear, grief and/or guilt. Charlie, for instance, is subjected to serial comic emasculations: his wife deserts him; a passer-by in the motorway service station toilet mistakenly concludes that he is paying Vincent for sex; Vincent assumes that Charlie’s marriage collapsed because the latter was unable to satisfy his wife sexually. Also suggestive of multiple forms of impotence is the way in which Charlie is constantly figured as a fire-obsessed damp squib. He smokes incessantly. His car boot is full of plastic containers which he intends to fill with petrol in order to torch his ex’s Highland home. But when Charlie’s vehicle runs out of fuel in the middle of nowhere, he is revealed as a hapless blusterer shooting blanks. Vincent predicts that ‘you ain’t never going to burn someone’s house down: you ain’t got the cojones’. Similar provocations are flung in Magnus’s face. Morag sneers of a professional huntsman unable to fire a gun for years that ‘he’s lost his nerve, can’t do it anymore’. Such impotence stems from post-traumatic stress: forced to shoot Flora because



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he is unable to save her from the devouring flames, Magnus has been incapable of pulling another trigger since. Indeed, parallels between Charlie and Magnus, men who both struggle to cope with their respective crises of masculinity, proliferate. Both are stalkers: Magnus in a professional sense, Charlie in a proto-criminal one. Both are associated with the motif of fire: Magnus lives in a dingy caravan crammed with smoke-damaged furniture, relics retrieved from the blaze which took Flora. And, most importantly of all, the ongoing psychological difficulties of both stem from an inability (or refusal) to accept the departure from their lives of significant female others. Both men have to acknowledge their respective losses – Magnus by clearing the burnt-down croft, Charlie by embarking on a short-term relationship with Claire – before they can start to repair their damaged sense of self. Even the background décor of Moor Lodge hints subliminally at an idea that Charlie and Magnus personify, namely, the notion that men typically see major emotional crises as a premeditated assault on their masculinity and, in so doing, render themselves incapable of dealing appropriately with the particular challenges at hand. The stuffed birds that adorn the Lodge’s interior walls turn the building into a transplanted recreation of the Bates Motel. This, of course, is another cinematic space within which traumatised men cross-dress and become a danger to others as a direct result of their inability to countenance, and thus overcome, the loss of a female love object. Finally, The Last Great Wilderness shares with much subsequent DOGMAC cinema a provocative determination to mix bleak subject matter with black humour. In the film’s penultimate scene, Charlie browses through Ruaridh’s library and finds a medical textbook entitled Humour Therapy. This title, and that of a chapter (‘Crime, Punishment, and Humour’) within the book, sum up the narrative content and tone of David Mackenzie’s film well. Earlier in the movie, Charlie and Vincent stumble upon Ruaridh’s personal image archive, a collection that contains, among other things, separate videotaped analysis sessions with the equally distraught Flora and Claire; photographs taken of Vincent and Charlie while the men sleep; older shots of the Lodge’s residents in various states of undress (physical) and distress (mental). Such material initially seems voyeuristic, professionally inappropriate and indicative of malign intent. But Ruaridh is quite at ease with his unconventional therapeutic approach. He argues that the purpose of his rooms, and of the challenging images housed within them, is to function as deliberately exposed spaces (and/or spaces in which deliberate exposure takes place): ‘I leave [my rooms and their contents]… open for… others: that’s part of their therapy.’ Such methods seem to work. The film’s final moments show Charlie and Claire finding solace in each other; agoraphobic Eric taking tentative steps out-of-doors; recovering paedophile Paul playing unsupervised with Claire’s young son. The Last Great Wilderness aligns its thematic methods with Ruaridh’s therapeutic equivalents within the text itself. The film tries to function as a space open to others in multiple ways. It is, for example, wilfully frank about both the existence and nature of a broad range of sexually, emotionally and physically disquieting forms of human behaviour. It is also determined to explore such phenomena in notably graphic and ludic ways. In this sense, The Last Great Wilderness can be read as a Scottish attempt to replicate both the low-budget digital production

88 The New Scottish Cinema methods and self-conscious textual provocation that characterised the first wave of Dogme movies – Breaking the Waves (von Trier, Sp/Den/Swe/Fr/Neth/Nor/Ice, 1996), The Idiots (von Trier, Sp/Den/Swe/Fr/Neth/It, 1998) and Mifune (KraghJacobsen, Den/Swe, 1999) – during the mid-to-late 1990s.33

Skagerrak After The Last Great Wilderness, Zentropa further entrenched its presence within the Scottish scene by co-producing Skagerrak, Mifune director Søren Kragh-Jacobsen’s English-language feature debut. Skagerrak deliberately transplants long ago and far away into the here and now. Described by Kragh-Jacobsen as ‘a fairy tale’34 and ‘a sweet dream’,35 and by co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen as ‘a fairy tale about a young woman’,36 the film deploys a range of motifs drawn from European folklore and the New Testament story of the Immaculate Conception within a narrative of bereavement and single motherhood set in present-day Scotland. Danish Marie (Iben Hjejle) and Irish Sophie (Bronagh Gallagher) are friends, inseparable because largely sequestered from the outside world. The women work offshore in the North Sea oil industry, cleaning rigs and ships for months on end. Intermittent periods of shore leave see the pair hit not just land, but also the booze, the shops and on any number of local men. Pay packets quickly emptied, another extended spell at sea beckons. This self-perpetuating cycle of drudgery and debauchery shows little sign of abating until Sophie is assaulted and robbed by a man she picks up at a Scottish dockside bar. The women’s consequent pennilessness persuades Marie to accept an unusual offer made by a local aristocrat, Sir Robert Andrew-Lumley (James Cosmo), a man she meets at the local hospital where Sophie’s injuries are treated. Sir Robert’s son Roman (Scott Handy) and daughter-in-law Stella (Helen Baxendale) are unable to conceive. As the family cannot provide itself with an heir to the ancestral title and estate, they offer Marie £30,000 to act as a surrogate mother to Roman’s child. She agrees reluctantly, and only on condition that Sophie is present throughout the pregnancy to offer support. But Marie’s life is then turned upside down by the imminent prospect of an uncared-for arrival and the abrupt fact of an unlooked-for departure. Impregnation successfully accomplished, the women’s first dip into the proceeds of their deal sees them hire a car to drive South to Glasgow, where Sophie hopes to be reunited with American car mechanic Ken, her former lover and a man whom Marie has never met. But Sophie is killed in a motor accident en route: grief-stricken Marie attempts suicide before vowing to abort the unborn child she carries. First, however, she completes the journey to Glasgow alone, hoping to meet Ken and break news of Sophie’s death to him. Ken, however, has just died of cancer, leaving behind him a pile of debts for Willy (Gary Lewis), Thomas (Simon McBurney) and Gabriel (Ewen Bremner), his hapless erstwhile colleagues in a local garage called Skagerrak. The Andrew-Lumleys send Ian (Martin Henderson), an American veterinary surgeon employed on the family estate, to Glasgow in pursuit of Marie, and a comic web of double-dealing ensues. The aristocrats do not tell Ian about the surrogate pregnancy,



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instead presenting Marie as an unstable family friend. Willy, Thomas and Gabriel conceal the fact of Ken’s death and persuade Ian to pose as the deceased mechanic, hoping to part Marie from her money as a result. Ian falls in love with Marie, but is unable to reveal his true identity to her. All deceptions are eventually exposed, however, and all deceivers finally repent. Marie’s child is born on the Skagerrak premises, with Ian supervising the delivery and all the other main protagonists in attendance. In a final plot twist, the newborn infant is revealed to be the child of the black pub piano player who Marie slept with on the drunken spree during which Sophie was assaulted nine months before. An epilogue shows Marie and Ian living together several years later, having had a family of their own. An unseen/undead Sophie’s closing voiceover narration comments approvingly on her earthbound friend’s unexpectedly happy fate. Even more so than The Last Great Wilderness, Skagerrak is a film that takes place in Scotland without taking that place as a central thematic concern. Indeed, Søren Kragh-Jacobsen conceived of his movie’s setting in primarily negative terms, with Scotland functioning as a narrative space that is ‘not-Denmark’. The director noted that ‘the story had to be set outside Denmark, where the girl could be away from protective Danish society. Setting [Skagerrak] in Denmark would make the drama of the story impossible’.37 This is not to say that markers of Scottish cultural specificity are completely absent within the film. Willy, for example, supports Glasgow Rangers FC and displays otherwise hidden depths of sensitivity while giving a moving performance of the celebrated Robert Burns song ‘Green Grow the Rashes, O’. But fleeting local nods of this kind lack the critical mass necessary to turn Skagerrak into a work substantively ‘about’ Scotland. The sensibility of a film conceived, scripted and directed by Danish artists is essentially that of the raucous foreign females at the narrative’s heart. Tellingly in this regard, Marie and Sophie adopt Eurythmics’ ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’ – a song co-written and sung by a Scotswoman, but narrated by a peripatetic protagonist who endlessly ‘travel[s] the world and the seven seas’ – as their personal anthem, and perform the track at various points throughout the narrative. Skagerrak needs only its opening five minutes to make crystal-clear its central characters’ lack of personal interest in Scotland. A long shot showing Marie and Sophie’s first steps on Scottish soil is accompanied by the sound of an unseen local sailor promising the two that he will ‘see them later’. Sophie’s dismissive response – ‘no way, man’ – suggests that the women have very different ideas about lingering in what Marie terms ‘a dump like this’. Indeed, it takes a surreal collision between superstition and scatology to make the pair stay for any length of time at all. An augury of the most banal kind – Sophie is shat on by a quayside seagull – convinces her that ‘we have to stay here… just for a while… this is our lucky town’. Even then, the name of the hotel that the women subsequently check in to (The Caledonian) still implies the idea of Scotland as little more than a stopping place for travellers ceaselessly on the road. More generally, one might also note the fact that Skagerrak’s central characters – Marie, Sophie, Ian and Ken (or Ian masquerading as Ken) – are all mobile foreigners. It is secondary protagonists – the Andrew-Lumleys, Willy,

90 The New Scottish Cinema Thomas and Gabriel – who personify a Scottish identity that is variously static, unsympathetic, comically ineffectual or resentful of its inability to move beyond national borders. Sir Robert, for example, is utterly in thrall to his ancestors’ centurieslong occupation of the heirloom-laden family seat ‘built… in 1779: I’m the eighth Earl… a place like this has to be handed on’. This he uses as licence to interfere insensitively within his son’s troubled marriage. Willy, Thomas and Gabriel are often figured as bathetic buffoons, trapped by their financial obligations in a loss-making business that exists for the sole purpose of enabling its clients to travel when and where they so choose. Willy is obsessed with mysterious ‘plans’ of ‘a one-way ticket out of this place’, but his seemingly grand schemes are ultimately revealed to involve nothing more than a tatty second-hand caravan and a reconditioned American-style pickup truck. Essentially, then, Skagerrak deploys Scotland as a convenient Anglophone backdrop against which to explore the contemporary resonance of venerable folk beliefs and narratives. Kragh-Jacobsen explained that he ‘had always been fascinated by old European fairy tales… this [film is] a clone [of] Snow White and Seven Dwarfs [and] I’ve been looking a bit at the wonderful tale of [Virgin] Mary and the three wise men’.38 Modern-day versions of gallant princes and damsels in distress, Immaculate Conceptions and Virgin Births, abound within the film’s narrative. But Skagerrak’s ideological relationship to these motifs proves to be self-contradicting in nature. A self-conscious note of uncertainty in this regard is struck as early as the movie’s prologue sequence. Here, a modern-day fairy tale – that of the safe, solvent and self-satisfied nuclear family unit – unfolds before the viewer’s eyes. Sophie tends to an idyllic rural home while a handsome husband brings home freshly caught fish for the family table and a blond infant brood frolics in an expansive garden. Marie’s accompanying voiceover notes of this blissful tableau that, ‘this isn’t my dream – it belongs to Sophie… she believes in that stuff. Happy Ever After… even the sound of the word[s] makes me sad.’ While Marie cannot endorse the terms of Sophie’s fantasy, she is incapable of wholly extricating herself from it, either. She is emotionally affected by her friend’s dream, albeit not in a way that Sophie would understand or wish for. Something similar holds for Skagerrak as a whole. As Allan Hunter notes, ‘signs and superstitions… tentatively nudge the film towards magic realism but the [narrative] situations and settings pull in the direction of realistic drama’.39 This tension arises from the fact that Kragh-Jacobsen’s movie accepts from the very outset the idea that fantastical and/or faith-based beliefs and myths still wield significant power within an ostensibly secular present. The consequent challenge that the film sets itself involves developing a modernised version of these traditional narrative and ideological structures, one that can speak to, and perhaps even salve, the warring senses of scepticism and yearning contained within Marie’s opening speech. Such reformist/revisionist intent is most clearly manifest in Skagerrak’s satirical reversal of gender roles and identities frequently encountered within European folkloric and Judeo-Christian belief systems. ‘Sweet Dreams…’ is a fitting choice of signature tune for Marie and Sophie in this regard. That track’s famous promotional



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video showcases singer Annie Lennox in masculine garb, wielding close-cropped hair and dark business suit and tie as if they were offensive weapons. Similarly, Skagerrak’s early scenes construct Marie and Sophie as individuals in possession of virtues and vices – alcohol-fuelled camaraderie, voracious sexual appetite, bawdy irreverence – stereotypically claimed to be masculinity’s preserve. The same sequences simultaneously distance the women from conventionally approved forms of maternal desire and deportment. Ethanol, rather than embryos, is what Marie and Sophie most want inside their bodies. Swigging neat vodka as their ship sails into port, the latter diverts the former with a grotesque parody of childbirth. She pulls a succession of children’s dolls from between her legs and throws these out of the women’s cabin. The heads of her abandoned ‘children’ shatter in a dingy corridor among a pile of empty spirit bottles. Marie then creates a similar image when she and Sophie are forced to visit the local hospital. Donning a doctor’s white coat in order to smuggle bottles of medical alcohol out for home consumption, Marie unintentionally creates the appearance of a woman in labour when Sir Robert first sees her. One hand grasps her bulging belly while her eyes look down in shock at just-broken waters (the contents of a glass container of ethyl alcohol which Marie has just dropped). Even after she knows that she has truly become pregnant, Marie continues to drink heavily and seems unshakable in her desire to abort the foetus. If judged against conservative prescriptions of gender identity and activity, Marie and Sophie would hardly seem recognisably feminine in any way. For this reason, Skagerrak’s extensive quotation from fairy tale and religious narrative always takes care to reverse the gendered character roles and positions that such venerable stories contain. Take, for instance, the film’s treatment of Biblical accounts of Christ’s conception and birth. In case the Marian symbolism of Marie’s name is not enough, coy dialogue asides hammer the point home. On first sight of Marie, Gabriel – a man who explicitly professes religious faith and shares a name with the angel responsible for the Annunciation – murmurs ‘Holy Mary – she’s beautiful’. ‘She’ then becomes ‘it’ at the film’s end, when Gabriel utters the same words in adoration of Marie’s newborn child. Like the Virgin Mary, Marie appears (keeping in mind the belated revelation of the true identity of her child’s father) to be an unmarried woman impregnated at a male authority figure’s behest. This, however, is where direct parallels begin and end. Marie is promiscuous, not chaste; intimate with numerous men, rather than none. Her womb is bought by Sir Robert, rather than blessed by God. While the Biblical Annunciation sees a male figure (the Angel Gabriel) informing a woman (Mary) of her Immaculate Conception, Skagerrak has a woman (Marie) informing a man (mechanic Gabriel) of her illegal abortion. Gabriel, Willy and Thomas are three men wacky rather than wise; they scheme to steal from Marie, rather than bringing her precious gifts. Finally, Skagerrak speculates that, if angelic beings were to exist, they could just as easily be female, rather than male. Marie intermittently sees and talks to a spectral Sophie; the latter sends a series of supernatural signs that shore up her vulnerable friend’s fragile spirits. The film’s final scene fulfils the fantasy contained within the work’s first moments. Sophie’s imaginary family is replaced by Marie’s actual one; Marie’s alienated perspective is

92 The New Scottish Cinema replaced by Sophie’s angelic one. The latter reflects on how ‘that’s the way it is with happiness – sometimes it comes wrapped in wet newspaper’, as opposed to hallowed scripture.

Figure 3.2 Touched by the hand of God: masculine primacy reasserts itself towards the end of Skagerrak But for all this strategic self-consciousness, Skagerrak ultimately fails to navigate a safe passage between the twin rocks of romantic superstition on one hand and secular ennui on the other. The climactic scene in which Marie gives birth suggests that archetypal narratives and beliefs remain valuable, because profoundly instructive, cultural resources in the present day. Ancient stories retain the power to move us because they acknowledge foursquare certain fundamental human experiences – birth, death, love, loss – encountered by almost everyone at some point along their allotted span. One need not share Gabriel’s belief in the Virgin Birth in order to draw the same lesson from that story as he does: human life and the capacity of the species to reproduce (‘it’s amazing… a tiny little human being… there, underneath your heart’) are miraculous gifts. Yet the birth scene is also perhaps the only instance of Skagerrak’s quotation from Christian mythology and iconography where established gender roles and relations of power are not deliberately reversed. After Ian has safely delivered her child, Marie reaches out to touch him with loving gratitude. A close-up of the pair’s hands intertwining – hers bottom-left of frame, his top-right – recreates the most famous detail from Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel fresco The Creation of Adam (c. 1511). The respective positions of the characters’ hands entail that divine primacy is coded as masculine and human supplication, feminine. This implied hierarchy sits uneasily with Skagerrak’s overt attempts to revise patriarchal religious mythologies in ways that might render them potentially acceptable (and thus useful) to contemporary secularism. It could be argued, therefore, that what Søren Kragh-Jacobsen’s film ultimately puts forward is a tame modern-day myth of docile feminine contentment. That story



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is one that a patriarchal worldview, religiously informed or otherwise, would have little trouble in accepting. For the greater part of proceedings, Ian seems to represent a parody of the knight in shining armour. He tends rich people’s horses, for example, rather than riding to the rescue on one of his own. Yet in the final analysis, Ian does perform a traditionally masculine narrative function. Hirsute and handsome, he frees an unhappy and unfulfilled damsel from her self-imposed emotional distress, thus saving an unborn child from its mother, and that child’s mother from herself. When Ian tells Marie that he intends his name to be inked indelibly inside the blank heartand-scroll tattoo which she bears on her upper arm, the narrative sails very close indeed to the classic fairy-tale idea of the male kiss that precipitates the arousal (in all possible senses) of any good young woman. At surface level, Skagerrak satirises a range of culturally problematic but enduring traditional beliefs about men, women and relationships between the two sexes. Less visibly, however, the film is belatedly won over to the idea of perpetuating antiquated prejudice instead.

Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself) Skagerrak was not the only Scottish-set, English-language feature debut made by a prominent Danish director in 2003. The central protagonist of Lone Scherfig’s Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself) relishes the dying of the light, rather than raging against it. Wilbur (Jamie Sives) and Harbour (Adrian Rawlins) are very different adult siblings. The latter is a paragon of dutiful diligence who uncomplainingly shoulders the weight of two burdensome family inheritances. Harbour tries to prevent North Books, his recently deceased father’s cash-strapped second-hand bookshop, from going to the wall. He also strives to stop his suicidal brother from following the siblings’ dead parent into the grave. Wilbur is a veteran of numerous failed attempts to take his own life, and makes several more during the film’s course, protesting that ‘it gets more humiliating each time I survive’. Such behaviour provokes varying responses from those whose lives are touched by Wilbur’s obsession with ending his own. Horst (Mads Mikkelsen), the Scandinavian psychologist compelled to treat Wilbur time and time again at the local hospital, has long given up on a man whose lack of hope makes him a hopeless case. Deadlock is broken when hospital night cleaner Alice (Shirley Henderson) and her young daughter Mary (Lisa McKinlay) enter Harbour and Wilbur’s lives. Harbour and Alice strike up a romantic relationship, marry, and move in together at North Books. But their domestic bliss is short-lived: Harbour discovers that he is dying of pancreatic cancer. Meanwhile, Wilbur, perfectly uninterested in the opposite sex to this point in time, falls in love with Alice, who reciprocates his feelings. After a final visit home for Christmas dinner, Harbour, who by now realises that his wife and brother are in love, returns to his hospital bed and calmly overdoses on pills. In sharp contrast to Wilbur’s earlier attempts to take his own life, Harbour’s act is selfless, a sacrifice made to clear the way for the three people he loves most in the world. The film ends with the new family unit of Wilbur, Alice and Mary walking away from camera after a visit to Harbour’s snow-covered grave.

94 The New Scottish Cinema Though set in present-day Glasgow, Wilbur… has ‘very little sense of Scottishness about it’40 and demonstrates no significant interest in exploring cultural specificity as a central theme. Co-writer Anders Thomas Jensen admitted in a 2003 Edinburgh International Film Festival interview that, ‘I don’t know if the film is Scotland. I’m glad if people think it is, but for me it’s the way Lone and I think Scotland is’.41 Internationally legible signifiers of nation and nationality are thus few in number and facetious in nature. A suicide survivors’ group member explains to his clinically depressed captive audience the peculiar attractions of Snowballs, a sugar-saturated confection of marshmallow, cheap chocolate and desiccated coconut yet to catch on beyond Scotland’s borders; Harbour comments briefly on the average size of the country’s molehills; Wilbur’s female workmate accessorises a tartan mini-skirt with matching scarf and rucksack; Wilbur adopts a masculine version of that look by wearing a tartan tie to Alice and Harbour’s wedding; a St Andrew’s Cross is fleetingly visible on the dust jacket of a children’s adventure novel that Wilbur reads to Mary as a bedtime story; preparations for Harbour’s last family Christmas are decked out in minimal tartan trimmings: ‘Auld Lang Syne’ plays on the stereo and paper napkins are decorated with a Royal Stuart check. Indeed, Lone Scherfig went so far as to concede that: In a way I would have liked the film to be more realist and to be set more on the streets of Glasgow… This is a Scottish film which has no drugs and where the poverty is on a Barbara Cartland-like level. I’m very proud of the film, but I’m not sure I’m proud that it portrays a non-existent Scotland.42 Yet Wilbur…’s failure to put down substantial Scottish roots could be read as something other than a fey evasion of inconvenient local detail. The work’s carefully cultivated sense of placelessness attempts to convey the near-total extent of the titular lead’s narcissistic self-absorption. Film mimics character’s personal disengagement from his native environment in order to make that facet of his personality unmistakably clear. Scherfig and Jensen also seem keen not to conflate the image of an individual’s sensibility with that of a nation’s identity. After one (briefly successful) suicide attempt, Harbour asks his resuscitated brother to describe what being dead actually feels like. Wilbur’s glib reply – ‘There’s nothing: just blackness and utter silence… a bit like being in Wales’ – is telling. This surreal simile glosses the movie’s overarching point of view: viewers are not encouraged to reify Wilbur’s psychological malady into a national state of mind. Wilbur… pre-empts any potential for misrecognition of this sort in various ways. Firstly, the film transforms Glasgow into an intensely malleable, because multicultural, narrative setting. The city becomes ‘barely recognisable, reinvented as a timeless, fairy-tale version of itself ’,43 a place where exaggerated transplantations of foreign cultures, identities and artefacts are more frequently encountered than any allegedly authentic native counterparts. The fatalism of chain-smoking, bedside manner-less Horst parodies the melancholia stereotypically ascribed to Scandinavian



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cultural sensibility. The destination of choice for any celebratory occasion (Alice and Harbour’s wedding, for example) is a Chinese restaurant festooned with examples of that nation’s visual and material cultures. Wilbur’s job as a (child-hating) childminder takes him to a local museum where, under a single roof, his young charges gawp at stuffed Arctic animals in one room and experience the recreation of a savannahstyle microclimate in another. While North Books’ painted frontage advertises the business as a specialist retailer of Scottish texts, it is in fact publications and authors associated with other cultures and places that characters nearly always discuss or handle. Harbour tells Alice of his late father’s interest in literature concerning ‘polar stuff and tundra… that kind of thing’; Alice places a travel book about China on display in the shop window after her wedding banquet; a regular customer always asks for works by Rudyard Kipling. The consequent elusiveness of a local identity and culture always obscured by the iconography of elsewhere is perhaps best exemplified by two symbolic devices that Wilbur… associates with the domestic dead. Firstly, Alice strikes up a relationship with Harbour because she constantly brings second-hand books to his shop. These texts were owned by the recently deceased, people whose vacated hospital beds and rooms Alice cleans without any knowledge of individual faces or histories. The now-ownerless items that she sells to her future husband are, therefore, not unlike headstones without names. Conversely, the graves of Wilbur and Harbour’s parents have names attached to them but no headstones. This constitutes an oddity in a cemetery otherwise full of extravagant Victorian monuments to the dear departed, and is the reason why Wilbur is unsure of where to stand whenever he visits in order to pay his respects. When Wilbur, Alice and Mary visit Harbour’s grave in the film’s final scene, the young girl questions the lack of a headstone to mark the latest family interment. Wilbur dismisses these misgivings with the explanation that, ‘I’m sure [Harbour] would have thought it was too much trouble’. On one hand, the graveyard is a local space to which Wilbur…’s central protagonists are intimately linked. But on the other, those protagonists choose not to formally advertise or memorialise the connections binding people to place. That fact reflects the systematic manner in which Scherfig and Jensen’s work dissociates its native characters from their indigenous national sphere. Wilbur… deliberately renders itself ‘[a] film without a genuine sense of place’.44 The painstaking set design of the movie’s main narrative location, the sale and display area of the North Books premises, also helps Wilbur… to achieve an attenuated relationship with its present-day Scottish setting. The shop overflows with books: many of its windows are obscured by broken spines stacked high, while others are decorated with stained glass panels. Once inside the space, therefore, customer and viewer alike can easily forget about the existence of the city outside. Indeed, obscured windows through which little or nothing of the wider world can be seen constitute something of a running motif within the movie. Net curtains cover the window of the kitchen in which Wilbur tries to gas himself during the work’s opening scene; large parts of the windows in the hospital ward where the suicide survivors’ group meets are frosted over; windows in the Chinese restaurant bathroom are plastered

96 The New Scottish Cinema with old newspaper; closed blinds hem in the consultation room where Horst tells Harbour that death is fast approaching. The closeted nature of these interior spaces conveys the idea of a diegesis that exists somewhere out-of-place. Other elements of North Books’ eclectic décor amplify this disorientation by creating the impression of a diegesis that also exists somewhere out-of-time. A diverse range of design aesthetics exists cheek-by-jowl within the shop’s cluttered space: chintz wallpaper, bedding and other textiles; faded Persian rugs; dark wood panelling; Art Nouveau glass; Formica kitchen worktops; and, perhaps most noticeably of all, countless lamps and lampshades fashioned in a bewilderingly diverse array of period styles. Nowhere is the implication of multiple timeframes emphasised more explicitly than in the largest set-piece scene to which the shop plays host: that depicting Mary’s birthday party. Shafts of sunlight stream through motes of dust as young girls attired in bowed and beaded vintage party dresses frolic around the bookshelves. One of Mary’s friends notes smugly that the antique gown she wears, a spectacular creation embroidered with 100 grams of 24-carat gold, originally belonged to her grandmother when the latter was a girl. The attendant sense of a narrative setting that inhabits several time periods simultaneously – and thus, no one specific time at all – is also underscored by Wilbur…’s studied treatment of the only recognisably Glaswegian landmark to which the film repairs on more than one occasion: the city’s famous Necropolis cemetery. Here, Harbour and Wilbur grieve for their father, and Wilbur, Alice and Mary later mourn Harbour. When performing these actions, characters are framed against the striking backdrop of a cityscape that mixes Victorian Gothic revivalism (the gravestones and other memorial erections visible in the foreground) with post-World War II brutalism (the modern high-rise blocks and smoking factory stacks seen in the distance). But noting the lengths to which Wilbur… goes to deracinate itself does not automatically explain why the film makes such choices. Key in this regard is the work’s desire to function as a universally applicable moral fable, an instructive tale that emphasises the preciousness of all human existence. Wilbur…’s droll refusal to treat its central character’s death wish with any significant degree of solicitude or seriousness may at first appear cynically provocative, even misanthropic, a version of Horst’s weary (and seemingly unprofessional) disinterest in his patients. But the doctor’s brusque admonition – ‘we don’t want to hear any more about it’ – to a vulnerable individual who tries to recount a recent suicide attempt simply reflects the sincerity of the film’s thematic priorities. Though its main protagonist longs to die, what really interests Wilbur… are the reasons why most people are so able and willing to live. Scherfig argues that ‘Wilbur’s suicide attempts are a device, which allows us to analyse life: why are we here at all, and what makes life worth living?’45 Her film’s answer to that question is perhaps best articulated by the dying Harbour, when he observes that ‘it’s nice that people can get together when they don’t have anyone else’. Within this humanistic worldview, Wilbur’s attempts to end his own existence cannot be dignified in any way. Even were he to obliterate his private difficulties thus, his actions would simply add to the burdens borne by those who love him.



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If Harbour articulates Wilbur…’s central homily in an isolated snatch of dialogue, the film continuously proffers the same idea via a ubiquitous visual metaphor: that of isolated lights illuminating encroaching darkness. The painstakingly precise miseen-scène of various sequences choreographs artificial and natural sources of light in order to convey the message that human companionship, and the generosity of spirit which motivates one individual to offer their company to another, are what make existence valuable, rather than merely endurable. In many of the scenes in question, the physical appearance and/or position within the frame of an artificial light source indicate the ways in which a particular character impacts positively on the lives of others. The unadorned modernism of Horst’s chrome office table lamp, for instance, suggests that his unsparingly direct manner benefits many who are exposed to it. At one point, he offers Harbour a glassful of Dutch courage because the latter’s terminally damaged liver makes over-consumption of alcohol a medical irrelevance. Horst’s matter-of-factness here successfully jolts Harbour out of self-deluding denial regarding his imminent fate. Similarly, when sexual desire belatedly shakes Horst out of his own self-imposed isolation, a sudden longing for human contact is provoked by the sight of a cleaner’s shapely pair of legs as she stands on the doctor’s office desk in order to dust the ceiling light above it. Elsewhere, immediately after the scene in which Wilbur first kisses his sister-in-law, the narrative cuts to a guilty Alice doggedly gluing the fragments of a broken plastic lampshade back together as she sits beside an unsuspecting Harbour. Mary even translates this pervasive visual symbolism’s emotional logic into spoken words at one point, appropriating snatches of purple prose from one of the shop’s innumerable books in order to communicate the depth of her love for Harbour, ‘my safe, secure haven… my lighthouse’.

Figure 3.3 Light up my life: existential optimism in Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself) We might note also the importance of the painstaking distinctions that Wilbur… makes between natural and manufactured light sources in many of the scenes in question. These carefully underscored differences work to acknowledge the fact that

98 The New Scottish Cinema for every moment when life proves an unalloyed pleasure, there are many others where spirits (whether one’s own or those of others) need to be kept artificially bright. Thus, sunlight suffuses sequences within Wilbur… which provide or presage joyous experiences: the first explicitly romantic overtures between Alice and Harbour; Mary’s birthday party; Wilbur and Alice’s second and third trysts in the kitchen, the point at which they are forced to admit the depth of their shared feelings. By contrast, artificial light (usually, though not always, emanating from the plethora of lamps dotting the interior of North Books) dominates scenes where characters bond in order to face down adversity: most obviously of all, the tree-and-tinsel-decked Christmas for which Harbour comes home one final time. Indeed, given the intensity of Wilbur…’s symbolic use of light, it seems no accident that the film’s narrative climaxes at Christmas. Scherfig and Jensen attempt to harness the resonance of an ancient festival with origins in the ritual celebration of light as a means by which to survive, both physically and psychologically, life’s darkest and most inhospitable moments. If their work displays any form of culturally specific sensibility whatsoever, it is one diffusely northern, rather than specifically Scottish, in character. Wilbur’s life experiences, both good and bad, turn him into something like the polar creatures – snow beast, Arctic owl, penguin – with which he is fleetingly associated throughout the narrative’s course. Emotional maturation makes him capable of surviving, and even prospering, within challenging environments, and also of helping others to do the same. The makers of Wilbur… clearly intend that their film’s moral lesson should be one capable of travelling across any one set of national borders. For this reason, ‘the setting of Scotland does not form a primary source of meaning but rather forms the setting for [a] tonally and generically unfamiliar drama’.46 Similar arguments apply, moreover, to several of the DOGMAC movies that followed in Wilbur…’s wake. Most prominent of all in this regard was Red Road, the Glasgowset debut feature of English writer/director Andrea Arnold, and the first film to be produced through the Advance Party initiative developed by Sigma Films and Zentropa.47

Red Road As was the case with earlier DOGMAC films such as The Last Great Wilderness, Aberdeen and Skagerrak, the title of Red Road has the capacity to mislead viewers in a very specific way. Despite surface appearances to the contrary, the name of Andrea Arnold’s film refers to more than one – and more than one kind of – place at once. As Jane Sillars and Myra Macdonald note, the work’s title ‘points’ towards ‘[a] mix of modes’ which coexist within the text: ‘Red Road is a real place, but also signifies [the central character’s] journey into danger, often explicitly coded as sexual danger.’48 As with DOGMAC cinema more generally, the location that most interests Red Road is not the ‘real place’, but rather, an alternative location that is intensely private and psychological in nature. It is certainly true that local socio-cultural specificity – most notably, the endemic deprivation that blights many of Glasgow’s dilapidated public housing schemes – plays an important role within Arnold’s movie. But that milieu is



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not depicted as a self-sufficient end in itself. Instead, it functions as a means to make visible – and thus, understandable – the complex and unspoken individual trauma that lies at Red Road’s (broken) heart. Jackie (Kate Dickie) sees all human life while staying separate from it. ‘A ghost floating through a phantom city’,49 Jackie has, for reasons initially unexplained, reduced her existence to an endless series of shifts working as a CCTV camera operator monitoring crime and social disorder within the most deprived areas of present-day Glasgow. The wedding ring that she wears makes her wilful withdrawal from the world seem even more confusing. Spouse or offspring are nowhere to be seen, while reluctant attendance at a family wedding highlights Jackie’s long-term estrangement from her father-in-law, Alfred (Andy Armour). When not avoiding her next of kin, she engages in a furtive series of passionless fortnightly trysts with a married man in the front seat of his work van. But a lonely woman’s actions then become more inexplicable still. First by camera, and then in person, Jackie starts stalking Clyde (Tony Curran), a man she happens to capture on CCTV while he is engaged in a hurried act of anonymous outdoor sex. It is not clear whether Jackie believes Clyde to pose a danger to women/society at large, or if it is her own intentions that are malignant. She steals CCTV tapes from work in order to monitor Clyde’s movements at all times, and graduates to physically tracking her prey around the grim tower blocks of the Red Road housing estate where he shares a shabby flat with young couple April (Natalie Press) and Stevie (Martin Compston). Jackie even inveigles her way into this apartment on no fewer than three separate occasions. During a drunken party there, she almost allows herself to be seduced by Clyde before bolting. She later returns during daylight hours, posing as Clyde’s friend in order to extract information about him from Stevie and April. Finally, Jackie uses CCTV to track Clyde to a local bar, and immediately repairs there in order to strike up a conversation. Stalker and stalked return to Clyde’s flat, where they have consensual intercourse. But Jackie immediately fabricates the appearance of a rape, knowing full well that her distraught and dishevelled figure will be caught on the cameras that ceaselessly record the Red Road flats. Though Clyde is arrested, Jackie quickly drops all charges. She reveals to Stevie that her vendetta is motivated by the fact that, several years before and while high on drugs, Clyde crashed his car into her husband and daughter, killing both instantly. A final meeting between Jackie and Clyde allows each to voice their respective feelings of loss and self-laceration. Jackie then reconciles with her parents-in-law and suggests that arrangements are finally made for the scattering of her husband’s ashes. Red Road’s concluding scene shows its central character stopping on the street to pass the time of day with an anonymous dog-owner she has often watched on CCTV. The implication is that Jackie has at last begun to cast off the cold chrysalis of pathological grief. Red Road prioritises the exploration of landscapes that are private and psychological, rather than public and physical, in nature. To understand both how and why this is so, one must consider the specific ways in (and times at) which the film makes use of the austere, borderline surrealistic architectural topography of the Red Road flats. As Andrew Burke correctly notes,50 a narrative setting ‘integral’

100 The New Scottish Cinema to Red Road’s thematic project has the potential to signify more things than one for a viewing audience. The run-down estate offers ‘a striking visual symbol for the alienation and anomie of characters’ within the movie on one hand, but is also ‘the material, even concrete, terrain that registers a history of uneven development and the persistence of social and economic inequities’ within late-twentieth-century Scotland/Britain on the other. The first explicit sight and sound of the eponymous tower blocks occurs almost exactly 18 minutes into Red Road’s narrative. Jackie brings the buildings up on a CCTV monitor and telephones a colleague to ask whether she is ‘right in thinking they house a lot of ex-prisoners?’ But the fact that the movie’s title refers primarily to a different kind of location (and a different kind of journey necessary in order to get to and through that place) has already been suggested by other formal means. Specifically, the colour red makes numerous metaphorically loaded appearances prior to the introduction of the Red Road flats into the narrative. Jackie sees a red tabard-wearing night cleaner make a low-paid, antisocial job bearable by singing and dancing along to the private soundtrack which the latter’s Walkman provides; Jackie’s married lover decorates the dashboard of his van with a red soft toy given to him by his child; Jackie watches her sister-in-law and the latter’s new husband emerge from their wedding ceremony clad in red and pink finery; a scene at the subsequent evening reception opens with a shot of a young girl dancing in a spangled red dress, while elsewhere in the room, Jackie converses with another lady in red, her elderly Aunt Kathy (Annie Bain). Kathy encourages Jackie to ‘get up and dance’, dismissing encroaching infirmity (the old woman suffers from osteoporosis) by arguing that ‘we’ll be bloody dead soon’. After leaving the wedding – early and without emulating Kathy’s game example – Jackie reads a handwritten red shop-window sign that advertises hamster babies for sale. The raw redness of Clyde’s hair seems initially to be the main source of Jackie’s shock as she follows his nocturnal rutting on CCTV; during her frantic attempts to track Clyde’s subsequent movements, a surveillance camera image shows a fox racing across a deserted street; red bed linen then frames a sleepless Jackie before she gets up later that night to compulsively scour a hoard of old press cuttings that cover the death of her loved ones and Clyde’s subsequent trial. Following a pattern by now well-established, despite the fact that Red Road remains less than one-fifth of the way through its running time, viewers see that Jackie stores these bitter relics inside a tattered red carrier bag. The symbolic ubiquity of a primary colour emphasises the primary manner in which Red Road conceives of its titular thoroughfare: less a notorious local address, more a universally applicable existential metaphor. For Hannah McGill, Red Road’s title works as an ‘indicat[ion of] the hazardous route that Jackie herself must follow, from guarded self-discipline towards a resolution that will necessitate the release of her emotional and sexual energies’.51 Andrea Arnold’s initial idea of/for Jackie was, in the director’s words, that of a character ‘somewhat separated from life and not taking part… being a CCTV operator seemed an ideal job for her’.52 Arnold thus developed Red Road’s script by:



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Start[ing] from the character and [her] emotional place, so I’d say the story is about Jackie and her journey… it could be universal… I didn’t know Glasgow… as I was writing I was incorporating what I was seeing and the Red Road flats came into the story… the film shows a certain side of Glasgow and not [the city’s] whole self.53 Red Road theorises the human condition as a life journey defined at all stages by unavoidable necessity and unpredictable consequence. Everyone must enter into active physical and emotional engagements with other people, but no-one knows where such social transactions will lead them. Eight of the ten deployments of the colour red that precede the introduction of the Red Road flats are clearly linked to ideas of sexuality and procreation. Even the two instances which are not (the different kinds of scarlet woman personified by the night cleaner and Aunt Kathy) still emphasise the pleasurable physical potential of the human body. But social and sexual transactions with others are precisely what a profoundly damaged Jackie has renounced, in a perverse attempt at self-protection. In this sense, the description of Clyde uttered by one of his seemingly numerous sexual conquests – ‘you’re a fucking animal’ – contains within it a truth that Jackie is ultimately compelled to (re) acknowledge in relation to herself. Human beings are animals possessed of (and by) the instinct to fuck. Individuals crave and carve out visceral physical and emotional ties with others because those bonds constitute a powerful way to anchor the vagaries of existence. But the primal power of such drives and desires also entails a troubling paradox, one which Jackie’s experience of loss illustrates with painful clarity. The creation of close bonds with other people (and the creation of other people to bond closely with) imperils as much as it protects. The ties that bind can also be broken, and this is so in any number of ways that lie beyond individual prediction or control. The red road Jackie chooses to (re)tread by the film’s conclusion, then, is the newly unpredictable life journey which lies before her. In deciding to re-embrace the possibility of meaningful encounter with others, ‘re-engag[ing] with the world and her humanity’,54 Jackie exposes herself to all the unforeseeable consequences – painful and pleasurable – which her leap of faith brings back into play. Red Road decides from the outset to prioritise a distraught fictional character’s interior trajectory over the real-life deprivation endured by a much broader Glaswegian community. The film then works endlessly to maintain that balance as its narrative progresses. In Dave Calhoun’s words, Red Road might usefully be thought of as ‘first-person cinema… most of the action takes place on the sidelines, away from Jackie’.55 Thus, once the Red Road flats achieve a degree of visual and narrative prominence within the work, its metaphorical usages of the colour red are compelled to become ever more ostentatious and explicit in reply. Take, for instance, the scene in which Jackie infiltrates Clyde’s flat for the first time, gate-crashing his boozy house party. Floridly expressionistic cinematography turns the apartment’s squalid interior into a disturbingly pregnant analogue for the central character’s wildly confused and dangerous emotional state. Blood-red light suffuses a full-frontal shot/reverse shot

102 The New Scottish Cinema sequence of Jackie and Clyde’s faces as the two make charged eye contact across a crowded room. Red then continues to permeate a longer series of extreme close-ups that show the pair’s bodies locked together in a slow dance. Later, as Jackie entraps Clyde, graphic images of the protagonists’ nudity and sexual contact are intercut with extravagantly symbolic shots of the nocturnal urban panorama visible from Clyde’s bedroom window. A red lava lamp casts constantly mutating reflections in the glass: Jackie’s arousal and eventual orgasm are figured as a weird scarlet miasma which engulfs the unseen city far below. That the terms of private experience here obscure those of a broader public equivalent is quite deliberate. Red Road sees Jackie’s physical trips to the eponymous tower blocks as important only insofar as those journeys precipitate her psychological transcendence of crippling bereavement. The links between Arnold’s film and Scottish/British traditions of social realist cinema characterised by an overt sense of socio-political engagement and critique are thus strictly limited in nature. Instead, Red Road seems far closer to certain prominent, consciously introspective late-twentieth-century European art movies which use formal and/or narrative excess (including heavily symbolic use of colour) to inhabit and explicate female experiences of grief: Three Colours: Blue (Krzysztof Kieslowski, Fr/Pol/Swi, 1993) and Under the Skin (Carine Adler, GB, 1997) spring to mind here.56

Figure 3.4 Seeing red: colour exteriorises Jackie’s inner state in Red Road Red Road’s active privileging of the personal over the political also manifests itself in the film’s treatment of a contemporarily resonant background theme: escalating levels of social paranoia and the mushrooming technological apparatus of Orwellian observation that exacerbates such anxiety as much as it ameliorates it. Only a few weeks before the domestic theatrical release of Arnold’s movie, a report submitted to the UK government’s Information Commissioner drew attention to a disturbing



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statistic. There were, at that point in time, something like 4.2m CCTV cameras in Britain: one recording lens for every 14 lives waiting to be recorded. Moreover, that figure accounted for no less than 20 per cent of all CCTV cameras installed around the globe.57 But Red Road displays comparatively little obvious concern with the reasons behind, or ramifications of, the largely uncontested domestic rise of a surveillance state. As with the film’s approach to questions of local/national cultural specificity, the work sees in its CCTV theme another opportunity to connote several things closely related to Jackie’s individual experience of the world: her initial state of mind; the twisted reasoning that has drawn her to that lonely place; and her eventual tentative move towards an emotionally healthy future. A variety of CCTV-related compositional patterns underline Jackie’s near-total suppression of selfhood in response to the death of her loved ones. The majority of scenes in which she trails Clyde in person or on camera are shot from an overthe-shoulder perspective. Jackie thus becomes a dark, blurred and heavily cropped shadow that clings to the frame’s vertical edges: disembodied watcher, not fleshand-blood woman. Elsewhere, and especially in the film’s early stages, Red Road uses contrapuntal editing patterns to contrast Jackie’s relative sedation at work with her obvious agitation when placed in direct physical contact with others. Shot/reverse shot and eye-line match editing are deployed most extensively and classically during scenes that showcase Jackie’s displaced digital encounters with unwitting others. Red Road’s opening sequence, for instance, uses both compositional devices (with eyeline matching from Jackie’s perspective only) to depict her happily spying on two of her favourite local characters, the dancing night cleaner and the dog-owner who tends to his sick pet. Here, Jackie momentarily exudes genuine human warmth, albeit for people she knows as pixels rather than in person. Compare this, however, with the succeeding scene in which Jackie and her married lover copulate in the physically and emotionally cramped conditions of his van. This sequence largely forgoes shot/ reverse shot and eye-line matching edits. Penetrated from behind, the only person Jackie can see is herself, via the reflection in one of the vehicle’s wing mirrors. But downcast eyes refuse to acknowledge the presence of her suitor or herself within the moment: Jackie’s emotional disengagement from the world seems near complete. Similarly, her uncomfortable meeting with Alfred at the wedding reception respects shot/reverse shot grammar, but deliberately inverts the one-sided eye-line match pattern that structures the edit of the film’s opening scene. Cuts moving from Alfred to Jackie (five out of the sequence’s total of 12) are conventionally motivated, following eye-line matches from his perspective. But cuts moving from Jackie to Alfred (also five in number) conspicuously lack this standard justification. Jackie refuses to meet her father-in-law’s eye: the strength of the barriers she has erected between herself and her dead husband’s family are stressed as a result. Finally, Jackie’s accidental face-to-face encounter, immediately after she leaves the wedding, with the dog-owner is blocked in such a way as to refuse shot/reverse shot and eye-line matching altogether. The two characters stand side-by-side, gazing wordlessly into the same shop window: no form of contact, ocular or emotional, is instigated between them. These early scenes, and the varying ways in which they

104 The New Scottish Cinema are edited, lay bare the terms of Jackie’s long-term self-mutilation. Renouncing the social role and identity of an ‘I’ defined by direct physical and emotional engagement with her native community, Jackie has instead turned herself into a distanced and dehumanised ‘eye’, a component part of the all-seeing Foucauldian hydra which Glasgow’s elaborate CCTV network represents. So cauterised is Jackie that other people must be physically distant, anonymous and intermittent presences within her life before she is able to muster even the smallest of positive emotional connections to them. Editing decisions do not represent the only way in which Red Road avoids the explicitly socio-political resonance of its CCTV storyline in order to mould this plot strand into an overarching metaphor for Jackie’s self-destructive reaction to the aftermath of loss. The film withholds explanation for its central character’s choice of job, not to mention her obsessive degree of investment in it, until one of its final scenes. During her last, cathartic encounter with Clyde, Jackie finally verbalises the crippling guilt that refuses to leave her, confessing that ‘it was my fault they [i.e., her husband and daughter] went out… I told her to get out my sight: it was the last thing I said’. The motivation behind her self-abnegating immersion in work is at last made clear. Momentary refusal to look at a blameless daughter resulted in tragedy. Jackie’s self-hating, self-harming response has been to compulsively look at (and thus, after) as many nameless surrogates as she possibly can. It is surely no accident in this regard that all of the individuals captured on CCTV in situations of danger, whether actual and apparent, during the course of Red Road’s narrative are female: April sitting alone on a deserted night-time street; the nameless woman who Clyde follows, then fucks, on a piece of waste ground; the teenager stabbed while Jackie fixates on tracking a car journey made by Clyde and Stevie; and finally, Jackie herself, making sure to stare directly into the recording lens as she bursts out from Clyde’s tower block in order to create the appearance of rape. Red Road’s implicit gendering of surveillance culture could be presented as a consciously politicised position which the film adopts in relation to a contemporary social issue as topical as it is vexed. Jessica Lake observes that ‘analysis of surveillance in cinema rarely takes the identity or gender of the watcher or watched into account’,58 and proposes that Andrea Arnold’s film ‘manages to reinscribe and reorient the landscape of surveillance studies by rejecting the traditional conceptual coupling of surveillance and male voyeurism’.59 One could argue, for instance, that Jackie personifies – not least by virtue of her biological sex – a hysterical nanny state fixated by the misguided notion that it protects its most deprived citizens best by first infantilising them through a process of round-the-clock observation. Such feminine/feminised fretfulness arguably assumes forms both political/institutional and psychological/individual within the movie. By contrast, Clyde and Stevie exemplify an ideological pole diametrically opposed because heavily masculinised. That discourse (and the two men who personify it) recognises no need to record, restrict or redirect the instinctually dictated, and therefore viscerally unpredictable, nature of human interaction. When Jackie visits Stevie and April in Clyde’s flat, the young man asks her if she ‘want[s] to feel the wind’. Invited to stand up close



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against an open twenty-fifth-floor window, Jackie’s senses are stunned by an aerial panorama very different in nature to that provided by the desaturated digital images she surrounds herself with at work. Elsewhere, the already-noted symbol of the fox associates Clyde with animal nature, rather than artificially disciplined culture. His idea of ‘get[ting] to know each other’ involves asking Jackie what her ‘cunt tastes like’, before slinging her over his shoulder – caveman’s lift as much as fireman’s – in order to cart her home to his bed. Once there, and just before they have sex, Clyde draws his ostensible conquest’s attention to the eerie noises made by foxes somewhere in the dark beyond the Red Road flats. He also notes his lack of interest in moulding a wood carving he is working on into any premeditated shape of his own choosing, arguing that, ‘every piece of wood is different… you’re supposed to let it be whatever it wants’. Clyde’s laissez faire logic is the antithesis of the uneasy and insatiable desire for complete social knowledge and control which Jackie and her banks of omnipresent CCTV cameras speak of. In the final analysis, however, Red Road’s overriding interest clearly lies in the personal resonances of its surveillance storyline, rather than any political equivalents. These priorities are (re)confirmed one last time in the film’s closing scene. Having interacted directly with someone she previously knew only as a digital image (the dog-owner), Jackie walks further down a busy city-centre street. An edit cuts to a CCTV image of the thoroughfare in question, with the character clearly visible continuing her journey along it. Jackie is now, Red Road implies, present within the world once more, previous and psychologically twisted attempts to police it from afar/above left behind her. It is difficult to believe that any work centrally concerned to advance a sceptical critique of surveillance culture would end thus. After all, Jackie’s unauthorised capture in one sense (the recording of her image and actions in a manner she neither consents to nor controls) is presented as a symbol for her self-liberation in another. But within the introspective thematic remit that Red Road privileges, the image and inferences with which the work concludes are entirely consistent with all that has gone before. As well as exemplifying DOGMAC cinema’s premeditated turn away from nationally specific and politically polemic subject matter, Andrea Arnold’s movie perhaps represents that transnational filmmaking project’s most accomplished attempt to develop a substantive set of alternative thematic concerns.

Donkeys Made at the end of a decade that witnessed a remarkable upsurge in Scottish– Scandinavian co-production activity, Donkeys (Morag McKinnon, GB/Den, 2010), the second Advance Party feature, offers possibly the darkest example to date of DOGMAC cinema’s pitch-black comic sensibility. The shared humour of many DOGMAC movies laughs at taboo subject matter in order to laugh away the anxieties the latter arouses. In The Last Great Wilderness, Charlie eventually relinquishes his determination to visit destruction on his ex-wife and her new partner; Skagerrak’s Marie ultimately gives birth to the child she was obsessed with aborting; Wilbur

106 The New Scottish Cinema (Wants to Kill Himself)’s suicidal lead protagonist finally finds a reason to live. In stark contrast, the central character of Donkeys proves beyond salvation. A combination of inoperable cancer and irredeemable failure (both as a father and a friend) dictates that Alfred Patterson (James Cosmo) can only engineer a happy ending of sorts by granting his estranged daughter Jackie’s (Kate Dickie) vituperative wish that he ‘just die’. The suspicion that Donkeys is a notably uncompromising work is only reinforced when director Morag McKinnon’s movie is compared with Red Road, its predecessor within the projected Advance Party trilogy. Although an obviously melancholic piece, Andrea Arnold’s film is imbued with the warmth, chromatic and symbolic, offered by the colour red. The movie thus implies the existence of an innate life force that somehow sustains people through the most painful and damaging personal experiences imaginable. Donkeys reverses that equation. Comic exuberance finds unlikely fun in any number of profoundly discomfiting themes: terminal illness, broken families, accidental incest and premeditated betrayal. At the same time, however, the film drenches itself in a different primary colour and its associated symbolism. Chill blue is the signature hue of numerous interior sets and exterior lighting set-ups; the colour even permeates the eyes of the hospital doctor who performs the tests that confirm the fact of Alfred’s impending demise. In this and other ways, Donkeys allows its character Brian’s (Brian Pettifer) description of ‘life’ as ‘one long hollow scream of emptiness’ to be considered at something approaching face value. Or, as McKinnon put it, I wanted to do something about somebody coming to the end of their life and… having to assess it. I like the idea that he comes to the conclusion that it’s all been futile… Life is absurd.60 The narrative of Donkeys centres on a man who brings false brightness to the lives of strangers while casting a real shadow over those of his nearest and dearest. The garish second-hand knick-knacks and novelty items sold by Alfred Patterson from his Glaswegian market stall offer their purveyor scant comfort when increasingly frequent and unexplained bouts of intense pain and incontinence lead him to conclude that his life is coming to an end. Remorse, fear and selfishness – though not necessarily in that order – impel Alfred to set aside long-cherished plans of retirement to southern Spain with best (because only) friend Brian. He now prioritises instead the idea of belated reconciliation with his daughter Jackie and her 12-yearold child Bronwyn (Natasha Watson), next-of-kin with whom he has not spoken for more than a decade. Ingrained resentment – Jackie holds Alfred responsible for her husband’s death in a road accident ten years before – and present emotional strain – she supports her neighbour Margaret (Hope Ross) through the latter stages of a cancer so advanced that the sufferer has lost the power of speech – lead her to rebuff her father’s inept overtures. Undaunted, Alfred tries to recruit Margaret’s recently returned son Stevie (Martin Compston) as a mole who will provide the information



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necessary for him to inveigle his way back into his daughter’s affections. That plan quickly goes to pot, however, when Alfred discovers the identity of Stevie’s mother. Alfred and Margaret had a clandestine affair many years before, and he realises that he is in fact Stevie’s never-known (and much-resented) father. Desperate to avoid detection, but also struck by the idea that a fabricated family reunion might help soften Jackie’s heart, Alfred spins a cruel lie to childless Brian and fatherless Stevie, convincing the pair that they are father and son. This heartless scheme quickly crashes down on its perpetrator. The unwitting Bronwyn sets her mother and Stevie up on a date; Alfred is forced to burst in on, and break the unwelcome truth to, his son and daughter just as they are about to sleep together. Now decisively cut off from personal ties already few and frail in nature, Alfred receives formal confirmation that he is dying of cancer. In a last desperate attempt to salvage something from the emotional wreckage he has created throughout his life, Alfred pressures an angry and unwilling Brian into helping him to commit suicide. The appearance of a premature natural death will pay out extra on Alfred’s life insurance policy: a lump sum initially intended to support his retirement to Spain instead becomes a guilt offering laid at his daughter’s feet. Donkeys ends with its antihero striking an inappropriate note from beyond the grave: Jackie, Bronwyn and Brian endure a funeral set to the grating strains of Demis Roussos’ ‘Una Paloma Blanca’ playing on a graveside cassette recorder. More cheeringly, those Albert leaves behind seem freed by the fact of his passing. Stevie and Jackie display what seems like genuine fraternal affection at Margaret’s hospital bedside, and thus offer the dying woman significant relief and pleasure. Lonely Brian, meanwhile, is shown to be in the process of becoming a surrogate grandparent to Bronwyn.

Figure 3.5 Fancy dress: the iconography of elsewhere in Donkeys

108 The New Scottish Cinema If Donkeys’ uncompromising absurdism sets it apart from the wider corpus of DOGMAC cinema in some ways, the film is much more of a part with that movement in others. McKinnon’s film echoes, for instance, earlier Scottish– Scandinavian movies’ strategic downplaying of their local narrative settings. As discussed above, the works in question tend either to make their central protagonists incoming aliens with little interest in Scotland (The Last Great Wilderness, Skagerrak) or alienated natives who lost their interest in the place long ago (Aberdeen, Wilbur…, Red Road). Donkeys gravitates towards the latter pole. Less than three minutes into the movie, Alfred tells a distressed Brian that ‘something good has come’ from the death of the latter’s pet dog: ‘there is nothing to keep you here: you and me are going to Spain’. The remainder of the narrative then proceeds to mock its tieless central duo’s lack of connection to home by mimicking that attitude. Though markers of local specificity are not completely absent – Aberdeen is mentioned as the place where Stevie served a prison sentence for drug dealing, a close-up of a cafe’s neon welcome sign identifies the premises as the ‘Home of the Great Glasgow Fish Tea’ – these are few in number. Moreover, scant signification of Scotland is forced to compete with a surreally jumbled iconography of overseas. Alfred and Brian’s incongruous sartorial choices, for instance, mark them out as men whose heads left home long ago, with aging bodies yearning to follow. Alfred regularly wears a grubby sweatshirt emblazoned with the logo of Romanian football team Sparta Buchareste, while Brian frequently dons a Hawaiian shirt as unsuitable for the unforgiving local climate as it is hard on the eye. The Spartan interiors of the two men’s respective flats are also decorated with kitsch that suggests personal allegiances and aspirations located far beyond Scotland’s borders. Alfred’s living room contains a miniature palm tree, a print of an oceangoing clipper, an antique map of the Americas and a crumpled 1980s tourist poster for Spain. Brian, whose familial connections to Scotland are non-existent, adorns his bare blue walls with portraits of the non-human or nonnative dead: a portrait of his departed dog hangs alongside one of Pope John Paul II. Elsewhere, a fancy dress game which Bronwyn and Brian play sees the pair turn themselves into caricatures of Michael Jackson and Mahatma Ghandi respectively. Finally, close-ups of the crazy stock that populates Alfred’s market stall, what he describes as ‘a stunning array of animal sculptures from around the world’, suggest that the idea of cosmopolitanism on the cheap might appeal to many more than just the two lonely old souls at Donkeys’ heart. A plastic Scottish Saltire tangentially links the market stall scene to place, but camera and customers alike seem far more interested in ephemera which speaks of the foreign, albeit with desultory regard for cultural authenticity or sensitivity: a ceramic gollywog, a Mexican squirrel carved from onyx, a gold-sprayed scale reproduction of the Statue of Liberty and so on. On one hand, Donkeys’ careful dilution/complication of local specificity reiterates the general attempt DOGMAC cinema makes to render itself marketable within many nations by refusing to mark itself out as the cultural product or provenance of any single one. Yet on the other, the film also tries to make this overarching strategic imperative serve its own particular thematic interests. The comic ubiquity of out-ofplace stereotypical souvenirs reflects, for instance, one of the work’s central insights.



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This is the disturbing ease and enthusiasm with which people surround themselves and others with lies in a vain attempt to mask the frustration permeating unsatisfied and unsatisfying lives. Alfred is quite clearly the movie’s deceiver-in-chief: he conceals his serious illness from family and friend alike; he misleads Brian and Stevie in order to evade detection of his past indiscretions; he attempts to reconcile with Jackie under doubly false pretences. Yet a range of more sympathetic characters also proves fallible in closely related ways. If Alfred conceals Stevie’s parentage for a matter of days, Margaret has already done so for many years. Stevie suggests to Jackie that her unshakeable sense of Alfred’s responsibility for her husband’s death is in part a lie she tells herself in order to avoid confronting her partner’s possible culpability for his own demise. Even Brian, Alfred’s most apparently blameless victim, bears some responsibility for the pain visited on him. His childless state makes him all-toosusceptible to the unlikely tale that Alfred spins, and he ekes the yarn out yet further under his own steam, so desperate is he to believe that he ‘always knew there was somebody out there’. Although a recovering alcoholic who has spent his most of his adult life out of work, Brian cannot permit himself to see the self-serving stupidity of his fanciful speculation that Margaret did not tell him that he had a son because ‘she knew it would have scuppered my chances in life’. All of Donkeys’ central adult characters are forced to confront lies which each would have preferred to persevere with. Once that process has unfolded, Alfred and Brian spend their final moments together considering the extent to which false ideas and images of place represent just one of many kinds of ornamental distraction that people use to clutter – and so conceal from view the truths which structure – their lives. Paradoxically, however, the men reach this all-too-accurate conclusion by telling themselves a final untruth. The pair destroys one hopelessly unrealistic mental image of Spain – a sun-soaked paradise within which twilight years drift by in perfect contentment – by erecting another in its place – a ludicrous caricature of the Iberian peninsula as a geriatric fascist colony, ‘full of Germans… banging on about the Final Solution at the salad bar’. Intertwined running motifs of faux cosmopolitanism and the unfortunate ubiquity of deception within human relationships sit well with Donkeys’ final defining characteristic: the film’s comically incongruous parody of the spy movie genre. Proud ‘father’ Brian boasts at one point of himself and Stevie that ‘we’re bonding here’. But ‘Bond-ing’, in the sense of espionage’s double-dealings, occurs at least as frequently within the narrative of Donkeys as does ‘bonding’ in the sense of a relatively disinterested display and exchange of genuine human emotion. Brian only starts to feel affection towards Stevie because Alfred has first tricked him, and because it suits his own purposes to be so deceived. Right from the parodic Man from UNCLE-style guitar theme which soundtracks Donkeys’ opening titles, the film plays out a succession of divertingly diminished spy-movie skits. Houses are broken into by night; middle-aged men in slow-moving cars stalk lone women to wind-blasted cemeteries; phone calls are made using disguised voices; detente and deception struggle for the upper hand within a familial cold war; cover stories are invented and put into action; apparently fast friends prove capable of ruthless betrayal; seemingly natural deaths are in fact ruthlessly stage-managed. Alfred even goes so far as to

110 The New Scottish Cinema make the structuring parallel crystal-clear, through the words he uses when first trying to persuade Stevie to spy on Jackie: ‘a wee bit of light espionage… your mission would be to infiltrate… we could have a cover for you so you wouldn’t break under pressure’. In this regard, Donkeys mostly closely recalls not another 2000s Scottish film, but a contemporaneous American work, Burn After Reading (Ethan and Joel Coen, USA/GB/Fr, 2008). On one hand, both movies generate comic pleasure through the ingenuity with which they hybridise filmic scenarios – spy movie, intimate family drama – that at first sight seem incompatible. But on the other, such playful sophistication works to advance a disturbing, because borderline misanthropic, thesis. In both Donkeys and Burn After Reading, the transposition of surveillance techniques and spy movie tics – faked identities, elaborate doublecrosses, tense assignations on park benches – from a significant arena (geopolitical conflict) to sordid equivalents (marital infidelity, dereliction of parental duty) reveals, and recoils from, a world in which mistrust, deception and evasion are common currency. Espionage’s amoral ruthlessness permeates the grain of the most everyday and intimate of human relationships, and humankind divides into two equally unappetising camps: those whose overriding instinct is to lie, and those whose overriding instinct is to be lied to. As the preceding discussion tries to indicate, 2000s DOGMAC filmmaking clearly turned Scottish cinema into a more cosmopolitan entity than had been the case at the twentieth century’s end. A systematic decade-long process of local collaboration with Scandinavian peers introduced a wide range of international filmmakers and film financiers into the workings of the domestic industry. Yet if such developments diversified the cultural identity of Scottish cinema in some ways, they also left it largely untouched in others. Despite the arch background playing with ideas of multiculturalism in films such as Wilbur… and Donkeys, the main creators and characters of DOGMAC cinema were white northern Europeans to a wo/man. The next chapter examines a contemporaneous turn within 2000s Scottish filmmaking, one that placed images and issues of ethnic and racial diversity squarely to the fore within the nation’s cinematic output.

4 TRAVELLING SCOTS: IMAGES OF RACE AND ETHNICITY IN 2000s SCOTTISH CINEMA

As the previous chapter shows, an ongoing process of collaboration with Scandinavian counterparts represents one important way in which 2000s Scottish filmmaking sought to transcend nationally exclusive or essentialist cinematic concerns. But the increasingly frequent production of ‘films which engage with multicultural representations of Scotland’1 has been of comparable importance in this regard. This chapter discusses a range of post-2000 Scottish features that explore themes of ethnic and racial identity, diversity and conflict, encountered both within and without Scotland’s borders: Ae Fond Kiss… (Ken Loach, GB/Bel/Ger/It/Sp, 2004), Nina’s Heavenly Delights (Pratibha Parmar, GB, 2006), Cargo (Clive Gordon, Sp/GB/Swe, 2006), True North (Steve Hudson, Ger/Ire/GB, 2006) and The Last King of Scotland (Kevin Macdonald, GB, 2006). In stark contrast to late-twentieth-century English cinema,2 images of ethnic and racial diversity were conspicuously absent within Scottish filmmaking of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. Writing in 1982 about an early-1950s Scottish film, The Gorbals Story (David MacKane, GB, 1950), John Hill argued that a work notable and novel for its inclusion of a Scots-Pakistani protagonist within a Glasgow-set narrative ‘signifies cultural and ethnic difference… only to go on and deny it under an umbrella of universalised humanism’.3 For most of the characters in MacKane’s film, the fact of belonging to a particular district of Glasgow trumps any other form of self-definition and cultural allegiance. The terms in which Hill analyses a single period movie could perhaps be expanded in order to explain the near-total whiteness of Scottish cinema prior to the 2000s. Within late-twentieth-century Scottish film culture, an overarching ‘umbrella’ of ‘universalised nationalism’ – a prevailing assumption that indigenous feature production ought to be a vehicle for national representation and self-expression – held sway. This hegemony encouraged the production, both on the

112 The New Scottish Cinema screen and the printed page, of numerous assertions about Scottish culture, society and identity conceived (consciously or otherwise) in the singular. Local cinematic exploration and articulation of sub-, non- or transnational forms of difference and diversity was marginalised as a result. But that situation changed markedly during the 2000s, a decade that witnessed, in Steve Blandford’s words, the ‘emerge[nce of] a small but significant number of films that have explored the impact of immigrants and asylum-seekers on the Celtic nations’ of the United Kingdom.4 Two contemporary developments in the specifically Scottish context seem of relevance here. On one hand, increasing numbers of mobile productions locating to the country occasionally highlighted questions of ethnic and racial diversity and hybridity. The Bollywood industry’s increasing use of Scotland as narrative setting and/or symbol, in movies such as Kandukondain Kandukondain (Rajiv Menon, Ind, 2000), Kuch Khatti Kuch Meethi (Rahul Rawail, Ind, 2001) and Pyaar Ishq Aur Mohabbat (Rajiv Rai, Ind, 2001), has attracted comment in this regard.5 On the other, a significant proportion of 2000s Scottish cinema was born from local artists’ direct and detailed engagement with contemporary issues of ethnicity and race. That collective turn has complicated Scottish cinema’s traditional association with discourses of national identity in several ways. Firstly, many of the movies concerned – Gas Attack (Kenny Glenaan, GB, 2001), Yasmin (Kenny Glenaan, Ger/GB, 2004), Tickets (Abbas Kiarostami/Ken Loach/Ermanno Olmi, It/GB, 2005), Cargo, True North, Trouble Sleeping (Robert Rae, GB, 2008), Outcast (Colm McCarthy, GB/Ire, 2010) – examine the experience of non-Scottish protagonists, whether newly arrived in that country or living somewhere else altogether. Secondly, a large number of the films in question – Yasmin, Cargo, True North, The Last King of Scotland – are set mostly or wholly outside of Scotland. Thirdly, even when their narratives unfold within Scotland, a significant proportion of these works – Gas Attack, Ae Fond Kiss…, Nina’s Heavenly Delights, Trouble Sleeping – are explicitly concerned to acknowledge the increasingly multicultural makeup of the modern nation. In all these ways, local images of ethnicity and race have called definitive and/or comprehensive prescriptions of a single overarching Scottish national culture and identity into serious question. One representative contemporary figure in this regard is the director Kenny Glenaan. His debut feature, Gas Attack, explores the social deprivation imposed upon many members of Scotland’s refugee communities, imagining the aftermath of a racially motivated anthrax attack on Kurdish immigrants housed in a Glaswegian tower block. Glenaan argued that ‘immigration is the big story of the twenty-first century’,6 and Gas Attack diagnoses manifold contradictions and hypocrisies that shape Scottish governmental policy on this issue. The film emphasises the extent to which cities like Glasgow ‘welcomed’ significant numbers of refugees during the late 1990s and early 2000s, not as a matter of principle, but in order to bank large European Union grants offered in support of such action. Glenaan’s second feature, Yasmin, tackled closely related subject matter. The film’s eponymous central character is a young northern English-Pakistani woman forced, by a British statesponsored post-9/11 wave of Islamophobia, to renegotiate the already conflicted terms of her bifurcated cultural heritage and identity.7 Glenaan noted how his aim

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with this project was to highlight the existence of what he termed ‘an invisible war happening in Britain which British Caucasians may or may not see… for the Muslims of our country, it’s similar to being Irish in the ’70s and ’80s – guilty until proven innocent’.8 Similarly, Trouble Sleeping, a micro-budget, workshop-style collaboration between Edinburgh-based Theatre Workshop, local independent producer Makar Productions, Screen Academy Scotland and various members of Edinburgh’s immigrant communities, explores, in its director Robert Rae’s words, ‘the usually invisible world of Edinburgh’s refugees… we glimpse the city through their eyes… their present includes house arrest, prostitution, welfare dependency, unskilled labour, mental illness and isolation’.9 Perhaps the most significant figure of all within 2000s Scottish cinema’s turn towards contemporary questions and stories of ethnicity and race is the screenwriter Paul Laverty. More than any of his local contemporaries, Laverty has repeatedly explored this territory over the last decade-and-a-half or so: two of the films discussed in this chapter, Ae Fond Kiss… and Cargo, were written by him. One of the most prolific of all post-1990 British screenwriters, Laverty made his feature debut on the English director Ken Loach’s Carla’s Song (GB/Sp/Ger, 1996). The pair has since collaborated on a further 11 feature projects, the most recent being The Angel’s Share (Ken Loach, GB/Fr, 2012). Laverty and Loach’s work on Ae Fond Kiss… is singled out for analysis here because this film seems to have consolidated its writer’s creative and political interest in issues of ethnicity and race. Several of Laverty’s scripts in the four years immediately before Ae Fond Kiss… (and all but one of his scripts in the eight years since) take the long-term consequences of colonialism, whether the traditional form practised by sovereign nation states or the modern equivalent essayed by multinational capital, as their narrative and ideological starting point. This is so regardless of whether any given Laverty script has been Scottishset or not, and whether it was written for Ken Loach or another director. Bread and Roses (Ken Loach, GB/Fr/Ger/Sp/It/Swi, 2000) follows low-paid immigrant Latin American workers’ struggle for union rights in modern-day Los Angeles; Loach and Laverty’s section of the 2002 portmanteau documentary 11’ 9’ 01 (various, GB/ Fr/Egy/Jap/Mex/USA/Ir, 2002) links the American 9/11 of 2001 to the Chilean 9/11 of 1973, the US-endorsed coup d’état that overthrew the democratically elected Allende government; Laverty’s scripts for Ae Fond Kiss… and Cargo are discussed below; The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Ken Loach, Ire/GB/Ger/It/Sp/Fr/Bel/Swi, 2006) examines the early-twentieth-century Irish War of Independence; It’s a Free World… (Ken Loach, GB/It/Ger/Sp/Pol, 2007) highlights endemic exploitation of migrant workers within modern Britain; Route Irish (Ken Loach, GB/Fr/It/ Bel/Sp, 2010) delves into the murky world of private security contracting in postSaddam Iraq; Even the Rain (Icíar Bollaín, Sp/Mex/Fr, 2010) juxtaposes the April 2000 Bolivian Water War with the destructive arrival of Spanish colonists in the Americas several centuries before. Laverty’s position within a 2000s Scottish turn towards questions of race and ethnicity is comparable to the place of Sigma Films within the contemporaneous rise of collaboration with Scandinavia. His work is

114 The New Scottish Cinema both an illustrative example of, and an inspiring catalyst for, broader processes of significant cinematic change in Scotland.

Ae Fond Kiss… Ae Fond Kiss… charts the course of a true love that runs anything but smooth. The narrative prominence of heartache can be traced back to the film’s desire to acknowledge the existence, and anatomise the effects, of a range of conflicts between (and, just as importantly, within) different cultures and communities that coexist uneasily within present-day Glasgow. Casim (Atta Yaqub) is the early-20-something son of first-generation Pakistani Scots. His father, Tariq (Ahmad Riaz), came to Scotland after being separated from his own loved ones during the 1947 Partition of India and Pakistan. A part-time DJ and would-be club owner, Casim lives at the family home on Glasgow’s Southside with his parents and two sisters, one older – Rukhsana (Ghizala Avan) – one younger – Tahara (Shabana Bakhsh). When the film begins, he is about to enter into an arranged marriage with a cousin from Pakistan. Though this decision is one his parents have made on his behalf, Casim clearly respects and accepts their wishes. But his imagined future crumbles when he meets Roisin (Eva Birthistle), an attractive, white, Irish Roman Catholic woman of his own age. Roisin teaches music at the local Roman Catholic Secondary School that Tahara attends. Like Tariq, her relocation to Scotland stems from a traumatic sundering of intimate ties: in Roisin’s case, the end of a marriage back in Ireland. Casim and Roisin begin a clandestine relationship, but break up when he belatedly reveals the fact of his impending marriage. Though Tahara helps the couple to reconcile, solving one problem simply creates several others. Casim becomes estranged from his family after he moves in with Roisin. The family’s shame in the eyes of the wider Pakistani community leads to the cancellation of Rukhsana’s arranged marriage. Meanwhile, Roisin loses the chance of a permanent teaching position at Tahara’s school. The local priest (Gerard Kelly) has heard of her affair with Casim, and refuses to provide the official Church certification of good character necessary to confirm Roisin in the post. Matters come to a head when Casim’s parents and Rukhsana trick him into visiting the family home: his erstwhile fiancé has been brought over from Pakistan in an attempt to steamroller him into marriage. During the angry conflict that ensues, Casim tells his parents to respect his decision to be with Roisin. The film ends with Casim and Roisin happily reunited in her rented flat. In contemporary interview, director Ken Loach and screenwriter Paul Laverty were at pains to present Ae Fond Kiss… as a film concerned to explore the post-9/11 extent and impact of various forms of racial and cultural prejudice in Scotland and further afield. Laverty recounted how, after the World Trade Center attacks, One of my friends from a traditional Muslim background told me her niece, who was born in Glasgow, was scared to go out. That really got to me… it made me want to examine what was going on… when Catholics first came to

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Scotland 150 years ago they were seen as aliens with a loyalty to something foreign to the indigenous population.10 A story of apparently ill-starred lovers should therefore be understood as a populist means to a political end. Casim puts it more succinctly within the film itself, when he explains to Roisin that his decision to leave her stems not from a lack of private emotion, but a surfeit of social obligation. The pressure of responsibilities to his immediate family and the wider Pakistani community entail, in the young man’s words, that ‘it’s not about love: it’s about much more than that’. If the terms of this statement are significant for the political project of Ae Fond Kiss… so, too, is the fact that Casim, not Roisin, is the person who utters it. Steve Blandford argues that ‘for many, the balance of sympathy will be with the white, Catholic Roisin because of the way in which she is treated by Casim’s family’.11 But detailed consideration of the narrative structure and formal characteristics of Ae Fond Kiss… suggests that, if anything, the film guides viewers towards the opposite perspective on the narrative which unfolds. Loach noted admiringly of Laverty’s screenwriting practice that ‘Paul is very good at finding characters and a narrative in which… there is a justice in everyone, there is a sense that everyone has right on their side’.12 Ae Fond Kiss… certainly shows both brown and white Glaswegians to be potential victims of, and vehicles for, racial prejudice. But it is nearly always Pakistani-Scots characters, rather than their Caucasian counterparts, who articulate the most extended, nuanced and self-conscious understanding of racism as an endemic social problem and challenge. Most obviously of all, Tahara proclaims and personifies multicultural ideals during a speech that she gives during a school debate on the justification (or otherwise) of Western military powers’ so-called War on Terror. Her peroration is self-confident and eloquent in equal measure: I reject the West’s simplification of a Muslim. I am a Glaswegian, Pakistani, teenage woman of Muslim descent who supports Glasgow Rangers [the city’s Protestant-identifying football team] in a Catholic school… I’m a dazzling mixture, and I’m proud of it. Though subsequent words spoken by other Pakistani-Scots protagonists lack the same degree of assertiveness, they often work to a similar end. Casim tells Roisin that the conflicting cultural pressures he is compelled to negotiate as the son of firstgeneration immigrants are ‘too much for you to understand – and I don’t expect you to’. Tahara diagnoses the same dilemma in a different way when she protests to her parents that she, her brother and older sister are ‘Western – we’re not from Pakistan’. Elsewhere, Casim attempts to explain to Roisin the trauma that the Partition of India continues to visit upon Tariq and others of his generation. Rukhsana confronts Roisin with the fact that the latter’s (notionally) private life has profound and highly public consequences for Casim’s family: ‘because of your love, so many peoples’ lives are being destroyed – you clearly don’t understand that, do you?’ Finally, in the film’s

116 The New Scottish Cinema penultimate scene, Tariq implores his departing son not to return to Roisin, warning Casim that ‘You could be with them [i.e., the white community] one hundred years [but] they’ll still call you “black bastard”: you’re still the same to them’. The proliferation of such utterances indicates the extent to which Ae Fond Kiss… consciously aligns itself with a Pakistani-Scots perspective on issues of post-9/11 racial prejudice and tension. It is not that the film necessarily agrees wholly with any or all of the character statements quoted above – although Tahara’s speech surely comes close to her creators’ political beliefs. What the movie in fact identifies most strongly with is the sheer acuteness of Pakistani-Scots protagonists’ perception of race as a socially problematic issue, one which individuals and entire communities must constantly negotiate in their day-to-day transactions. As John Hill argues, Ae Fond Kiss…, like Loach and Laverty’s other Scottish collaborations, seek[s] to avoid explaining the actions of characters simply in terms of psychological make-up or moral outlook, but [instead attempts] to demonstrate how [actions] result from the social and economic pressures that weigh upon, and restrict opportunities open to, [characters].13 Hill’s insight helps to explain why this film does not side primarily (or even noticeably) with a white understanding of the socio-political questions at its narrative’s heart. Put bluntly, the Caucasian characters of Ae Fond Kiss… fail to understand prejudice properly because they are far less likely to find themselves on the receiving end of it than their Pakistani counterparts are. Loach acknowledges as much when he identifies an irony central to the film’s story: ‘[Roisin] is the most recent immigrant [to Scotland]… but [is] not treated as an immigrant, whereas Casim… born in Glasgow, [is] not an immigrant, yet [finds himself] treated as one.’14 That imbalance goes a long way towards explaining why, regardless of whether she feels complacent or indignant at any given point in time, Roisin’s views on race frequently lack personal or political nuance. By contrast, experience, as painful as it is persistent, has taught Casim, his kin and their community that personal priorities are always subject to a range of indifferent, even hostile, public pressures. Roisin, however, stubbornly cleaves to a belief in just the opposite. She knows at heart that romantic love is a socially propagated and policed phenomenon, remembering, for instance, that her now-broken marriage back in Ireland took place ‘in front of all our friends, and God, and State, and [Roman Catholic] Church’. But what Roisin sees in Casim is a chance to evade, not engage with, these unwelcome facts of life. Her professed desire for ‘a real equal match’ is unobjectionable in one sense, but highly questionable in another: it implies the idea that an intimate relationship is (or should be) a human jigsaw made complete by the joining together of only two individual pieces. Roisin articulates that romantic (in every sense of the word) worldview most directly when reacting indignantly to the local priest’s refusal to certify her moral fitness to teach in a Catholic school: ‘what my private life has to do with anything, I have no idea’. Yet Ae Fond Kiss… proposes that all manner of socio-political concerns

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(‘anything’) in fact have a great deal ‘to do with’ the trajectory of any ‘private life’. Viewed from such a perspective, Roisin’s diagnosis of the unenviable situation that she and Casim find themselves in – ‘fucking bigots, all of them… if it’s not the… priest and his cronies on one side, it’s your dad and fucking Mullahs on the other… we’re stuck in the middle’ – is as unhelpful as it is understandably angry. On one hand, the scale of the obstacles the lovers each face is analogous, but not equivalent. On the other, Roisin’s surprise at the fact that social and religious institutions are perfectly capable of decisive intervention within individual relationships suggests a degree of self-serving blindness. Casim and Roisin’s final argument is in part provoked by her resentment of the fact that their love cannot divorce itself neatly from the multiple social pressures and obligations surrounding it. She lists, and lashes out against, a range of individuals and institutions that intervene between her and her ideal of splendid (domestic) isolation: ‘if it’s not Hamid, it’s the priest; if it’s not the priest, it’s your bloody sister’. While Ae Fond Kiss… clearly sympathises with this distress, it cannot side with the intemperate political analysis that emerges from Roisin’s hurt. This fact is flagged throughout the narrative by a formal imbalance that characterises the depiction of Casim and Roisin’s developing affair. At several vital junctures within that embryonic relationship – first meeting, near-fatal estrangement (Casim’s confession of his impending marriage) – Roisin is shot from Casim’s physical point of view (and by implication, from his political perspective). There are, however, no similarly pivotal scenes where the opposite proves true.

Figure 5.1 Both sides now? The privileging of Casim’s perspective in Ae Fond Kiss… Elsewhere, many of Roisin’s classroom uses of music also hint at a clear distinction between white (idealistic/simplistic) and brown (chastened/complex) understandings of race relations, as well as the alignment of Ae Fond Kiss… with

118 The New Scottish Cinema the latter perspective, not the former. Early in the film, Roisin provides piano accompaniment to a Roman Catholic Mass held in her school. She leads her pupils in a rendition of a song she has chosen specially for the occasion, the eighteenthcentury Scottish poet Robert Burns’ great egalitarian anthem ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’ (1795). Crucially, the tenor of the song’s lyrics recalls that of Roisin’s angry and/or uncomprehending protestations regarding the difficulties that she and Casim face. The respective utterances of the song’s writer and performer concentrate less on the complexities of the world as it currently is (a society disfigured by systematic prejudice) and more on the inspirational simplicity of the world as it ought one day to be: a community within which humanist fraternity neuters all forms of sectarian bigotry, a future time when, in Burns’ words, ‘Man to Man, the world o’er/Shall brothers be for a’ that’. But towards the movie’s end, and after bearing the brunt of a range of angry and/or bigoted reactions to her relationship with Casim, a chastened Roisin exposes her young charges to a very different lesson taught through song. She plays the children a seminal composition associated with an iconic twentiethcentury African-American musician: Billie Holiday’s 1939 reading of ‘Strange Fruit’ soundtracks a slideshow presentation on the history of lynching in the American South. Both the song’s lyrics and the singer’s bravura reading of them underscore the pain of racial division experienced in the present, rather than anticipating a future conveniently free from such wounds and scars. None of the above is to suggest, however, that Ae Fond Kiss… constructs and celebrates a homogenised Scots-Pakistani answer to the vexed socio-political questions that the film’s narrative raises. Laverty was careful to note that ‘even within families, there are multiple senses of identity’.15 His script accordingly allows its ScotsPakistani characters to develop numerous individual interpretations of, and reactions to, the multicultural nature of the present-day Scottish society that they inhabit. Most significant of all in this regard are the symbolic resonances attached to a pair of very different, but similarly embryonic, physical/social spaces that viewers see imagined, then part-erected, during the movie’s course. One of these is associated with Casim, the other with Tariq. The older man oversees the construction of an extension to the family home in preparation for his son’s impending marriage. This plan exemplifies one course of action – self-defensive segregation – open to a minority community that feels itself constantly threatened by racial persecution. Tariq believes that his growing family, and the Scots-Pakistani community more generally, best looks after its own interests by creating spaces and institutions exclusive to it alone. The political importance of the extension sub-plot is clear from the speed with which it is introduced into Ae Fond Kiss…, appearing as early as the movie’s fourth scene. While the sequence in question is clearly played for laughs, it also implies that Tariq’s mentality represents a wilfully blinkered refusal to engage with pre-existing social realities: the old man heedlessly stomps over the flowerbeds of the family garden in order to pace out the dimensions of yet-to-be-built bedrooms. At the film’s end, however, Tariq himself wreaks physical destruction on the just-finished extension. He smashes windows and doors in despairing, rage-filled recognition of the fact that Casim’s commitment to Roisin has led the young man to decisively reject

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the ideological project which the family home’s new annex embodies, ‘a lovingly constructed but futile monument to tradition’.16 The ‘choice’ that Casim demands his father ‘respect’ is the young man’s demolition job on the self-willed and -policed apartheid which the extension represents in the form of a concrete metaphor. It should perhaps come as no surprise that Casim ultimately chooses as he does. After all, Ae Fond Kiss… associates the young man from the outset with an optimistic vision of racial integration, in stark contrast to his father’s (understandable) bunker mentality. Acting in counterpoint to the extension sub-plot is another in which Casim, like his parent, puts a significant emotional and economic investment into the construction of a social/physical space cherished but as-yet-unrealised. Casim’s first appearance in the film sees him DJ-ing in a nightclub mixing booth, orchestrating the soundtrack to a dancing throng’s collective pleasure. Later, the words he uses to describe to Roisin his dream of building and running his own nightclub indicate the extent to which Casim’s mixing activities are multicultural as well as musical in nature: ‘look at the potential that’s in this place… different music rooms everywhere… there won’t be any dress codes… anyone’s allowed… burkas to g-strings’. Of course, this could be dismissed as the naive utopianism of inexperienced youth, a counterpart to the well-meaning romanticism that underpins Roisin’s inclusion of Burns’ ‘A Man’s a Man…’ within the celebration of Mass. Yet Ae Fond Kiss… gives credence to Casim’s vision by including two club-based scenes that depict the young man’s goal as one already achievable in everyday social practice. The racial mix of revellers in both club sequences suggests that such spaces are indeed ones within which peaceable forms of cultural diversity and co-existence can be celebrated and cemented. Moreover, while the club that Casim hopes to open has not come into being by the film’s end, a microcosmic version of the social vision that drives his plans does come to pass. The final scene of Ae Fond Kiss… is set within Roisin’s flat, a newly created social space (Casim has just moved in permanently) populated by music (she is playing piano as he enters the living room) and by people of different racial backgrounds who successfully bond in the face of daunting obstacles set in their path. In this way, and as John Hill notes, Loach and Laverty’s film ‘embraces the continuing possibility of living with new, hybrid forms of cultural identity… a new kind of cultural settlement’.17 Ae Fond Kiss… aligns itself with the perspectives and experiences of a non-white Scottish community and identity for two ends. On one hand, the film openly acknowledges the existence of racial prejudice and tension within present-day Scotland. But on the other, it also outlines a tentatively optimistic analysis of the progressive social and cultural possibilities inherent within an increasingly multicultural national sphere.

Nina’s Heavenly Delights A yet more upbeat, but less politically nuanced, analysis of similar issues to those tackled by Ae Fond Kiss… emerges in Nina’s Heavenly Delights, a £4.5 million Glasgowset romantic comedy created by the Scottish screenwriter Andrea Gibb and KenyanEnglish director Pratibha Parmar.18 Parmar argued that her work attempted to strike a very precise balance. On one hand, Nina’s… sought to put onscreen ‘a wonderful

120 The New Scottish Cinema blend of Indian and Scottish cultures, which has not been seen before’.19 But on the other, the film also aimed to develop an approach to questions of sexual and racial diversity in contemporary Scotland that involved more than ‘simply fantasy’.20 To Parmar’s mind, it was ‘very important to show cinematic possibilities of alternative ways to live’.21 Her movie’s unapologetically commercial utopian romantic comedy thus lionises an increasingly complex range of identities – (inter)national, sexual, communal, personal – contemporarily resident within a fictionalised Glasgow ‘in which all cross- or intercultural desires are not only permitted, but also provide the recipe for financial success’.22 In these ways, Nina’s… can be seen to extend many of the signature political concerns that defined Parmar’s distinguished career as a short and television documentary filmmaker from the mid-1980s onwards. Tamsin Whitehead argues that ‘a significant aim’ of the director’s non-fiction oeuvre is: to destabilize or undermine any reading of identity as being unitary, fixed, or determined by socially limiting constructs of difference, where a person is solely identified as belonging to a particular social group, the parameters of which are rigidly determined by race, gender, sexuality, etc… Parmar works to promote a self-determination that is rooted in the recognition and celebration of the multiplicity inherent in the identity of any individual.23 It is certainly the case that these political ideas and positions are also given voluble expression within Parmar’s fiction feature debut. The death of her father (Raad Rawi) brings Nina (Shelly Conn), a single 20-something Indian-Scot, back to her home city after several years spent living in London. During that time, Nina has effectively estranged herself from her family and best friend Bobbi (Ronny Jhutti), a gay Indian-Scotsman. This separation is a consequence of bad feeling created by Nina’s refusal to enter into an arranged marriage with Sanjay (Raji James), the son of Raj (Art Malik), a family friend and business competitor. On her return to Glasgow, Nina discovers that her mother and siblings are on the verge of selling the family restaurant, The New Taj, to Raj and Sanjay. The proposed sale is a direct result of her late father’s financial irresponsibility. A 50 per cent share of the business has already been ceded to Lisa (Laura Fraser), an old schoolmate of Nina’s, due to a bet made between the two women’s fathers. A preopening titles flashback sequence establishes that Nina’s bond with her father was once exceptionally strong, forged over a shared love of, and skill in, cooking Indian cuisine. She persuades her family and Lisa to delay selling The New Taj, and thus buys herself a little time to fulfil her father’s dearest wish. This is that his daughter should enter, and win for the third time, an internationally televised annual cookery competition held to determine the best curry house in Glasgow. At the same time, a developing romance with Lisa forces Nina to admit, first to herself and then to her family, that she is gay. All plot strands are resolved in the climactic on-air cookery contest. Nina and Lisa beat Sanjay and kiss passionately on live television, thus announcing their relationship and sexuality to the community at large. Family unity and financial solvency are completely

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restored: Nina stays in Glasgow to enter into a long-term relationship with Lisa and run a newly successful restaurant that remains in family hands. Nina’s Heavenly Delights articulates an unabashedly utopian political project on two central levels: one multicultural, the other matriarchal. As David Martin-Jones notes, these aspects of the film overlap to a significant degree: ‘lesbianism… acts as a metaphor for Scottish-NRI [Non-Resident Indian] identity’ throughout the narrative.24 Ostensibly at least, the movie takes a markedly non-patriarchal and anti-heteronormative approach to questions of gender and sexual identity. As in significant earlier British Asian movies such as Bhaji on the Beach (Gurinder Chadha, GB, 1993) and Bend it like Beckham (Gurinder Chadha, GB/Ger/USA, 2002), many of Nina’s… female protagonists undertake various forms of self-emancipation and -assertion. This usually involves individual emergence from a male authority figure’s shadow and/or a more general refusal to submit any longer to the received dictates of patriarchal ideology and institutions. Most obviously, her father’s death forces Nina to exorcise her past demons and assume the male deceased’s role as family head. She does so despite various protestations that feminine usurpation of masculine primacy is an unworkable and/or undesirable development. Nina’s mother (Veena Sood) complains that a lack of submissiveness represents the fatal (because unwomanly) flaw in her daughter’s character: ‘Do what you want, Nina, you always do.’ Nina’s brother (Atta Yaqub) asks her, ‘What makes you think you can do this without dad?’ Sanjay, her spurned suitor, taunts Nina with the possibility that he is still capable of placing her in a state of servitude, albeit professional rather than personal, once he and his family assume control of The New Taj: ‘then you can cook for us’. The film’s plot revolves around Nina’s ultimately successful struggle to overcome a range of misogynist objections and obstacles placed in her path. She eventually prevents a newly matriarchal family unit and business from falling under the control of – quite literally – a replacement male Raj. Viewed in this light, a significant implication within Nina’s… opening scene (the flashback depicting an infant heroine being taught to cook by her proud parent) becomes clear. This sequence showcases at the earliest possible opportunity a piece of advice that Nina’s father gives her, and which the film proffers by extension to all of its female protagonists. The counsel in question is feminist, as well as food-based, in nature: ‘no matter what the recipe says, always follow your heart’. Accordingly, and although they each do so in different ways and to different degrees, Nina’s… women characters eventually refuse to respect entrenched patriarchal precedents and priorities any longer. Nina has in fact already kick-started that process several years before the movie’s narrative begins, when she rebelled against her parents’ misguided attempt to make her ‘shrivel away with a man I didn’t love’ by marrying Sanjay. In the present tense of the story, and even before she fully acknowledges her attraction to Lisa, Nina presents her desire to withhold financial control of The New Taj from Raj and Sanjay as a matter of feminine/feminist solidarity and self-sufficiency. She tells her future lover that her business plan represents an infinitely preferable alternative to ‘jump[ing] into bed with the first dodgy geezer who offers you a knockdown price’. Lisa is in turn presented as entirely comfortable with her sexuality, allowing

122 The New Scottish Cinema Nina to learn from and emulate that example. Also suggestive in this regard is the fact that television coverage of the climactic cookery competition includes introductory posed stills of the various restaurants competing to be crowned Glasgow’s best curry house. With the exception of Nina/Lisa and The New Taj, the other competitors are all shown to be run by (and as) variations on the heterosexual nuclear family unit. The fact that two gay women and their fledgling business assumes a rightful place among, and then triumphs over, such competition represents a victory that is cultural as well as culinary in its nature and significance. As noted above, the other central facet of Nina’s… utopian worldview involves the film’s celebratory depiction of Glasgow/Scotland as an increasingly multicultural society. Immigrant Indian influences are understood to have augmented the native culture into which they have settled. Indeed, that positive contribution is figured in quite literal terms, as an enhanced sense of local colour. The movie’s second scene, for instance, introduces Nina (and the viewer) to Scotland. Arriving at Glasgow Airport, a large ‘Welcome’ sign confronts incoming visitors with a striking but austere dun-coloured Highland landscape. Waiting beneath this image to greet his returning friend is Bobbi, who presents an altogether more exuberant chromatic spectacle in kilt and neon pink top. The very next sequence performs a similarly ostentatious form of colour-based counterpoint, one that is then subsequently repeated at various points throughout the narrative. Aerial long shots contrast the greys and muted reds of Glasgow’s climate and city-centre architecture with Bobbi’s multicolour VW Camper van, its bodywork painted with an ornate amalgam of traditional Indian and 1960s psychedelic motifs. Elsewhere, several establishing shots show the flickering neon signage of The New Taj providing the lone dash of colour in a nocturnal Glaswegian skyline. Finally – and most pointedly of all – there is the device which Nina’s… uses on no fewer than six occasions to mark the climactic cook-off ’s approach. Static long shots of the Glasgow cityscape are accompanied by the cheerful chatter of a Scots-Indian DJ who broadcasts on local radio to the city’s Indian community. On one hand, this sound/image juxtaposition implies that Glasgow is a more racially diverse city than it might seem to the naked eye. On the other, use of colour filtering in these shots (and indeed, elsewhere in the movie), gold/orange suffusing one half of the frame, cold blue dominating the other, suggests another idea. A once monolithically white northern European society has become more hospitable and habitable due to the (heart-)warming presence of new immigrant cultures and communities in its midst. Nina’s… untrammelled multicultural optimism also leads the film to argue that Indian characters and culture have benefited from the influence of the Scottish social sphere which they have relocated themselves within. Most obviously, Lisa enables Nina to discover and publicly acknowledge her sexual identity. Bobbi’s romantic relationship with a white Scotsman is presented as both a source of emotional security and creative inspiration: the lovers run a troupe of dancing drag queens who combine Bollywood and Western popular musical influences and performance styles. Nina’s younger sister, Priya (Zoe Henretty), defies the idea that her father’s authority is absolute and forges a sense of autonomous selfhood by becoming a

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prize-winning Scottish Country Dancer, against her parent’s wishes and without his knowledge. Nina’s brother secretly marries a white Scottish girl, pursuing personal happiness instead of professional respectability. He works with his wife in a cashand-carry, having abandoned the university degree in medicine which his family had originally encouraged him to take. Yet Nina’s… is ultimately a much more conservative work than it first appears. For one thing, the film is almost apologetically self-conscious with regard to its bountiful use of fantastic and utopian motifs within the Glasgow/Scotland that the story depicts. Bobbi tells Nina that the drag routines which viewers see his troupe perform represent the dancers’ preparations to audition for roles in a visiting Bollywood feature production, the archly titled Love in a Wet Climate. Accordingly, Nina’s… final scene takes the form of a faux film shoot. The movie’s central characters – young and old, male and female, white and brown, straight and gay – dance in Indian and Scottish national costume in front of a green screen onto which traditional Highland scenery is projected. The self-exculpating assertion here seems to be that simulating diversity in a studio is a potentially powerful way of stimulating it on the street. Pratibha Parmar noted, for example, that she was ‘a great believer in imagining positive endings, which are not entirely beyond the realms of possibility’.25 But notwithstanding this, the extent to which Nina’s… presents Scotland’s ongoing ethnic, racial and social diversification as a weirdly anaesthetised process of cultural change is problematic. In contrast to a movie like Ae Fond Kiss…, the present-day Glasgow that Parmar’s film depicts is an unblemished society. Crosscultural exchange and hybridisation seem to occur, or to have already occurred, a (dramatically convenient) minimum of dissent or friction. The only moment where encounter with the Other provokes any real sense of discomfort is banally humorous in nature. Not used to cooking with Indian ingredients, Lisa rubs raw chilli into her eye. But even here, momentary unpleasantness is carefully engineered to facilitate the emergence of its obverse: an erotic charge is swiftly created when Nina bathes Lisa’s aggravated cornea with cool water. To coin a phrase used by the Indian-Scots compere of the televised cookery contest, Nina’s… is a movie which resolves ‘in true fairytale fashion: the heart wins out’. But the pronounced utopianism of that narrative conclusion seems at least as much a matter of commercial calculation as it does one of fully thought-through political principle. These suspicions are only amplified when the equivocal nature of the film’s apparently anti-patriarchal, anti-heteronormative political stance is identified. Despite surface appearances at plot level, Nina does not so much replace her deceased father in multiple senses (family head, culinary expert, prominent local businessperson) as dutifully reincarnate him. Nina’s… self-consciously flags Bobbi’s drag act, homosexual man mimicking heterosexual woman, as a celebratory example of cultural diversification and innovation. Nina performs Bobbi’s act of passing in reverse: homosexual woman following the wishes, and in the footsteps, of heterosexual man. That fact is suggested by a smattering of images that are fleeting and telling in equal measure: the reflection of Nina’s face merging with that of her father in his framed funeral portrait; the moment when she dons her dead parent’s

124 The New Scottish Cinema white chef ’s jacket in order to display her – or is it his? – culinary mastery on live television. Indeed, ideological equivocation is present within the movie from the very start. Nina’s… ascribes extreme importance to the advice dispensed by the heroine’s father during the opening flashback sequence – ‘no matter what the recipe says, always follow your heart’. Those words are endlessly recalled and repeated by Nina and other characters at pivotal points throughout the narrative. But in terms of Nina’s… ostensibly feminist politics, parental dictum perhaps represents an insurmountable paradox. The film is built, after all, around a man’s instruction to a woman not to follow instructions. Indeed, with the (notable) exception of her decision to acknowledge and act on her sexual orientation, Nina’s major life choices end up conforming to, and carrying out, her father’s prior wishes. Victory in the televised cookery competition fulfils his proud prophecy that ‘someday, you’ll be the best cook in Glasgow’. Similarly, Nina’s belated return to Glasgow after her parent’s death acts out, albeit in an ironic sense, her father’s dream as it is subsequently recalled by Raj: ‘Nina will come home – then I’ll be in Heaven.’ In cultural as well as culinary terms, Nina ultimately proves to be a more submissive than self-assertive daughter. She cooks from the paternal recipe book rather than writing her own. The meal she makes in front of the television cameras (or, as she describes it, ‘what he’d want’) is the wedding banquet that, decades before, her father had deemed an appropriate celebration of his own nuptials. The victory that menu brings belongs, therefore, at least as much to him as it does to her: daughter quite literally becomes her father’s representative on Earth.

Figure 5.2 My heart belongs to daddy: dutiful daughterhood in Nina’s Heavenly Delights Writing about a range of European films that explore the cultural tensions (but also possibilities) provoked by revelations within the diasporic nuclear family of individual members’ same-sex orientation, Daniela Berghahn identifies several different ways in which such narratives are commonly resolved.26 Two of the recurring forms of resolution that she highlights are ‘Otherness… absorbed into a homogenizing

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family of nation’ and the ‘build[ing of] alternative structures of family and kinship… queer[ing] the family of nation’. For all of the reasons outlined above, Nina’s… sits far closer to the conservative former pole than to the more challenging latter. In a film that systematically blurs the boundaries between genuine cultural acceptance and strategic assimilation, the ‘new’ New Taj which Nina and Lisa end up running by the story’s conclusion represents a social settlement far more in tune with its predecessor than surface appearance at first suggests. A similar charge can be brought against the movie’s ultimately unconvincing portrait of easy and ever-escalating social diversification within present-day Scotland more generally. Parmar’s film ‘evades the [local] particularities of social problems… and counters the provocative thrust of its gender politics in a fantasy world of sensuous universalism’.27

Cargo Cargo, described by its Scottish producer Andrea Calderwood as ‘a genuinely international production’,28 spent no fewer than 11 years in development and was a £4.8 million collaborative venture between British (Slate Films), Spanish (Morena Films, Oberon Cinematografia) and Swedish (Hepp Film) partners.29 The movie can be seen as both a representative and an exceptional example of its screenwriter Paul Laverty’s creative practice during the 2000s. Like Bread and Roses, Ae Fond Kiss…, Tickets and The Wind that Shakes the Barley, it explores vexed questions of colonial or neo-colonial socio-economic conflict and exploitation. But unlike those movies, Cargo traces the mechanics of such processes, and possible political responses to them, in an avowedly symbolic manner. It provokes its viewer obliquely – at the level of visual and narrative metaphor – rather than directly – through detailed political debate played out at the level of scripted dialogue. In this sense, Cargo was, in its writer’s words, ‘different from the films I’ve worked [on] with Ken [Loach]… I was trying to do something that was slightly more Gothic, more kind of supernatural… reality is slightly twisted’.30 The following discussion of the work traces the mechanics, and assesses the success, of Laverty’s experimentation with different forms of screenwriting strategy to those with which he is popularly associated. A petty instance of neo-colonial European arrogance sets Cargo’s narrative in train. Browsing for souvenirs in the marketplace of an unnamed African port city, Chris (Daniel Brühl), a young white German, steals a piece of native craftwork that he has been refused permission to buy. After a scuffle with local police, he finds himself on the run and passport-less. Chris ends up in a dockside dive, where he sees a crew of European sailors strike an illegal deal to transport exotic birds back to Europe in the hold of their cargo ship, the Gull. Following the men back to that vessel, Chris stows away on board, where his presence is quickly discovered. Hauled before the Gull’s taciturn, enigmatic captain, Brookes (Peter Mullan), the young man is offered free and safe passage in return for his labour during the voyage home. But the trip proves no pleasure cruise. Chris is warned by Baptist (Luis Tosar), the Gull’s most sympathetic crew member, to close his eyes and ears to all that transpires on board. Despite that warning, the young man discovers that he and the birds are not

126 The New Scottish Cinema the boat’s only unauthorised passengers: the crew hunt down and throw over the side desperate African stowaways who have secreted themselves in the vessel’s hold. Brookes tells Chris that such terrible deeds are natural acts of self-preservation. Years before, captain and crew lost a previous commission because their vessel was discovered to be carrying illegal immigrants without the sailors’ knowledge. Since that time, the men have stopped at nothing in order to prevent that trauma repeating. They have murdered shipmates, and Brookes has even slain his only son, in order to conceal evidence of their systematic slaughter of stowaways. Brookes then invites a morally repulsed Chris, who by now knows too much, to join the crew and save his skin. The young man seems to succumb, pushing Subira (Nikki Amuka-Bird), a female stowaway he had previously helped, overboard to her apparent death. But Chris repents immediately, leaping after his victim and drowning in the ocean waters. A distraught Brookes (who saw Chris as a possible surrogate son) orders the crew to abandon ship and ‘save your miserable souls’. He frees the smuggled birds from the Gull’s hold and weeps over the retrieved corpse of Chris. Subira, who has somehow managed to clamber back on deck, strikes out in the ship’s lifeboat for the European coastline now clearly visible on the horizon. From its earliest moments, Cargo frames itself as an act of witnessing. Brookes opens the narrative with the following line of voiceover dialogue: ‘My name is Captain Brookes. I am a witness. I am part of the filth of it all.’ The film explores several possible meanings of the term ‘witness’, in order to examine contemporary questions of neo-colonial inequality and exploitation. Speaking literally, Chris and Brookes are witnesses in a mundane, and essentially passive, sense: people who just happen to be present at an event where and when it unfolds. Brookes is repeatedly associated with this sense of witnessing. He is a man who tries to remain morally and emotionally disengaged from the human spectacles that accidentally litter his path through life. For instance, when Chris first steals on board the Gull, Cargo cuts to a point-of-view shot of the deck as it would be seen from Brookes’ vantage point on the bridge. The implication is that the Captain espies the young man but chooses not to intervene. A similar edit occurs later, when Chris steals food from the ship’s kitchen in order to feed the stowaways hidden in the hold. Again, the young man is seen traversing the deck from what, logically speaking, must be Brookes’ position on the bridge. But again, the older man says and does nothing in response. In one possible reading, these sequences suggest the last remaining vestiges of Brookes’ humanity. While the Captain has convinced himself that his repeated acts of slaughter are necessary ones of self-preservation, he does not actively seek out such bloodletting. Alternatively, Brookes’ deliberate failure to act either way could be viewed as a symptom of moral cauterisation. He has self-mutilated by becoming the most immovable kind of witness imaginable: a bystander who remains perfectly neutral in relation to all human transactions set before him, personal or political, appropriate or amoral. In the Captain’s own words, the murders his crew commits are ‘neither right nor wrong’ in the eyes of a man who has successfully divorced himself from any substantive form of personal interest or involvement in the affairs of others. Physical survival now represents Brookes’ only goal.

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The Captain’s utter selfishness points towards another central way in which Cargo defines the act of witnessing. The film repeatedly suggests that to be a witness to something is to find oneself placed in a position of danger. Most obviously, this is so in a physical sense. Cargo deploys many elements and motifs from the thriller and conspiracy movie genres, constructing Chris as a paradigmatic example of the questing hero who stumbles on, and eventually solves, a central narrative enigma. The closer the young man gets to the mystery’s heart, the greater the risk he runs. On a basic commonsensical level, Baptist’s advice – ‘lock the doors, shut your eyes, and go to sleep’ – is self-evidently good. For that reason, Chris spins a long series of lies and half-truths that all work to deny his status as a witness. ‘I didn’t see a thing’, or words to that effect, repeatedly spill from his lips. Yet Baptist also comes in time to personify another cautionary lesson about the dangers of witnessing. Cargo uses his character to suggest that the primary risks a witness runs are long-term and psychological, not immediate and physical, in nature. Baptist’s unhappy fate illustrates the film’s view that what one sees in life is less important than what one does in response to those sights. In Cargo’s latter stages, Baptist acknowledges the extent to which he has been dehumanised as a result of his past decisions to remain a witness, in the literal and passive senses of the term, while the Gull’s crew killed without compunction. Baptist’s religious faith, a sustaining belief in his and humankind’s capacity for good, has been obliterated as a result. He confesses that ‘I used to baptise people, but I believe in nothing anymore’. A man who once anointed individuals with water in a ritual acknowledgement of shared humanity latterly refuses this principle by allowing others to be annihilated with the same element. Brookes’ comparable moral inaction/inversion scars him in a similar way. Laverty conceived of the Captain’s character as a man who has ‘travelled the world, seen how it works… and in a way is kind of poisoned by this’.31 Irreparably damaged by all he has seen and done (or perhaps better, all he has seen and done nothing about), Brookes now subscribes to a warped personal code that fuses Conradian and Darwinian elements. For the weary sailor, an all-too-thin veneer of moral restraint cannot adequately conceal the fact that humanity is at root just another animal species: as red in tooth and claw as any other, and ruled utterly by the survival of the fittest. Brookes’ killing of his offspring shows that human beings are quite capable of feeding on their own when necessary, in order to die another day. In this way, Cargo introduces and exploits one last meaning of the term ‘witness’. Brookes and his crew are living witnesses, flesh-and-blood exemplifications of a wider truth, namely, humankind’s innate capacity for animalistic amorality. This is the ‘filth’ that the Captain identifies, and admits to being ‘part of ’, as the film opens. It is probably no accident, then, that the Gull’s crew are multinational as well as motley, ‘a bunch’, in director Clive Gordon’s words, ‘of hard-bitten misfits picked up by [Brookes] on his journeys around the world’.32 Because they hail from everywhere (and thus nowhere in particular), the sailors can fully personify the disturbing implications of Cargo’s numerous avian metaphors. The film repeatedly compares human beings to wild animals because it perceives that the former all-toooften act, or are forced to act, as such. The African stowaways are as powerless and

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Figure 5.3 The descent of man: avian metaphor in Cargo frightened as the caged birds they share temporary living space with. Baptist (who is the ship’s cook) tosses gutted chicken entrails overboard, a sly echo of his shipmates’ jettisoning of defenceless would-be migrants. The discomfiting symbolism of the Gull’s name is made clear by the contents of Brookes’ private sketchbook. Its pages overflow with savagely expressionistic illustrations of predatory gulls that morph successively into distorted human faces (including the Captain’s own). Equally repulsive painted images of ravenous seabirds adorn the walls of Brookes’ private quarters (or perhaps better, nest). The Captain explains to Chris that he and his crew have chosen to renounce the illusion of human exceptionality, accepting and embracing instead the ‘true’ nature of a species of ruthless biped predators: ‘Gulls, gulls, gulls: self-centred, single-minded survivors. Will you gull with us?’ As one critic correctly notes, Cargo’s chastened view of human nature is therefore one in which ‘no-one is remotely innocent… only degrees of malfeasance vary’.33 Thus, when he asks Chris if he is prepared to ‘gull’, Brookes deliberately subjects the young man to the same moral test that the middle-aged sailor himself failed years before. At this crucial juncture within the film, Brookes compels Chris to become a witness in all the senses of the term outlined above. He physically pins the young man to the window of the ship’s bridge, telling him that ‘I want you to see something’. Cargo then cuts to Chris’s horrified point-of-view as a terrified stowaway is first beaten, then bailed overboard. In forcing the young man to witness physically, Brookes makes Chris decide what kind of living witness the young man is prepared to become in response to what he is confronted with. The Captain, by now in full-on Origin of Species mode, growls that ‘this is how it works: you’re either with us or against us’. Chris finally manages, however, not to side with the crew and the nightmarish vision of human nature which they instantiate. In a work that makes pointed use of Biblical allusion and metaphor, the lead character is in possession of a Christian name in more ways than one, identifying him with the celebrated martyr who helps pilgrims to complete difficult journeys across water.

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Cargo also uses the character of Chris as an empathy-inducing proxy for the unenviable position of powerless, penniless, illegal Third World migrants to Europe. His situation – stranded without money, papers or local knowledge in a strange country – is not dissimilar to theirs. Individual white European experience thus comes to speak for a collective black African equivalent. The film’s African stowaways are fleeting presences, barely seen or heard, and unable to speak English when they do appear. Instead, Chris is the one seen negotiating a dramatically and emotionally involving version of the situation that his fellow stowaways also face. He, like them, is initially secreted in the Gull’s hold; he, like them, is hunted down and held over the ship’s side by the murderous crew. In this way, Cargo encourages its viewer to identify with racially and economically oppressed non-European characters (and by extension, entire cultures) which the film does not depict at any significant length. The same desire underpins a recurring (but narratively redundant) establishing shot that introduces several scenes within the movie. Here, the camera mimics the physical position of a recently jettisoned stowaway, floating on the ocean’s surface and watching the Gull sail off into the distance. The presence of such devices within Cargo indicates the film’s acute awareness of a politically and philosophically thorny dilemma that confronts it. The problem in question is explicitly identified at one point by the cynically observant Brookes: if selfishness is indeed an innate element of the human condition, then most individuals will be inured to the suffering of others, unfortunate lives that do not seem to impinge directly on our own. The Captain notes, with equal parts admiration and astonishment, how Chris seems to be – or to become – different. The young man is the ‘one against the gang’, a lone voice that stands out from, and thus in the way of, the Gull’s survivalist regime. Brookes cannot comprehend why a latterday Saint – Chris(topher) – is ‘willing to risk your life for people you don’t even know’. But the Captain’s logic poses a challenge for his creators. If Brookes is correct, then audiences may well fail to be moved – emotionally or ideologically – by the African stowaways’ plight. Viewers are, after all, prevented from ‘knowing’ these ‘people’ (and their native cultures) due to the short amount of time that they actually spend onscreen. For this reason, Chris must be an extraordinary figure in one sense – the good man who says ‘Enough’ – but a representative one in another – someone whose personal experience and situation satisfactorily glosses those of other characters and cultures. Only after Chris dies, for instance, does Cargo permit direct and explicit viewer identification with an African character’s physical and psychological perspective. The film ends with a close shot of Subira rowing alone towards the coast of Europe. Chris’s unlikely status as a cipher for African experience is not the only way in which Cargo works in a counterintuitive fashion. Co-lead actor Peter Mullan proposed the film as ‘one great big allegory about globalisation and what it does to people. The ship is very much the symbol of the rotting vessel of capitalism trundling through the waters destroying any weakness that it sees.’34 Yet a movie undoubtedly interested in themes of neo-colonial exploitation and inequality pursues little direct investigation of the practical mechanics that underpin those

130 The New Scottish Cinema phenomena. The closest Cargo comes in this regard is an unanswered question posed sneeringly and in passing by Brookes. The Gull’s legitimate cargo is African cocoa; the Captain asks why Chris has never questioned the fact that European shops are not therefore full of chocolate bars made and sold by African companies. But instead of the quasi-documentary approach which detailed pursuit of this line of questioning might necessitate, Cargo adopts a parable-like approach to its central political questions, advancing answers to them by metaphor, rather than manifesto. This fact is indicated by the Biblical source (Luke’s Gospel) of the enigmatic graffito that Chris encounters while scrubbing the ship’s toilets: ‘For nothing is secret that shall not be made manifest.’ Ultimately, the ‘secret’ that Cargo makes ‘manifest’, the thing lurking in the Gull’s dark hold (Brookes asks Chris repeatedly if the young man knows what lies hidden there), is not a factually detailed account of the material workings and ideological underpinnings of a neo-colonial global economic system. Rather, it is the sight and stench of Brookes’ ‘filth’, the feral aspects of human nature that allow the species to first construct, and then subsequently countenance, grossly exploitative socioeconomic relations between individuals and entire societies. The Captain thus constitutes a deeply troubling figure for his viewer and creators alike. While Brookes is profoundly ‘wrong’ in a moral sense, this does not preclude the possibility that his bleak worldview may be ‘right’ in multiple others.

True North A metaphorically loaded imbalance of power between white European sailors who smuggle and non-white, non-European stowaways who are smuggled also forms a political and plot-based cornerstone for True North, the debut feature of Germanbased writer/director Steve Hudson. Benefiting from no fewer than eight sources of European production finance, True North was a $4.7 million collaborative venture between majority producer Ariel Films (Germany), Makar Productions (Scotland) and Samson Films (Ireland).35 Hudson identified two central inspirations behind his film.36 Firstly, the death by suffocation of 58 Chinese illegal immigrants concealed in the back of a lorry travelling from the Continent to the port of Dover in June 2000. Secondly, the ongoing contemporary decimation of the Scottish fishing industry, witnessed at first hand by the director during a visit to the northeastern Scottish fishing town of Fraserburgh. True North accordingly narrates the unhappy story of a father-and-son fishing trawler, the ironically named Providence, fighting a losing battle to meet monthly mortgage repayments. Sean (Martin Compston), the son of the boat’s unnamed Skipper (Gary Lewis), assumes responsibility for managing the parlous family finances because his father is wilfully blind to those pressing matters. But it is clearly a matter of when, not if, the Providence will go under. Sean’s understandable fears for the future lead him to follow the dangerous advice offered by Riley (Peter Mullan), a cheerfully unscrupulous member of the boat’s small crew. Riley puts Sean in touch with a people trafficker when the Providence docks in the Belgian port of Ostend to sell its most recent catch. In return for a lucrative sum of money, and without his father’s prior knowledge, Sean agrees to transport a group

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of illegal Chinese migrants back to the UK in the Providence’s hold. This illicit human cargo is quickly loaded onto the ship, with one unnoticed exception: Su Li (Angel Li), a frightened prepubescent girl who conceals herself above deck. The Providence’s voyage home then proves disastrous. Bad weather delays the crossing, as does the Skipper’s fruitless pursuit of elusive fish shoals that repeatedly show up on the vessel’s sonar equipment. Despite Riley’s increasing concern, Sean becomes more and more determined to see the pair’s scheme through: a successful catch might extend the stowaways’ agonies in the hold, but it will provide useful cover with Customs officials once the Providence finally reaches Scotland. However, worsening conditions eventually force Sean to confess all to his father: one of the migrants in the hold dies, and the ship’s cook (Steven Robertson), previously unaware of Sean and Riley’s scheme, discovers Su Li. But it transpires that the Skipper has been aware of the stowaways’ presence all along: he waits until Sean and Riley are asleep before murdering his luckless passengers by flooding the hold. The next morning, the Providence’s nets are hauled up to reveal a grotesque catch of fish intermingled with human flesh. The Skipper protests that his concern was to protect ship and son alike. He then makes to throw Su Li, the only survivor, overboard, but is killed by the cook. True North then finally reaches Scottish shores: Riley puts Su Li on a bus and gives her the blood money he and Sean received back in Belgium. True North’s defining characteristic, both in terms of plot and politics, is the film’s deliberately one-sided focus on, and consequent alignment of audience identification with, the character perspectives of Scottish smugglers, rather than smuggled Chinese. Hudson explained how: There have been several very strong films that have told illegal immigrants’ stories from their point of view. What really interested me, though, was to make a film from the point of view of people smugglers.37 With the notable exception of Su Li, who cannot speak English and is named only in True North’s end credits, viewers see the trafficked migrants infrequently, impersonally, and almost always from the physical (and, by implication, political) perspective of Caucasian European characters. The unfortunate Chinese become a collective character that cowers in the back of a dark lorry before dying in the dank hold of a ship. But this narrative approach runs a number of significant ideological risks. The undifferentiated group identity imposed upon the migrants arguably lessens the impact of their eventual demise. The semi-individuated Su Li’s execution would be dramatically challenging, because difficult to comprehend in terms other than as a concrete human loss. The mass murder of her anonymous compatriots, by contrast, represents something more tolerable: a grandstanding set piece of wouldbe progressive symbolism. True North clearly wishes to underscore the extent to which much popular and political discourse around the vexed subject of economic migration into Europe routinely dehumanises those who come to the continent in search of a better life. Yet the film scrupulously avoids the most emotionally

132 The New Scottish Cinema distressing form of plot resolution through which that point could be made. It could be argued that Su Li’s survival leaves viewers discomfited – but not too discomfited – by the ideological implications of the narrative they have just seen. Other dangers attach themselves to True North’s concentration on those who smuggle, not those smuggled. The film runs the risk, for example, of inadvertently reproducing aspects of the discourses of anti-migrant racism that it is eager to condemn. While deployed for very different ideological ends, True North’s keynote depiction of its Chinese characters – an amorphous, alien mass desperate to hit land, ‘our’ land – has potential affinities with the stock imagery of tabloid journalism and far-right demagoguery. Riley’s casual racism is, for instance, underpinned by a personal refusal to see foreign bodies in fully human (because fully individualised) terms. To his mind, the trafficking of people is excusable because ‘there’s millions of Chinese, billions of Chinese… all we’re doing is bringing the next generation of pot-washers into the takeaway: where’s the harm in that?’ Riley’s sexual predilections also speak of his instinctual and inhumane habit of reducing non-white human flesh to nothing more than a commodity that passes through endless pairs of Caucasian hands. Visiting an Ostend brothel, the priapic sailor refuses a white European prostitute’s advances, indicating to the madam of the premises (who is also white) that he ‘is looking for something a bit different’. The ‘difference’ desired takes the form of two sex workers of black African descent. Later in the film, Riley’s taste in filmed pornography also implies his blithe ascription of varying degrees of humanity to individuals based on the colour of their skin. Whiling away idle hours at sea with Best of Bangkok Hardcore: Jade Anal III, Riley sees, not people, but cuts of exotic performing meat: ‘look at them, Thai girls… they can pack it away’. He attempts to justify his noxious attitude and actions by arguing that Oriental objects actually benefit from the dehumanisation which Caucasian consumers subject them to: ‘she gets paid for it; she feeds her babies through it; what’s the alternative?’ Although True North consciously rejects Riley’s outpourings, the (presumably unintended) audiovisual parallel between the writhing Asian bodies briefly visible on the sailor’s TV screen and the shivering ones shown trapped in the Providence’s hold is troubling. Both groups of exploited foreigners remain essentially anonymous masses: heard moaning, whether in simulated pleasure or very real pain, but only fleetingly seen. The challenge that True North creates for itself, then, involves finding a way to critique racist European assumptions about the migrant Other without inadvertently copying or confirming these itself. Despite the possible concerns raised above, it is perfectly possible to argue that Steve Hudson’s film proves ultimately successful in this regard. One positive consequence of True North’s deliberate concentration on the Scottish smugglers’ perspective, for example, is that it allows the film to explore a variety of local reactions to ever-increasing levels of global migration. Native attitudes on display range from clueless (cook), through compromised (Sean), to downright callous (Riley in the film’s early stages, the Skipper at its end). The idea of the Providence as a metaphor for Scottish society, with its crew personifying dominant domestic views of the new arrivals presenting themselves at the country’s borders, is suggested by

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various establishing shots used during the movie’s opening titles. These introductory images of the Providence at sea and docking at Ostend take care to highlight not only the ship’s name, but also the proximity of a painted St Andrew’s Cross to this. It is thus implied from the outset that the crew’s varying responses to their illegal cargo’s covert presence represent in microcosm Scottish social attitudes towards recently arrived and expanding migrant communities. Sean and Riley, for instance, personify an economically complicit perspective: they stand to benefit materially from the stowaways’ safe arrival in Scotland. Because of this, they systematically conceal the very fact of that group’s existence, and thus confirm its utter vulnerability, a community powerless because deliberately rendered invisible by those who might have instead chosen to act as humane hosts. Alternatively, the Skipper is gripped by a Fortress Europe mindset, one ruthless and incredulous in equal measure. Bewildered and affronted, the aging fisherman asks Su Li, when she finally appears before the crew on deck, ‘What are you doing here?’ For the Skipper, migration is quite literally a matter of ‘them’ or ‘us’. Rather like the character of Brookes in Cargo, he is perfectly willing to murder an immigrant child in order to protect his own family interests (i.e., the Providence). The Skipper’s bloodthirsty intent extends populist discourses of protectionism to their logical, and profoundly disturbing, extreme.

Figure 5.4 Get your story straight: True North comments on the dehumanisation of economic migrants True North’s determined dramatic concentration on its Scottish characters could be said to successfully highlight the dehumanising consequences of anti-migrant political discourses in other ways, too. Take the painstaking choice of words that defines the conversation in which Sean and an unnamed Belgian people trafficker agree terms. The migrants are systematically reduced to ‘things’, ‘something’ and

134 The New Scottish Cinema even ‘it’ within the pair’s profit-centred exchange. Most importantly of all, it is only during the movie’s first two-and-a-half minutes that Chinese characters other than Su Li are clearly heard to speak. In these opening moments, digital video footage recorded by those transporting the migrants as far as Ostend narrates, straight to camera, a succession of heartrending stories of individual deprivation and disaster: farmers forcibly evicted from family land by big businesses, striking workers jailed by a police state. Yet these affecting tales of woe are immediately revealed to be carefully constructed falsehoods. A brusque off-screen prompter berates the visibly exhausted migrants with the instruction that ‘you have to have a story’ in order to remain in, rather than simply reach, countries like the United Kingdom. In the first telling distinction drawn between Su Li and her compatriots, it is only she who insists on relating the real reasons behind her unhappy voyage: ‘I have to go and earn money… my family borrowed everything to pay for me to go… I have to work to pay it back’. The unseen prompter’s scornful retort is that the bald truth of non-white economic need and aspiration will not count for nearly enough in the collective mind of the girl’s prospective British hosts: ‘Who gives a shit? You need to have a story.’ True North thus suggests that gaining physical entry to Scotland (and/ or Europe more generally) is not the main challenge which present-day migrants face. Being recognised and respected as fully human once in the Promised Land represents a far greater struggle. A troubling assumption structures the traffickers’ coaching of Chinese characters to exhibit empathy-inducing (because extraordinary) excesses of emotion and experience for European viewers’ benefit. An individual ‘story’, however risible, is the only way in which the migrants have any chance of overcoming the semi-human status that will be accorded to them as a matter of course if/when they are (un)lucky enough to reach their intended destination. Of course, special pleading on behalf of its migrant protagonists is exactly what True North refuses to provide domestic audiences with. The film’s ideological address is notably uncompromising in this regard. The advice of Su Li’s unseen interrogator urges the viewer to examine their own possible prejudices with regard to the issue of economic migration. True North self-consciously differentiates itself from a prominent trend within mainstream contemporary European and Anglophone cinema tackling this subject matter. Important films such as In this World (Michael Winterbottom, GB, 2002), Dirty Pretty Things (Stephen Frears, GB, 2002) or Welcome (Philippe Lioret, Fr, 2009) respond to First World Caucasian prejudice and protectionism by ensuring that their fictional immigrants ‘have a story’ that will ingratiate those foreign bodies to domestic gatekeepers initially unaligned or unsympathetic vis-à-vis the issue of mass migration. In other words, narratives of extraordinary individual misery, endurance and/or transcendence are often deployed as emotional and political bait within this kind of progressively minded cinema. True North, by contrast, asks just what it is about popular European beliefs surrounding migration and race that makes such well-intentioned snaring a perceived necessity in the first place. Steve Hudson’s movie deliberately dehumanises its migrant protagonists in order to make domestic viewers ask themselves if they are instinctually minded to do the same. Watching

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True North, it is perfectly possible to find oneself in the same boat as the crew of the Providence in more ways than one.

The Last King of Scotland The best-known 2000s Scottish film to examine issues of ethnicity and race is also the most ideologically problematic work of this kind. The Last King of Scotland was adapted from Giles Foden’s 1998 novel of the same name, financed by FilmFour and National Lottery production franchise DNA, distributed by Fox Searchlight and Twentieth Century Fox International, and co-produced by Andrea Calderwood’s Slate Films and Cowboy Films.38 Director Kevin Macdonald’s first foray into feature-length fiction filmmaking proved to be a notable international commercial success, garnering Forest Whitaker a Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of the notorious Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Set during the early-to-mid 1970s, The Last King of Scotland depicts a young man’s flight, both literal and spiritual, from a modern-day form of predestination: a douce existence of institutionalised middle-class Scottish respectability. Newly graduated with a degree in medicine, Nicholas Garrigan (James McAvoy) is expected to submit himself to a life already mapped out by others: proud parents blithely assume that their son will take up the role of junior partner in his father’s general medical practice. A desperate Nicholas spins the globe in his childhood bedroom, vowing to flee to the first country he lays his finger on. One false start later (Canada seems too much like frying pan to Scotland’s fire) this game of chance sets the young man on his way to Uganda. Once there, he assists at a rural medical practice run by an idealistic English doctor, Merrit (Adam Kotz), and the latter’s wife, Sarah (Gillian Anderson). Complacently ignorant of the political, economic and cultural complexities of Uganda’s colonial past and newly independent present, Nicholas is impressed by a barnstorming speech given at a local political rally by the country’s newly installed military dictator, President Idi Amin (Forest Whitaker). Scottish doctor and Ugandan dictator are then thrown together by chance: Nicholas is compelled to treat a minor injury that Amin sustains in a road accident. Taken by Nicholas’ professionalism – and even more so by his Scottishness – Uganda’s ruler invites the young man to become his personal physician. Easily swayed because morally feckless, the young Scot accepts the offer and moves to Kampala, anticipating a life there of indolent white mischief. But matters unfold differently. At first, Amin treats Nicholas as, in the dictator’s words, ‘my own son’. Yet in time the two men’s relationship collapses utterly, due to two combining factors. On one hand, Amin’s charming, and often comic, public persona conceals paranoid psychosis. On the other, Nicholas’ professional respectability hides unsavoury priapism: he is more often hypocritical than Hippocratic in both word and deed. Though Nicholas claims to be in Uganda in order to do ‘whatever I can… to help’ an infant independent polity and its economically deprived population, an enraged Amin glosses the young Scots adventurer’s real motivation with all-tooaccurate scorn during The Last King of Scotland’s penultimate scene: ‘I will go to Africa and play the White Man with the natives.’ While Amin imagines treachery all around,

136 The New Scottish Cinema endlessly culling his inner circle as a result, Nicholas actively draws himself into the firing line by pursuing a clandestine affair with one of the President’s wives, Kay (Kerry Washington). When that liaison is discovered, Amin has his secret police decapitate his spouse before attempting to ritually torture and kill Nicholas at Entebbe Airport in the midst of the notorious 1976 hostage crisis there. The confusion that reigns at the airport allows the Scot to escape, however, with the assistance of Doctor Junju (David Oyelowo), the black Ugandan medic whom he previously supplanted as Idi’s personal physician. The Last King of Scotland ends with a bloodied Nicholas smuggled onto a plane transporting freed hostages out of Uganda, Junju’s exhortation that he ‘tell the world the truth about Amin’ ringing in his ears. The Last King of Scotland is a troubling film. It confirms, whether consciously or not, colonialist caricatures of Amin and Africa alike. While director Kevin Macdonald acknowledged the fact that the dictator was/is popularly deployed as convenient shorthand for ‘everything that is rotten and horrible in the western imagination of Africa’,39 his movie still manages to reproduce many of that outside perspective’s most lurid and self-serving elements. Although The Last King of Scotland’s narrative runs to some 117 minutes, only the first three of these are actually set in Scotland. This has led some critics to argue that the country’s ‘centrality… in the novel as a place of ancestral roots, retreat, moral revisioning, and fugitive rebirth is lost in the film’.40 But the movie’s brief Scotland-set introduction is worthy of note because it proves intensely significant for the Uganda-based narrative that succeeds it. Arch depiction of Nicholas’ unhappy home life introduces a recurring motif which The Last King of Scotland exploits tirelessly, as a way to advance its preferred reading of a significant post-colonial moment (the mid-twentieth-century end of the British Empire) as a white man’s nightmare. The motif in question takes the form of an anxious awareness of the violence – private or public, psychological or physical – always waiting to be released within cultures dominated by patriarchal and patrilineal ideologies and institutions. As early as the film’s second scene, The Last King of Scotland introduces a disquieting sense of the oppression that patriarchs routinely visit upon their male progeny. The joyful abandon of introductory images in which Nicholas sheds robes and inhibitions alike, marking his graduation by skinny-dipping in a Scottish loch, is swiftly drowned by a flood of filial repression and resentment. A crushingly staid family dinner reveals the threat to personal autonomy which Nicholas feels he must flee. Mr and Mrs Garrigan calmly subsume their son’s nascent individuality within his male parent’s ossified equivalent. Nicholas’ mother pointedly addresses both men as ‘Doctor Garrigan’. A single identity encompasses two individuals at once, the older man’s extending to, and engulfing, the younger’s. When Dr Garrigan Senior promises his mute offspring ‘a long future together’, he refers to more than just a particular professional arrangement, father and son working together in the family practice. Parental banality accidentally uncovers a chilling prospect: Nicholas will forever be denied the chance to be his own man, in all possible senses of that cliché. On one level, then, The Last King of Scotland can be understood as an Oedipal drama played out across two continents. The film certainly goes to great lengths to

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underscore a central dramatic irony: the fate Nicholas flees in his home country is one he finds again in a foreign land. Take, for instance, the young man’s innocent mistake when he first meets Sarah. Nicholas addresses her as ‘Doctor Merrit’ when this is in fact her husband’s title. Although Sarah’s marriage is swiftly revealed to be an unfulfilling one, she resists her attraction to Nicholas and his unscrupulous advances, constrained by the knowledge that ‘my husband is a good man’. Thus rebuffed, the would-be seducer is forced to concede that ‘my father is the same’. This is but the first of many parallels that The Last King of Scotland draws between two apparently dissimilar national cultures. Sarah’s chaste dutifulness proves that Uganda, like Scotland, is a place where a person’s private desires can be subject to the dictates of a male authority figure, whether the latter consciously intends to be so or not. The most obvious example of this parallel occurs, however, in the evolution of Nicholas’s relationship with Amin. Early in their friendship, the young man revels in the submersion of his identity within that of Uganda’s leader, enjoying this as much as he had previously resented the long shadow cast by his own father. While being chauffeured to Kampala for the first time in Amin’s presidential limousine, Nicholas is amused by the spectacle of smiling, waving children who line his route. Even more diverting is the collective mistake which prompts this unexpected local homage: ‘they think you are the President’, Amin’s soon-to-be-executed Minister for Health informs the smirking Scottish doctor. Later, a visibly self-satisfied Nicholas luxuriates in reflected patriarchal and political power. He is delegated by Amin to meet representatives of international pharmaceutical companies on the President’s behalf. But no-one tells the meeting’s other attendees: an entire Ugandan Parliamentary conference room is taken back when double doors swing open to reveal a slight, white, be-suited Scotsman rather than a burly, black, uniformed African head of state. Indeed, Amin quickly starts to speak of himself as a surrogate father to Nicholas. In so doing, he underscores the uncanny similarities between their relationship and the young man’s with his biological male parent back in Scotland. Nicholas is painfully slow in understanding just how dangerous such parallels are. Once he realises the extent of his peril, he vainly attempts to reclaim personal autonomy and retreat to his country of birth: ‘I’m Nicholas Garrigan, and I’m from Scotland – it’s my home.’ But Amin swipes that protest aside with the assertion that ‘you are like my own son’. As in Scotland, so in Uganda: Nicholas’ wishes count for nothing when set beside the filial obedience which patriarchal authority demands. The depth of Amin’s rage when he discovers Nicholas’s affair with Kay stems from the fact that Garrigan’s adultery obliterates Idi’s preferred view of the young Scot: as progeny, not peer. The cuckolded despot roars that ‘I am the father of this nation, and you have most grossly offended your father’. In light of all this, Nicholas’ last-minute escape from the clutches of Amin/Africa comes to represent two things at once. On one hand, it is simply the means by which the terrified Scot clings on to existence. But on the other, it also signifies his acceptance of an idea that he refused to countenance at The Last King of Scotland’s outset: the notion that the structuring terms of Nicholas’ existence are the incontestable preserve of males older and more powerful than he is. As

138 The New Scottish Cinema Nicholas admits to Kay, the conclusion he is forced to draw from his experience in Uganda (and his abortive father/son relationship with Amin most of all) is that: ‘I shouldn’t be here – I should be in Scotland with my dad.’ Garrigan’s personal journey is thus one which eventually comes full circle. The Last King of Scotland starts with the character’s calculated flight from home, and ends with him relieved to have scrambled on board a chartered flight bound back to it. The burnt hand teaches best: Nicholas now knows not to contest his allotted place – physical, psychological and patriarchal – within the wider world. To read The Last King of Scotland in this way is, to a large extent, to echo the preferred understanding of the film’s creators. Co-writer Jeremy Brock, for instance, argued that the movie told the story of a vulnerable young man ‘seduced by a father figure he’s been yearning for, because his relationship with his own dad is very limited’.41 Similarly, director Kevin Macdonald glossed his work as ‘the story [of] a love affair between two men’.42 But such comments do not acknowledge the extent to which The Last King of Scotland’s private patriarchal conflicts also advance an imperialist definition of the relationship which should hold between Ugandan (and, for that matter, Scottish) identity and an innately superior, because more mature, British counterpart. In addition to creating a dramatically involving account of a young adventurer’s picaresque travels and travails, Macdonald explained that, in his view, The Last King of Scotland ‘tests the notion’ of Amin as ‘a Conradian shorthand for all that was wrong with Africa’.43 Tellingly in this regard, the motif of tortured father/son dynamics dominates the historical component of the film as much as it does the fictional one. For Amin and Nicholas, read Uganda and Scotland: both are figured as prodigal sons set free to make disastrous mistakes within the wider world. Macdonald went so far as to claim that he ‘wouldn’t have made’ The Last King of Scotland if ‘it had just been about Idi Amin and Uganda… the experience I understand is what it’s like to be a young Scot going to Africa… so the film is told from Garrigan’s point of view and is about the relationship between Britain and Uganda’.44 Elsewhere, the director emphasised his view that this film ‘isn’t about Uganda, it’s about the relationship between a Ugandan and a Scot’.45 Similarly, producer Andrea Calderwood has presented The Last King of Scotland as: a completely Scottish story… a very Scottish phenomenon, because of the colonial legacy, this idea of leaving Scotland for an adventure, fundamentally, and having an impact on the country you go to that’s not necessarily positive. It’s a classic Scottish colonial story… the history of Africa has been affected by Scottish adventurers… It’s a real theme in [the film], the legacy of colonialism and the impact of dictatorship, all that stuff that a lot of countries in the world are still dealing with. It’s a fundamentally Scottish story I would say.46 But the misdeeds that errant Scottish and Ugandan children egg each other on to commit within Macdonald’s movie ultimately legitimise the British patriarchal authority that those figures explicitly seek to contest throughout that narrative. That

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position underpins both The Last King of Scotland’s dismissive construction of newly independent Uganda’s status vis-à-vis the British Empire, and secondarily, the film’s understanding of Scotland’s place within the post-1707 unitary British state. The idea that Nicholas and Amin should be read as personifications of their respective national identities might be dismissed as a form of critical psychosis. After all, the most obvious assertions within The Last King of Scotland that one man can speak for (and of) an entire nation emanate from the unhinged Ugandan dictator. Such delusions of grandeur are suggested during Amin’s first speaking appearance in the film, at the political rally where he exultantly informs a cheering native crowd that ‘I am you’. Later, while smothering Nicholas in a bear hug, Amin utters the words ‘Uganda embraces you’. The Last King of Scotland clearly uses its imagined Idi to argue – ostensibly, at least – that wholesale conflation of a single person with an entire polity is a psychologically and politically disastrous act. Yet elsewhere, and with notable consistency, Macdonald’s film advances its own version of Amin’s dubious form of national identity politics.

Figure 5.5 Swapping sartorial signifiers of post-Britishness: Garrigan and Amin’s first meeting in The Last King of Scotland Several scenes within The Last King of Scotland indicate the extent to which this is so. Take the sequence in which Nicholas and Amin first meet. Doctor treats dictator, and a budding friendship is born. Nicholas unbuttons his long-sleeved shirt to reveal beneath it a t-shirt bearing the St Andrew’s Cross. A delighted Amin immediately links the two men’s respective national cultures with the assertion that ‘if I could be anything instead of a Ugandan, I would be a Scot’. Sartorial signifiers of nationhood are then swapped: Amin asks for Nicholas’ t-shirt and offers his Ugandan Army shirt in return. Later, Nicholas witnesses the strange spectacle of a Ugandan choir serenading Amin (garbed at this point in Highland military dress) with the popular Scots ballad ‘Loch Lomond’. Towards the film’s end, a grandstanding Idi entertains international journalists with the news that ‘my good friends the Scottish people have seen how I have defeated the English here and they want me to do the same for

140 The New Scottish Cinema them there’. The Last King of Scotland clearly plays these incongruous ideas of crosscultural equivalence for overt laughs. At the same time, however, the film covertly proposes, in all seriousness, an idea of Uganda and Scotland as interchangeable entities, two nations definitively (and desirably) colonised by the British imperial project. Elizabeth Heffelfinger and Laura Wright are absolutely right to observe that Scotland, despite spending very little time onscreen, ‘becomes a liminal site, an unstable signifier suggestive of Amin and Garrigan’s ambiguous relationship with England’.47 Amin is figured as a monstrous surrogate father on one hand – through his private relationship with Nicholas and his public one with the Ugandan people – and as a little monster on the other, a querulous child straining against Britain’s historic colonial authority. As several critics note, The Last King of Scotland pointedly links Nicholas and Amin by presenting the pair as ‘men… united by a hatred of the English’,48 ‘fellow post-colonial subject[s]… shar[ing]… distaste for the meddling British imperialists’.49 The respective national identities each character stands for are infantilised as a result. Alternatively, Paul C. Taylor suggests that structuring equivalence between Amin/Uganda and Nicholas/Scotland is implied by the ambiguity of the film’s title.50 The individual subject of the latter could, after all, be identified as either man. The former offers to lead Scotland in a war of independence against the British state, while the latter, Taylor argues, ‘as the chief advisor to the dictator… is in a way the power, or the brain between Amin’s absolutist throne’. In developing this line of analysis, it might be noted that Amin presents the British Army (‘my father left me… it became my home’) as the adoptive parent he now tries to supplant by declaring himself ‘the father of this [Ugandan] nation’. Elsewhere, Nicholas repeatedly crosses paths (and swords) with Stone (Simon McBurney), an oleaginous, enigmatic British Foreign Office diplomat. The instant dislike that springs up between the two men suggests that Scotland’s historic relationship to Britain essentially replicates the unequal bond between London and Kampala. Amin/Uganda and Nicholas/Scotland are essentially siblings, childlike cultures that both long to emerge from the same patriarch’s unwanted shadow. Significantly in this regard, Nicholas’ hostility towards Stone is first provoked by the latter’s complacent conflation of the young man’s national identity with the diplomat’s own. Stone welcomes the arrival of ‘another Englishman’ to Kampala, immediately claiming/ categorising the resentful Scot as ‘one of us’. Not least because that action possesses unhappy echoes of Nicholas’ troubled relationship with his father back home, the slighted young man goes out of his way to differentiate his Scottishness from Stone’s Englishness, and to reiterate that point during subsequent encounters between the pair. When Nicholas and Stone encounter each other at an Indian tailor’s shop, the latter drawls that ‘a firm hand’ is ‘[the] only thing the African [sic] really understands’; the former’s response is to mutter quietly about the ‘bloody English’. An official reception at Kampala’s Parliament House sees Nicholas and Stone stood side by side, listening to Amin proclaim that Uganda is ‘an independent African nation living in peace and economic power: Black Power, just like all you people [i.e., white diplomatic representatives of the British government] thought never would be possible’. Close physical proximity shows up the yawning gap between English and

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Scottish responses to this declaration: Stone curls his lip, while Garrigan claps his hands. Later, the diplomat taunts Nicholas with British press reports of widespread political disappearances and assassinations in Amin’s Uganda. Tellingly, the affronted Scot hits out at what he sees as kneejerk English imperial condescension through recourse to a reverse parent-child metaphor: ‘at the first sign of an independent African leader actually achieving something… you spit your dummy because you can’t stand the idea that he’s done it without you’. In exchanges such as these, Nicholas echoes Amin’s differentiation between English arrogance and Scots egalitarianism. Yet rapidly mounting evidence of the dictator’s delirium and despotism ultimately forces an increasingly out-of-his-depth Scot to bow to Stone’s patrician view of the world. In doing so, Nicholas implicitly concedes two things: an infant African state’s inability to govern itself and an infantile Scottish identity’s inability to develop an independent, non-British understanding of geopolitics and statecraft per se. As Lesley Marx notes, ‘Stone, the English target of Nicholas’s overplayed Scots antipathy, [is] proved right, and by extension so [is] the British government’.51 Indeed, as The Last King of Scotland moves towards a close, the self-satisfied diplomat punctures, with ever-increasing scorn, the naivety and ignorance that underpins Nicholas’ infatuation with Amin and the dictator’s post-colonial political posturing. With mock-sorrow, Stone compares Amin (and by implication, Uganda) to an immature child unfit to be trusted with even the smallest of parentally delegated privileges. He reveals (and revels in) the fact that the military coup which propelled Amin to power was licensed by an ‘intimately involved’ British government fearful of Uganda’s absorption into the global Communist bloc. Yet events since have led Her Majesty’s Government to regretfully conclude that ‘Idi [and by extension/implication, Nicholas] always seems to get it wrong, doesn’t he?’ Moreover, Stone is not The Last King of Scotland’s only white English voice of reason. Though Sarah is a much less cynical (and thus, far more attractive) figure than the FO’s man in Kampala, she shares his weary/wary scepticism about Uganda’s ability to run its own affairs free from British oversight. Sarah initially refuses to go to the political rally where Nicholas first sees Amin, asserting that ‘I don’t work for’ the latter. The very thing a wise Englishwoman can in no circumstances bring herself to do is just what a foolish Scotsman cannot hold himself back from. During the rally, Sarah is visibly unmoved by Amin’s inflated rhetoric, while Nicholas is as easily enthused as the cheering locals: numerous reaction shots juxtapose his Scottish excitability with her English ennui. That contrast is repeated in the visual presentation of Nicholas and Stone listening (and responding very differently to) Amin’s subsequent speech at Parliament House. In ways such as these, The Last King of Scotland dismisses out of hand the post-colonial/post-British impulses and identities that its two main male characters attempt to articulate. In order to effect this ideologically loaded rejection, the movie is forced to construct a particular African country and identity as ‘characterised by gross violence and brutality… [thus] representing Africa and Europe as binary opposites’.52 While Kevin Macdonald argues that his film’s version of Amin functions as ‘a kind of distorted mirror’,53 this is perhaps not so in the way the director intends. It is not the case, as Macdonald claims, that The Last

142 The New Scottish Cinema King of Scotland’s Idi primarily ‘reflects back to the coloniser what he has learned from them’.54 Rather, the fictionalised dictator reproduces a British imperialist perspective, one defined by the coloniser’s refusal to learn anything that might call the self-exculpating myth of the white man’s burden into serious question. The Last King of Scotland can thus be understood as a prominent example of a contemporary cinematic cycle that Martha Evans and Ian Glenn label ‘Afropessimism’,55 a collection of Hollywood-financed films that advance ‘the consistently negative view that Africa is incapable of progressing, economically, socially, or politically’. Kevin Macdonald’s movie builds its regressive racial hierarchies on two key Manichean distinctions: one between black and white identities, the other between British and (would-be) postBritish equivalents. The conscious cosmopolitanism of 2000s Scottish films that explore issues of ethnicity and race is frequently reflected in the financial arrangements behind those projects. In the case of the five movies discussed above, for instance, production monies were raised from no fewer than seven different countries. As Chapter 3 shows, something similar held true for post-2000 DOGMAC cinema. But not all 2000s Scottish filmmakers wanted (or found themselves in a realistic position) to engage in transnational ways of working. This book’s final chapter examines the rise of local low- and micro-budget filmmaking practices in the new millennium. Movies of this nature were usually financed from domestic sources alone. But that fact did not necessarily entail the emergence of an unthinkingly inward-looking strand of contemporary Scottish cinema to set against the two deliberately internationalist traditions discussed in this and the previous chapter. Much low- and micro-budget local work of the 2000s offered a more complex and interesting proposition instead. On one hand, many of the films in question adopted popular genre forms (thriller, horror, chase movie) in an entrepreneurial bid to achieve a degree of international commercial marketability. Yet on the other, these movies frequently put genre to surprising and imaginative uses, as a tool with which to engage in acts of locally specific social commentary and critique.

5 NAZIS, NEDS AND NETHERWORLDS: SCOTTISH LOW-BUDGET GENRE CINEMA OF THE 2000s

As previous chapters document, 1990s Scotland witnessed the devotion of much collective energy to the creation of a public funding infrastructure capable of maintaining, then enhancing, newly buoyant levels of indigenous feature production. The 2000s, however, saw increasing numbers of local artists produce work partly (and on occasion, wholly) outside of established channels of state support. Nowhere was that phenomenon more visible than in the post-millennial mushrooming of micro- and low-budget filmmaking practices in Scotland. A list of low- or microbudget 2000s Scottish features would include little-seen titles such as Black Coffee (Wilma Smith Finnigan, GB, 2002), The Clan (Lee Hutcheon, GB, 2009), Cola Dan (Wilma Smith Finnigan, GB, 2010), Electric Man (David Barras, GB, 2012), Four Eyes (Duncan Finnigan, GB, 2003), In a Man’s World (Lee Hutcheon, GB, 2004), Measured (Alexander Collett, GB, 2006), My Brother’s Keeper (Lee Hutcheon, GB, 2012), My Life as a Bus Stop (Duncan and Wilma Smith Finnigan, GB, 2007), One Day Removals (Mark Stirton, GB, 2008), Rez Bomb (Steven Lewis Simpson, GB, 2008), Retribution (Steven Lewis Simpson, GB, 2005), Running in Traffic (Dale Corlett, GB, 2009), Senseless (Simon Hynd, GB, 2008) and The Ticking Man (Steven Lewis Simpson, GB, 2003). Mirroring contemporary UK-wide trends more generally, the films that emerged from this development frequently looked to a range of popular and cult film genres (horror cinema especially) and youth subcultures (gaming, comics) for creative and commercial inspiration.1 The present chapter discusses five indigenous features of this kind that received substantive domestic theatrical and/or DVD distribution during the 2000s: Wild Country (Craig Strachan, GB, 2005), Outpost (Steve Barker, GB, 2008), The Inheritance (Charles Henri Belleville, GB, 2007), New Town Killers (Richard Jobson, GB, 2008) and GamerZ (Robbie Fraser, GB, 2005).

144 The New Scottish Cinema Several factors help to explain the rapid rise of Scottish micro- and low-budget filmmaking in the years after 2000. Firstly, key local institutions such as Scottish Screen actively encouraged entrepreneurial filmmaking practices as the relative liquidity of the late 1990s (associated above all with FilmFour and Lottery funding) evaporated somewhat during the following decade. Indeed, as early as autumn 2000, Steve McIntyre, then only a few weeks into his tenure as Scottish Screen’s Chief Executive, cited the lucrative Tomb Raider PC game (and subsequently film) franchise as: an example of the kind of thing we want to get into. It’s interesting that it has life as a game, as a design concept and as a feature film… you can’t develop a film industry in isolation from that other area of [screen content] work because they are increasingly locked together.2 As the 2000s progressed, Scottish Screen and a range of funding partners concentrated money and energy alike on a range of feature production initiatives geared towards the support of markedly less expensive work than was the norm in the six or seven years after Shallow Grave (Danny Boyle, GB, 1995). Twenty First Films, launched in 1999 in association with the Scottish Arts Council, provided up to 75 per cent of successful applicants’ production budgets, with a maximum award level of £0.3 million.3 New Found Films, begun in 2003 in collaboration with STV and Grampian Television, aimed to fund two c. £0.3 million features annually.4 In addition to supporting GamerZ, one of the films explored at length later in this chapter, the scheme also funded the low-budget features Afterlife (Alison Peebles, GB, 2003), Blinded (Eleanor Yule, GB, 2004) and Night People (Adrian Mead, GB, 2005). Finally, the abortive Fast Forward Features initiative, established in 2004 as a partnership with BBC Films and the commercial distributor ContentFilms, sought to produce three features with maximum budget levels of £1.3 million.5 Indeed, all of the five case studies this chapter discusses benefited, directly or indirectly, from public financial support. Gabriel Films, the independent producer behind Wild Country, received £0.1 million of Scottish Screen slate and project development finance in 2000/01 alone.6 The same sum was awarded to Black Camel, the producers of Outpost, when Scottish Screen launched a two-year Slate Fund initiative in March 2008.7 Scottish Screen supported the DVD release of The Inheritance, while GamerZ was, as noted above, a beneficiary of the New Found Films scheme. Finally, writer/ director Richard Jobson’s New Town Killers was part-funded with Lottery monies awarded by Scottish Screen. The organisation also contributed around 50 per cent of the budget for Jobson’s debut feature, 16 Years of Alcohol (GB, 2003), a £0.4 million poetic tale of a young Edinburgh man’s attempt to escape the twin bonds of alcohol addiction and gang culture.8 But local institutional sponsorship was not the only reason why low-budget and genre filmmaking modes flourished within 2000s Scotland. Ironically, those strategies also attracted many precisely because they were seen as a possible way

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of freeing local artists from the perceived shackling effect of enforced dependence on public patronage. In 2004, the Screen Industries Summit Group – a collective involving, among other organisations, Scottish Screen, the Scottish Executive, the major Scottish broadcasters and several key local independent producers – made a submission to the British Office of Communications’ (OFCOM) Review of Public Service Broadcasting. In it, the Summit Group complained that ‘the current system of subsidies in the film industry is working against growth and entrepreneurship, with Scotland yet to discover a business model for profitable films’.9 For local filmmakers who shared such misgivings, a ‘Do It Yourself ’ approach, one realistically realisable if feature production budgets could be kept low enough, seemed the obvious answer. One such figure, writer/producer/director Steven Lewis Simpson, summed up a creative mindset that became increasingly common within 2000s Scotland when he asserted of his own lack of financial resources that, ‘it’s essential never to see it as a compromise but to treat it as a liberation’.10 In a more celebrated example of indigenous low-budget enterprise, Owen Thomas produced One Life Stand (May Miles Thomas, GB, 2000), a self-financed, £60,000 black-and-white digital feature with a script partly inspired by the example of Pasolini’s Mama Roma (It, 1962).11 For Thomas, One Life Stand’s successful production and extensive screening at a range of international festivals showed how: with digital technology… producers can restructure the entire process, removing significant costs… and, in many other ways, adding value without expense… there needs to be more of an emphasis in this country [i.e., Scotland] on the skills required to get films made irrespective of the availability (or not) of public funds. There is very little enterprise apparent in our film producing culture – to an extent due directly to the existence of public funds.12 Richard Jobson made a very similar argument in relation to 16 Years of Alcohol, noting that: My films are designed to be shot for x amount. We shoot them high-definition, we edit them on Avid Xpress DV or Final Cut Pro. We grade them ourselves. It’s very much part of the punk DIY culture we belong to… digital empowers someone like me… there’s a ‘can’t do’ culture about some British filmmakers, they’re like bloody farmers, dependent on subsidies. They should get out there and get on with it.13 This bullish rhetoric of creative self-empowerment and independence finds numerous echoes in the low-budget case studies discussed at length below. In the case of both Wild Country and The Inheritance, the films’ producers actively chose to handle DVD distribution as a way of maximising revenue and defining their projects’ long-term public profiles.14 The producers of GamerZ sold US DVD rights for their movie before securing domestic theatrical distribution for it, rather than the other

146 The New Scottish Cinema way round.15 Arabella Page Croft and Kieran Parker, the co-producers of Outpost, secured a £1.2 million international distribution deal with Sony, not on the basis of the finished movie, but by showing the company a 15-minute teaser reel.16 Page Croft claimed that this project ‘came about out of sheer frustration with the process of trying to produce films in the UK’,17 while Parker explained that the pair’s decision to make an ‘action-horror’ movie was based on their subjective identification of ‘what kind of film would be quickest to finance’.18 With that decision made, the two raised roughly two-thirds of Outpost’s production budget by re-mortgaging their own home.19 The comments by Owen Thomas and Richard Jobson also indicate the extent to which the rapid evolution of digital production and post-production technologies helped to facilitate low- and micro-budget Scottish filmmaking’s contemporary rise. Writing in the early 2000s, Duncan Petrie observed that, within a specifically British context at least, new technologies ‘have primarily been regarded as a new opportunity for stimulating low-budget film production… [offering] a more sustainable and realistic approach’ to the business of getting indigenous features made.20 Jobson in particular proved an enthusiastic proponent of that view. The director worked with production budgets at or below £0.5 million throughout the 2000s, and argued that, ‘as far as I’m concerned, there’s no reason now to shoot on film’.21 It is certainly true that a project such as The Inheritance, a feature shot mostly in natural light, over an 11-day period, on locations dotted along a 250-mile stretch of Scottish coastline and with only a £5,000 production budget, would have been a significantly harder (if not impossible) proposition in the pre-digital era. Elsewhere, GamerZ writer/director Robbie Fraser explained how, in his view, a £0.3 million feature ‘inspired by the 1978 animated version of Lord of the Rings [Ralph Bakshi, USA, 1978], as well as by more modern swords-and-sorcery videogames’ would have been ‘quite impossible’ to realise ‘without an all-digital HD digital workflow’:22 Role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons take place only in the imaginations of their players… [who] are constantly referring to a world rich and strange… and demonstrably not present… we would have a second visual layer in the film… an animated fantasy element, which would bring the game world to life… the fact that GamerZ was produced digitally… gave us leeway to play with both the number and scale of the creatures we were creating.23 One thing that the following case studies collectively illustrate, then, is a range of commercial and creative possibilities that Scottish filmmakers discerned within digital technology during the twenty-first century’s opening decade. But one final point about 2000s low- and micro-budget Scottish cinema ought to be made before looking in detail at individual films within that movement. It is important to emphasise that the increasing local industrial prominence of lowbudget genre modes is not the only reason why this kind of filmmaking deserves detailed critical attention. With the exception of Outpost, each of the case studies

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explored below illustrates how the collective 2000s turn towards low-budget genre frequently saw Scottish filmmakers try to reconcile commercial and cultural forms of enterprise, rather than sacrificing the latter in favour of the former. On one hand, low- and micro-budget production models were symptomatic of significant change within local thinking about the best ways to achieve long-term film industrial sustainability. But on the other, many movies emerging from that shift proved surprisingly amenable to traditional critical agendas that see artistic exploration and representation of national identity as Scottish cinema’s primary raison d’être. Works like Wild Country, The Inheritance, New Town Killers and GamerZ all explore alternative ways in which domestic socio-cultural commentary might unfold on the cinema screen, rather than (or as well as) proposing that alternatives to national identity might usefully broaden Scottish cinema’s thematic preoccupations and international commercial appeal. In this sense, the post-2000 impact of digital technology in Scotland has proved both revolutionary and evolutionary in nature.

Wild Country Wild Country was the fruit of a determined local attempt to break into genre filmmaking. Producer Ros Borland’s company Gabriel Films spent the early 2000s developing an ambitious slate of commercial genre projects. Most notable among these was the never-made The Bothy, a $10–15 million collaboration with Icon Entertainment in which an American serial killer was to be set loose in the Scottish Highlands during the night of a freak storm.24 Although a far more modest financial proposition, Wild Country emerged from Gabriel’s overarching desire, in the words of writer/director Craig Strachan, ‘to see a little bit more… genre filmmaking in Scotland… there’s enthusiasm for it here… Glasgow could be what Rome was in the mid ’70s… a European centre of horror film production’.25 Wild Country’s central protagonist is initially figured as the epitome of feminine vulnerability: both a motherless child and a childless mother. Unsupported by a female parent too indifferent or devout to protest, unmarried teenager Kelly Ann (Samantha Shields) allows the local Catholic priest, Father Steve (Peter Capaldi), to give her new-born son up for adoption by a waiting surrogate family. Six weeks later, a still-traumatised Kelly Ann joins a group of friends – Louise (Nicola Muldoon), David (Kevin Quinn) and Mark (Jamie Quinn) – on a weekend camping trip organised by Father Steve. The cleric drops the teens off at a remote rural spot; the arrangement is that the young people will camp overnight and rejoin Father Steve at a designated meeting point the next day. As soon as the latter leaves, another member of the camping party appears. To Kelly Ann’s dismay, the late addition is Lee (Martin Compston), the estranged father of her child. It emerges, however, that this separation was one engineered by the unscrupulous Father Steve: the priest told both Kelly Ann and Lee that the other did not want to maintain contact. A seemingly sanitised sojourn in the great outdoors then degenerates into outright horror. Kelly Ann is troubled by the sound of a child’s cries carried on the wind, and persuades a reluctant Lee to help her investigate. In the cellar of a nearby ruined castle, the pair finds an apparently abandoned baby and the eviscerated corpse of a local

148 The New Scottish Cinema shepherd who earlier taunted them and their friends. Kelly Ann and Lee return to camp, and the five friends decide to take the child to safety. But they find themselves pursued – and successively picked off – by a giant wolf-like creature whose lair Kelly Ann and Lee have evidently disturbed. After the deaths of Mark and Louise, Kelly Ann leads the survivors back to the castle. Here, they successfully trick and kill their lycanthropic tormentor. But that beast is swiftly revealed to be one of a pair, and quite possibly the ‘rescued’ child’s werewolf mother, rather than a lone predator that stole the infant for food, as the teenagers initially assume. Lee’s speculation that the first creature pursues the campers because it wants to ‘sav[e]’ the child ‘for later’ is absolutely correct, albeit not in the sense the young man imagines. The female beast’s enraged, grief-stricken mate kills David immediately, and Lee later sacrifices himself so that the child and Kelly Ann have a chance to escape. Last woman standing, she reaches the farmhouse rendezvous point agreed with Father Steve. The priest refuses to believe Kelly Ann’s fantastic tale, however, assuming instead that she has stolen a child as part of a psychotic response to the trauma of separation from her own. She then snaps, berating the cleric as the real thief, the man who took her son away from her. The child and Kelly Ann then transmogrify into werewolves and kill Father Steve. Wild Country ends with an arch Happily Ever After tableau: Kelly Ann’s new bestial family unit – her, her adoptive child and the male partner who previously hunted the teenage campers – wander lazily through sun-dappled woods. Wild Country obviously sets its sights on the commercially lucrative post-Scream (Wes Craven, USA, 1996) market for tongue-in-cheek teen slasher or monster pics. But the film also deploys the conventions of those genres as a way of examining, albeit in a playful way, certain substantive thematic concerns. As David Martin-Jones notes,26 films such as An American Werewolf in Paris (Anthony Waller, GB/Neth/ Lux/USA/Fr, 1997) and Ginger Snaps (John Fawcet, Can, 2000) made self-conscious attempts to put the figure of the female werewolf to a range of ideological uses from the mid-1990s on. Wild Country continues that lycanthropic lineage: the movie explores an archetypal opposition between poles of civilisation (figured as patriarchal, artificial and hypocritical) and nature (portrayed as matriarchal, instinctual and sincere). As part of that project, the film critiques the oppressive nature of dominant masculine attitudes – active denigration on one hand, attempted domination on the other – towards female bodies within a phallocentric social sphere. Wild Country introduces its concern with the subjugated female body during the film’s earliest moments. The work’s first image is a close-up of a sweating, bedbound Kelly Ann deep in the pangs of labour. Its first spoken words are instructions that aim to control what the young woman does with her physical frame: an unseen midwife tells Kelly Ann that ‘you can’t push… until I tell you to’. A whispered conversation between nurses then confirms that the new mother is not even allowed to hold her just-born child before he disappears from her life forever. The very next scene introduces Father Steve, who congratulates a bereft Kelly Ann on her privileging of Church strictures over personal desires: ‘you made a family today… you did the right thing’. The scene following this exchange in turn suggests that the priest’s prejudice reflects a wider societal equivalent. A radio news report playing in the background

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as Kelly Ann prepares for the camping trip states that ‘Scotland has one of the highest rates of teen pregnancy in the world’. The unseen reporter implies that this phenomenon is the result of an intersection between already-problematic gender and class identities: ‘girls from poor areas have little incentive not to be mothers’. In these ways, the ‘problem’ of women’s reproductive capacity, and institutional desire to police this, are swiftly established as central thematic preoccupations. As Sam Wigley notes, Wild Country tries to encompass both ‘the flippant postmodernisms of Wes Craven’ and ‘a low-key social realism closer to the work of Ken Loach’.27 Or, as director Craig Strachan framed matters, his movie aimed to meld local specificity and lycanthropic fantasy within ‘a teen horror set and rooted in the West of Scotland, the Greater Glasgow area’.28 Wild Country seeks not just to emphasise, but also to explain, patriarchal aspirations to control both the mechanics and politics of human reproduction. It does so by arguing that female fertility provokes gynophobic anxiety and uncertainty in most (if not all) men. Shots immediately preceding the ironic closing image of lycanthropic family love, for instance, depict a man (Father Steve)’s view of a woman (Kelly Ann, now transformed into a werewolf) suckling a child. A rapid zoom into the priest’s contorted, screaming visage offers a comically exaggerated image of masculine terror at the spectacle of mother with child. Similarly, the fount of all physical danger in Wild Country, the creatures’ subterranean lair, is clearly figured as a womb-like space: dark, damp, smeared with viscera and housing a naked infant. Kelly Ann’s maternal instincts drive her on to uncover and understand the secrets of this foreboding location. In contrast, David and Lee are more cautious about, because physically repelled by, the prospect of exploring uterine depths. During his first visit to the castle, Lee complains about the smell; David repeats that protest when the three surviving teenagers return later in a desperate attempt to kill the female beast. The difference between male and female demeanours suggests that the lair represents something that arouses masculine anxieties in particular. So, too, does the bizarre contrast between Kelly Ann and Lee’s initial discoveries there: the crying infant lying beside the shepherd’s cold corpse. That counterpoint implies an idea of the womb as a space able to create, but also cancel out, male life. This latter threat is given grotesque literal form in Wild Country’s set-piece special effects sequence. A desperate Kelly Ann, her friends by now all dead, meets an uncomprehending male farmer and begs him for help. Ignoring her confused and confusing tale, the man instead goes off to investigate the physical distress of one of his cows lying prone nearby. Close-up shots present the bewildered farmer’s view of unexplained writhing beneath the animal’s skin. That surface then splits apart in a horrific parody of birth, revealing the feasting male werewolf hidden within. Splattered with effluvia, the horrified farmer is then immediately dispatched by the creature. It seems telling that a scene pivotal in pyrotechnic (and therefore commercial) terms also represents the film’s most florid satirical expression of male gynophobia. Moreover, if the cow’s breached body constitutes the apogee of birth’s horror in the eyes of men, it should also be remembered that male characters use bovine metaphors to denigrate both Kelly Ann and Louise earlier in the narrative.

150 The New Scottish Cinema Mark calls Louise a ‘big ugly cow’, and asks if she plans to graze in the fields of the countryside like the local animals do. More pointedly, Kelly Ann is literally milked by her son’s surrogate family. She uses a pump to extract food from her breasts in return for payment. Her reproductive resources are thus placed in the service of others, a good example of the docile and disciplined female body required by the patriarchal ideology which Father Steve personifies. Wild Country also suggests that men respond as inappropriately to the sexual capacities of the female body as they do to its reproductive counterparts, a failing that applies to sympathetic and antagonistic male protagonists alike. Father Steve and the lascivious shepherd – the latter, a knowing parody of the bucolic bogeymen familiar from seminal genre pieces like The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Tobe Hooper, USA, 1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (Wes Craven, USA, 1977) – are, quite literally, wolves in sheep’s clothing. These men personify the animalistic urges which artificial moral codes struggle to deny and keep at bay. The shepherd wears a greasy sheepskin kaftan as he stalks Kelly Ann in the dark; the teenagers tease Father Steve’s white cable-knit sweater, warning him that he may become the object of unwelcome attention from sheep-fancying rural locals. The latter constituency, however, should perhaps be more worried about the priest than he about them. Father Steve disregards his vow of chastity in order to shack up with the female owner of the bed and breakfast where he awaits the teenagers’ arrival after their overnight camp. Despite the terrible death of his girlfriend Louise mere hours before, David leers at Kelly Ann while she breastfeeds the rescued baby, commenting that, ‘I’m a wee bit thirsty myself ’. Even the film’s most seemingly blameless male protagonists, Lee and the nameless infant, are implicated in this regard. No sooner has Lee managed a tentative reconciliation with Kelly Ann than he offends her with a clumsy sexual advance. Meanwhile, the child draws blood from Kelly Ann the first time that she suckles him. Granted, this latter action fulfils a number of functions. In plot terms, it constitutes a moment of infection, the explanation for Kelly Ann’s otherwise inexplicable transformation at Wild Country’s end. More generally, the injury caused by the child also exemplifies the movie’s thesis that humankind should not deceive itself by imagining the species to be set above the general phenomenon of Nature red in tooth and claw. But with specific regard to Wild Country’s interest in relationships between the sexes, the fact that the male child’s instinctual desires prove physically injurious to Kelly Ann is consistent with everything else that viewers see during the film. The incident in question extends a general pattern reiterated throughout the narrative: seemingly innate forms of masculine deportment and desire invariably have negative consequences for women. When Wild Country is viewed in this light, Kelly Ann’s climactic metamorphosis is meaningful in both generic terms – a respectful repetition of the shape-shifting motif familiar from innumerable horror flicks – and ideological ones. The young woman leaves her female human form behind because she also discards her previous acquiescence in the patriarchal oppression to which human females are routinely subjected. Or, as David Martin-Jones puts it, Kelly Ann ‘rejects the teachings of organised religion in favour of a wilder expression of youthful sexual freedom’.29

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Father Steve persists to the very last in presuming to speak authoritatively of and for female experience. He asks Kelly Ann, ‘How do you think [the rescued child’s] mother feels?’ She responds, however, with a decisive act of rebellion, speaking directly of and for herself, protesting against the hypocrisy and hurt which stem from the institutionalised misogyny that the priest represents and enforces: ‘I know how his mother feels: you took my baby away from me.’ While it then takes several more minutes for the young woman’s physical transformation to occur, that special-effects-driven metamorphosis merely confirms at epidermal level the ideological rebirth which Kelly Ann has already gone through. It is the latter form of becoming, rather than the former, which truly renders her horrific from a patriarchal perspective. Father Steve’s last pompous homily – ‘This isn’t a fairy tale: it’s real life and it’s serious’ – nicely glosses the motivation behind Wild Country’s exploitation of a range of established horror film conventions and motifs.

Figure 6.1 From Red Riding Hood to Big Bad Wolf: Kelly Ann’s climatic metamorphosis in Wild Country Yet in ideological terms, Wild Country is a more complex (because possibly more compromised) work than discussion of it has so far suggested. On one hand, the film supports Kelly Ann in her quest to find, and then fulfil, her personal desires free from male interference. Yet one could argue that the precise nature of those desires is quite compatible with conservative prescriptions of gender identity and relations. Kelly Ann’s trials might be taken to imply that the most natural thing which any woman could – indeed, should – want is to be a mother. David Martin-Jones reads Wild Country in this way, concluding that that ‘Kelly Ann’s choice is ultimately to be part of a family (however monstrous)… [a] conservative reaffirmation of the status quo’.30 It is also certainly true that female protagonists who do not conform to

152 The New Scottish Cinema traditional notions of family values are either criticised or killed. Kelly Ann’s apathetic mother is an unattractive figure, one who puts Mother Church ahead of mothering child. The grisly fate of Louise and David, briefly seen enjoying sex together in a tent, reiterates a warning familiar from countless horror movies: recreational teenage intercourse is a pastime to be avoided at all costs. Missy, the highly sexed bed and breakfast owner (and the unapologetically unmarried status implied by her name is surely telling), teases Father Steve after they sleep together by warning him that, ‘If I’m pregnant, you’re paying for the abortion’. That un-motherly taunt seems to seal her demise: the male werewolf immediately appears and eviscerates her offscreen. But notwithstanding such complexities and self-contradictions, Wild Country is a suggestive film. It shows that a post-2000 collective turn towards genre work did not necessarily entail outright rejection of the idea that one important function of an indigenous cinema was to engage in acts of locally specific social commentary and debate. In many 2000s Scottish genre movies, political intervention assumes forms unexpected, because markedly different from, what had gone before in Scottish cinema – not unlike the ultimate fate of Kelly Ann within Wild Country itself.

Outpost At the same time, however, it should not be denied that a significant proportion of 2000s Scottish genre cinema attempted to divorce itself from any sort of local cultural imperative whatsoever. Black Camel, the independent production company behind the Outpost franchise, was established in 2004 by partners Arabella Page Croft and Kieran Parker as a straightforwardly commercial enterprise. Speaking the year after the business sold Anglophone theatrical and DVD distribution rights for Outpost to Sony Pictures at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, Parker was blunt in identifying the kind of Scottish filmmaking he was committed to as a producer: Whether you like Outpost or not, starting a company with a first feature that sold out worldwide with Sony attached gets you in the door. The movies I want to make are big, commercially driven films. It’s an industry and the industry ethos has to be underwritten by a sense of responsibility towards the financiers… If we could make films here with American money, that would be the ideal.31 Unlike the other 2000s genre films this chapter discusses, Outpost is a movie defined by a painstaking, profit-focused attempt to minimise or muddy all possible signs of cultural specificity within the film’s narrative. The near-total extent to which that aim is achieved offers one justification for director Steve Barker’s claim that ‘no-one has really made a movie in Scotland like this before’.32 Contemporaneous features like GamerZ, New Town Killers and Wild Country used popular genre in an attempt to reconcile cultural aspiration with commercial achievement. By contrast, Outpost was, in Barker’s words, a cheerfully lurid exploitation piece of ‘guys with guns fighting with dead Nazis… a Saturday night, bit of pizza, fun, men, guns, undead Nazis kind of flick’.33 Such single-minded commercial focus goes a long way towards

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explaining why this particular film, more than any of its Scottish low-budget genre contemporaries, achieved a significant degree of international profitability. Outpost offers corroborating evidence for the idea that a deliberately popular/populist lowbudget approach represented the most industrially sensible (because sustainable) way forward for twenty-first-century Scottish cinema. But at the same time, the movie also provides a cautionary illustration of what a national cinema free of any substantive cultural agenda, nationally specific or otherwise, might actually look like in practice. Outpost’s opening inter-title is studiedly (and symptomatically) vague. Somewhere in ‘Eastern Europe – present day’, viewers encounter DC (Ray Stevenson), the middle-aged leader of a similarly long-toothed mercenary unit open to offers from all sides in the sketchily defined civil war that passes for the film’s narrative setting. DC’s soldiers of fortune are a cosmopolitan bunch. Prior (Richard Brake) is a nihilistic gun nut from the American Deep South; medic Jordan (Paul Blair) is a religiose Scot; radio operator McKay (Michael Smiley), a scruple-free Northern Irish scavenger. The remaining troops all hail from non-Anglophone backgrounds. Cotter (Enoch Frost) is black African (no particular country of origin is specified); Taktarov (Brett Fancy) is a trigger-happy, volatile Russian; finally, Voyteche (Julian Rivett) is native to the unnamed European country in which Outpost is set. DC negotiates a commission for his men from an enigmatic and evasive English engineer, Hunt (Julian Wadham). The latter hires the mercenaries to ensure his safe passage on a reconnaissance mission to a site inconveniently located on the civil war’s front line. On reaching their destination, the men discover it to be an abandoned World War II SS bunker. Hunt seeks to remove a mysterious piece of generator-like equipment from the stronghold’s depths. But this mission is quickly compromised. The soldiers stumble upon a charnel room in the underground facility, a space crammed with naked dead bodies and one mute survivor (Johnny Meres), thereafter referred to as ‘the breather’. The men assume that they have uncovered the aftermath of an act of genocide committed as part of the ongoing civil conflict. But when they come under unexplained attack from unseen enemy forces, seemingly all-powerful assailants picking off the mercenaries one by one, Hunt is forced to reveal the real goal of his mission. The generatorlike apparatus is revealed to be the centrepiece of covert Nazi experimentation into Einstein’s unified field theory. It is a machine capable of restoring dead bodies to life and moving individuals across great distances in space invisibly and nearinstantaneously. The apparently lifeless bodies the mercenaries earlier discovered are not corpses at all, but SS troops preserved from World War II; the breather was/ is the bunker’s original Commandant. Hunt tries desperately to restore the Nazi generator to full working order, arguing that this represents the group’s only chance to contain an enemy that cannot be killed. He fails, however, and the entire party dies at the hands of its phantasmic fascist foe. Outpost concludes with a backup squadron’s subsequent arrival at the bunker. These soldiers discover the charnel room and are immediately set upon by SS troops, thus suggesting the possibility of an infinite loop of bloodshed.

154 The New Scottish Cinema Outpost’s premise and plot are clearly risible. But they shed light on two important aspects of the film’s character: the work’s unalloyed commercial ambition and the particular narrative and generic strategies through which it tries to realise its financial aims. While Outpost paints its central protagonists as a singularly unprepossessing gaggle, it undoubtedly shares and puts into practice large chunks of their mercenary code. Like the dogs of war within it, the film cussedly confuses and confounds the stability (and thus, recognisability) of nation-based borders, bonds and back stories. Steve Barker notes that an early cut of the movie established an identifiable geographical and political context for its narrative, ‘the Serbian-Kosovan conflict in the late ’90s’.34 But this original creative choice to ‘hav[e] such a specific timeframe and a very specific, very real and very brutal war’ was eventually jettisoned on commercial grounds: Outpost’s makers feared that they were ‘lead[ing] viewers to expect a much more serious film’35 than the movie was intended to be. As a result, the film’s central location, the haunted SS bunker, becomes deliberately placeless in the finished version of the work, endlessly disputed territory which, as DC notes, belongs to everyone (and therefore no-one) at once: ‘every couple of months it switches between government and insurgency hands’. Similarly, the mercenary team’s multinational makeup renders the soldiers denizens of nowhere and everywhere at once. The contradictory array of national military insignia visible on the men’s uniforms also works to sever them from any secure (because single) set of national ties. Jordan is a Scot who wears the Red Cross and French tricolour; McKay is even more schizophrenic, sporting both Irish Republican Army tattoos and the beret of a British Army paratrooper. DC dismisses the idea that an individual’s personal history or cultural background fixes their identity in any meaningful way, stating to Hunt that ‘where you’ve been has nothing to do with where you are’. Outpost applies the same logic to itself, a Scottish film that renounces all substantive signs of national origin or thematic interest. The mercenary unit and the movie that contains it are equally deracinated entities. In this way, both open themselves up to lucrative financial offers from any and all potential buyers in a globalised marketplace. Outpost wholly endorses Cotter’s hard-headed cynicism when the soldier notes that ‘man pays the money, he picks the tune’. An uncompromising determination to renounce all possible motivations bar the pursuit of profit is also suggested by Outpost’s pronounced interest in plot motifs and devices associated with ideas of resurrection and repetition on an infinite scale. Such fascination is integral to the film because, unlike contemporaneous Scottish genre projects, Outpost deliberately positioned itself as a franchise capable of successive reanimations in future years. Indeed, at the time of writing in early 2012, a $3 million sequel, Outpost: Black Sun (Steve Barker, GB), was complete and slated for imminent international theatrical release through distributor ContentFilm International.36 For this reason, the indestructible nature of the movie’s spectral Aryan antagonists is carefully and consistently emphasised: that characteristic paves the way for their relentless reappearance in later money-spinning iterations. Unexpectedly telling in this regard is the juxtaposition that Outpost engineers between two different kinds of cross – Iron and Christian – which the luckless mercenaries come upon at different

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stages of their ill-starred mission. While undertaking initial reconnaissance of the bunker, Jordan and Prior find a discarded crucifix necklace. The Scot asks, ‘Is it just me, or does that not belong here?’ Given, however, that both bunker and the film housing it are sites devoted to the successful achievement of resurrection, the religious artefact’s presence is entirely appropriate. Later, the precise nature of just who/what Outpost summons back from the grave is flagged by DC’s discovery, in the aftermath of a nocturnal firefight, of an Iron Cross dropped on the ground. Seemingly innocuous snatches of throwaway dialogue throughout the movie persistently link the different forms of life after death which the two crosses represent. The imprecations (‘Mother of God’; ‘Jesus’; ‘Oh, Christ’) with which the mercenaries respond to their ghostly foes’ uncanny and unexpected incursions are almost always irreligious in nature. Most arch of all in this regard are the words of Hunt. His character’s main role is to provide a lengthy and ongoing expository account of the fictional technology on which not just Outpost, but also the plausibility of future sequels to it, depends. Hunt describes the Nazi generator as a ‘miracle’, albeit one that ‘God isn’t in on’. The bunker’s terrible secret, therefore, is that it shelters a version of the ungodly ‘bright light’ with which Prior at one point taunts the devout Jordan: ‘it ain’t Heaven, son: it’s just a muzzle flare’. Outpost constitutes itself in a very similar manner: a dazzlingly empty spectacle that voids itself of any thematic resonance or specificity which might interfere with the franchise’s second (or third, fourth, fifth, etc.) comings in future sequels and spin-offs. Finally, Outpost’s unalloyed commercialism is also suggested by the distinctive manner in which the film presents its central location. The appearance and atmosphere of the bunker’s subterranean space exert a marked degree of influence on a work that responds to budgetary restrictions by turning itself into, in co-producer Arabella Page Croft’s words, ‘a one-location movie’.37 The bunker is quite clearly a simulacrum, its physical and tonal contours determined with exclusive reference to popular cinematic convention and myth. Outpost’s skeletally defined contemporary Balkan setting, the respective nationalities of several of the mercenaries (Cotter, McKay, Voyteche), and Nazism’s Aryan supremacist ideology might lead one to expect a work that explores the contemporary politics and enduring historical presence of ethnic hatred and military conflict. But this is what the film’s creators strive to avoid at all costs. Their decision to make the narrative antagonists Nazis is driven by stylistic, rather than ideological, concerns. For director Steve Barker, the attraction of SS shock troops related to their politically neutered popular status as ‘classic Saturday matinee villains’.38 Barker was absolutely clear and self-confident about his desire to make Outpost: quite an old-fashioned film… enough time has gone by that we could confidently take the villains from films like Where Eagles Dare [Brian G. Hutton, GB/USA, 1968] or Raiders of the Lost Ark [Steven Spielberg, USA, 1981]. They’re almost like cartoon versions [of Nazis] and they have such striking imagery… the old-fashioned bogeymen from the movies of my childhood.39

156 The New Scottish Cinema The attendant sense that the movie is interested only in the commercial exploitation of a profoundly dangerous and destructive fascist ideology can be gauged from the baroque manner in which it first reveals the identity of the bunker’s original inhabitants. Coming upon a disused portable cinema screen, Prior is startled by, because unexpectedly caught in the beam of, a 16mm projector that splutters back into life once Hunt manages to restart the bunker’s generator. As Prior rolls the screen up, and with the projector still audible and visible in the foreground, a large painted swastika is revealed on the previously hidden portion of the wall of the room. Outpost’s preferred version of Nazism is thus figured, quite literally, as a form of old-fashioned cinematic projection. The film’s wilful disengagement from Europe’s troubled twentieth-century past is summed up by Prior’s puerile statement that ‘you can say what you want about the Nazis, but they had style’.

Figure 6.2 ‘Say what you want’: Outpost’s commercial exploitation of Nazi iconography Outpost’s questionable fascination with decontextualised aesthetic surface at the expense of historical and ideological depth also manifests itself in the bunker’s unlikely status as an unofficial archive of film-related ephemera. Before Hunt confesses the nature of his mission, the engineer is seen searching for clues hidden among rusty canisters of 16mm film, holding strips of antique celluloid up to the light in order to discern their secrets. While guarding the mute breather in the projection room, McKay searches a box full of Nazi soldiers’ possessions and finds a snapshot of an unidentified 1940s female film star; one almost expects another soldier to trip over a complete back run of Picture Post. More ostentatiously, two major expository scenes depict the projection and discussion of digitally faked period film footage. Hunt shows the mercenaries (and by extension, the viewer) the fruits of his search through the film cans: grainy documentary records of Nazi laboratory tests and an animated propaganda short produced in celebratory anticipation of the successful conclusion of that research. When these images fill the screen, Outpost’s Nazis become a doubly fantastic spectacle: fictional film images encased within what is already fictional

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film. But in light of the movie’s nakedly commercial (and thus, knowingly apolitical) ambitions, this is exactly what it requires its villains to be. At certain points in Outpost, a simulated period cinematic aesthetic even feels ingrained within the bunker’s physical fabric. A running motif has the facility’s wall and roof lighting flicker on and off; the fleeting visual effect is to make the bunker’s corridors look like they are fashioned from reels of celluloid. The first such image appears immediately after Prior discovers the mildewed 16mm projection screen. A striking high shot of the corridor outside replaces near-total darkness with a succession of roof and wall lights clanking into life one by one: the resulting spectacle is intensely reminiscent of a blank film strip waiting to be populated by character and incident. The same illusion is then replayed on several subsequent occasions: during the conversation between DC and Jordan in which the medic explains that an ancient bullet dug out of Mac’s arm could never have been fired by a modern-day gun; in tandem with DC and Hunt’s exchange after the discovery of Taktarov and Voyteche’s mutilated corpses; and finally, throughout the close-quarters climactic shootout in which Prior and Jordan lose their lives. The preceding discussion of Outpost does not intend to call into question either the professional competence or creativity of those involved with the project: it takes a great deal of enterprise and intelligence to make a film as perfectly and lucratively mindless as this one, The Wild Geese (Andrew V. McLaglen, GB/Swi, 1978) cast adrift in The Fog (John Carpenter, USA, 1980). Moreover, Outpost undoubtedly poses a range of difficult but necessary questions for contemporary Scottish cinema criticism. This is particularly so with regard to the causal link that the film seems to demonstrate between complete abandonment of cultural or political engagement (nationally specific or otherwise) and international commercial return.

The Inheritance Although produced right at the no-budget end of the film industrial spectrum, The Inheritance represents a far more high-minded engagement with the creative and commercial possibilities of low- and micro-budget filmmaking modes than was the case with Outpost. Director Charles Henri Belleville’s 60-minute feature was produced for a mere £5,000, shot on Mini DV over just 11 days, filmed for the most part outdoors and in natural light and set largely inside a second-hand VW camper van which simultaneously functioned as a mobile production unit. David (Tim Barrow) and Fraser (Fraser Sivewright) are estranged siblings. Fraser has always lived in Scotland, staying close (in all senses of the word) to his immediate kin. David, however, relocated to London and has not visited his family for some five years. The last wish of the brothers’ recently deceased father (Tom Hardy) is that his unwilling offspring be physically and emotionally reunited: dead parent therefore sets living progeny on a road trip North to the island of Skye. A valedictory letter promises the pair that a bequeathed key will open a door in a place called Kilchrist, and the unspecified nature of the brothers’ inheritance will ‘all become clear’. David and Fraser thus set out on a cold, wet and bad-tempered odyssey in the antiquated family

158 The New Scottish Cinema camper van. They pick up a female hitchhiker, Tara (Imogen Toner), during the drive North. She sleeps with both brothers before stealing their rickety vehicle. Completing the journey’s final leg in a car they themselves purloin, a fatal confrontation ensues after the revelation that nothing physical waits for David and Fraser to inherit at Kilchrist. A wild goose chase brings murderous birds home to roost. Fraser claims always to have known that the brothers’ journey was engineered by their father in the hope that time spent together might repair the siblings’ relationship. David trumps this by revealing that the trip was in fact provoked by a secret that he confessed to his dying parent a fortnight earlier (in the course of a distressed phone call witnessed in the film’s opening scene). An enraged Fraser strangles David, but neither he nor the viewer uncovers the secret which dead father and son take with them to their graves. Throughout the late 1990s, new Scottish directors – including David Mackenzie, Morag McKinnon, Peter Mullan and Lynne Ramsay – generally began fledgling careers through participation in the arena of short filmmaking. A large number of publicly funded short schemes – First Reels, New Found Land, Prime Cuts, Tartan Shorts – flourished during this period as an institutionally sanctioned seedbed within which promising domestic talent could be identified and initiated. During the 2000s, however, institutions like Scottish Screen, Scottish Television and BBC Scotland showed less interest in the idea of shorts as the vital link in a carefully sequenced, centrally overseen ladder of opportunity for emerging local filmmakers. This may in part have been because a new generation of budding artists seemed less keen than their predecessors to undergo a preparatory apprenticeship in the short filmmaking field. More attractive to many was an aspiration to create low- and micro-budget feature work produced as far as possible from personal resources. Charles HenriBelleville had, for instance, been involved with the theatrical distribution of the critically well-regarded British film London to Brighton (Paul Andrew Williams, GB, 2006). Produced for £75,000 (not that much more money than the typical budget for a half-hour Tartan Short), Henri Belleville saw Williams’ debut feature as an inspiring model for young British filmmakers: Those guys just went out there… they didn’t wait for anybody to give them permission to make the film… [that] was really inspiring: not waiting for… £20,000 or £30,000 to… make a short, never mind make a feature… we felt we had the talent, we felt we had a story to tell, and we just kind of wanted to get out there and do it.40 The Inheritance could therefore be understood as a Scottish attempt to both emulate and extend London to Brighton’s shining example. While The Inheritance usefully illustrates the terms of a ‘just do it’ mindset that became increasingly prevalent (because practically possible to prosecute) locally during the 2000s, the film is also of interest due to the nature of what its makers just wanted to do. Speaking about contemporary micro- or no-budget feature filmmaking, Tim Barrow, The Inheritance’s writer, producer and lead actor, posited the widespread

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influence of ‘a belief that, in order to make a successful low-budget film, you need one location, do a slasher movie, everyone gets killed throughout the journey of the film’.41 Several examples of the phenomenon that Barrow describes emerged from 2000s Scotland. The Dead Outside (Kerry Anne Mullaney, GB, 2008) was a postapocalyptic zombie movie in which two uninfected central protagonists hole up in a remote rural farmhouse. Dark Nature (Marc de Launey, GB, 2009), a slasher flick with erratic ecological overtones, was filmed almost entirely within the grounds and immediate environs of an isolated country house on Scotland’s Galloway coast. Barrow argued that The Inheritance articulated ‘exactly the opposite point of view’42 as to what a micro-budget Scottish cinema might look like in practice. He noted that his movie could only be understood as an example of the financially strategic one-location model if one was willing to see the austere topography of northern Scotland as a single found film set: We set it outdoors, because it’s free and it’s Scotland… you’ve got the most incredible locations for free on your doorstep… really bleak or really beautiful… immediately, you’ve got an amazing production value… something that really made The Inheritance work.43 Elsewhere, Barrow proposed that, ‘there’s something so striking about Scotland… your state of mind changes as you progress through the landscape… you’re somewhere so different, spiritually as well as physically. I wanted The Inheritance to communicate that.’44 This pronounced emphasis on physical setting dovetails perfectly with the culturally specific nature of The Inheritance’s central thematic concerns. Barrow presented the film as one that had grown out of a personal attempt ‘to make sense of my Scottish identity… what it means to be in Scotland now, and the identity of young men growing up there’.45 He stated his belief that: There’s a common understanding, particularly about men in Scotland, that people can’t find the emotional language to express themselves. It was very much the environment I grew up in… [I therefore wanted] to create a situation where Scotsmen are forced to communicate.46 The Inheritance’s title resonates, therefore, on at least two levels: that of plot (a father’s bequest to his surviving sons) and that of politics (a troubled intersection between masculinity and nationality which David and Fraser’s mutually destructive relationship exemplifies). Though a making-of documentary included as an extra feature on The Inheritance’s British DVD release describes the film as ‘A Scottish Road Movie’, Barrow and Henri Belleville’s film might be better thought of as a road movie in reverse. On one hand, the work’s central characters do successfully undertake an out-of-the ordinary physical journey during the narrative’s course. But on the other, they fail to achieve any attendant form of escape from their original psychological situation and

160 The New Scottish Cinema mindsets. David and Fraser in fact end up back exactly where they started: at each other’s throats, not in each other’s hearts. This overwhelming sense of intractable difficulty bleeds into the way in which The Inheritance understands the various forms of national identity realistically open to present-day young Scotsmen. An ostensibly stark and simplistic nationalist distinction between a progressive sense of proud rootedness (Fraser) and a self-destructive, deracinated polar opposite (David) finally gives way at the film’s climax, when Fraser kills his sibling. The plot’s central MacGuffin – the fact that there is no door to open, no inheritance to collect – might feel like an overly forced contrivance. It makes perfect sense, however, as an expression of the film’s tortured uncertainty as to the existence of any modern variant of Scottish identity to which the nation’s male young might profitably acknowledge and adhere. The words spoken by a dying old man (father) to a living young one (David) in the movie’s opening scene – ‘it’s not about me… it’s about you’ – suggest just how much importance The Inheritance accords to the identification of a sustaining and sustainable sense of modern Scottish masculinity. Yet by the time final credits roll, the film appears to concede that this goal stubbornly evades its yearning grasp. The irony is that such matters seem far more clear-cut (and thus comforting) for most of The Inheritance’s narrative, as the warring brothers behave like cookiecutter examples of historian Christopher Harvie’s well-known distinction between historic ‘Red’ (David/mobile/outward-looking/high-achieving) and ‘Black’ (Fraser/ stable/insular/conservative) traditions of Scottish identity.47 Until its final scene, the movie appears to place all its ideological chips on black. An early cross-cutting sequence, for instance, shows the two brothers putting mirrors to radically different uses. The contrast between David snorting coke and Fraser slathering shaving foam marks the former out as self-destructive and unhappy because alienated from home (both familial or national), while the latter seems a picture of domestic tranquillity and normality. Moreover, the respective personality traits ascribed to each brother construct Fraser as a far more sympathetic figure than his sibling. David is almost always defensive, dismissive and closed; Fraser is enthusiastic, open to reconciliation and respectful of his father’s final wishes. At times, this black-and-white (or blackand-red) binary even seems to flirt with outright Anglophobia. During one of the many stops, scheduled or otherwise, that punctuate the drive North, Fraser notes to David that ‘I don’t know how you do it down there [i.e., London]. All everyone talks about is fucking money’. David’s behaviour both before and after this remark is made appears to confirm its glib diagnosis of a specifically Southern malaise. Though reluctant to undertake the journey to Skye, the London-based sibling is alltoo-keen to pocket the money that he assumes lies waiting at the trip’s end. David thus obsesses about the safety of the key – ‘Is it safe? It’s my inheritance’ – which his father instructs the brothers to take to Kilchrist. Once that destination has been reached, he makes crystal clear his nakedly material motivation for being there: ‘Fuck you. Fuck dad. I’m going back to London, leaving you, leaving this, leaving everything. There’s nothing here. Going to… get my money, [then] fuck off.’ In stark contrast, Fraser seems selfless in his self-professed wish to ‘honour the dead’, whether his

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own kin or entire generations of Scots more generally. He revels in what he calls ‘the smell of Scotland’, and reifies the Forth Road Bridge into a national talisman, rather than simply a major transport route: ‘fifty men lost their lives in the building of that fucker. What a statement, eh? Scottish engineering at its finest.’ David’s profound unhappiness seems rooted in his equally intense nostophobia: ‘there’s nothing here’, he bitterly exclaims at one point. Fraser’s level-headedness appears grounded in his willingness to accept the national origins and identity that he inherits through no active choice of his own: ‘well, we are here: we might as well make the best of it’.

Figure 6.3 ‘Making the best of it’: landscape as film set in The Inheritance The (ultimately misguided) suspicion that The Inheritance identifies uncomplicatedly with Fraser is deepened by that character’s repeated expression of an idea which his creators applied to their movie, in an attempt to achieve commercial viability: a patriotic declaration of the Scottish landscape’s aesthetic and emotional power. Fraser notes that ‘Scotland looks a wee bit more sparkly’ when viewed from the interior of the VW camper van within which much of the film is set. He tries to convince a sceptical David of the delights of being ‘out on the open road’. He highlights his native heath’s ‘lovely scenery’ for Englishwoman Tara’s benefit. He deliberately drags out the drive to Skye, arguing that one ‘just need[s] to pull over so often; just experience it, you know?’ For Fraser, the advantage of driving more slowly than is necessary relates to the fact that ‘you can enjoy the scenery more’. Yet while Fraser tries to instruct spectators – whether those within the film or those watching it – how to experience the Highland landscapes which The Inheritance showcases, that topography is usually viewed from another protagonist’s physical (and by extension, psychological) perspective. This disjunction opens up the possibility of readings of local landscape that are not in thrall to Fraser’s prescriptive patriotism. For example, at one point he commends the ‘lovely scenery’ to Tara. But the dark, featureless hills shown in an accompanying shot that depicts her point of view constitute a more complicated, and potentially unsettling, spectacle. More

162 The New Scottish Cinema generally, and on a basic commonsensical level, the numerous montage sequences of hills, mountains and lochs with which The Inheritance is festooned must, for the most part, be understood to represent a passenger’s point of view, rather than a driver’s: in other words, David’s perspective, not Fraser’s. In fact, the work’s initial intimation of a potent connection between physical and mental landscapes emanates from David, not Fraser: the former stares sadly at the wintry countryside flashing by during an early-morning London-Edinburgh train journey for his father’s funeral. As a rule, what the viewer hears of the Scottish landscape throughout The Inheritance denotes Fraser’s patriotic cultural allegiances. But what the viewer sees at the same time connotes David’s alienation from that position. In the final analysis, the bleakness and darkness of the Highland vistas seen throughout The Inheritance are most readily associable with the peripatetic sibling’s mindset. Deserted, desolate glens and lochs illustrate in literal terms the lesson that a prodigal son has long understood, even if his parochial counterpart cannot: Scotland is no fit place to live in. The Inheritance explores different possible accommodations between gendered and national forms of identity within contemporary Scotland. Ultimately, however, the film finds fault with each of the options that it road tests/tests out on the road. By The Inheritance’s end, it appears that young Scotsmen face an unappetising choice: insular naivety (Fraser) on one hand, cosmopolitan misery (David) on the other. Nothing lies in-between. Within such a polarised mindset, national identity – perhaps the most important of the different forms of inheritance referred to in the film’s title – must be conceived more as a burden than a boon. The promise that the brothers’ dying parent makes in his final letter (‘no matter what’s gone before, I’ll always be your father’) is a curse, not a comfort. Though The Inheritance strongly foregrounds its Scottish identity, the film actually identifies most closely with David, a man obsessively determined to put protective distance between himself and all possible ideas or experiences of Scotland.

New Town Killers The Inheritance was not the only 2000s Scottish film to explore links between masculinity and nationality while simultaneously exploiting popular genre as a means to pursue both commercial and cultural ends. In addition to unleashing a plethora of kinetic chase sequences, writer/director Richard Jobson’s fourth feature, New Town Killers, ‘paints an almost apocalyptic picture of a rich/poor schism in booming Edinburgh’.48 Or, as Jobson himself put it, ‘[the film] was born from something real, but I took it into the world of cinema, and into a cinematic genre that really appeals to me… a kind of thriller/chase movie’.49 Jobson’s three previous features – 16 Years of Alcohol, The Purifiers (GB, 2004) and A Woman in Winter (GB, 2006) – received production finance from established public (Scottish Screen, the UK Film Council’s New Cinema Fund) and a diverse range of private funders (Tartan Works, Bill Kenwright Films, Vestry Films). All three works were shot digitally, thus keeping their respective production budgets comparatively low (£0.5 million or less). By choosing to work in this way, Jobson aimed to identify, acquire and then advertise

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the entrepreneurial skills that he believed were essential for any director wishing to work regularly and sustainably from a Scottish base. He argued that: There has never been a better time than now for Scottish filmmaking to embrace the powerful world of digital technology. I’ve never shot on film and never will: it’s totally pointless. The economic gain, the aesthetic production value, the interface between hardware and software means that low-budget filmmakers are empowered and in reality anything is possible.50 New Town Killers is one result of the filmmaker’s attempts to put his enterprising and ambitious rhetoric into action. Sean MacDonald (James Anthony Pearson) is an orphaned teenager sharing an Edinburgh council estate flat with his sister, Alice (Liz White). The siblings symbolise an entire social class who, in Jobson’s words, ‘are not part of the success story of modern Britain [and who…] have all but been forgotten… [they] would not be missed if they were suddenly to disappear’.51 Brother and sister are targeted in different ways by a wealthy and sadistic financial services magnate, Alistair Raskolnikov (Dougray Scott). Alice has accumulated £12,000 of debts to a loan sharking company Raskolnikov runs. Wholly unable to repay the sum, she is pressured to work as a drug mule instead. Alistair then offers Sean an unusual way out of this dilemma. He suggests playing a game: if Sean can remain free of the businessman’s clutches overnight, he will win enough money to cover his sister’s liabilities. Lacking any other realistic option, the boy accepts this proposal. But Sean quickly discovers that Alistair’s intentions are lethal, not ludic, in nature. Raskolnikov routinely hunts down and kills economically deprived individuals as a perverse form of pastime. Pursuing Sean through the closes, council estates and nightclubs of central Edinburgh, Alistair kills or seriously injures all who intervene between him and his prey. That rampage culminates in a grotesque assault made upon Alice with a kettle full of boiling water. As the chase unfolds, Sean also learns that it is a game played with loaded dice. Raskolnikov runs a network of paid informants that extends even as far as Sam (Charles Mnene), Sean’s best friend. Enraged by the banker’s vicious attack on his defenceless sister, Sean tracks Alastair to the latter’s palatial apartment in Edinburgh’s Georgian New Town. Here, the young man emerges victorious from a final violent confrontation. Rather than kill Alastair, Sean emails full details of his tormentor’s murderous activities to everyone included in the businessman’s email address book. Sam and Sean are reunited when the latter collects his prize money from the bus station locker where Raskolnikov had earlier promised to deposit it. Jobson presented New Town Killers as the fruit of ‘a new agenda for me’, one that involved ‘creating genre films… that have got something to say at the heart of them, but are thrilling and entertaining’.52 The director’s sincerity in this regard can be gauged from the sizeable overlaps between New Town Killers and The Purifiers, his first foray into genre filmmaking. A lawless nocturnal urban environment forms the primary setting for both movies: present-day Edinburgh in New Town Killers,

164 The New Scottish Cinema Glasgow re-imagined as a futuristic Anyplace in The Purifiers. Both movies critique the increasing power of democratically unaccountable private capital: the villain of each piece is an utterly amoral businessman, a charismatic fascist attired in Armani instead of military epaulettes. Both movies feature attractive and idealistic young central protagonists who symbolise a more communitarian ethos. Both movies studiedly alternate between chase and conflict set pieces as a way of structuring their respective narratives. But the socio-political commentary of New Town Killers is much more clearly grounded in a recognisably Scottish milieu than that of The Purifiers. Jobson’s fourth feature traverses thematic territory more commonly associated with Scottish/British traditions of social realist filmmaking than with popular genre-based counterparts. The writer/director identified endemic socio-economic inequality and the systematic disenfranchisement (and cultural demonisation) of the young working class as his central themes. New Town Killers tried to publicly align itself with, and celebrate the potential of, the marginalised constituency that Sean represents. Jobson explained that: I’m trying to use the [chase/thriller] genre to look at a bigger picture, socially and politically… I wanted to make a film that would address a young audience, and try and put forward positive characters that they could believe in.53 To the filmmaker’s mind, exploitation of genre convention – the high-speed chase movie and the quasi-cinematic experience and aesthetics of Xbox and PlayStation home gaming systems54 – would enable him to fulfil his political project. This was so for two main reasons. Firstly, Jobson argued that a more staid social realist filmic tradition was wont to ‘criminalise kids of [Sean’s] age… [but] I really wanted to create a character… who was much more… optimistic’.55 Secondly, New Town Killers would communicate well with its target audience on a political level by speaking simultaneously to them on an aesthetic one, ‘a movie that’s made for… a generation who really understand the visual language… because that’s part of their world’.56 Jobson noted how he ‘always set out to create… a connection with computer games’57 in New Town Killers. The film foregrounds this link, and the visual and ideological uses to which it might be put, at the earliest possible opportunity. A blood-red opening title sequence, designed by local digital artists previously involved in the production of the seminal Grand Theft Auto franchise, takes the form of a twenty-first-century platform game. A digitised Sean performs death-defying leaps across, over and down from the tops of tall Edinburgh buildings. These stunts are even more hyperbolic versions of the feats of derring-do that viewers see the young man cornered into during the main narrative itself. At one level, the pronounced illusionism of the opening titles simply sells the thrill of the chase (not to mention that of the computer) to the viewer. But there is more to it than just this. Digitally rendered perspectival trickery enables Sean’s avatar to make impossible bounds through, above or across many of Edinburgh’s Georgian architectural landmarks. Thus, before its narrative even begins, New Town Killers already ascribes unlimited

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energy and potential to its main character and the young working-class generation that he represents. Sean’s empowerment, both in the introductory titles and in the narrative that follows them, is twofold in nature. It is not only tall buildings that the boy transcends, but also the vested class and financial interests which such edifices shelter and symbolise. New Town Killers then proceeds to put computer game iconography and narrative structure to other ideologically inflected uses. A deliberately disorienting opening montage sequence, for instance, rapidly alternates between different types and sources of digital imagery. This melange connects Raskolnikov’s public activities and self-image to their private equivalents. DV footage of a real-life game (titled Running Man IV) unfolds on the banker’s laptop; a nameless victim’s death is confirmed by the appearance of a ‘game over’ inter-title. Interspersed with such disturbing material is the familiar iconography associated with Alistair’s day job. Broken-glasslike computer graph lines monitor and manipulate the endless mutations of global financial markets; ceaselessly rolling Stock Exchange banners track the yo-yoing of share indexes and exchange rates. By making this juxtaposition (and making it so swiftly), Jobson’s film suggests that computer game aesthetics and experiences are not simply the cultish preserve of a fetishised or demonised social minority. Rather, contemporary society as a whole is defined by a collective addiction to highly kinetic games of risk, domination and destruction. That certain kinds of game and gamer are denigrated while others are deified is simply a matter of ideological double standards. The killings that Alistair makes – whether financial or physical – are far more dangerous to the health of the body politic than the virtual ones associated with the leisure pursuits of Sean and his generation. New Town Killers also structures its narrative in a manner akin to that of a computer game. This is because the film understands present-day Scottish society to be organised in a similar fashion. The real world is as strategically stratified as anything one might encounter on Xbox, divided into discrete levels that each come with jealously guarded points of entry and exit. Sean’s determined ascent through the different levels of Raskolnikov’s game is therefore an individual journey with wider socioeconomic implications. In the end, the young man swaps his cramped council flat for Alistair’s palatial New Town eyrie, and a hooded top for a designer suit. Yet Sean ultimately chooses to quit, rather than colonise, the final game level which he expends so much skill and energy in completing. He refuses Raskolnikov’s offer of entry into the banker’s world at the expense of his complicit silence, and returns to Sam and Alice instead. In choosing so, Sean confounds two forms of sequential, hierarchical logic. Firstly, that which structures many computer games; secondly (and more importantly), the unthinking societal materialism that ascribes worth to individuals and entire social classes solely in terms of their ability to accumulate wealth. In all these ways, New Town Killers could be understood to have, in Jobson’s words, ‘that quality of providing an overview of [the] society’58 within which the film’s narrative is rooted. But New Town Killers’ extensive and enterprising use of popular cultural reference points has ambiguous as well as clearly progressive ideological consequences. Producer

166 The New Scottish Cinema Luc Roeg identified the film’s target audience as ‘a male-orientated demographic, definitely… that PlayStation, Xbox generation’.59 This perhaps explains why New Town Killers’ critique of contemporary materialism occasionally has a whiff of misogyny about it. The movie presents acquiescence or active participation within consumer society as the preserve of two groups: women, on one hand, and men willing to feminise themselves in self-destructive ways, on the other. Raskolnikov’s hyper-masculinity roots itself not in the businessman’s extraordinary liquidity, but in his perfect (but uncaring) comprehension of the moral bankruptcy, individual and collective, that underpins his financial achievements. In sharp contrast, and despite the wish of New Town Killers to advance an empowering image of workingclass youth, that constituency’s only female representative within the film cuts a notably pathetic figure. Utterly in thrall to the mendacious creed of no-strings credit, it is Alice’s misguided actions and desires that first leave her and Sean open to Raskolnikov’s depredations. The introductory sign of her presence within the narrative is a symbolically loaded one: Alice leaves a note on the kitchen door, telling Sean that she has ‘gone to new club Hysteria’ and inviting him to ‘come and join us’. Other women fleetingly seen throughout the film seem to belong to Alice’s hysterical consumerist sisterhood. Sean watches celebrity-obsessed young female wannabes on television, girls pitifully desperate to mimic vapid celebrities like Paris Hilton because, in their own words, they ‘love her money’. Raskolnikov’s most sinister accomplice is a vampiric female loan shark who turns up at Alice and Sean’s door wielding a final demand for payment. The siblings’ dead mother is implied to have been a deeply flawed figure. Sean advises his sister to ‘think about what mum would have done – then do the opposite’, while Alice later concedes that ‘I’m just like her: hopeless’. Towards the movie’s end, viewers are clearly asked to see Raskolnikov’s verbal tirade against Alice (‘What kind of mother are you going to be… as good as your mother? … Another starving, screaming piece of skin and bone the state has to pay for’) as grotesquely sadistic. Yet New Town Killers’ own treatment of Alice (and of more minor female characters) could be said to concede that an infinitesimal grain of truth is lodged deep within Alistair’s hate-filled words. New Town Killers seems to construct young working-class women as consumerism’s natural pawns and prey. When young working-class men succumb to or strengthen that collective madness, the film understands their acts to involve the prostitution, literal or otherwise, of male heterosexuality. Sam’s preferred self-image, for instance, is that of ‘a successful, self-employed entrepreneur’. He sees a townhouse of the kind Alistair owns as the ultimate symbol of self-fulfilment (‘I’m going to have one of them’). But as Sean points out, Sam only has ‘cash in hand’ because of a selfviolating willingness to first handle ‘cock’. Sam works as a rent boy in order to indulge a predilection for designer trainers; later, he naively betrays Sean to Raskolnikov in return for the proverbial 30 pieces of silver. By contrast, Sean is fundamentally unable to compromise his seemingly innate forms of identity, whether gendered, sexual or classbased. He makes one abortive attempt to work as a rent boy, and even then only as a way to clear Alice’s debts. Physical repulsion prevents him, however, from becoming a middle-aged punter’s plaything. Elsewhere, Sean’s acceptance of Alistair’s invitation

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is also figured as an act (albeit unconscious) of self-prostitution. Sean agrees, after all, to sell his body to two wealthy older men who first proposition him in a hotel toilet. There is an undeniable (homo)sexual undertone to Raskolnikov’s suggestion of a ‘game’ played overnight by three consenting male adults and ‘with no strings attached’.

Figure 6.4 Predatory capitalism: Alistair asserts ownership of Sean’s bloodied body in New Town Killers Two especially vivid subsequent images in New Town Killers’ narrative also suggest the extent to which the film understands its hero to have inadvertently imperiled his heterosexual masculinity. Cornered by Raskolnikov in a crowded nightclub, Sean steals a long red wig from an unconscious reveller in order to disguise himself; the young man cuts a markedly androgynous figure while wearing that hairpiece. Later still, the climactic Mexican stand-off between the young man and his tormentor assumes explicitly predatory overtones. Alistair’s final offer of ‘more money than you ever dreamed of ’ is accompanied by a disquieting close-up of the banker’s manicured hand caressing Sean’s bloodied face. The latter’s refusal to be led into temptation at this vital point represents his decisive reassertion of three forms of identity that New Town Killers both celebrates and conflates: working-class, masculine and heterosexual. In all of the ways discussed above, Richard Jobson’s movie illustrates many of the opportunities, but also the complexities, that were inherent within a collective turn towards genre filmmaking in 2000s Scotland. New Town Killers demonstrates that unashamedly populist production strategies did not automatically prevent local filmmakers from simultaneously pursuing progressive political agendas within their work. Yet the film also shows how wholesale exploitation and inhabitation of genre convention can compromise a given work’s aspirations toward radicalism in some regards, even as it clearly enables them in others.

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GamerZ Like New Town Killers, writer/director Robbie Fraser’s debut feature GamerZ is a film defined by an extensive and self-aware engagement with a particular form of gaming culture associated with contemporary youth. Orphaned working-class teenager Ralph (Ross Finbow) has few friends in the world – or at least, in this world. Ralph lives with his grandmother (Eileen McCallum) in her Glasgow council flat and is routinely persecuted by his thuggish peers from the surrounding estate, a gang led by pubescent drug pusher Lennie (James Young). The young man thus retreats into a fantasy world of his own making, a Dungeons and Dragons-style diegesis presided over by Ralph’s alter ego/avatar, the infinitely powerful and cruel wizard Z’rennk (Arnold Brown/Lewis MacLeod). Another form of escape beckons when Ralph begins an undergraduate degree in experimental physics led by eccentric Dr Denholm (Edward Tudor Pole) at Glasgow University. He quickly falls in with, and then lords it over, a small student gaming society there, inducting the group’s other members – Hank (Ross Sutherland), Davy (Johnny Austin) and Marlyn (Danielle Stewart) – into his own game, The Reign of Z’rennk. Ralph requires total collective immersion in his compensatory fantasy, and thus relocates society meetings to the Physics Department’s cordoned-off basement, a subterranean substitute for Z’rennk’s underground lair. Three developments then complicate matters. Ralph becomes besotted with Marlyn (and/or her elven avatar, Imbrenbella); Ralph’s nemesis Lennie discovers the game’s existence and forces his way into it; Marlyn is attracted to Lennie, causing an envious, resentful Ralph to lust for revenge. The wounded would-be wizard plots a grisly end for the game-players’ avatars. He presides over this in a castle turret that the teenagers hire as an especially atmospheric location within which to complete the fictional quest Ralph has so entranced them with. Immediately remorseful at the collective hurt he causes, Ralph relents, resurrecting his companion’s characters and renouncing his own. A disciplinary hearing called by the university sees him expelled from the physics course for trespassing on university property. But Dr Denholm is impressed by The Reign of Z’rennk, and offers his errant ex-pupil a fast-track place on a virtual realities postgraduate research group. GamerZ ends with Ralph and Lennie reconciled: the latter is now enrolled on a degree in business management and enthusiastically engaged in creating a game world of his own. Analysis of GamerZ suggests a range of possible ways in which 2000s Scottish genre cinema might usefully (and legitimately) be seen as a cohesive cinematic movement, rather than a ragbag of loosely relatable individual movies. Take the film’s intense (albeit ostensibly light-hearted) identification with vulnerable and alienated adolescent experience. This theme links GamerZ to many other twenty-first-century Scottish genre works, some discussed at length within this chapter (New Town Killers, Wild Country), others touched on only briefly. The teenage siblings at the heart of low-budget slasher movie Dark Nature, for instance, display no positive emotional attachment of any kind to their middle-class mother and stepfather. Indeed, the adolescents go so far as to kill their biological parent with a crossbow – perhaps by accident, perhaps not – after she slays the psychopath who dispatches the rest of the film’s unfortunate cast. Similarly, the paranoid misanthropy of April (Sandra Louise

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Douglas), the young female lead protagonist of micro-budget zombie flick The Dead Outside, is a direct consequence of a brutal (and brutalising) childhood overseen by a drug-addicted mother and indifferent grandparents. Like Wild Country, Outcast (Colm McCarthy, GB/Ire, 2010) is a werewolf film that applies lycanthropic motifs to the troubles of marginalised working-class adolescents. The movie’s two central teen characters are compelled to struggle against the unrelenting burden of their respective mixed-race backgrounds. Fergal (Niall Bruton) is an outcast in a fantastical sense, rendered literally monstrous by an immature inability to comprehend or control his developing adult sexuality. Petronella (Hanna Stanbridge) cares for her mentally handicapped brother unassisted by the siblings’ alcoholic mother, and faces daily taunts out-of-doors due to her part-Romany ethnic identity. Ralph’s initial situation and feelings in GamerZ are reminiscent of those endured by the unhappy cinematic teenagers described above. Deprived of his parents at an early age, the boy tries to mould Z’rennk into a surrogate father figure. But Ralph succeeds only in connecting with, and giving voice to, a fantasy projection of his damaged inner child. His chastened concluding resolution that ‘the world will never hear from Z’rennk again’ signals, therefore, Ralph’s tentative progression from unhappy adolescence towards a more stable adulthood. His personal journey of maturation provides a real-life parallel for the game-players’ successful movement through the different, and increasingly challenging, levels of Z’rennk’s dungeon. Marlyn also cuts a troubled teenage figure. Her relationship with her mother seems deeply problematic: during the latter character’s only appearance in the film, she comes across as a markedly uncaring parent. Her parent’s succession of transient relationships with men whom Marlyn bitterly terms ‘pretend uncles’ has damaged the young woman emotionally. Their traumatic childhoods cause both Marlyn and Ralph to be gripped by an inchoate attraction towards conceptions of adult sexuality defined by ideas of physical and psychological violence. The inescapable trap that Ralph conceals within the final level of Z’rennk’s dungeon (which the furious boy titles ‘Apocalypse’) has Marlyn, the heedless object of his desire, as its main prey. Once Marlyn/Imbrenella’s companions have been picked off one by one, Ralph/Z’rennk indulges in a lurid fantasy of unending gang rape. Marlyn’s avatar is carried off to become, in Ralph/Z’rennk’s words, an orc army’s ‘sticky slave and plaything for all eternity’. Earlier in the film, Marlyn’s comparable unhappiness also manifests itself in naive imaginings of sexualised violence/violent sex. She recommends the castle turret as a game-playing venue because ‘there’s a dungeon in the basement: bring your shackles’. Her regular place of part-time work is a business which conflates the erotic and the apocalyptic just as much as the final level of Z’rennk’s dungeon: World’s End is an S&M retail outlet that specialises in an eye-watering array of fetish apparel and implements. For all its ostentatious comic absurdity, GamerZ is genuinely concerned with (and by) the vengeful and vulnerable aspects of modern-day adolescent experience. This quality links the movie not only to other contemporaneous local genre works, but also to a frequently proffered critical ideation of Scottish cinema per se. Many observers suggest that films focused on pre-adult central protagonists and/or autobiographical

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Figure 6.5 Tolkien ’bout my generation: adolescence as fantasy roleplaying in GamerZ accounts of childhood represent a (or even the) prominent strain within Scottish filmmaking since the pioneering 1970s debuts of Bill Douglas and Bill Forsyth.60 Indeed, this thematic territory continued to be explored at length by local writers and directors during the early twenty-first century, in films such as Dear Frankie (Shona Auerbach, GB, 2004), Hallam Foe (David Mackenzie, GB, 2007), Summer (Kenny Glenaan, GB/Ger, 2008) and Sweet Sixteen (Ken Loach, GB/Ger/Sp, 2002). Thus, if 2000s low-budget genre production announced new representational directions for Scottish cinema on one hand, on the other, the movement also allowed established preoccupations to be revisited in novel ways. The Janus-faced quality of much Scottish low-budget genre cinema in this regard challenges criticism to become more inclusive and open-minded when identifying types of film and filmmaker presumed to be of especial relevance or importance to understandings of Scottish cinema’s history, identity and future development. A brief comparative analysis of GamerZ and a far more critically prestigious movie, a work made by one of Scotland’s most internationally acclaimed and analysed auteur filmmakers,61 indicates the extent to which this is so. Neds (GB/Fr/It, 2010), the third feature by writer/director Peter Mullan, tells a story of good boy gone bad. John McGill (Conor McCarron/Greg Forrest) is an intellectually gifted and ambitious child who at first strives earnestly to overcome numerous personal and social obstacles set in his way. John’s family background is a troubled one. His parents’ marriage remains intact in name only, a concession to the social conservatism and orthodox Catholicism that dominate the film’s early-1970s Glasgow milieu. Older brother Benny (Joe Szula) is an especially notorious member of one of the city’s numerous male teenage gangs. Moreover, if John’s family background constitutes one significant burden which the boy bears, societal prejudice about his socioeconomic

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status represents another. When the shy, bookish child finally forges a much-needed friendship outside of school, that connection is strangled at birth by a middle-class mother who considers a working-class lad’s company to be beneath her privately educated son. Fatally wounded by this rejection, John falls in with a local gang, and so becomes one of the eponymous Neds (non-educated delinquents) of the film’s title. John’s discovery of a notable, but hitherto untapped, taste for violence rapidly cements his position within Glasgow gangland culture. An initially intoxicating existence of drink and dope by day and running battles by night prompts the young man to leave behind all previous academic aspirations. But he is unable to control his impetuosity and bloodlust, and so becomes even more alienated and isolated within his new life than he was within his old. John nearly kills Canta (Gary Milligan), a boy who threatened him a couple of years before, and is ostracised by his delinquent peers as a result. Increasingly unhinged, he then takes on a rival gang single-handed, in what looks very much like an unsuccessful suicide attempt. Neds ends on a note of extravagant symbolism. During a school visit to a local safari park, John and the now brain-damaged Canta abscond, wandering away from camera through a field of grazing lions. Points of thematic and aesthetic overlap between GamerZ and Neds abound. For one thing, the films’ respective titles advertise a shared concern with youth subcultures usually dismissed and/or demonised by hostile outside perspectives. Both movies underscore the violent potential of angst-ridden working-class male adolescent protagonists. In GamerZ, Ralph’s resentful sadism remains contained at the level of his imagination: the axe-wielding armies with which he keeps company are painted fantasy figurines dotted throughout his bedroom. The all-too-knowledgeable Lennie (himself a present-day Ned) remarks on ‘how real’ The Reign of Z’rennk feels, with one crucial exception: ‘the fighting: it’s no’ real fighting… in real life, even a wee weapon is gonnae dae some real damage’. In Neds, by contrast, the pain caused by middleclass snobbery causes John’s previously untapped capacity for physical violence to germinate instantaneously. He vows that if ‘yies want a Ned, I’ll gie ye a fuckin’ Ned’, and then spends the rest of the movie deploying a range of extemporised lethal weapons within ever more dangerous forms of hand-to-hand combat. GamerZ and Neds also both take great pains to distance themselves from the Scottish (and/or British) social realist cinematic traditions within which indigenous working-class culture and experience has most frequently been represented onscreen. The two films experiment instead with fantastical alternative ways to depict such phenomena. Peter Mullan argued of Neds that: I’ll get a bit of a kicking for daring to play around with the social realist model that, for some bizarre reason, is seen to be the staple of British cinema… [but] the whole point of the film was to get into [John’s] head, and if getting into someone’s head takes them into the realms of the slightly absurd, or the completely insane, then it suits me.62

172 The New Scottish Cinema Many key shots and sequences within Mullan’s movie are thus socially and emotionally resonant, but logically risible, at one and the same time. John goads Christ down from the cross to engage in a square go; a homemade paper hat and telescope turn the boy into a latter-day Robison Crusoe; John and Canta become latter-day Daniels, wandering unscathed through the lions’ den. Similarly, Robbie Fraser noted of GamerZ that: Ralph has a visionary connection with the game world that he has created. Since we experience the story through Ralph’s eyes, it made sense that we should see a bit of what he sees in the land of magic in his own head, the realm of the dungeon. I wanted these scenes to have a magical quality.63 Fraser’s film is accordingly punctuated with CGI sequences that depict the main characters’ silhouetted avatars exploring the depths of Z’rennk’s dungeon. More generally, the intense interest that GamerZ displays in teen game-playing culture stems from the film’s understanding of that activity as simultaneously subcultural and socially representative. The movie opens, for instance, with Ralph stacking supermarket shelves in a deeply unrewarding low-paid evening job. He notes to himself that ‘it’s time for me to leave these forsaken lands’, and then escapes, first imaginatively, then physically, mentally turning a display of tinned peas into a towering edifice erected by Z’rennk as he goes. This is but the first example of a psycho-social phenomenon that GamerZ repeatedly foregrounds: the extent to unhappy personal circumstance compels people to transform, at the level of imagination, their unsatisfying day-today routines. Individuals create alternative, compensatory worlds in order to give themselves a place to escape to. ‘Life’, in Marlyn’s words, is thus all ‘about stories’, an experience defined largely by the tales that people spin around themselves and others, the things they imagine in response to what they endure. As well as going to great lengths to inhabit the fantasy universe that exists inside Ralph’s head, GamerZ also tries to underline the social characteristics of the real world which compel him to retreat within the confines of his skull in the first place. Finally, GamerZ and Neds studiously complicate the seemingly clear-cut personal and cultural choices that Ralph and John each confront: formal education/social mobility/individual escape versus informal entertainment/social stasis/individual entropy. Mullan’s film figures school as an extension of, not an alternative to, nocturnal teenage battlegrounds. The schoolteachers’ academic gowns and the Neds’ leather trench coats are both forms of ceremonial costume that the wearers don in order to engage in acts of ritual violence, whether with belts in classrooms or blades in parks and housing schemes. An especially telling tableau occurs at the start of John’s first day at secondary school. In the background, janitors scrub gang graffiti (nicknames, logos) off playground walls. But in the foreground, teachers chalk class numbers onto the same brickwork so that the new intake can be segregated immediately on the basis of perceived academic ability. John is thus caught between two masculine cultures equally structured by ideas of pecking orders, self-imposed

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divisions and all the individual and collective resentment that flows from them. For Neds, the idea of a middle-class educated culture that is superior to, and offers an escape from, John’s violent working-class background is a cruel chimera. GamerZ, meanwhile, refuses to make any black-and-white prescriptive distinctions between gauche teenage subculture (fantasy role-playing) and grown-up academic seriousness (the university environment Ralph tentatively explores). When the latter dons his homemade wizard’s cowl in order to induct the other game-players into The Reign of Z’rennk, he does so beneath an oil portrait of an academic dignitary attired in notdissimilar apparel. Similarly, the paraphernalia worn by the university disciplinary panel at the movie’s end makes those figures look like elderly equivalents of the teenage game-players who swathe themselves in customised blankets in order to better immerse themselves in Ralph’s fantasy world. The young man’s leisure pursuits and degree studies also prove to be closely connected in surprising ways, confounding any standard-issue distinctions drawn between the culturally serious and silly. The intellectual skills and interests that Dr Denholm deems necessary for an engagement with experimental physics – ‘Forget the universe, let it go. Embrace the multiverse: parallel worlds, an infinity of realities… can we see them?’ – are the very things that Ralph and his fellow gamers embrace and exemplify nightly. Indeed, Ralph’s investment in fantasy ultimately saves his academic career, rather than scuppering it. Dr Denholm reveals that he game-played as a student, and sees within The Reign of Z’rennk creative abilities and qualities relevant to the postgraduate research group that he runs: ‘a fascinating and rounded system for mapping out virtual universes with laws different to those of our own; probabilities and outcomes charted with total internal cohesion’. GamerZ and Neds both reject received social and cultural hierarchies. Both films do so, moreover, through notably similar means and to a notably similar end. Willy Maley’s argument that Mullan’s movie wants to show how ‘underdogs may be capable of more compassion and humanity than their supposed betters, but more importantly… may be capable… of effecting social transformation for the good of all’64 is equally applicable to Robbie Fraser’s work. Such affinities seem particularly relevant in the context of the subject matter that this book has discussed. Neds represents just the sort of critically legitimated art cinema practice that has traditionally been asserted to be the ‘central spine which can be attached to the notion of a characteristically Scottish film and television product’.65 By contrast, populist genre works such as GamerZ might be said to constitute Scottish cinema’s coccyx, an area of local film culture that most commentators have felt justified in overlooking. Yet the numerous overlaps between the two movies suggest that today matters might not be so neatly hierarchical. Analysis of Neds, GamerZ and other 2000s genre works teaches an important lesson. In 2012, it is increasingly difficult to produce and police watertight critical distinctions between culturally significant and insignificant, meaningful and meaningless, kinds of Scottish film and filmmaker. The marked diversity discernible within the respective oeuvres of David Mackenzie and Richard Jobson, easily the most prolific directors to emerge from 2000s Scotland, is symptomatic in this regard. Both artists’ creative interests and

174 The New Scottish Cinema experience incorporate the critically sanctioned territory of European art cinema without restricting themselves to that field. Jobson’s career trajectory has been outlined briefly above; Mackenzie’s displays a similar developmental pattern. On one hand, works like Young Adam (GB/Fr, 2003) or Hallam Foe recall the Continental art cinema model in their exploration of central protagonists’ profound alienation and troubled sexuality. But on the other, movies like The Last Great Wilderness (GB/ Den, 2002) or Perfect Sense (GB/Swe/Den/Ire, 2011) suggest a filmmaker equally interested in exploring the possibilities of popular genres: road movie in the case of the former film, romantic melodrama and apocalyptic disaster flick in that of the latter. Taken as whole, then, 2000s genre filmmaking constitutes one of the most urgent, and potentially instructive, areas of enquiry for contemporary criticism. If nothing else, that movement demonstrates just how diverse Scottish cinema has become, aesthetically, thematically and industrially speaking, since the first stirrings of meaningful local change in the early 1990s.

AFTERWORD

More and more over the last 20 years, to watch, think and write about Scottish filmmaking is to find oneself transported beyond a single set of national borders. Both critically and culturally speaking, this is a very different situation from that which held during the late-1970s/early-1980s moment of Scottish cinema’s initial gestation. In the era of pioneering works such as Bill Douglas’ Childhood Trilogy (GB, 1972–78) and That Sinking Feeling (Bill Forsyth, GB, 1979), an emergent school of Scottish cinema studies identified the representation and reformation of national identity by indigenously based filmmaking talent, the creation of ‘alternative discourses… adequate to the task of dealing with the reality of Scottish life’,1 as the main raison d’être for any future national cinema. That prescription has proved enduringly influential in the decades since. Duncan Petrie’s Screening Scotland, the first major academic response to the catalytic late-1990s upsurge in domestic feature production, concluded, for instance, with an assertion of the author’s passionate 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’.2 The present work is deeply indebted to the example set by that critical tradition. Discussion here of films such as The Big Man (David Leland, GB, 1990), Rob Roy (Michael Caton-Jones, USA/GB, 1995), Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, GB/Fr, 1999), Strictly Sinatra (Peter Capaldi, GB/USA, 2001), Ae Fond Kiss… (Ken Loach, GB/ Bel/Ger/It/Sp, 2004), The Inheritance (Charles Henri Belleville, GB, 2007), New Town Killers (Richard Jobson, GB, 2008), GamerZ (Robbie Fraser, GB, 2005) and Neds (Peter Mullan, GB/Fr/It, 2010) tries to make clear that one major function of Scottish cinema is to engage domestic audiences in shared processes of socio-cultural debate and self-definition. But at the same time, I also wanted to examine films like Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, GB/Can, 2002), Late Night Shopping (Saul Metzstein, GB/Ger, 2001), The Magdalene Sisters (Peter Mullan, GB/Ire, 2001), Skagerrak (Søren KraghJacobsen, Den/Swe/GB/Sp/Ger/Fr/Swi, 2003), Red Road (Andrea Arnold, GB/ Den, 2006), Cargo (Clive Gordon, Sp/GB/Swe, 2006) and Outpost (Steve Barker, GB, 2008) as a way of showing the extent to which traditional ideas of a deliberate, dominant and didactic focus on the question of nation are not straightforwardly

176 The New Scottish Cinema applicable to a significant proportion of contemporary Scottish filmmaking. The country’s cinema has grown and diversified markedly since the early 1990s. As a result, criticism must be prepared to acknowledge and explore the full span of local filmmakers’ creative, cultural and commercial ambitions. This book has argued that the latter incorporate, but also extend far beyond, the desires of an inwardly focused celluloid commentariat. Supporting evidence for this contention can be found in the post-2010 continuation of major twenty-first-century Scottish filmmaking trends discussed within the present work’s later chapters. Director David Mackenzie’s Perfect Sense (GB/Swe/Den/Ire, 2011), an imaginative combination of romantic melodrama and apocalyptic nightmare written by Danish screenwriter Kim Fupz Aakeson, and the psychological horror film Citadel (Ciaran Foy, GB/Ire, 2011), the first in a projected wave of Advance Party II features, further cemented cinematic collaboration between Scotland and Scandinavia. So did the announcement that writer/director Terence Davies’ long-awaited adaptation of Scottish novelist Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song is to film in late 2012 with support from Swedish production company Götafilm.3 Elsewhere, issues of ethnicity, race and cross-cultural encounter remain very much to the fore in several recent movies. The narrative of romantic comedy Day of the Flowers (John Roberts, GB/Cuba, 2012) sees two sisters travel to Cuba in order to scatter their late father’s ashes. Once there, the women are forced to confront their prior personal and political assumptions about the island and the legacy of its Communist revolution. Richard Jobson’s fifth feature, The Somnambulists (GB, 2012), acts as a showcase for the traumatic testimony of British Army personnel who have served tours of duty in the Iraq War. Up There (Zam Salim, GB, 2011) represents the first indigenous feature to be made by a non-white Scottish writer/ director. Finally, many local filmmakers continue to prosecute enterprising and imaginative engagements with the possibilities of popular genre and/or low-budget digital production strategies. The 80-minute feature You Instead (David Mackenzie, GB, 2011) was shot entirely on location over a five-day period at the annual T in the Park music festival. Richard Jobson made The Somnambulists in a small studio space built as an extension to his home.4 Electric Man (David Barras, GB, 2011), a 98-minute comedy charting two comic shop owners’ quest to locate and sell a rare 1930s comic book, was successfully produced on a budget of £55,000.5 God Help the Girl, Belle and Sebastian musician Stuart Murdoch’s debut feature as writer/ director, is shooting in Glasgow as I write this afterword in late July 2012. Murdoch’s movie raised $121,085 of production finance from 1,334 individual backers using the online creative funding platform Kickstarter.6 But other ways of making Scottish films (and other ways of making sense of them) abound. Scottish cinema’s increasing industrial maturity and cultural diversity dictates that any critical account can offer only one story about – not the story of – its object of study. I am uncomfortably conscious, for instance, that this book explores questions of gender representation in a fleeting and incomplete fashion. A coherent and comprehensive study of the place of gender discourses within Scottish filmmaking would be a long-overdue addition to our knowledge of the

Afterword

177

field. This is, moreover, only one of several important areas of inquiry which to date remain largely untouched. Of course, it is not my place to predict or prescribe what future critics could or should do. Yet I wish to conclude by suggesting that any remotely responsive analysis of contemporary Scottish cinema must now be open to several overarching precepts. Firstly, we should respect David Martin-Jones’ insight that twenty-first-century Scottish filmmaking ‘exists in the midst of, and interjects in various ways with, the increasingly decentralised flows of film production and distribution that circulate the globe’.7 As a result of the developments witnessed over the last 20 years, the country’s feature production sector is irreversibly embedded within transnational networks of financial and creative exchange. If that contention seems doubtful, consider the following statistical contrast. Duncan Petrie identifies 28 Scottish features produced with indigenous public financial support between 1983 and 2000.8 Of that number, less than half (ten) were international co-productions. But in a recent article discussing a sample of 43 post-2000 films that incorporate a significant degree of Scottish financial and/or creative involvement, the corresponding figure rises to 33.9 That shift points in turn to proposed precept number two. In seeking to define a set of working parameters for the body of films taken to constitute Scottish cinema, we should be ready to accept into that corpus movies made by overseas artists working in Scotland and by Scottish artists working outside the country. For instance, 20 of Petrie’s 28 indigenously supported 1980s and 1990s features were set locally, and 18 of them were directed by filmmakers Scottish by birth. But for the above-noted selection of 43 post-2000 movies, the corresponding figures (17 and 11) are lower. This is despite the fact that the sample itself is more than twice the size of its pre-2000 counterpart. Criticism has to date proved willing to acknowledge some aspects of this long-term process of cinematic change more than others. On one hand, certain films made in Scotland by non-Scottish filmmakers – Ae Fond Kiss… and Red Road, for example – have been written about extensively. In choosing to analyse movies such as Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself) (Lone Scherfig, Den/GB/ Swe/Fr, 2002) and True North (Steve Hudson, Ger/Ire/GB, 2006), I have tried to contribute something to this particular way of defining and debating Scottish cinema. But at the same time, a significant number of my case study choices – Charlotte Gray (Gillian Armstrong, GB/Aus/Ger, 2001), The Magdalene Sisters, Cargo (Clive Gordon, Sp/GB/Swe, 2006), The Last King of Scotland (Kevin Macdonald, GB, 2006) – were motivated in a different way. I have always been puzzled by the historic reluctance of Scottish cinema studies to engage with the work that native artists produce outside their country of birth. That collective refusal has condemned important individual films such as Housekeeping (Bill Forsyth, USA, 1986) or Comrades (Bill Douglas, GB, 1987) to unnecessary and unfair neglect. It has automatically relegated the careers of certain prolific, but also peripatetic, filmmakers – Paul McGuigan and Gillies Mackinnon spring to mind here – to the critical sidelines. Yet, given the ways in which Scottish cinema expanded and evolved during the 1990s and 2000s, we surely blind ourselves in one eye if we refuse to accept that the indigenous and international

178 The New Scottish Cinema components of increasingly globalised local filmmaking careers might usefully be explored in tandem. My third and final precept also relates to possible ways in which scholarly work might engage with the critical mass of creative talent that has emerged from Scotland since the 1990s. It would be productive for criticism to engage with a broader range of cinematic professions than has traditionally been the case. It could be argued that a near-exclusive historic focus on the activities of directors is as blinkered a methodological approach as that which admits only films shot and set on home soil into the national cinematic canon. The analysis presented here has tried to incorporate consideration of directing, scriptwriting and producing careers and practices into its overarching account of Scottish cinema in the years after 1990. But fully detailed accounts of the work of important Scottish producers (Gillian Berrie, Andrea Calderwood, Andrew Macdonald, Christopher Young), writers (Andrea Gibb, David Kane, Paul Laverty) and actors (Gary Lewis, Kelly Macdonald, James McAvoy, Ewan McGregor, Peter Mullan) of the period remain to be written. This book has argued that the last two decades witnessed a welcome and unprecedented proliferation of modes and approaches within Scottish filmmaking. But in order to fully document that phenomenon, Scottish film criticism must also prove willing to duplicate it.

NOTES

Introduction

1 Forsyth Hardy, ‘The cinema’, in Paul H. Scott (ed.), Scotland: A Concise Cultural History (London: Mainstream Press, 1993), pp. 267–78, p. 268. 2 David Bruce, ‘Collaboration – not isolation’, Scottish Film and Visual Arts 6, (1993), p. 18. 3 John Caughie, ‘Don’t mourn – analyse: reviewing the trilogy’, in Eddie Dick, Andrew Noble and Duncan Petrie (eds), Bill Douglas: A Lanternist’s Account (London: British Film Institute, 1993), pp. 197–204, p. 204. 4 Colin McArthur, ‘In praise of a poor cinema’, Sight and Sound 3/8 (August 1993), pp. 30– 32, p. 30. 5 HMSO Charter for the Arts in Scotland (Edinburgh: HMSO, 1993), p. 29. 6 Eddie Dyja (ed.), BFI Film and Television Handbook 1996 (London: British Film Institute, 1995), p. 37; Sarah Street, ‘Trainspotting’, in Jill Forbes and Sarah Street (eds), European Cinema: An Introduction (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 183–92, p. 183. 7 David Bruce, Scotland the Movie (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996), p. 3. 8 Duncan Petrie, Screening Scotland (London: British Film Institute, 2000), p. 226. 9 See Janet McBain, ‘Scotland in Feature Film: a Filmography’, in Eddie Dick (ed.), From Limelight to Satellite: A Scottish Film Book (London/Glasgow: British Film Institute and Scottish Film Council, 1990), pp. 233-55; Petrie, Screening Scotland, pp. 227–28. 10 Petrie, Screening Scotland, pp. 227–30. 11 John Caughie, ‘Representing Scotland: new questions for Scottish cinema’, in Dick (ed.), From Limelight to Satellite, pp. 13–30, p. 30. 12 Duncan Petrie, ‘The new Scottish cinema’, in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (eds), Cinema and Nation (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 153–69, p. 154. 13 See Richard Mowe, ‘Scottish Screen Locations’, Scottish Film and Visual Arts (4th quarter 1992), pp. 16–17. 14 See, for example, Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film (London: Bloomsbury, 2004). 15 Pippa Edge, ‘Redford boosts Scottish film-making’, The Scotsman, 3 April 1998, p. 8. 16 Gavin Docherty, ‘Moonstone spotlight falls on Celtic talents’, The Scotsman, 31 October 1997, n.p.; James Ross, ‘Lights, camera and plenty of action as the Sundance Kid heads for the hills’, The Scotsman, 19 September 1997, n.p. 17 Olga Taxidou, ‘John McGrath: from Cheviots to Silver Darlings’, in Randall Stevenson and Gavin Wallace (eds), Scottish Theatre since the ’70s (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996), pp. 149–63, p. 157. 18 Brian Pendreigh, ‘In step with Sundance’, The Sunday Times, 12 April 1998, n.p. 19 Petrie, Screening Scotland, p. 186.

180 The New Scottish Cinema 20 Duncan Petrie, Contemporary Scottish Fictions: Film, Television and the Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 103. 21 Martin McLoone, ‘Internal decolonisation? British cinema in the Celtic Fringe’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, 2nd edn (London: British Film Institute, 2001), pp. 184–90, p. 184. 22 Murray Smith, Trainspotting (London: British Film Institute, 2002), pp. 18–19. 23 Ibid, p. 19. 24 Bert Cardullo, ‘Fiction into film, or Bringing Welsh to a Boyle’, Literature/Film Quarterly 25/3 (1997), pp. 158–63, p. 162. 25 Ronan Bennett, ‘Lean, mean and cruel: interview with Danny Boyle’, Sight and Sound 5/1 (January 1995), pp. 34–36, p. 36. 26 Neon Productions, Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema, 5 x 30 minutes, first transmitted BBC Radio Scotland, 2–30 July 2002. 27 Angus Finney, The State of European Cinema: A New Dose of Reality (London: Cassell, 1996), p. 201. 28 Petrie, Contemporary Scottish Fictions, p. 202; see also Duncan Petrie, ‘Economics and aesthetics in the New Scottish Cinema’, TwonineTwo: Essays in Visual Culture 1 (2000), pp. 112–24; Duncan Petrie, ‘Devolving British cinema: the new Scottish cinema and the European art film’, Cineaste: Contemporary British Cinema Supplement XXVI/4 (Fall 2001), pp. 55–57. 29 Paul Laverty, Carla’s Song: Original Screenplay (London, Faber and Faber, 1997), pp. xix–xx. 30 Universal Studios, ‘Commentary by Ken Loach and Paul Laverty’, Carla’s Song DVD extra, (2005). 31 Susan Ryan and Richard Porton, ‘The Politics of Everyday Life’, Cineaste XXIV/1 (Winter 1998), http://zakka.dk/euroscreenwriters/interviews/ken_loach_03.htm (accessed 27 July 2012). 32 David Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 57. 33 John Hill, ‘Failure and utopianism: representations of the working class in British cinema of the 1990s’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), British Cinema of the 90s (London: British Film Institute, 2000), pp. 178–87, p. 179. 34 See Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema, pp. 155–64. 35 Leon Forde, ‘Ramsay’s Callar gets early call-up’, ScreenDaily, 24 April 2001, http://www. screendaily.com/ramsays-callar-gets-early-call-up/405536.article (accessed 27 July 2012). 36 Allan Hunter, ‘Ramsay pursues pure poetry’, Screen International 1360, 21 June 2002, p. 30; see also Peter Bradshaw, ‘Magical mystery tour’, Guardian, G2 section, 1 November 2002, pp. 14–15; Linda Ruth Williams, ‘Escape artist’, Sight and Sound 12/10 (October 2002), pp. 22–25; Chris Darke, ‘Has anyone seen this girl?’, Vertigo 2/4 (Spring 2003), pp. 16–17. 37 See Sarah Neely, ‘Contemporary Scottish cinema’, in Neil Blain and David Hutchison (eds), The Media in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), pp. 151–65; Jane Sillars and Myra Macdonald, ‘Gender, spaces, changes: emergent identities in a Scotland in transition’, in Blain and Hutchison, The Media in Scotland, pp. 183–98; Sarah Street, ‘New Scottish cinema as trans-national cinema’, in Jonathan Murray, Fidelma Farley and Rod Stoneman (eds), Scottish Cinema Now (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 139–52; John Caughie, ‘Morvern Callar, art cinema and the “Monstrous Archive”’, in Lucia Nagib, Chris Perriam and Rajinder Dudrah (eds), Theorising World Cinema (London: I.B.Tauris, 2012), pp. 3–20. 38 Allan Hunter, ‘Case study: Charlotte Gray’, Screen International 1337, 14 December 2001, p. 30. 39 Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Cinefile: Charlotte Gray’, Time Out (London), 6 October 2004, p. 155. 40 See John Hill, ‘“Changing of the guard”: Channel 4, FilmFour and film policy’, Journal of Popular British Cinema 5 (2002), pp. 53–63.

Notes 13–23

181

4 1 Hunter, ‘Case Study: Charlotte Gray’. 42 See Andrew Pulver, ‘End of an era’, Guardian, G2 section, 12 July 2002, pp. 2–4. 43 Phil Miller, ‘Glasgow chosen to give new exotic background to Bollywood’s epics’, The Scotsman, 20 July 2000, p. 10. 44 Christine Winford, ‘A new era for Scottish Screen: interview with Steve McIntyre’, Vertigo 2/2 (Spring 2002), pp. 16–18, p. 16. 45 Allan Hunter, ‘New head for funding body’, Screen International 1484, 14 January 2005, p. 10. 46 Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Scottish producers criticise Scottish Screen’, ScreenDaily, 25 May 2006, http://www.screendaily.com/scottish-producers-criticise-scottish-screen/4027441. article (accessed 27 July 2012). 47 Anon., ‘Don’t let our film industry go down the pan’, The Herald, 21 June 2006, p. 6. 48 Anon., ‘Film quango slammed for lack of vision’, The Scotsman, 1 August 2009, http:// www.scotsman.com/news/film_quango_slammed_for_lack_of_vision_1_1355047 (accessed 27 July 2012). 49 Caughie, ‘Morvern Callar, art cinema and the “Monstrous Archive”’, p. 7. 50 Neely, ‘Contemporary Scottish cinema’, p. 155. 51 Sillars and Macdonald, ‘Gender, spaces, changes’, p. 187. 52 Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema, pp. 195–96, 198. 53 Peter Ross, ‘Year of the Rat: interview with Lynne Ramsay’, The Sunday Herald, Edinburgh Festival Directory section, 8 August 1999, pp. 4–5, p. 5. 54 Geoff Andrew, ‘Interview with Lynne Ramsay’, Guardian, 28 October 2002, http://www. guardian.co.uk/film/2002/oct/28/features (accessed 27 July 2012). 55 Libby Brooks, ‘Charlotte’s web’, Guardian, G2 section, 20 February 2002, p. 12. 56 Video Collection International, ‘Featurette’, Charlotte Gray DVD extra (2002). 57 Williams, ‘Escape artist’, p. 24. 58 Ibid. 59 Katja Hofmann, ‘Does my gun look big in this?’, Sight and Sound 12/3 (March 2002), pp. 10–11. 60 Ginette Vincendeau, ‘The French Resistance through British eyes: from ’Allo ’Allo to Charlotte Gray’, in Lucy Mazdon and Catherine Wheatley (eds), Je T’aime.… Moi Non Plus: Franco-British Cinematic Relations (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2010), pp. 237–52, p. 241. 61 Petrie, Screening Scotland, pp. 227–28. 62 Petrie, Contemporary Scottish Fictions, p. 206. 63 Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema, p. 1. 64 Simon Brown, ‘“Anywhere but Scotland?” Transnationalism and new Scottish cinema’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen 4/1 (2011), http://erc.qmu.ac.uk/OJS/ index.php/IJOSTS/article/view/109/pdf (accessed 27 July 2012).

Chapter 1. Metamorphosis: Scottish Cinema, 1990–95

1 John Brown, ‘Poor Scots’, Sight and Sound 3/10 (October 1993), p. 64. 2 Murray Grigor, ‘A good risk for those who want to buy a piece of the action’, The Scotsman, 12 May 1990, p. 9. 3 Bob Flynn, ‘Shooting stars in the old country’, Guardian, 31 July 1992, p. 32. 4 Peter Meech and Richard Kilborn , ‘Media and identity in a stateless nation: the case of Scotland’, Media, Culture and Society 14/2 (1992), pp. 245–59, p. 257. 5 Ian Lockerbie, ‘Pictures in a small country: the Scottish Film Production Fund’, in Eddie Dick (ed.), From Limelight to Satellite: A Scottish Film Book (London/Glasgow: British Film Institute/Scottish Film Council, 1990), pp. 171–84, p. 174. 6 Allan Hunter, ‘Highland hopes’, Screen International 819, 9 August 1991, pp. 10–11; Anon., ‘Fresh blow for film industry as production company folds’, The Scotsman, 13 April 1991, p. 5.

182 The New Scottish Cinema 7 John Brown, ‘Scotland be damned’, Sight and Sound 59/4 (Autumn 1990), p. 285. 8 See Charlie Gormley, ‘The impact of Channel Four’, in Dick, From Limelight to Satellite, pp. 185–92; Catherine Lockerbie, ‘Tenacious maverick: interview with Mike Alexander’, The Scotsman, 4 January 1989, p. 9; Gareth Wardell, ‘Opinion’, Producer 9 (Autumn 1989), p. 27. 9 Anon., ‘Sporran partners’, Screen International 717, 12 August 1989, p. 19. 10 Alan Morrison, ‘Working in reel time’, Theatre Scotland 2/7 (Autumn 1993), pp. 27–28, p. 27. 11 James Rampton, ‘Rae of good fortune’, The Scotsman, 12 June 2000, p. 21. 12 Celia Stevenson, ‘Letter: providing locations’, Sight and Sound 6/2 (February 1996), p. 64. 13 Allan Shiach, ‘A central role for Scottish Screen’, Scottish Film 16 (1996), pp. 22–23, p. 22. 14 Michael O’Pray, ‘The Big Man’, Monthly Film Bulletin 681 (October 1990), pp. 287–88, p. 287. 15 Ibid. 16 Angus Finney, The Egos Have Landed: The Rise and Fall of Palace Pictures (London: Heinemann, 1996), p. 202. 17 John Hill, British Cinema in the 1980s: Issues and Themes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), p. 45. 18 Douglas Gifford, ‘Imagining Scotlands: The return to mythology in modern Scottish fiction’, in Susanne Hagemann (ed.), Studies in Scottish Fiction: 1945 to the Present (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1996), pp. 17–50, p. 43. 19 Stephen Neale, Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1980), p. 57. 20 Finney, The Egos Have Landed, p. 198. 21 Bob Flynn, ‘Picking a fight with The Big Man’, Guardian, 13 August 1990, p. 32. 22 Duncan Petrie, Screening Scotland (London: British Film Institute, 2000), p. 153. 23 Andrew Noble, ‘Afterword: reflections on Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher’, in David Dickson, Seán Duffy, Cathal Ó Háinle, and Ian Campbell Ross (eds), Ireland and Scotland: Nation, Region, Identity (Dublin: Centre for Irish-Scottish Studies/Trinity College, 2001), pp. 95– 98, p. 96. 24 Anon., ‘On the road to success’, London Evening Standard, 8 January 1993, p. 27. 25 Colin McArthur, ‘The cultural necessity of a poor Celtic cinema’, in John Hill, Martin McLoone and Paul Hainsworth (eds), Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe (London/Belfast: British Film Institute/Institute of Irish Studies/University of Ulster, 1994), pp. 112–25, p. 116. 26 Colin Brown, ‘Soft Top, Hard Shoulder’, Screen International 890, 15 January 1993, p. 8; Philip Kemp, ‘Soft Top, Hard Shoulder’, Sight and Sound 3/1 (January 1993), p. 52. 27 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edn (London: Verso, 1991), p. 5. 28 David Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 51. 29 Adam Mars-Jones, ‘The high road’, The Independent, 15 January 1993, p. 16. 30 Ibid. 31 Anwar Brett, ‘Car trouble’, What’s On, 13 January 1993, p. 22. 32 Douglas Kennedy, ‘The romance of the open road’, The Sunday Telegraph, Review section, 10 January 1993, p. xii. 33 Steve McIntyre, ‘Inventing the future – in praise of small films’, Scottish Film and Visual Arts 5, 3rd quarter (1993), pp. 17–19, p. 17. 34 Finney, The Egos Have Landed, p. 201. 35 McIntyre, ‘Inventing the future’, p. 17. 36 Steve McIntyre, ‘Vanishing point: feature production in a small country’, in Hill, McLoone and Hainsworth, Border Crossing, pp. 88–111, pp. 103; 108–09. 37 McIntyre, ‘Inventing the future’, p. 19.

Notes 30–38

183

38 Ibid. 39 Angus Finney, The State of European Cinema: A New Dose of Reality (London: Cassell, 1996), pp. 192–93. 40 Eddie Dyja (ed.), BFI Film and Television Handbook 1996 (London: British Film Institute, 1995), p. 28. 41 Finney, The State of European Cinema, p. 195. 42 Richard Mowe, ‘There’s big money in sheep stealing’, British Film 1 (Summer 1995), pp. 7–8, p. 8. 43 Allan Hunter, ‘Rob Roy’, Screen International 985, 25 November 1994, p. 23. 44 David Hall, From Scenes Like These? Essays on Scottish Historical Films (n.p.: Cameron Press, 1999), p. 3; see William Hutchison Murray, Rob Roy MacGregor: His Life and Times, 2nd edn (Edinburgh: Canongate, 1995). 45 John Caughie, ‘Small pleasures: adaptation and the past in British film and television’, in Anelise Reich Corseuil (ed.), Ilha Do Desterrro (Film, Literature and History Special Issue) 32, 1st semester (1997), pp. 27–50, p. 32. 46 Colin McArthur, ‘Tendencies in the new Scottish cinema’, Cencrastus 13 (Summer 1983), pp. 33–35; Elizabeth Sussex, ‘This other Eden’, Sight and Sound 52/1 (Winter 1982/3), pp. 40–41. 47 See Cairns Craig, ‘The haunted heart’, New Statesman and Society, 5 October 1990, p. 27. 48 Pat Kane, ‘Me tartan, you chained to the past’, Guardian, G2 section, 18 May 1995, p. 12. 49 James R. Keller, ‘Masculinity and marginality in Rob Roy and Braveheart’, Journal of Popular Film and Television 24/4 (Winter 1997), pp. 146–51, p. 147. 50 Brian Woolland ‘Rob Roy: man in the middle’, Jump Cut 43 (July 2000), pp. 31–37, p. 31. 51 Ibid. 52 Mowe, ‘There’s big money in sheep stealing’, p. 7. 53 Finney, The State of European Cinema, p. 192. 54 Ibid. 55 Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Highland reels’, Moving Pictures International 8 (April 1995), pp. 24–25, p. 24. 56 Finney, The State of European Cinema. 57 Eddie Dick, ‘Poor wee Scottish cinema’, Scottish Film 10 (4th quarter 1994), pp. 19–23, p. 21. 58 Allan Hunter, ‘Regeneration’, Screen International 1120, 8 August 1997, pp. 17–18, p. 17. 59 Lockerbie, ‘Pictures in a small country’, p. 175. 60 Angus Finney, ‘SCRIPT puts emphasis on development activity’, Scottish Film 16 (1996), pp. 6–7, p. 6. 61 Ibid. 62 Andrea Calderwood, ‘Film and television policy in Scotland’, in John Hill and Martin McLoone (eds), Big Picture, Small Screen: The Relations between Film and Television (Luton: John Libbey Media/University of Luton, 1996), pp. 188–95, p. 188. 63 Mowe, ‘There’s big money in sheep stealing’, p. 7. 64 Anon., ‘Rob Roy’, Time Out (London), 21 December 1994, pp. 34–36, p. 36. 65 Liz Lochhead, ‘The shadow’, Sight and Sound 5/6 (June 1995), pp. 14–16, p. 16. 66 Ibid. 67 See Keller, ‘Masculinity and marginality in Rob Roy and Braveheart’, p. 147. 68 Anon., ‘Rob Roy’, p. 36. 69 Ibid. 70 Kim Newman, ‘Rob Roy’, Sight and Sound 5/6 (June 1995), pp. 51–52, p. 52. 71 Nolan Fell, ‘Deeply shallow: interview with Andrew Macdonald’, Rushes (January/ February 1995), pp. 18–21, p. 20. 72 Finney, The State of European Cinema, pp. 173–75.

184 The New Scottish Cinema 73 Keith Hopper, ‘Interview with Danny Boyle’, Film West 24 (Spring 1996), pp. 12–14, p. 14. 74 Robert Murphy, ‘Popular British cinema’, Journal of Popular British Film 1 (1998), pp. 5–12, p. 6; Eddie Dyja (ed.), BFI Film and Television Handbook 1997 (London: British Film Institute, 1996), p. 37. 75 Lucy Johnson (ed.), Talking Pictures: Interviews with Contemporary British Filmmakers (London: British Film Institute, 1997), p. 89. 76 Gerald Pratley, ‘Channel 4: broadcasters support filmmakers’, Kinema (Fall 1996), http:// www.kinema.uwaterloo.ca/article.php?id=295&feature (accessed 27 July 2012); see also Duncan Petrie (ed.), Inside Stories: Diaries of British Filmmakers at Work (London: British Film Institute, 1996), p. 3. 77 Petrie, Screening Scotland, p. 196. 78 Carl Neville, Classless: Recent Essays on British Film (Winchester: Zero Books, 2011), p. 27. 79 Robert McCall, Shallow Grave – a worthy standard-bearer for Scotland?’, Scottish Film 9 (3rd quarter 1994), pp. 15–17, p. 17. 80 Dick, ‘Poor wee Scottish cinema’, pp. 22–23. 81 Brian Pendreigh, ‘Northern lights, camera, action’, Guardian, G2 section, 5 February 1999, pp. 12–13, p. 12. 82 Cathy Dunkley, ‘Glasgow’s witty thriller’, Moving Pictures International 145, 22 July 1993, p.  12; Allan Hunter, ‘Glasgow offers first UK film fund’, Screen International 892, 29 January 1993, p. 8; Robert McCall, ‘Opinion’, Scottish Film and Visual Arts, 5, 3rd quarter (1993), pp. 5–6. 83 Charles Hewitt, ‘Scot Aid: aka the Glasgow Film Office’, Eyepiece 20/3 (June/July 1999), pp. 20–21, p. 20. 84 Karen McVeigh, ‘Starring Glasgow, a character actor of many parts’, The Independent, Metro section, 19 April 1995, p. 20. 85 Macnab, ‘Highland reels’, p. 25. 86 Allan Laing, ‘Shallow Grave has backers digging deep for new film’, The Herald, 12 January 1995, p. 9. 87 Anon., ‘Small Faces release as GFF list reaches five’, Screen Finance, 20 March 1996 (Scottish Screen Information Services Archive). 88 Ibid. 89 Figures derived from Petrie, Screening Scotland, pp. 176, 227. 90 Calderwood, ‘Film and television policy in Scotland’, p. 190. 91 Ibid., pp. 193–94. 92 Ronan Bennett, ‘Lean, mean and cruel: interview with Danny Boyle’, Sight and Sound 5/1 (January 1995), pp. 34–36, p. 35. 93 Fell, ‘Deeply shallow’, p. 18. 94 John Archer, ‘Anything but shallow’, The Herald, Mix section, 11 December 1999, p. 4. 95 Finney, The State of European Cinema, p. 175. 96 Philip Kemp, ‘Shallow Grave’, Sight and Sound 5/1 (January 1995), pp. 57–58, p. 57. 97 Neville, Classless, p. 26. 98 Claire Monk, ‘From underworld to underclass: crime and British cinema in the 1990s’, in Steve Chibnall and Robert Murphy (eds), British Crime Cinema (London: Routledge, 1999), pp. 172–88, p. 181. 99 John Caughie, Television Drama: Realism, Modernism and British Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 14.

Chapter 2. ‘It’s been great working with you’: Scottish Cinema, 1995–2001

1 David Belcher, ‘I’ve got him under my skin’, The Herald, 9 November 2001), p. 20. 2 Ibid.

Notes 47–50

185

3 Duncan Petrie (ed.), Inside Stories: Diaries of British Filmmakers at Work (London: British Film Institute, 1996). 4 Ibid., p. 84. 5 FilmFour, The Acid House Press Pack (British Film Institute Reading Room microfiche, 1998), p. 20. 6 Allan Hunter, ‘Supermarket sweet’, Scotland on Sunday, 4 February 2001, p. 4. 7 Matthew Magee, ‘Film noir with a Glaswegian accent’, Scotland on Sunday, Spectrum section, 30 July 1995, p. 12. 8 Graeme Stewart, ‘Shelved Scottish film ready to roll as distributor found’, The Scotsman, 8 May 1997, p. 6. 9 John Byrne, The Slab Boys: original screenplay (London: Faber and Faber, 1997), p. vii. 10 Brian Logan, ‘Are you looking at me?’, Guardian, Review section, 18 June 1999, p. 7. 11 Eddie Dyja (ed.), BFI Film and Television Handbook 1999 (London: British Film Institute, 1998), p. 32; William Russell, ‘Too gauche for comfort’, The Herald, 10 April 1997, p. 19. 12 Brian Pendreigh, ‘Local heroes missing out on the big picture’, Scotland on Sunday, 1 December 2002, p. 9. 13 Phil Wickham, Producing the Goods? UK Film Production since 1991: An Information Briefing (London: British Film Institute, 2003), p. 25. 14 Julian Petley, ‘From Brit-flicks to shit-flicks: the cost of public subsidy’, Journal of Popular British Cinema 5 (2002), pp. 27–52, p. 48. 15 Wickham, Producing the Goods?, p. 40. 16 Eddie Dyja (ed.), BFI Film and Television Handbook 2001 (London: British Film Institute, 2000), p. 39 and BFI Film and Television Handbook 1999 (London: British Film Institute, 1998), p. 32; Brian Pendreigh, ‘It was billed as the new Trainspotting. It made £4,438. What went wrong?’, Guardian, Friday Review section, 15 January 1999, pp. 6–7. 17 See, for example, Peter Bradshaw, ‘Poetry from the rubbish tip’, Guardian, G2 section, 12 November 1999, p. 4; Harlan Kennedy, ‘Ratcatcher’, Film Comment 36/1 (January/February 2000), pp. 6–9; Andrew O’Hagan, ‘This is my film of the year’, The Daily Telegraph, 12 November 1999, p. 25. 18 Jonathan Murray, ‘Kids in America? Narratives of transatlantic influence in 1990s Scottish cinema’, Screen 46/2 (2005), 217–25; Stuart C. Aitken, ‘Poetic child realism: Scottish film and the construction of childhood’, Scottish Geographical Journal 123/1 (March 2007), pp. 68–86. 19 Emma Wilson, Cinema’s Missing Children (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), pp. 108–22; Annette Kuhn, Ratcatcher (London: British Film Institute, 2008). 20 Ted Sheehy, ‘The Magdalene Sisters makes a deep impression on Ireland’, ScreenDaily, 28 November 2002, http://www.screendaily.com/the-magdalene-sisters-makes-a-deepimpression-on-ireland/4011403.article (accessed 27 July 2012). 21 British Film Institute Information Services, The Stats: An Overview of the Film, Television, Video and DVD Industries, 1990–2003, http://www.bfi.org.uk/sites/bfi.org.uk/files/ downloads/bfi-the-stats-an-overview-of-the-film-television-video-and-dvd-industriesin-the-uk-1990-2003.pdf. (accessed 27 July 2012) 22 Harry Conroy, ‘A successful industry, if we all pull together’, The Herald, 23 March 1995, p. 7. 23 George Kerevan, ‘Why are we ploughing so much cash into movie flops?’, The Scotsman, 10 May 2001, p. 5. 24 Yakub Qureshi and Aidan Smith, ‘Iconic film “sent UK industry off rails”’, Scotland on Sunday, 11 July 2004, p. 6 25 Paul Power, ‘His name is Peter’, Film Ireland 67 (October/November 1998), pp. 20–22, p. 22. 26 Bob Flynn, ‘Spot the difference’, Business A.M., 21 June 2001, n.p. (Scottish Screen Information Services Archive).

186 The New Scottish Cinema 27 Martin McLoone, Irish Film: The Emergence of a Contemporary Cinema (London: British Film Institute, 2000), p. 200. 28 Neon Productions, Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema, 5 x 30 minutes, first transmitted BBC Radio Scotland, 2–30 July 2002. 29 Ibid. 30 Allan Hunter, ‘$4. 5 million boost for Scottish film’, Screen International 1055, 26 April 1996, p. 14; Stewart Kemp, ‘Scottish film receives triple cash boost’, Screen International 1109, 23 May 1997, p. 2. 31 Hydra Associates, Scotland on Screen: The Development of the Film and Television Industry in Scotland (Glasgow: Scott Stern Associates, 1996), p. 9. 32 Colin McArthur (ed.), Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television (London: British Film Institute, 1982), p. 146. 33 Steve McIntyre, ‘Inventing the future – in praise of small films’, Scottish Film and Visual Arts 5, 3rd quarter (1993), pp. 17–19, p. 19. 34 Duncan Petrie, Screening Scotland (London: British Film Institute, 2000), p. 184. 35 Christine Winford, ‘A new era for Scottish Screen: interview with Steve McIntyre’, Vertigo 2/2 (Spring 2002), pp. 16–18, p. 16. 36 See Petrie, Screening Scotland, pp. 177, 227–28; John Hill, ‘Contemporary British cinema: industry, policy, identity’, Cineaste: Contemporary British Cinema Supplement XXVI/4 (Fall 2001), pp. 30–33, p. 32. 37 Anon., ‘SAC may spread cash more thinly’, Screen Finance 11/4, 19 February 1998, pp. 1–2, p. 2. 38 Figures derived from Petrie, Screening Scotland, pp. 177, 227–28. 39 See Anon., ‘Taking a stand on film funding’, The Herald, 6 June 1997, p. 10; Allan Laing, ‘Scots bid to ensure a fair cut’, The Herald, 21 May 1997, p. 3 and ‘Time to stand and deliver’, The Herald, 19 August 1997, p. 13; Jonathan Murray, Discomfort and Joy: the Cinema of Bill Forsyth (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2011), pp. 214–17. 40 Allan Hunter, ‘Regeneration’, Screen International 1120, 8 August 1997, pp. 17–18, p. 17. 41 Allan Hunter, ‘SAC sets up Lottery watchdog’, Screen International 1124, 5 September 1997, p. 4. 42 James Hamilton, ‘Northern star’, Creation (May 2000), pp. 14–17, p. 15. 43 Eddie Dyja (ed.), BFI Film and Television Handbook 1998 (London: British Film Institute, 1997), pp. 22, 26 and BFI Film and Television Handbook 2001, p. 24. 44 Dyja, BFI Film and Television Handbook 1999, p. 33; Eddie Dyja (ed.), BFI Film and Television Handbook 2000 (London: British Film Institute, 1999), p. 32 and BFI Film and Television Handbook 2002 (London: British Film Institute, 2001), p. 40; Brian Pendreigh, ‘Will this X-rated woman save the Scottish film industry?’, The Scotsman, 30 October 1998, p. 33. 45 Tim Adler, ‘Scottish Lottery bodies only recoup 15% of investment’, Screen Finance 16/19, 22 October 2003, p. 6. 46 Hunter, ‘Regeneration’, p. 17. 47 Anon., ‘SAC may spread cash more thinly’. 48 Various, ‘British cinema questionnaire’, Cineaste: Contemporary British Cinema Supplement XXVI/4 (Fall 2001), pp. 64–65, p. 64. 49 John McGrath, ‘Manifesto’, Product 5 (Winter 2000), p. 20. 50 Figures quoted in/derived from Petrie, Screening Scotland, pp. 177, 227–28. 51 Brian Pendreigh, ‘Film lottery winners turn into losers’, The Scotsman, 2 October 1997, p. 19. 52 Angus Finney, The State of European Cinema: A New Dose of Reality (London: Cassell, 1996), pp. 175–77; Murray Smith, ‘Transnational Trainspotting’, in Jane Stokes and Anna Reading (eds), The Media in Britain: Current Debates and Developments (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 219–27, p. 219. 53 Petrie, Inside Stories, p. 3.

Notes 55–67

187

54 John Hill, ‘“Changing of the guard”: Channel 4, FilmFour and film policy’, Journal of Popular British Cinema 5 (2002), pp. 53–63, pp. 58–59. 55 Beverley D’Silva, ‘No sex, no drugs, just rock ’n’ roll’, The Independent, Tabloid section, 28 August 1997, pp. 8–9. 56 Laura Macdonald, ‘100% Uncut: Irvine Welsh on The Acid House’ (1999), http:// www.indiewire.com/article/interview_100_uncut_irvine_welsh_on_the_acid_house (accessed 27 July 2012). 57 James Mottram, ‘Making a scene’, Guardian, Guide section, 27 January 2001, p. 15. 58 Derek O’Connor, ‘Interview with Peter Mullan’, Film West 36 (May 1999), pp. 13–14, p. 13. 59 See Andrew Pulver, ‘End of an Era’, Guardian, G2 section, 12 July 2002, pp. 2–4. 60 Steve McIntyre, ‘First cut’, roughcuts, August 2002, p. 1. 61 Neon Productions, Scotch Reels. 62 Juliette Garside, ‘Filmmaker aims to find the key to commercial success’, Sunday Herald, 7 January 2001, p. 7. 63 Ibid. 64 Saul Metzstein, ‘Grit and polish’, Sight and Sound 11/5 (May 2001), pp. 12–13, p. 13. 65 Andy Richards, ‘Late Night Shopping’, Sight and Sound 11/6 (June 2001), pp. 47–48, p. 47. 66 John Archer, ‘Harder they come’, roughcuts (May 2001), p. 1. 67 Neon Productions, Scotch Reels. 68 Hannah McGill, ‘Could this be the kiss of life?’, The Herald, 16 June 2001, p. 18. 69 Rory Ford, ‘Great Scots Movies II’, Edinburgh Evening News, 21 June 2001, p. 8. 70 Anthony Quinn, ‘Late Night Shopping’, The Independent, Features section, 22 June 2001, p. 10. 71 Neon Productions, Scotch Reels. 72 Simon Davis, ‘Raveheart: interview with Irvine Welsh’, Uncut 20 (January 1999), pp. 40– 43, p. 41. 73 Andrew O. Thompson, ‘A cosmopolitan celebration of cinema’, American Cinematographer 78/12 (December 1997), pp. 113–18, p. 116. 74 Paul Dave, Visions of England: Class and Culture in Contemporary Cinema (Oxford: Berg, 2006), p. 77. 75 Wendy Ide, ‘The thrill of the purchase’, Sunday Herald, Review section, 17 January 2001, p. 6. 76 Richards, ‘Late Night Shopping’, p. 47. 77 James Ashton, ‘Ideal World brings down curtain on films’, Business A.M., 18 November 2002, p. 5. 78 Andy Dougan, ‘My Oscar curse’, Glasgow Evening Times, 15 October 2001, p. 11. 79 Wickham, Producing the Goods?, p. 14. 80 Robert Murphy, ‘Another false dawn? The Film Consortium and the franchise scheme’, Journal of Popular British Cinema 5 (2002), pp. 31–36, p. 31. 81 Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Choose cash’, Guardian, 13 November 2003, http://www.theguardian. com/film/2003/nov/13/1 (accessed 19 August 2014). 82 Matt Bendoris, ‘The truth about MacHollywood’, The Sun, 30 March 2001, n.p. 83 Peter Bradshaw, ‘Review: Strictly Sinatra’, Guardian, 9 November 2001, http://www. theguardian.com/film/2001/nov/09/culture.peterbradshaw (accessed 19 August 2014). 84 Duncan Petrie, Contemporary Scottish Fictions: Film, Television and the Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), p. 104. 85 Tony McKibbin, ‘Retouching the real: Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher’, Cencrastus 65 (2000), pp. 35–40, p. 39. 86 Liese Spencer, ‘What are you looking at? Interview with Lynne Ramsay’, Sight and Sound 9/10 (October 1999), pp. 16–19, p. 17. 87 Lynne Ramsay, ‘Words and pictures’, The Observer, 6 February 2000, http://www. theguardian.com/film/2000/feb/06/100filmmoments.culture1 (accessed 19 August 2014).

188 The New Scottish Cinema 88 Lynne Ramsay, Ratcatcher: Original Screenplay (London: Faber and Faber, 1999), p. viii. 89 Eileen Elsey, ‘Herstories: Lynne Ramsay in conversation’, Vertigo 2/4 (Spring 2003), pp. 14–15, p. 14. 90 Kennedy, ‘Ratcatcher’, p. 9. 91 Neil Cooper, ‘Perfect vision: interview with Lynne Ramsay’, Product 5 (Winter 2000/01), pp. 22–27, p. 25. 92 Spencer, ‘What are you looking at?’, p. 17. 93 Anthony Quinn, ‘Ratcatcher’, The Independent, 12 November 1999, Review section, p. 11. 94 Spencer, ‘What are you looking at?’, p. 17.. 95 Graham Rae, ‘Striking gold in Glasgow’s trash-strewn streets’, American Cinematographer 81/4 (April 2000), pp. 14–17, pp. 14–15. 96 Spencer, ‘What are you looking at?’, p. 19. 97 O’Hagan, ‘This is my film of the year’. 98 Deborah Orr ,‘Young, gifted and Scottish’, The Independent on Sunday, Features section, 31 October 1999, p. 2. 99 Jonathan Murray, ‘Sibling Rivalry? Contemporary Scottish and Irish Cinemas’, in Liam McIlvanney and Ray Ryan (eds), Ireland and Scotland: Culture and Society, 1707–2000 (Dublin: Four Courts, 2005), pp. 144–63. 100 Kevin Rockett, Ten Years After: The Irish Film Board, 1993–2003 (Galway: Irish Film Board, 2003), p. viii. 101 Sheehy, ‘The Magdalene Sisters’. 102 Fintan O’Toole, ‘The sisters of no mercy’, The Observer, Review section, 16 February 2003, p. 6. 103 Robert McMillen, ‘A life of misery’, The Irish News, 3 January 2003, p. 21. 104 Lance Pettitt, Screening Ireland: Film and Television Representation (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 276. 105 Kevin Rockett, ‘Irish Cinema: The National in the International’, Cineaste XXIV/2–3 (1999), pp. 23–25, p. 25. 106 Luke Gibbons, ‘The Esperanto of the eye?’, Film Ireland 55 (October/November 1996), pp. 20–22, p. 20. 107 Allan Hunter, ‘Church of the Poisoned Mind’, Daily Express, 21 February 2003, p. 41. 108 Hannah McGill, ‘The bigger picture’, The Herald, 8 March 2003, p. 18. 109 O’Toole, ‘The sisters of no mercy’. 110 Tom Dunne, ‘Penitents’, Dublin Review 9 (Winter 2002/03), pp. 74–82, p. 75. 111 Ibid. 112 Cameron Simpson, ‘Mullan welcomes “humble” Catholic opinion’, The Herald, 17 February 2003, p. 2. 113 Alexander Walker, ‘Carve her name in Vogue’, London Evening Standard, 21 February 2002, p. 34.

Chapter 3. DOGMAC: 2000s Scottish–Scandinavian cinema

1 Ian Goode, ‘Different trajectories: Europe and Scotland in recent Scottish cinema’, Portal 4/2 (July 2007), http://epress.lib.uts.edu.au/ojs/index.php/portal/article/view/420/448 (accessed 27 July 2012). 2 Mette Hjort, ‘Affinitive and milieu-building transnationalism: the Advance Party initiative’, in Dina Iordanova, David Martin-Jones and Belén Vidal (eds), Cinema at the Periphery (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2010), pp. 46–66, p. 46. 3 Robin MacPherson, ‘Is bigger better? Film success in small countries – the case of Scotland, Ireland and Denmark’, 2010, http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/3752/ (accessed 27 July 2012).

Notes 79–83

189

4 Future Movies, ‘Huge success for Scottish cinema’, 2003, http://www.futuremovies. co.uk/filmmaking/huge-success-for-scottish-cinema/jay-richardson (accessed 19 August 2014). 5 Jacob Neiiendam, ‘Zentropa, Calyx form Danish-Scottish alliance’, ScreenDaily, 22 August 2000, http://www.screendaily.com/zentropa-calyx-form-danish-scottishalliance/403366.article (accessed 27 July 2012); Allan Hunter, ‘Scotland takes the high road’, Screen International 1281, 20 October 2001, p. 11. 6 Allan Laing, ‘Scots and Danes in digital film venture’, The Herald, 18 August 2000, n.p. 7 Cate Devine, ‘£3.5m Film City launched to put Glasgow back in the big picture’, The Herald, 11 June 2009, http://www.heraldscotland.com/pound-3-5m-film-city-launchedto-put-glasgow-back-in-the-big-picture-1.912303 (accessed 19 August 2014). 8 Allan Hunter, ‘Plans unveiled for Scottish facilities centre’, ScreenDaily, 1 April 2003, http://www.screendaily.com/plans-unveiled-for-scottish-facilities-centre/4012808. article (accessed 27 July 2012); Lynne Hibberd, ‘creative industries policy and practice: a study of BBC Scotland and Scottish Screen’, PhD thesis (Centre for Cultural Policy Research/Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow, 2008), pp. 86–87. 9 Jack Stevenson, ‘The wave breaks: star Danish directors fail to translate’, Bright Lights 41 (August 2003), http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/41/danish.php (accessed 27 July 2012). 10 MacPherson, ‘Is bigger better?’. 11 Jacob Neiiendam, ‘Zentropa and Sigma to throw Advance Party’, ScreenDaily, 6 February 2004, http://www.screendaily.com/zentropa-and-sigma-to-throw-advanceparty/4017181.article (accessed 27 July 2012). 12 Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen, ‘The Advance Party: the rules’, in Red Road Press Pack (2006), pp. 4–5, p. 4. 13 Wendy Mitchell, ‘From here to fraternity’, Screen International 1499, 29 April 2005, p. 11. 14 Jonathan Melville, ‘Interview: Morag McKinnon on Donkeys’, 2010, http://www. reelscotland.com/interview-morag-mckinnon-on-donkeys/ (accessed 27 July 2012). 15 Audrey Ward, ‘Scottish Danish and Irish production houses form film partnership’, ScreenDaily, 6 February 2009, http://www.screendaily.com/scottish-danish-and-irishproduction-houses-form-film-partnership/4043138.article (accessed 27 July 2012). 16 Juliette Garside, ‘Viking raid on Lottery film cash’, Sunday Herald, 30 December 2001, n.p. 17 Neil Young, ‘Lost in translation: Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself)’, 23 March 2004, http:// www.jigsawlounge.co.uk/film/reviews/wilbur-wants-to-kill-himself-2/ (accessed 27 July 2012). 18 Neiiendam, ‘Zentropa, Calyx form Danish-Scottish alliance’. 19 European Film Promotion, ‘Spotlight on Nordic cinema’, EFP Promotion 5, September 2002, http://www.efp-online.com/pdf/newsletter_no5.pdf (accessed 27 July 2012). 20 Allan Hunter and Jacob Neiiendam, ‘Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself)’, Screen International 1386, 6 January 2003, p. 27. 21 Jorn Rossing Jensen, ‘Scandi helmers opt for English’, Variety, 26 May 2002, http:// variety.com/2002/film/news/scandi-helmers-opt-for-english-1117867599/ (accessed 19 August 2014). 22 David Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 230. 23 Ibid. 24 Allan Hunter, ‘The Last Great Wilderness’, Screen International 1367, 9 August 2002, p. 14. 25 Jonathan Murray, ‘Straw or wicker? Traditions of Scottish film criticism and The Wicker Man’, in Benjamin Franks, Stephen Harper, Jonathan Murray and Lesley Stevenson (eds), The Wicker Man: Film and Cultural Studies Perspectives (Dumfries: Crichton University Press, 2005), pp. 11–36, p. 15.

190 The New Scottish Cinema 26 David Martin-Jones, ‘Sexual healing: representations of the English in post-devolutionary Scotland’, Screen 45/2 (2005), pp. 227–33, p. 232. 27 Kirsty A. Macdonald, ‘This desolate and appalling landscape’: the journey north in contemporary Scottish Gothic’, Gothic Studies 13/2 (2011), pp. 37–48, p. 44. 28 Hunter, ‘The Last Great Wilderness’. 29 Will Hodgkinson, ‘Skye’s the limit’, Guardian, G2 section, 6 May 2003, pp. 10–11, p. 10. 30 Neil Young, ‘The Wild(erness) Boys: interview with Alastair and David Mackenzie’, 2003, http://www.jigsawlounge.co.uk/film/reviews/the-wilderness-boys/ (accessed 27 July 2012). 31 Martin-Jones Scotland: Global Cinema, p. 64. 32 Neil Young, ‘Aberdeen’, 23 March 2004, http://www.jigsawlounge.co.uk/film/reviews/ neil-youngs-film-lounge-aberdeen/ (accessed 19 August 2014). 33 See, for instance, Andy Richards, ‘The Last Great Wilderness’, Sight and Sound 13/6 (2003), p. 49; Allan Hunter, ‘Calling card from promising new talent’, Screen International 1370, 30 August 2002, p. 32. 34 Nimbus Film International, ‘Cast and crew interviews’, Skagerrak DVD extra, 2003. 35 Nimbus Film International, ‘Director’s commentary’, Skagerrak DVD extra, 2003. 36 Christian Monggaard, ‘Playing with the medium’, Film 29 (May 2003), pp. 16–17, p. 17. 37 Jacob Neiiendam, ‘Skagerrak’, Screen International 1391, 7 February 2003, p. 25. 38 Nimbus Film International, ‘Cast and crew interviews’. 39 Allan Hunter, ‘Skagerrak’, ScreenDaily, 3 November 2003, http://www.screendaily.com/ skagerrak/4015828.article. (accessed 27 July 2012) 40 Philip Kemp, ‘Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself)’, Sight and Sound 14/1 (January 2004), p. 64. 41 The Script Factory, ‘A conversation with Lone Scherfig and Anders Thomas Jensen’ (2003), http://scriptfactory.co.uk/go/Training/Extract_194.html (accessed 27 July 2012) (link no longer working). 42 Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Suicide for beginners’, Sight and Sound 13/12 (December 2003), p. 25. 43 Hannah McGill, Takes your breath away’, The Herald, 12 April 2003, pp. 9–10, p. 9. 44 Trevor Johnston, ‘Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself)’ (2002), http://www.timeout.com/ london/film/wilbur-wants-to-kill-himself (accessed 19 August 2014). 45 Icon Home Entertainment, ‘Cast and crew interviews’, Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself) DVD extra, (2004). 46 Goode, ‘Different trajectories’. 47 Macnab, ‘Suicide for beginners’. 48 Jane Sillars and Myra Macdonald, ‘Gender, spaces, changes: emergent identities in a Scotland in transition’, in Neil Blain and David Hutchison (eds), The Media in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), pp. 183–98, pp. 195–96. 49 Jonathan Romney, ‘Red Road’, Independent on Sunday, ABC section, 29 October 2006, p. 13. 50 Andrew Burke ‘Concrete universality: tower blocks, architectural modernism, and realism in contemporary British cinema’, New Cinemas 5/3 (2007), pp. 177–88, p. 178. 51 Hannah McGill, ‘Mean streets’, Sight and Sound 16/11 (November 2006), pp. 26–28, p. 27. 52 David Gritten, ‘First person singular’, The Daily Telegraph, 13 October 2006, p. 31. 53 Michael J. Rowin, ‘See, Saw: An Interview with Andrea Arnold, director of Red Road’, Reverse Shot 19 (2006), http://www.reverseshot.com/article/interview_andrea_arnold (accessed 27 July 2012). 54 Lisa Mullen, ‘Red Road’, Sight and Sound 16/11 (November 2006), p. 78. 55 Dave Calhoun, ‘Red Road’, Time Out (London), 25 October 2006, p. 64. 56 See Jonathan Murray, ‘Scotland’, in Mette Hjort and Duncan Petrie (eds), The Cinema of Small Nations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 76–92, p. 86. 57 Surveillance Studies Network, A Report on the Surveillance Society, 2006, http://www.ico. gov.uk/upload/documents/library/data_protection/practical_application/surveillance_ society_full_report_2006.pdf (accessed 27 July 2012).

Notes 104–119

191

58 Jessica Lake, ‘Red Road (2006) and emerging narratives of “subveillance”’, Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies 24/2 (2010), pp. 231–40, p. 34. 59 Ibid., p. 237. 60 Miles Fielder, ‘Morag McKinnon makes black comedy Donkeys’, The List 668, 5 October 2010, http://film.list.co.uk/article/29921-morag-mckinnon-makes-black-comedy-donkeys/ (accessed 27 July 2012).

Chapter 4. Travelling Scots: images of race of ethnicity in 2000s Scottish cinema

1 Sarah Neely, ‘Contemporary Scottish cinema’, in Neil Blain and David Hutchison (eds), The Media in Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), pp. 151–65, p. 156; see also Duncan Petrie, ‘Cinema and the economics of representation: public funding of film in Scotland’, in Berthold Schoene (ed.), The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Scottish Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), pp. 362–70, p. 367. 2 See, for example, Jim Pines, ‘British cinema and Black representation’, in Robert Murphy (ed.), The British Cinema Book, 3rd edn (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), pp. 118– 24; Barbara Korte and Claudia Sternberg, ‘Asian British cinema since the 1990s’, in Murphy, The British Cinema Book, pp. 387–94. 3 John Hill, ‘“Scotland doesna mean much tae Glesca”: some notes on The Gorbals Story’, in Colin McArthur (ed.), Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television (London: British Film Institute, 1982), pp. 100–11, p. 106. 4 Steve Blandford, ‘A Way of Life, British cinema and new British identities’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 5/1 (2008), pp. 99–112, p. 100. 5 See Phil Miller, ‘Glasgow chosen to give new exotic background to Bollywood’s epics’, The Scotsman, 20 July 2000, p. 10; David Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 67–80. 6 James Drew, ‘Aftermath of an anthrax attack’, European Voice, 27 March 2003, http:// www.europeanvoice.com/article/aftermath-of-an-anthrax-attack-2/ (accessed 19 August 2014). 7 See Claudia Sternberg, ‘Babylon North: British Muslims after 9/11 in Yasmin (2004)’, in Lars Eckstein, Barbara Korte, Eva Pirker and Christoph Reinfandt (eds), Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+: New Perspectives in Literature, Film and the Arts (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2008), pp. 79–98; Rehana Ahmed, ‘British Muslim masculinities and cultural resistance: Kenny Glenaan and Simon Beaufoy’s Yasmin’, Journal of Postcolonial Writing 45/3 (2009), pp. 285– 96. 8 Tom Jennings, ‘Same difference?’, Variant 23 (Summer 2005), http://www.variant.org. uk/23texts/Jennings.html (accessed 27 July 2012). 9 Anon., ‘Trouble Sleeping’, roughcuts (June/July 2007), p. 22. 10 James Mottram, ‘In the mood for love’, Sight and Sound 14/3 (March 2004), pp. 22–23, p. 23. 11 Blandford, ‘A Way of Life ’, p. 101. 12 Icon Home Entertainment, ‘The making of Ae Fond Kiss…’, Ae Fond Kiss… DVD extra (2005). 13 John Hill, ‘“Bonnie Scotland, eh?” Scottish cinema, the working class and the films of Ken Loach’, in Jonathan Murray, Fidelma Farley and Rod Stoneman (eds), Scottish Cinema Now (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 88–104, p. 99. 14 Icon Home Entertainment, ‘Commentary by Ken Loach and Paul Laverty’, Ae Fond Kiss… DVD extra (2005). 15 Sixteen Films, Ae Fond Kiss… press pack (2004). 16 Myra Macdonald, ‘British Muslims, memory and identity: representations in British film and television documentary’, European Journal of Cultural Studies 14/4 (2011), pp. 411–27, p. 417.

192 The New Scottish Cinema 1 7 Hill ‘“Bonnie Scotland, eh?”’, p. 101. 18 Tim Adler, ‘October production investment increases by 32%’, Screen Finance 18/20, 2 November 2005, p. 3. 19 Pratibha Parmar, ‘Director’s statement’, Nina’s Heavenly Delights press pack (British Film Institute Reading Room microfiche, 2006), n.p. 20 Sara Wajid, ‘This isn’t just a fantasy world’, Guardian, G2 section, 19 September 2006, pp. 16–17, p. 16. 21 Ibid. 22 Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema, p. 80. 23 Tamsin Whitehead, ‘Rejecting the margins of difference: strategies of resistance in the documentary films of Pratibha Parmar’, thirdspace: a journal of feminist theory and culture 7/2 (Winter 2008), http://journals.sfu.ca/thirdspace/index.php/journal/article/view/ whitehead/107 (accessed 19 August 2014). 24 Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema, p. 85. 25 Bruce Munro, ‘Pratibha Parmar interview’ (2006), http://www.futuremovies.co.uk/ filmmaking/pratibha-parmar-interview/bruce-munro (accessed 19 August 2014). 26 Daniela Berghahn, ‘Queering the family of nation: reassessing fantasies of purity, celebrating hybridity in diasporic cinema’, Transnational Cinema 2/2 (2011), p. 129–46, p. 130. 27 Ellen Dengel-Janic and Lars Eckstein, ‘Bridehood revisited: disarming concepts of gender and culture in recent British Asian film’, in Eckstein, Korte, Pirker and Reinfandt (eds), Multi-Ethnic Britain 2000+, pp. 45–64, p. 59. 28 DeA Planeta Home Entertainment, ‘The making of Cargo’, Cargo DVD extra (2006). 29 Anon., ‘Missed starts’, Screen Finance 18/7, 20 April 2005, pp. 2–3; Charles Grant, ‘A clean slate’, Screen International 1526, 2 December 2005, p. 12. 30 DeA Planeta Home Entertainment, ‘The making of Cargo’. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Todd McCarthy, ‘Cargo’, Variety, 13 February 2006, p. 67. 34 David Archibald, ‘“Knocking on the door of Moronville”: interview with Peter Mullan’, The Drouth 18 (Winter 2005), http://www.thedrouth.org/singles/2005/12/2/knockingon-the-door-of-moronville-in-conversation-with-peter-mullan (accessed 19 August 2014). 35 Ed Meza, ‘World’s a stage for Teutonic producers’, Variety, 5 February 2006, http:// variety.com/2006/film/features/world-s-a-stage-for-teutonic-producers-1117937347/ (accessed 19 August 2014). 36 Ariel Films, ‘True North production story’ (2007), www.truenorth-film.com/production story.php (link no longer working). 37 Vitor Pinto, ‘Interview with Steve Hudson’ (2007), http://cineuropa.org/it.aspx?t=inter view&l=en&did=78434 (accessed 19 August 2014). 38 Tim Dams, ‘Chomet secures Dimension backing for Scottish animation’, ScreenDaily, 25 March 2004, http://www.screendaily.com/chomet-secures-dimension-backing-forscottish-animation/4017937.article (accessed 27 July 2012); Grant, ‘A clean slate’. 39 Twentieth Century Fox, ‘Director’s commentary’, The Last King of Scotland DVD extra (2007). 40 Lesley Marx, ‘The Last King of Scotland and the politics of adaptation’, Black Camera 3/1 (Winter 2011), pp. 54–74, p. 65. 41 Jason Davis, ‘The Last King of Scotland: interview with Peter Morgan and Jeremy Brock’, Creative Screenwriting 13/5 (September 2006), pp. 34–35, p. 35. 42 Twentieth Century Fox, ‘Director’s commentary’. 43 Stephen Robinson, ‘A tyrant’s tale’, Daily Telegraph, magazine section, 6 January 2007, pp. 15–18, p. 16.

Notes 138–145

193

4 4 Ali Jaafar, ‘Warped love story’, Sight and Sound 17/2 (2007), p. 35. 45 Bruce Munro, ‘The Last King of Scotland: James McAvoy and Kevin Macdonald interview’ (2007), http://archive.today/jkLQ (accessed 19 August 2014). 46 Christopher Meir, ‘On the art of “making movies happen”’: an interview with Andrea Calderwood’, International Journal of Scottish Theatre and Screen 4/2 (2011), http://journals. qmu.ac.uk/index.php/IJOSTS/article/view/136/pdf (accessed 27 July 2012). 47 Elizabeth Heffelfinger and Laura Wright, Visual Difference: Postcolonial Studies and Intercultural Cinema (New York: Peter Lang, 2011), p. 27 48 Sukhdev Sandhu, ‘The Last King of Scotland’, Daily Telegraph, 12 January 2007, p. 29. 49 Ricardo Guthrie, ‘Mythic appetites: The Last King of Scotland’s heart of darkness in the Jubilee year of African Independence’ (2008), http://nau.edu/uploadedFiles/Academic/ SBS/Ethnic_Studies/Forms/GUTHRIE_Mythic%20Appetites.pdf (accessed 27 July 2012). 50 Paul C. Taylor, ‘The Last King of Scotland or the last n----r on earth? The ethics of race on film’, Contemporary Aesthetics 7/2 (2009), http://www.contempaesthetics.org/newvolume/ pages/article.php?articleID=533 (accessed 27 July 2012). 51 Marx, ‘The Last King of Scotland and the politics of adaptation’, p. 68. 52 Tiisetso Tlelima, ‘Hollywood’s depiction of Africa’, Screen Africa (September 2007), p. 42. 53 Twentieth Century Fox, ‘Director’s commentary’. 54 Ibid. 55 Martha Evans and Ian Glenn, ‘“TIA – This is Africa:” Afropessimism in twenty-firstcentury narrative film’, Black Camera 2/1 (Winter 2010), pp. 14–35, pp. 14–15.

Chapter 5. Nazis, Neds and netherworlds: Scottish low-budget genre cinema of the 2000s

1 James Leggott, Contemporary British Cinema: from Heritage to Horror (London: Wallflower Press, 2008), pp. 57–61; ScreenDaily, ‘In focus: the UK’s micro wave’, 3 October 2008, http://www.screendaily.com/in-focus-the-uks-micro-wave/4041212.article (accessed 27 July 2012). 2 Phil Miller, ‘Scottish Screen seeks tartan Tomb Raider to boost film sales’ The Sunday Times, 2 September 2001, n.p. 3 Brian Pendreigh, ‘Going cheap’, The Herald, 17 June 1999, n.p. 4 Allan Hunter, ‘First digital features announced for Scotland’s New Found Films’, ScreenDaily, 28 April 2003, http://www.screendaily.com/first-digital-features-announcedfor-scotlands-new-found-films/4013088.article (accessed 27 July 2012). 5 Adam Minns, ‘BBC Content fast forward indie film-making scheme’, ScreenDaily, 18 May 2004, http://www.screendaily.com/bbc-content-fast-forward-indie-film-makingscheme/4018702.article (accessed 27 July 2012). 6 Allan Hunter, ‘Gabriel, Bronco secure Scottish Screen loans’, ScreenDaily, 10 November 2000, http://www.screendaily.com/gabriel-bronco-secure-scottish-screen-loans/404192. article; Scottish Screen, ‘June awards’, roughcuts (July 2001), p. 4. 7 Allan Hunter, ‘Scottish Screen increases slate funding to $2m over 2 years’, ScreenDaily, 26 August 2008, http://www.screendaily.com/scottish-screen-increases-slate-funding-to2m-over-2-years/4040389.article (accessed 27 July 2012). 8 Eddie Dyja (ed.), BFI Film and Television Handbook 2003 (London: British Film Institute, 2002), p. 38. 9 Robin MacPherson, ‘Shape-shifters: independent producers in Scotland and the journey from cultural entrepreneur to entrepreneurial culture’, in Jonathan Murray, Fidelma Farley and Rod Stoneman (eds), Scottish Cinema Now (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), pp. 222–39, p. 226. 10 Harry Webster, ‘Scotland’s one-man movie studio’, Factory 1 (2004), pp. 50–51, p. 50.

194 The New Scottish Cinema 11 Duncan Petrie, ‘British low-budget production and digital technology’, Journal of Popular British Cinema 5 (2002), pp. 64–76, p. 71. 12 Glasgow Film Office, ‘Interview with Owen Thomas’ (2001), http://www.glasgowfilm. com/made-in-glasgow/features6.asp (accessed 27 July 2012) (link no longer working). 13 Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Lyrical lads’, Sight and Sound 14/8 (August 2004), pp. 27–28, p. 28. 14 See David Boaretto, ‘Credit crunch filmmaking’, roughcuts (February 2009), pp. 24–25; Allan Hunter, ‘Scots producer enters distribution fray’, ScreenDaily, 17 January 2006, http://www.screendaily.com/scots-producer-enters-distribution-fray/4025782.article (accessed 27 July 2012). 15 Brian Pendreigh, ‘Let the Gamerz begin’, The Herald, 9 February 2008, http://www. heraldscotland.com/let-the-gamerz-begin-scots-film-is-us-hit-1.874368 (accessed 27 July 2012). 16 Brian Pendreigh, ‘Schlock and gore’, The Scotsman, 6 May 2008, http://www.scotsman. com/news/schlock-and-gore-1-1166814 (accessed 19 August 2014). 17 Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, ‘Filmmakers’ commentary: Steve Barker and Kieran Parker’, Outpost DVD extra (2008). 18 Ibid. 19 Anna Burnside, ‘Zombies on a budget are set to launch kitchen-table film-makers’, The Sunday Times, 18 May 2008, http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/culture/film_and_tv/ film/article93200.ece (accessed 19 August 2014). 20 Petrie, ‘British low-budget production and digital technology’, pp. 64–65. 21 Geoffrey Macnab, ‘Jobson on a roll’, Screen International 1519, 14 October 2005, p. 18. 22 Pure Magic Films, GamerZ Press Pack (British Film Institute Reading Room microfiche, 2005). 23 Robbie Fraser, ‘Shadowplay’, roughcuts (February 2008), pp. 26–27. 24 Adam Minns, ‘Icon boards Scottish serial-killer project’, ScreenDaily, 19 November 2001, http://www.screendaily.com/icon-boards-scottish-serial-killer-project/407550.article (accessed 19 August 2014). 25 Guerilla Films, ‘The Making of Wild Country’, Wild Country DVD extra (2007). 26 David Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), pp. 117–19. 27 Sam Wigley, ‘Wild Country’, Sight and Sound 16/3 (March 2006), pp. 82–83, p. 82. 28 Guerilla Films, ‘The Making of Wild Country’. 29 Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema, p. 132. 30 Ibid. 31 Allan Hunter, ‘Scottish horizons’, Screen International 1633, 1 August 2008, p. 10. 32 Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, ‘Filmmakers’ commentary: Steve Barker and Kieran Parker’. 33 Ibid. 34 Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, ‘Filmmakers’ commentary: Steve Barker and Kieran Parker’. 35 Ibid. 36 IMDb, ‘Outpost: Black Sun’ (2012), http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1418712/ (accessed 27 July 2012). 37 Sony Pictures Home Entertainment, ‘Behind the Scenes’, Outpost DVD extra (2008). 38 Ibid. 39 Steve Barker, ‘Director’s statement’, Outpost Press Pack (British Film Institute Reading Room microfiche, 2008), n.p. 40 Lyre Productions, ‘A Scottish road movie’, The Inheritance DVD extra (2008). 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid.

Notes 159–176

195

44 James Merchant, ‘Celebrating limitations: the road to digital freedom’, roughcuts (February 2009), pp. 24–25, p. 25. 45 Lyre Productions, ‘A Scottish road movie’. 46 Merchant, ‘Celebrating limitations’, p. 24. 47 Christopher Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism: Scottish Society and Politics, 1707–1977 (London: Allen and Unwin, 1977). 48 Matthew Taylor, ‘New Town Killers’, Sight and Sound 19/6 (June 2009), p. 72. 49 High Fliers Films, ‘New Town Killers: the story’, New Town Killers DVD extra (2009). 50 Richard Jobson, ‘Director’s statement’, New Town Killers Press Pack (British Film Institute Reading Room microfiche, 2009), n.p. 51 Richard Jobson, ‘Director’s statement’, 2008 London Film Festival Catalogue (2008), p. 70. 52 High Fliers Films, ‘Audio commentary by director Richard Jobson’, New Town Killers DVD extra (2009). 53 Eddie Harrison, ‘New Town Killers’, roughcuts (June 2009), pp. 24–25, p. 25. 54 Michael Gubbins, ‘Richard Jobson reignites the spirit of ’77’, ScreenDaily, 24 October 2008, http://www.screendaily.com/richard-jobson-reignites-the-spirit-of-77/4041556.article (accessed 27 July 2012). 55 High Fliers Films, ‘Audio commentary by director Richard Jobson’. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Harrison, ‘New Town Killers’, p. 25. 59 High Fliers Films, ‘New Town Killers: the story’. 60 See, for instance, Jonathan Murray, ‘Contemporary Scottish film’, The Irish Review 28 (Winter 2001), pp. 75–88; Gareth Wardell, ‘The big picture’, Cencrastus 68 (2001), pp. 7–14; Tony McKibbin, ‘Scottish cinema: a victim culture?’, Cencrastus 73 (2002), pp. 25–29; Duncan Petrie, Contemporary Scottish Fictions: Film, Television and the Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), pp. 162–84. 61 See Jonathan Murray, ‘Neds’, Cineaste XXXVI/4 (Fall 2011), pp. 54–56. 62 British Film Institute Live, ‘Peter Mullan masterclass’ (2010), http://www.bfi.org.uk/live/ video/493 (accessed 27 July 2012). 63 Pure Magic Films, GamerZ Press Pack. 64 Willy Maley. ‘From Red Clydeside to Ned Clydeside: Peter Mullan and the screening of class’, Edinburgh Review 133 (2011), pp. 7–25, p. 21. 65 Neil Blain, ‘The Scottish dimension in film and television’, in Kenneth Veitch (ed.), Scottish Life and Society: Transport and Communications. A Compendium of Scottish Ethnology, vol. 8 (Edinburgh: Birlinn (Imprint: John Donald) in association with The European Ethnological Research Centre, 2009), pp. 768–92, p. 775.

Afterword

1 Colin McArthur (ed.), Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television (London: British Film Institute, 1982), p. 3. 2 Duncan Petrie, Screening Scotland (London: British Film Institute, 2000), p. 226. 3 Sarah Cooper, ‘Hurricane Films, Götafilm board Terence Davies’ Sunset Song’, ScreenDaily, 16 February 2012, http://www.screendaily.com/news/production/hurricane-filmsgtafilm-board-terence-davies-sunset-song/5038164.article (accessed 27 July 2012). 4 Barry Didcock, ‘Richard Jobson creates nightmare scenarios with The Somnambulists’, The Herald, 12 February 2012, http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/film/richardjobson-creates-nightmare-scenarios-with-the-somnambulists.1329015925 (accessed 27 July 2012). 5 Ian Sandwell, ‘Lighting up Glasgow’, ScreenDaily, 24 February 2012, http://www. screendaily.com/5038491.article (accessed 27 July 2012).

196 The New Scottish Cinema 6 Kickstarter, ‘God Help the Girl – musical film’ (2012), http://www.kickstarter.com/ projects/godhelpthegirl/god-help-the-girl-musical-film?ref=live (accessed 27 July 2012). 7 David Martin-Jones, Scotland: Global Cinema (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2009), p. 11. 8 Petrie, Screening Scotland, pp. 227–28. 9 Jonathan Murray, ‘Blurring borders: Scottish cinema in the twenty-first century’, Journal of British Cinema and Television 9/3 (2012), pp. 400–18.

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INDEX

Advance Party 80, 98, 105, 106 Advance Party II 80, 176 advertising revenues 23, 42 Ae Fond Kiss… see Loach, Ken Aldrich, Robert 31 Ulzana’s Raid 31 alienation 57, 60, 61, 75, 85, 100, 162, 174 Allen, Kevin 6 The Big Tease 6, 15 Alliance Atlantis 19 American independent cinema 2, 5, 6, 8, 28, 30, 34, 43, 45, 46, 48, 59, 66, 67, 77 Anderson, Will 2 The Making of Longbird 1 Archer, John 53, 54, 58 Ariel Films 130 Armstrong, Gillian 12, 13, 16, 17, 19, 177 Charlotte Gray 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 177 Arnold, Andrea 16, 78, 80, 98, 100, 104, 105, 106, 175 Red Road 16, 78, 80, 81, 85, 98–105, 106, 108, 175, 177 Wasp 80 Auerbach, Shona 16, 79, 170 Dear Frankie 16, 79, 170 Aukin, David 39, 42, 55 Bakshi, Ralph 146 Lord of the Rings 146 Banks, Iain 54 Barker, Pat 54

Barker, Steve 15, 143, 152, 154, 155, 175 Outpost 15, 19, 143, 144, 146, 152–57, 175 Outpost: Black Sun 154 Barras, David 143, 176 Electric Man 143, 176 Barrow, Tim 157, 158, 159 BBC Films 144 BBC Scotland 13, 21, 23, 31, 32, 42, 158 Belleville, Charles Henri 16, 143, 157, 175 The Inheritance 16, 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 157–62, 175 Berghahn, Daniela 124 Berrie, Gillian 15, 79, 80, 178 Bier, Susanne 78, 79 After the Wedding 79 Brothers 78 The Big Man see Leland, David Bill Kenwright Films 162 Black Camel 144, 152 Blackcat 23 Blair, Tony 64 Blairism 71 Blanchett, Cate 12, 17 Blandford, Steve 112, 115 Bollaín, Icíar 113 Even the Rain 113 Bollywood 112, 122, 123 Borg, Maja 1 Future My Love 1 box office 24, 30, 31, 39, 43, 48, 49, 53, 55, 58, 60, 62, 64, 80 success 30, 31, 43, 60, 62

Index Boyle, Danny 1, 3, 7, 22, 23, 38, 40, 41, 42, 48, 144 The Beach 7 A Life Less Ordinary 7 Shallow Grave 1, 3, 8, 22, 23, 30, 31, 38–46, 48, 49, 50, 53, 54, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 64, 65, 144 Trainspotting 3, 6, 7, 8, 13, 15, 23, 30, 39, 48, 49, 50, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 64, 65 Bresson, Robert 67 Mouchette 67 British Film Institute 30 British Screen 30 Bronco Films 31 Broughan, Peter 8, 23, 31, 32, 33, 53 Bryden, Bill 32 Ill Fares the Land 32 Byrne, John 9, 32, 48, 54, 56 The Slab Boys 9, 48, 49, 53, 54, 55, 56 Calderwood, Andrea 42, 125, 135, 138, 178 Canadian Institute for Advanced Film Studies 42 Capaldi, Peter 9, 21, 27, 28, 29, 30, 47, 48, 49, 62, 64, 147, 175 Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life 21, 22, 23, 27, 47 Moon Man 47 Strictly Sinatra 9, 48, 49, 50, 57, 62–7, 175 Capra, Frank 21 It’s a Wonderful Life 21, 22 Cargo see Gordon, Clive Carpenter, John 157 The Fog 157 Catholics 72, 74, 75, 76, 114, 115, 116, 118, 147, 170 Caton-Jones, Michael 3, 22, 31, 34, 37, 48, 175 Rob Roy 8, 9, 22, 23, 24, 27, 31–8, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 46, 48, 50, 54, 65, 175 Caughie, John 1, 4, 15, 46 CCTV 99, 100, 103, 104, 105 see also surveillance culture CGI 172 Chadha, Gurinder 121 Bend it like Beckham 121 Bhaji on the Beach 121

213

Channel 4 13, 23, 30, 31, 38, 39, 40, 42, 50, 51, 55, 56, 57 Chaplin, Charlie 29 Coen, Ethan and Joel 8, 110 Burn After Reading 110 Collett, Alexander 143 Measured 143 colonialism 32, 113, 136, 138 communitarianism 27, 164 Compston, Martin 99, 106, 130, 147 computer games 164, 165 ContentFilm International 144, 154 Coppola, Francis Ford 66 The Godfather 66 Corlett, Dale 143 Running in Traffic 143 Cosmo, James 88, 106 Coutts, Don 11 American Cousins 11 Cowboy Films 135 Craven, Wes 148, 149, 150 The Hills Have Eyes 150 Scream 148 Creative Scotland 14 Croft, Arabella Page 146, 152, 155 cross-cultural exchange 28, 37, 73, 140, 176 Danish Film Institute 81 Darabont, Frank 74 Shawshank Redemption 74 Davies, Terence 54, 176 House of Mirth 54 dehumanisation 132, 133, 134 deprivation 68, 71, 98, 101, 112, 134 deracination 45 Dick, Eddie 33, 40, 41, 42 Dickie, Kate 99, 106 diegesis 66, 96, 168 digital technology 145, 146, 147, 163 diversity ethnic 19, 80, 110, 111, 112, 119, 120 racial 19, 80, 110, 111, 112, 119, 120, 123, 175, 176 DNA Films 64, 65, 135 DOGMAC 78–110, 142 Dogme 95 80 Donald, Simon 8, 48, 54, 60 The Life of Stuff 8, 48, 49, 53, 54, 60

214 The New Scottish Cinema Donen, Stanley 66 On the Town 66 Donkeys see McKinnon, Morag Douglas, Bill 170, 175, 177 Childhood Trilogy 175 Comrades 177 Downtown 56 DVD distribution 143, 145, 152 DVD rights 145 Eagles, Bill 8, 16, 48, 49 Beautiful Creatures 8, 16, 48, 49, 65 Eastwood, Clint 48 Unforgiven 48 Ecosse Films 13, 17, 23 Element Films 72 entrepreneurialism 5, 25 ethnicity 20, 61, 111, 112, 113, 135, 142, 176 European Modernism 21 European Regional Development Fund 79 European Union 5, 40, 112 Evans, Martha 142 fairy tale 88, 90, 91 Fares, Josef 78 Zozo 78 Fast Forward Features 144 Fawcet, John 148 Ginger Snaps 148 feminisation 24, 104 feminism 121, 124 Film City Glasgow 79 film festivals Cannes 1998 49 2007 152 Edinburgh International 1996 23 2004 80 2012 1 Sundance 5 Venice 49 1998 56 2002 72 FilmFour 12, 13, 14, 15, 55, 56, 57, 58, 135, 144

Finnigan, Duncan 143 Four Eyes 143 My Life as a Bus Stop 143 Finnigan, Wilma Smith 143 Black Coffee 143 Cola Dan 143 My Life as a Bus Stop 143 First Reels 158 Forman, Milos 74 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 74 Forster, Marc 2 World War Z 2 Forsyth, Bill 22, 28, 53, 55, 71, 85, 170, 175, 177 Gregory’s 2 Girls 55 Housekeeping 177 Local Hero 85 That Sinking Feeling 175 Forsyth, Michael 51, 52 Fox Searchlight 64, 135 Foy, Ciaran 79, 176 Citadel 79, 176 Fraser, Robbie 143, 146, 168, 172, 173, 175 GamerZ 143, 144, 145, 146, 147, 152, 168–74, 175 Frears, Stephen 134 Dirty Pretty Things 134 Fredholm, Gert 78 The Judge 78 Gabriel Films 144, 147 GamerZ see Fraser, Robbie gaming 143, 164, 168 genre cinema 152, 168, 170 genres Classical 8, 9, 21, 22, 24, 27, 31, 35, 38, 43, 46, 48, 62, 65, 73, 74 European Art 9, 21 film noir 48 horror 45, 142, 143, 146, 147, 149, 150, 151, 152, 176 road movies 28, 29, 30, 85, 86, 159, 174 slasher 148, 159, 168 Western 8, 24, 25, 26, 27, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 48, 65, 75, 77, 115, 122 Tartan 48 zombie 159, 169

Index Gibb, Andrea 119, 178 Gibson, Mel 3, 51 Braveheart 3, 4, 51 Giedroyc, Coky 16, 54 Stella Does Tricks 16, 54 Glasgow City Council 79 Glasgow Development Agency 40 Glasgow District Council 4, 40 Glasgow District Council’s Film Charter 4, 5 Glasgow Film Fund (GFF) 4, 5, 12, 38, 40, 41 Glasgow Film Office 58, 81 Glazer, Jonathan 2 Under the Skin 2, 102 Glenaan, Kenny 16, 112, 170 Gas Attack 112 Yasmin 16, 112 Gordon, Clive 13, 111, 127, 175, 177 Cargo 13, 19, 111, 112, 113, 125–30, 133, 175, 177 Grampian Television 144 Griffin, Annie 13 Festival 13, 16 Hardy, Robin 85 The Wicker Man 85 Harkins, Patrick 65 The Final Curtain 65 Harris, Leslie 22 Just Another Girl on the I.R.T. 22 Hayman, David 9, 41, 48, 82 The Near Room 9, 41, 48 Haynes, Todd 30 Poison 30 Hendel, Lorenzo 79 When Children Play in the Sky 79 Henderson, John 4, 51 Loch Ness 4, 51 Hepp Film 125 heterosexuality 35, 166 Hill, John 111, 116, 119 HMSO Charter for the Arts in Scotland (1993) 1 Hodge, John 7, 38, 40, 41, 42, 65 Hollywood 3, 7, 8, 10, 21, 23, 24, 29, 31, 34, 35, 43, 50, 51, 62, 64, 65, 66, 73, 74, 75, 76, 83, 142 see also Tinseltown

215

Hooper, Tobe 150 The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 150 Hudson, Hugh 54 My Life So Far 54 Hudson, Steve 16, 111, 130, 132, 134, 177 True North 16, 19, 111, 112, 130, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 177 Hunter, Allan 73, 90 Hutcheon, Lee 143 The Clan 143 In a Man’s World 143 My Brother’s Keeper 143 Hutton, Brian G. 155 Where Eagles Dare 155 Hynd, Simon 143 Senseless 143 Icon Entertainment 147 Ideal World 62 identity cultural 6, 7, 38, 59, 110, 119, 120 gender 15, 16, 24, 25, 74, 76, 77, 90, 91, 92, 104, 120, 121, 125, 149, 151, 166, 176 indigenous/Scottish 15, 16, 18, 19, 24, 25, 26, 28, 30, 31, 34, 35, 36, 37, 44, 45, 46, 61, 62, 64, 69, 81, 84, 90, 112, 139, 140, 141, 147, 159, 160, 162, 175 see also Scottishness male 86 masculine 16, 24, 25 religious 74, 75, 76, 77, 91, 92, 117, 127, 155 Scottish-American 33 Scottish-Non-Resident Indian (NRI) 121 sexual 121, 122 social 61 identity discourses 18, 74 inequality 19, 126, 130, 164 The Inheritance see Belleville, Charles Henri Islamophobia 112 Jensen, Anders Thomas 80, 88, 94 Jobson, Richard 19, 143, 144, 145, 146, 162, 163, 164, 165, 167, 173, 174, 175, 176 16 Years of Alcohol 144, 145, 162

216 The New Scottish Cinema Jobson, Richard cont. New Town Killers 19, 143, 144, 147, 152, 162–7, 168, 175 The Purifiers 162, 163, 164 The Somnambulists 176 A Woman in Winter 162 Kieslowski, Krzysztof 102 Three Colours: Blue 102 Kragh-Jacobsen, Søren 16, 78, 88, 89, 90, 92, 175 Mifune 88 Skagerrak 16, 78, 81, 85, 88–93, 98, 105, 108, 175 The Last Great Wilderness see Mackenzie, David The Last King of Scotland see Macdonald, Kevin Late Night Shopping see Metzstein, Saul de Launey, Marc 159 Dark Nature 159, 168 Laverty, Paul 9, 49, 113, 114, 115, 116, 118, 119, 125, 127, 178 Leland, David 9, 22, 24, 27, 175 The Big Man 9, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 30, 31, 32, 43, 46, 175 Lewis, Gary 88, 130, 178 Linklater, Richard 30, 58 Dazed and Confused 58 Slacker 30, 58 Lioret, Philippe 134 Welcome 134 Loach, Ken 9, 10, 18, 49, 55, 111, 112, 113, 114, 115, 116, 119, 125, 149, 170, 175 Ae Fond Kiss… 18, 19, 111, 112, 113, 114–9, 123, 125, 175, 177 Bread and Roses 113, 125 Carla’s Song 9, 10, 11, 15, 55, 113 It’s a Free World… 113 My Name is Joe 9, 49, 55 Route Irish 113 Sweet Sixteen 170 The Wind that Shakes the Barley 113, 125 Lockerbie, Ian 22, 34 Lothian, Jack 58, 59

Macdonald Andrew 7, 8, 38, 41, 42, 64, 65, 178 Macdonald, Kelly 63, 178 Macdonald, Kevin 13, 111, 135, 136, 138, 139, 142, 177 The Last King of Scotland 13, 19, 111, 112, 135–42, 177 Macdonald, Myra 16, 98 MacGregor, Robert Roy 8, 32 MacKane, David 111 The Gorbals Story 111 Mackenzie, Alastair 15, 82, 85 Mackenzie, David 15, 78, 79, 82, 84, 85, 87, 158, 170, 173, 176 Hallam Foe 79, 170, 174 The Last Great Wilderness 15, 18, 78, 81, 82–8, 89, 98, 105, 108, 174 Perfect Sense 79, 174, 176 You Instead 79, 176 Young Adam 79, 81, 174 Mackinnon, Gillies 9, 22, 29, 53, 177 Regeneration 9, 53, 54 Small Faces 9, 29, 41 Madden, John 13, 23 Mrs Brown 13, 23 The Magdalene Sisters see Mullan, Peter Makar Productions 113, 130 Martin-Jones, David 19, 81, 82, 84, 85, 121, 148, 150, 151, 177 masculinity 16, 24, 25, 26, 32, 48, 87, 91, 159, 160, 162, 166, 167 matriarchy 121, 148 McAvoy, James 135, 178 McBurney, Simon 88, 140 McCarey, Leo 75 The Bells of St Mary’s 75, 76, 77 McCarthy, Colm 15, 112, 169 Outcast 15, 112, 169 McGill, Hannah 73, 100 McGrath, John 5, 33, 53, 54 McGregor, Ewan 3, 7, 39, 59, 178 McGuigan, Paul 8, 14, 48, 177 The Acid House 8, 14, 48, 54, 55, 56, 60 Gangster No. 1 14 Lucky Number Slevin 14 Push 14 The Reckoning 14 Wicker Park 14

Index McIntyre, Steve 14, 30, 51, 52, 57, 144 McKinnon, Morag 16, 78, 80, 105, 106, 108, 158 Donkeys 16, 18, 78, 80, 81, 105–10 McLaglen, Andrew V. 157 The Wild Geese 157 McLoone, Martin 6, 50 Mead, Adrian 144 Night People 144 MEDIA 5 Menon, Rajiv 112 Kandukondain Kandukondain 112 metaphor 16, 25, 26, 43, 44, 86, 97, 100, 104, 119, 121, 125,127, 128, 130, 133, 141, 149 Metzstein, Saul 8, 48, 58, 59, 60, 61, 175 Late Night Shopping 8, 48, 49, 50, 57–62, 67, 175 migrants 128, 129, 131, 133, 134 Millar, Gavin 53 Complicity 53, 54 Minnelli, Vincente 85 Brigadoon 85 Miramax Films 13, 23, 24, 30, 47, 55, 62 misogyny 151, 166 Moland, Hans Petter 16, 78, 85 Aberdeen 16, 78, 81, 85, 86, 98, 108 Moonstone International 5, 33, 54 Morena Films 125 Movie Makars 5, 42 Mullan, Peter 9, 48, 49, 50, 55, 56, 67, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 125, 129, 130, 158, 170, 171, 172, 175, 178 The Magdalene Sisters 9, 48, 49, 50, 67, 72–7, 175, 177 Neds 143, 170, 171, 172, 173, 175 Orphans 9, 55, 56 Mullaney, Kerry Anne 16, 159 The Dead Outside 16, 159, 169 multiculturalism 94, 111, 112, 115, 118, 119, 121, 122 Murdoch, Stuart 176 God Help the Girl 176 Muslim 114, 115 myth 65, 90 nationalism 111 nationality 25, 94, 159, 162

217

National Lottery 3, 12, 50, 51, 52, 57, 64, 135 Neeson, Liam 24, 32 Neilson, Anthony 9, 48 The Debt Collector 9, 48, 49, 55 Neville, Carl 40, 43 Newell, Mike 64 Four Weddings and a Funeral 64 New Found Films 144 New Found Land 158 New Town Killers see Jobson, Richard New York Film Office 40 Nina’s Heavenly Delights see Parmar, Pratibha Oberon Cinematografia 125 Office of Communications (OFCOM) 145 Olesen, Annette 79 1:1 79 the Other/Otherness 29, 123, 125 Caledonian Other 56 Outpost see Barker, Steve Pakistani-Scots 115, 116 Palace Pictures 24, 27, 30 de Palma, Brian 4 Mission Impossible 4 Parker, Kieran 146, 152 Parmar, Pratibha 16, 111, 119, 120, 123, 125 Nina’s Heavenly Delights 16, 19, 111, 112, 119, 120–5 patriarchy 32, 76, 92, 93, 121, 136, 137, 138, 139, 148, 149, 150, 151 Peebles, Alison 16, 144 Afterlife 16, 144 Petrie, Duncan 4, 5, 19, 27, 39, 146, 175, 177 PFP 72 Polanski, Roman 48 Chinatown 48 post-9/11 112, 114, 116 post-colonial 136, 140, 141 Powell, Michael 85 I Know Where I’m Going! 85 Pressburger, Emeric 85 I Know Where I’m Going! 85 Prime Cuts 158 production budgets 2, 7, 13, 15, 19, 20, 23, 24, 30, 33, 39, 41, 42, 49, 53, 55, 56, 57, 58, 64, 81, 82, 142, 143, 144, 145, 146,

218 The New Scottish Cinema production budgets cont. 147, 153, 157, 158, 159, 163, 168, 169, 170, 176 high- 2, 7, 30, 53, 55 low- 15, 19, 20, 23, 30, 39, 46, 53, 57, 58, 87, 142, 143–74, 176 medium-to-high- 55 micro- 113, 142, 143, 146, 147, 157, 158, 159, 169 no- 158 race 20, 112, 113, 116, 117, 120, 134, 135, 142, 176 racism 115, 116, 119, 132 Rae, Douglas 12, 13 Rae, Robert 112, 113 Trouble Sleeping 112, 113 Rai, Rajiv 112 Pyaar Ishq Aur Mohabbat 112 Ramsay, Lynne 9, 12, 13, 15, 16, 17, 19, 48, 49, 50, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 73, 158, 175 Morvern Callar 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 175 Ratcatcher 9, 16, 48, 49, 50, 67–72, 73, 175 Rank 23 Ratcatcher see Ramsay, Lynne Rawail, Rahul 112 Kuch Khatti Kuch Meethi 112 Red Road see Arnold, Andrea Refn, Nicolas Winding 81 Valhalla Rising 81 Richards, Andy 58, 61 Rickman, Alan 53, 54 The Winter Guest 53, 54, 55 Roberts, John 176 Day of the Flowers 176 Rob Roy see Caton-Jones, Michael Rockett, Kevin 72, 73 Rodriguez, Robert 22 El Mariachi 22 Salim, Zam Up There 176 Samuel Goldwyn Co. 64 Samson Films 130 Scandinavia 15, 20, 78, 79, 81, 93, 94, 110, 111, 113, 176

Scherfig, Lone 16, 78, 80, 81, 93, 94, 96, 177 Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself) 16, 78, 80, 81, 93–7, 105, 108, 110, 177 Schwartz, Stefan 8, 22, 64 Soft Top, Hard Shoulder 8, 22, 23, 27–31, 43, 46, 64 Scots-Pakistani 111, 118 Scottish Arts Council (SAC) 5, 14, 52, 53, 54, 144 Film Production Committee 53 Scottish Arts Council National Lottery Fund 12, 52, 53, 54, 55, 58 Lottery Panel 53, 55 Scottish Classical filmmaking 22, 24, 27, 31, 43, 46, 48, 62, 65 Scottish Enterprise Glasgow 79 Scottish Executive 145 Scottish Export Assistance Scheme 33 Scottish Film Council 1 Scottish Film Production Fund 21, 22, 33, 34, 42, 49, 53 Scottish independent filmmaking 8, 15, 22, 23, 27, 30, 43, 46, 48, 58, 60, 62, 79 Scottishness 7, 35, 37, 40, 43, 46, 81, 84, 94, 135, 140 Scottish–Scandinaviano-productions 78, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85, 105, 107 Scottish Screen 4, 5, 12, 13, 14, 15, 23, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 56, 57, 58, 81, 82, 144, 145, 158, 162 Slate Fund 144 Scottish Screen Locations 4, 23 Scottish Stand 53 Scottish Television (STV) 30, 144, 158 Screen Academy Scotland 113 Screen Industries Summit Group 145 Screen Training Ireland 5 screenwriting 5, 33, 115, 125 script structure 33, 34, 36, 41, 60, 61 scriptwriting 33, 34, 35, 59, 178 selfhood 103, 122 sexuality 73, 101, 120, 121, 169, 174 Sharp, Alan 8, 31, 32, 33, 36 Shiach, Allan 23, 49, 53 Sigma Films 15, 78, 79, 80, 81, 98, 113 Sillars, Jane 16, 98

Index Simpson, Steven Lewis 143, 145 Retribution 143 Rez Bomb 143 The Ticking Man 143 Shallow Grave see Boyle, Danny Skagerrak see Kragh-Jacobsen, Søren Slate Films 125, 135 Smart Egg 41 Smith, Kevin 58 Clerks 58 Mallrats 58 social realism 25, 27, 102, 149, 164, 171 socio-culturalism 44, 45, 61, 65, 98, 147, 175 Soderburgh, Steven 8, 38 sex, lies and videotape 8, 38, 39 Soft Top, Hard Shoulder see Schwartz, Stefan Sony 146, 152 Spielberg, Steven 29, 155 Duel 29 Raiders of the Lost Ark 155 Stirton, Mark 143 One Day Removals 143 Stoltz, Eric 32, 65 Strachan, Craig 15, 16, 143, 147, 149 Wild Country 15, 16, 19, 143, 144, 145, 147–52, 168, 169 Strathclyde Regional Council 40 Strictly Sinatra see Capaldi, Peter Sturges, John 73 The Great Escape 73 Subotica 80 Sundance Institute 5 surveillance culture 104, 105 see also CCTV Svaasand, Stewart 81 One Last Chance 81 Tait, Margaret 16 Blue Black Permanent 16 Tarantino, Quentin 22 Reservoir Dogs 22 Tartan Shorts 21, 158 Tartan Works 162 television 5, 7, 13, 23, 30, 32, 51, 62, 66, 72, 120, 173 Thatcher, Margaret 24, 26 Thatcherism 26, 27, 71

219

Theatre Workshop 113 Thomas, May Miles 16, 145 One Life Stand 16, 145 Thomas, Owen 145, 146 Tinseltown 6 see also Hollywood transnationalism 19, 78 von Trier, Lars 4, 78, 79, 81 Breaking the Waves 4, 88 Dogville 78 The Idiots 88 Manderlay 78 True North see Hudson, Steve Twentieth Century Fox International 135 Twenty First Films 54, 144 UK Film Council 162 United Artists 23, 31 utopianism 119, 123 Vestry Films 162 Waller, Anthony 148 An American Werewolf in Paris 148 Warner Bros 13 Welsh, Irvine 54, 56, 60 Wilbur (Wants to Kill Himself) see Scherfig, Lone Wild Country see Strachan, Craig Wilder, Billy 43 Sunset Boulevard 43 Williams, Paul Andrew 158 London to Brighton 158 Winterbottom, Michael 134 In this World 134 Woolley, Steven 24, 25 Yaqub, Atta 114, 121 Young, Christopher 53, 178 Yule, Eleanor 16, 144 Blinded 16, 144 Zeffirelli, Franco 4 Hamlet 4 Zentropa Entertainments 78, 79, 80, 81, 82, 88, 98

Cinema and Society series General Editor: Jeffrey Richards Age of the Dream Palace, The: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain Jeffrey Richards Banned in the USA’: British Films in the United States and their Censorship, 1933–1960 Anthony Slide Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema Colin McArthur Britain Can Take It: British Cinema in the Second World War Tony Aldgate & Jeffrey Richards British at War, The: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 James Chapman British Children’s Cinema: From The Thief of Baghdad to Wallace and Gromit Noel Brown British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus Tony Shaw British Film Design: A History Laurie N. Ede Children, Cinema and Censorship: From Dracula to the Dead End Kids Sarah J. Smith Christmas at the Movies: Images of Christmas in American, British and European Cinema Mark Connelly (ed.) Classic French Cinema 1930–1960, The Colin Crisp Crowded Prairie, The: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western Michael Coyne Death Penalty in American Cinema, The: Criminality and Retribution in Hollywood Film Yvonne Koslovsky-Golan Distorted Images: British National Identity and Film in the 1920s Kenton Bamford An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory Annette Kuhn Family Films in Global Cinema: The World Beyond Disney Noel Brown and Bruce Babington (eds) Femininity in the Frame: Women and 1950s British Popular Cinema Melanie Bell Film and Community in Britain and France: From La Règle du jeu to Room at the Top Margaret Butler Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany Richard Taylor

Finest Years, The: British Cinema of the 1940s Charles Drazin Frank Capra’s Eastern Horizons American Identity and the Cinema of International Relations Elizabeth Rawitsch From Moscow to Madrid: European Cities, Postmodern Cinema Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain: From the 1920s to the Present Mark Glancy Hollywood Family Film, The: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter Noel Brown Hollywood Genres and Postwar America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir Mike Chopra-Gant Hollywood’s History Films David Eldridge Hollywood’s New Radicalism: War, Globalisation and the Movies from Reagan to George W. Bush Ben Dickenson Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films James Chapman New Scottish Cinema, The Jonathan Murray Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film James Chapman Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces Andrew Moor Projecting Tomorrow: Science Fiction and Popular Cinema James Chapman and Nicholas J. Cull Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945 David Welch Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History and American National Identity Jenny Barrett Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone Christopher Frayling Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster Geoff King Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema Andrew Spicer Unknown 1930s, The: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929–1939 Jeffrey Richards (ed.) Withnail and Us: Cult Films and Film Cults in British Cinema Justin Smith

Cinema and Society series General Editor: Jeffrey Richards Age of the Dream Palace, The: Cinema and Society in 1930s Britain Jeffrey Richards Banned in the USA’: British Films in the United States and their Censorship, 1933–1960 Anthony Slide Best of British: Cinema and Society from 1930 to the Present Anthony Aldgate and Jeffrey Richards Brigadoon, Braveheart and the Scots: Distortions of Scotland in Hollywood Cinema Colin McArthur Britain Can Take It: British Cinema in the Second World War Tony Aldgate & Jeffrey Richards British at War, The: Cinema, State and Propaganda, 1939–1945 James Chapman British Children’s Cinema: From The Thief of Baghdad to Wallace and Gromit Noel Brown British Cinema and the Cold War: The State, Propaganda and Consensus Tony Shaw British Film Design: A History Laurie N. Ede Children, Cinema and Censorship: From Dracula to the Dead End Kids Sarah J. Smith Christmas at the Movies: Images of Christmas in American, British and European Cinema Mark Connelly (ed.) Classic French Cinema 1930–1960, The Colin Crisp Crowded Prairie, The: American National Identity in the Hollywood Western Michael Coyne Death Penalty in American Cinema, The: Criminality and Retribution in Hollywood Film Yvonne Koslovsky-Golan Distorted Images: British National Identity and Film in the 1920s Kenton Bamford An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory Annette Kuhn Family Films in Global Cinema: The World Beyond Disney Noel Brown and Bruce Babington (eds) Femininity in the Frame: Women and 1950s British Popular Cinema Melanie Bell Film and Community in Britain and France: From La Règle du jeu to Room at the Top Margaret Butler Film Propaganda: Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany Richard Taylor

Finest Years, The: British Cinema of the 1940s Charles Drazin Frank Capra’s Eastern Horizons American Identity and the Cinema of International Relations Elizabeth Rawitsch From Moscow to Madrid: European Cities, Postmodern Cinema Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain: From the 1920s to the Present Mark Glancy Hollywood Family Film, The: A History, from Shirley Temple to Harry Potter Noel Brown Hollywood Genres and Postwar America: Masculinity, Family and Nation in Popular Movies and Film Noir Mike Chopra-Gant Hollywood’s History Films David Eldridge Hollywood’s New Radicalism: War, Globalisation and the Movies from Reagan to George W. Bush Ben Dickenson Licence to Thrill: A Cultural History of the James Bond Films James Chapman New Scottish Cinema, The Jonathan Murray Past and Present: National Identity and the British Historical Film James Chapman Powell and Pressburger: A Cinema of Magic Spaces Andrew Moor Projecting Tomorrow: Science Fiction and Popular Cinema James Chapman and Nicholas J. Cull Propaganda and the German Cinema, 1933–1945 David Welch Shooting the Civil War: Cinema, History and American National Identity Jenny Barrett Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone Christopher Frayling Spectacular Narratives: Hollywood in the Age of the Blockbuster Geoff King Typical Men: The Representation of Masculinity in Popular British Cinema Andrew Spicer Unknown 1930s, The: An Alternative History of the British Cinema, 1929–1939 Jeffrey Richards (ed.) Withnail and Us: Cult Films and Film Cults in British Cinema Justin Smith