Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements of Original Publishers
- Personal Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Dedication
- Editor’s Introduction
- 1 Ashes and Diamonds
- 2 The Roots of the Western
- 3 Pickup on South Street
- 4 Extract from Underworld U.S.A.
- 5 Politicising Scottish Film Culture
- 6 Crossfire and the Anglo-American Critical Tradition
- 7 Breaking the Signs: Scotch Myths as Cultural Struggle
- 8 Scotland and Cinema: The Iniquity of the Fathers
- 9 The Maggie
- 10 National Identities
- 11 TV Commercials: Moving Statues and Old Movies
- 12 Tele-history: The Dragon Has Two Tongues
- 13 Scotland’s Story
- 14 The Dialectic of National Identity: The Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938
- 15 The New Scottish Cinema?
- 16 The Rises and Falls of the Edinburgh International Film Festival
- 17 A Dram for All Seasons: The Diverse Identities of Scotch
- 18 Scottish Culture: A Reply to David McCrone
- 19 In Praise of a Poor Cinema
- 20 Wake for a Glasgow Culture Hero
- 21 The Cultural Necessity of a Poor Celtic Cinema
- 22 Culloden: A Pre-emptive Strike
- 23 Casablanca: Where Have All the Fascists Gone?
- 24 The Scottish Discursive Unconscious
- 25 Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City
- 26 Artists and Philistines: The Irish and Scottish Film Milieux
- 27 Braveheart and the Scottish Aesthetic Dementia
- 28 The Exquisite Corpse of Rab(elais) C(opernicus) Nesbitt
- 29 Mise-en-scène Degree Zero: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï
- 30 The Critics Who Knew Too Little: Hitchcock and the Absent Class Paradigm
- 31 Caledonianising Macbeth, or, How Scottish is ‘The Scottish Play’?
- 32 Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Cultural Struggle in the British Film Institute
- 33 Transatlantic Scots, Their Interlocutors and the Scottish Discursive Unconscious
- 34 Scotch Myths, Scottish Film Culture and the Suppression of Ludic Modernism
- 35 Bring Furrit the Tartan-Necks! Nationalist Intellectuals and Scottish Popular Culture
- 36 Vanished or Banished? Murray Grigor as Absent Scots Auteur
- Author’s Afterword
- Select Bibliography
- Indexes
33 - Transatlantic Scots, Their Interlocutors and the Scottish Discursive Unconscious
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2025
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements of Original Publishers
- Personal Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Dedication
- Editor’s Introduction
- 1 Ashes and Diamonds
- 2 The Roots of the Western
- 3 Pickup on South Street
- 4 Extract from Underworld U.S.A.
- 5 Politicising Scottish Film Culture
- 6 Crossfire and the Anglo-American Critical Tradition
- 7 Breaking the Signs: Scotch Myths as Cultural Struggle
- 8 Scotland and Cinema: The Iniquity of the Fathers
- 9 The Maggie
- 10 National Identities
- 11 TV Commercials: Moving Statues and Old Movies
- 12 Tele-history: The Dragon Has Two Tongues
- 13 Scotland’s Story
- 14 The Dialectic of National Identity: The Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938
- 15 The New Scottish Cinema?
- 16 The Rises and Falls of the Edinburgh International Film Festival
- 17 A Dram for All Seasons: The Diverse Identities of Scotch
- 18 Scottish Culture: A Reply to David McCrone
- 19 In Praise of a Poor Cinema
- 20 Wake for a Glasgow Culture Hero
- 21 The Cultural Necessity of a Poor Celtic Cinema
- 22 Culloden: A Pre-emptive Strike
- 23 Casablanca: Where Have All the Fascists Gone?
- 24 The Scottish Discursive Unconscious
- 25 Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City
- 26 Artists and Philistines: The Irish and Scottish Film Milieux
- 27 Braveheart and the Scottish Aesthetic Dementia
- 28 The Exquisite Corpse of Rab(elais) C(opernicus) Nesbitt
- 29 Mise-en-scène Degree Zero: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï
- 30 The Critics Who Knew Too Little: Hitchcock and the Absent Class Paradigm
- 31 Caledonianising Macbeth, or, How Scottish is ‘The Scottish Play’?
- 32 Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Cultural Struggle in the British Film Institute
- 33 Transatlantic Scots, Their Interlocutors and the Scottish Discursive Unconscious
- 34 Scotch Myths, Scottish Film Culture and the Suppression of Ludic Modernism
- 35 Bring Furrit the Tartan-Necks! Nationalist Intellectuals and Scottish Popular Culture
- 36 Vanished or Banished? Murray Grigor as Absent Scots Auteur
- Author’s Afterword
- Select Bibliography
- Indexes
Summary
Consider the following quotations:
From the green saucer of Glenaladale, dipping down to Loch Shiel, Alexander Macdonald had taken one hundred and fifty men to serve in Clanranald's regiment. Within a century there was nothing there but the lone shieling of the song.
[T]his is Glencoe, the village at the foot of that most dramatic of glens, where the waters run down the precipitous black rock-faces like tears of pain and shame at what happened 300 years ago.
In Kildonan there is today a shadow, a chill of which any sensitive mind would, I am convinced, be vaguely aware, though possessing no knowledge of the clearances. We are affected strangely by any place from which the tide of life has ebbed.
I’m tied to Uig Sands. I don't know why […] Balnakiel just represents sort of the centre of the historical universe for me, and it is a particularly beautiful setting, and for me, if I were to picture my historic home, then it's going to be some place on Uig Sands, whether it's Carnish that sits on one side or Crowlista on the other side. That bay is a sort of ‘ground zero’ for me. It's strange that it didn't turn out to be Aird, but Aird to me is always a sort of removal place, some place that we went after we left the homeland.
The first quotation is from the deracinated Canadian writer John Prebble (1915–2001)'s Culloden (1961), the second from indigenous Scots journalist Brian Pendreigh's 1992 newspaper account of the 300th anniversary of the 1692 massacre of Glencoe, the third from a 1935 essay by the Scots novelist Neil Gunn (1891–1973) and the fourth is a statement by a transatlantic Scot on her recent return to Scotland. Speaking generally, the four quotes illustrate the extent to which ‘[Cultural] identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past’. More specifically, a related factor worthy of investigation is the extent to which all four quotations, despite being produced at diverse moments and by both indigenous Scots and North Americans, sound the same elegiac note and/or display the same rhetorical trope of running, mantra-like, the names of people and places off the tongue.
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- Cinema, Culture, ScotlandSelected Essays, pp. 449 - 468Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2024