Cinema, Culture, Scotland Quotes

“To recall the extent to which Hitchcock was marked by his petit bourgeois interpellation may not radically change the way we read his films. It should, however, remind us that his British films in particular come out of a highly class-structured and class-conscious social formation and are likely to bear the traces of this, even if only in their interstices.”
― Colin McArthur, Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays

“Scotland was not imune to these developments, but since their role in France, Germany, Itay and Poland was to provide the ideological amunition to further political (and sometimes military) advance, there was no obvious use for them in Scotland, given that its polity and economy had already been defined in 1707. As a cosequence, the characteristic tropes of romantic nationalism were, in the Scottish context, diverted into non-political and non-military (in the sense of nationalist struggle) channels. This produced a particularly demented, introverted and sentimental romanticism which, since it could not focus on the future, oriented itself obsessively to the past. To the extent that this introverted nationalism found a contemporary role, it was in the service of British imperialism within which Scottish administrators and soldiers were disproportionately prominent.”
― Colin McArthur, Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays

“If I were to be asked what is most lacking and what I would most like to see in Scottish filmmaking today, I would say the union of the king of mis-en-scene which is steeped in cinematic history and gives us maximum cinematic pleasure, with a hard political analysis of Scottish history and contemporary Scotland.”
― Colin McArthur, Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays

“Crossfire is., pre-eminently, a film noir and it is this fact which throws most doubt on the social reading offered by many Anglo-American critics. The film noir is definable partly in thematic and partly in stylistic terms, but what seems incontestible is that the meanings spoken by the genre are less social, relating to the problems (such as antisemitism) of a [particular society, and more metaphysical, having to do with angst and loneliness as essential elements of the human condition. The latter are substantially the meanings spoken by Crossfire.”
― Colin McArthur, Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays

“Scottish film culture - or, more accurately, its discrete sections - has been highly politicised in the past. The problem has been the nature of the politics in question. Take Scottish filmmaking as example. On one hand, Scottish film workers have presented a picture of individualist effort which would gladden the heart of Margaret Thatcher and which, theoretically at any rate, should have produced a great variety of films of very diverse aesthetic and, therefore, political tendencies. On the other, however, these same film workers were forced to compete with each other for limited funds disbursed by a few key Scottish institutions of patronage, the powerful voices of which, historically, have been extremely reactionary. Small wonder, then, that Scottish films critical of established aesthetic forms, cultural atitudes and political arrangements have been the exception rather than the rule.”
― Colin McArthur, Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays

“It seems fitting, however, that the single Western film which most unambiguously endorses the agrarian ideal, The Covered Wagon, should contain one of the cinema screen's most graphic attacks on Industrialism. The film's intertitles inform viewers that one of the most formidable hazards facing the character of Wingate (Charles Stanton Ogle), the leader of the wagon train, is greed arising from the California gold strike of 1849. Several pioneers opt to dig gold in California rather than plow land in Oregon. In a visual composition symbollically resonant with the importance and irrevocability of that choice, the wagon train divides, one part going north and the other south, while visible in the foreground lie the discarded plows of those who have foresaken the agrarian ideal. These shots from a silent Western summarise a major split in the American psyche.”
― Colin McArthur, Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays