Cinema, Culture, Scotland
Selected Essays
Colin McArthur
Edited by Jonathan Murray
Anthologises key works from the oeuvre of Colin McArthur, a pioneering critic within Anglophone film and Scottish cultural studies
- Curates an extensive selection of key works (over half of which are currently out-of-print) by a leading Scottish and British film and cultural critic
- Includes two newly written synthesising reflections on this important body of individual scholarship, in the form of an editorial introduction and an authorial afterword
- Enables established, emerging, and future generations of scholars to discover and re/assess the career of one of Anglophone Film Studies’ founding and most distinctive and influential critical voices
- Enhances historical and intellectual awareness and evaluative understanding of multiple fields and traditions of debate within Anglophone Film Studies and modern Scottish Cultural Studies
- Supports enhanced understanding of a range of intellectual and creative milieus that have shaped both historical and contemporary Scottish and British moving image and broader popular cultures
This book anthologises selected key works from the oeuvre of Colin McArthur, a pioneering figure within Anglophone Film and Scottish cultural studies since the 1960s.
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Editor’s Introduction, Jonathan Murray
- ‘Ashes and Diamonds’ (originally published in Screen Education, [Mar/Apr 1966]: 28–31)
- ‘The Roots of the Western’ (originally published in Cinema, [Oct 1969]: 11–13)
- ‘Pickup on South Street’ (originally published in Peter Wollen and David Will, eds., Samuel Fuller [Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Festival ’69/Scottish International Review, 1969], 28–31)
- Extract from Underworld U.S.A. (London: Secker and Warburg in association the British Film Institute, 1972), 11–33)
- ‘Politicising Scottish Film Culture’ (originally published in New Edinburgh Review 34, no. 2 [1976]: 8–10)
- ‘Crossfire and the Anglo-American Critical Tradition’ (originally published in Film Form 1, no. 2 [1977]: 23-32)
- ‘Breaking the Signs: Scotch Myths as Cultural Struggle (originally published in Cencrastus, no. 7 [Winter 1981/2], 21–25)
- ‘Scotland and Cinema: the Iniquity of the Fathers’ (originally published in Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television, ed. Colin McArthur [London: British Film Institute, 1982], 40–69)
- ‘The Maggie’ (originally published in Cencrastus, no. 12 [Spring 1983], 10–14)
- ‘National Identities’ (originally published in National Fictions: World War Two in British films and television, ed. Geoff Hurd [London: British Film Institute, 1984], 54–56)
- ‘TV Commercials: Moving Statues and Old Movies’ (originally published in Television Mythologies: Stars, Shows and Signs, ed. Len Masterman [London: Comedia, 1984], 63–66)
- ‘Telehistory: The Dragon Has Two Tongues’ (originally published in Cencrastus, no. 21 [Summer 1985], 40–42)
- ‘Scotland’s Story’ (originally published in Framework, no. 26–7 [1985], 64–74)
- ‘The Dialectic of National Identity: the Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938’ (originally published in Popular Culture and Social Relations, eds. Tony Bennett, Colin Mercer and Janet Woollacott [Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1986], 117–34)
- ‘The New Scottish Cinema?’ (originally published in Desperately Seeking Cinema: What Kind of Scottish Film-making Do We Want?, ed. Kenny Mathieson [Glasgow: Glasgow Film Theatre, 1988], 7–11)
- ‘The Rises and Falls of the Edinburgh International Film Festival’ (originally published in From Limelight to Satellite: a Scottish Film Book, ed. Eddie Dick [London/Glasgow: British Film Institute/Scottish Film Council], 91–102)
- ‘A Dram for All Seasons’ (originally published in Scots on Scotch, ed. Philip Hills [Edinburgh: Mainstream, 1991], 87–102)
- ‘Scottish Culture: a Reply to David McCrone’ (originally published in Scottish Affairs, no. 4 [1993], 95–106)
- ‘In Praise of a Poor Cinema’ (originally published in Sight and Sound 3, no. 8 [August 1993] 30–32)
- ‘Wake for a Glasgow Culture Hero’ (originally published in Scottish Film and Visual Arts, no. 6 [1993], 11–12)
- ‘The Cultural Necessity of a Poor Celtic Cinema’ (originally published in Border Crossing: Film in Ireland, Britain and Europe, eds. John Hill, Martin McLoone and Paul Hainsworth [London/Belfast: British Film Institute/Queen’s University Institute of Irish Studies, 1994], 112–25)
- ‘Culloden: a Pre-emptive Strike’ (originally published in Scottish Affairs, no. 9 [1994], 97–126)
- ‘Casablanca: Where Have All the Fascists Gone?’ (originally published in Random Access: Crisis and its Metaphors, eds. Pavel Buchler and Nikos Papastergiadis [London: Rivers Oram Press, 1995], pp. 85–94)
- ‘The Scottish Discursive Unconscious’ (originally published in Scottish Popular Theatre and Entertainment, eds. Alasdair Cameron and Adrienne Scullion [Glasgow: Glasgow University Library Studies, 1996], 81–89)
- ‘Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City’ (originally published in The Cinematic City, ed. David B. Clarke [London: Routledge, 1997], 19–45)
- ‘Artists and Philistines: the Irish and Scottish Film Milieux’ (originally published in Journal for the Study of British Cultures 5, no. 2 [1998], 143–53)
- ‘Braveheart and the Scottish Aesthetic Dementia’ (originally published in Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History, ed. Tony Barta [London: Praeger, 1998], 167–87)
- ‘The Exquisite Corpse of R(abelais) C(opernicus) Nesbitt’ (originally published in Dissident Voices: the Politics of Television and Cultural Change, ed. Mike Wayne [London: Pluto Press, 1998], 107–26)
- ‘Mise-en-Scene Degree Zero: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï’ (originally published in French Film: Texts and Contexts, eds. Susan Hayward and Ginette Vincendeau [London: Routledge, 2000], 189–201)
- ‘The Critics Who Knew Too Little: Hitchcock and the Absent Class Paradigm’ (originally published in Film Studies, no. 2 [2000], 15–28)
- ‘Caledonianising Macbeth, or How Scottish is the Scottish Play?’ (originally published in Scottish Affairs, no. 36 [2001], 12–39)
- ‘Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Cultural Struggle in the British Film Institute’ (originally published in Journal of Popular British Cinema, no. 4 [2001], 112–27)
- ‘Transatlantic Scots, Their Interlocutors and the Scottish Discursive Unconscious’ (originally published in Transatlantic Scots, ed. Celeste Ray [Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press: 2005], 339–56)
- ‘Scotch Myths, Scottish Film Culture and the Suppression of Ludic Modernism’ (originally published in Scottish Cinema Now, eds. Jonathan Murray, Fidelma Farley and Rod Stoneman [Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009], pp. 39–55)
- ‘Bring Furrit the Tartan-Necks! Nationalist Intellectuals and Scottish Popular Culture’ (originally published in Scottish Affairs, no. 69 [2009], 75–92)
- ‘Vanished or Banished? Murray Grigor as Absent Scots Auteur’ (originally published in Directory of World Cinema: Scotland, eds. Bob Nowlan and Zach Finch [Bristol: Intellect Books, 2015], pp. 58–65)
- Author’s Afterword
Select Bibliography
Ranging from pioneering analyses of popular American cinema to ground-breaking studies of the representation of Scotland in visual and material culture, Colin McArthur’s writings have always, from the 1960s to the present day, constituted major interventions in their fields. It is thus particularly welcome that some of the finest examples are now readily accessible, and in such a diligently edited collection.
Cinema, Culture, Scotland is an autobiography of ideas by a pioneering, deeply committed writer on film and the wider culture, from angry young man to internationally recognised authority; it is also a history of English-speaking Film Studies since the mid-1960s by one of the discipline's key contributors. Much more than a 'legacy' volume set in stone, it should be a continuing inspiration to new generations of writers, thinkers and practitioners who take film seriously.
This book adds to our understanding of [McArthur's] persistent, intelligent probing and its impact on Scottish culture. Jonathan Murray is to be thanked for putting the collection together.
