Cinema, Culture, Scotland – Selected Essays, Colin McArthur and Jonathan Murray (ed), Edinburgh University Press 2024, 550pp ISBN 978 1 3995 1288 6 (pdf version)

Colin McArthur is a rare writer to be cherished. Over a career which has lasted sixty years he has written continuously in the form of film journalism and academic film studies as well as cultural analysis. He has combined a commitment to socialism and his Scottish roots, as well as a passion for Hollywood and aspects of European cinema. He has been involved since the 1960s in the development of film and media education, first in his work for the British Film Institute and later as a Visiting Professor at two Scottish universities as well as lectures at various institutions in the UK, continental Europe and the Americas. This book is edited by Jonathan Murray who provides a substantial introduction to the collection. Colin McArthur acknowledges that he thinks of the published book as ‘our book’ because of Murray’s achievement in transforming “a diverse set of essays written over almost half a century into something approaching a serious academic work”. 

This collection of 36 essays written between 1966 and 2020 plus an ‘Afterword’ represents McArthur’s large body of work through careful selections that cover his different interests and approaches. As the title of the book suggests, however, the bulk of the essays refer to McArthur’s long commitment to exposing and analysing what he sees as the main issues in Scottish film culture and Scottish arts culture more generally. This involves a familiar argument in the UK and many other countries about the impact of Hollywood filmmaking on audiences, filmmakers and cultural/political commentators and institutions. McArthur’s approach sees him comparing Scottish experience with that in the Republic of Ireland on a couple of occasions as different approaches to a ‘Celtic Cinema’.

I suspect many readers might come to this book with memories of the 1982 publication Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television which Colin McArthur edited. Or perhaps not that specific BFI publication but the naming of the ‘myths’ of ‘kailyard’ and ‘tartanry’ explored therein, which for non-Scots was an introduction to Scottish debates about national identity. This new collection offers an earlier essay by McArthur, ‘Politicising Scottish Film Culture’ (1976) and its last two pieces refer back to the continuing debates around Scottish national identity in ‘Scotch Myths, Scottish Film Culture and the Suppression of Ludic Modernism’ (2009) and ‘Bring Furrit the Tartan-Necks! Nationalist Intellectuals and Scottish Popular Culture’ (2009). In between these two bookends are around twenty essays dealing with McArthur’s take on the debates about Scottish Film Culture and Scottish culture more generally. The other dozen or so essays demonstrate how the author has encountered and developed ideas deriving from aspects of a wider international cultural context which have then informed his analysis of Scottish culture.

The ‘Author’s Afterword’ offers McArthur’s reflections on this long process of engagement and analysis which also acts as a commentary on film studies, media studies and cultural studies as they have developed over the last sixty years or so. McArthur is an almost unique figure because of his long writing career and his consistent attention to certain key approaches. In these various essays you will find examples of the importance of textual analysis analysis (or more specifically mise en scène study) as well as attention to the history of representations. He has also been attentive to institutional issues and to reflections on his own practice in relation to such institutions. I remember reading McArthur’s book on The Big Heat (Fritz Lang, 1953), published as part of the ‘BFI Film Classics’ series in 1992. I was surprised, but delighted, to read the substantial argument within the book about the struggles within the British Film Institute over the BFI Education Department’s ‘cultural work’. McArthur returns to this history in an essay reproduced in this current collection titled ‘Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Cultural Struggle in the British Film Institute’ (2001).

In his ‘Afterword’ McArthur comments on this ‘institutional aspect’ of his work which was to some extent ‘overdetermined’ by what was happening during the period in which he was working at the BFI (1968-1984). The three institutional frameworks within which he worked were the BFI itself (in terms of both policy and administration), the CNAA (Council for National Academic Awards) which validated degree proposals from the ‘non-university institutions’ such as polytechnics in the UK (which would later become universities) and the socialist newspaper Tribune, on which McArthur was the film critic from 1972 to 1978. It’s worth noting that none of these were Scottish institutions as such, though both the BFI and the CNAA had remits which covered Scotland. Colin McArthur has been an analyst and critic of the activities of specifically Scottish institutions while being resident in London, a position he has readily acknowledged at various times. In this collection are essays such as the ‘Rises and Falls of the Edinburgh International Film Festival’ (1990). It would be interesting to know what McArthur thinks about the current state of film culture in Edinburgh. He may well have written about it, but I haven’t found it. (A seven day EIFF has been announced for August 2024.) Other Scottish film institutions are discussed in various essays. I note that the book has an Index covering ‘Ideas, Institutions and Non-Film Texts’ in which I could quickly find that, for example, Scottish Screen is discussed on several pages, as are the Scottish Film Production Fund and the Scottish Film Council among other institutions.

Anyone interested in Scottish film culture should read this book. I’d go as far as to say anyone interested in film culture generally would find it useful. Despite at some points covering some abstruse aspects of film theory or the minutiae of some institutional practices, Colin McArthur writes in an engaging and accessible manner. Finally, I should add that the collection includes the first two chapters of Underworld U.S.A. by McArthur, published by Secker & Warburg in association with the BFI in 1972. As McArthur notes it was written “at a moment of transition in British film culture”, introducing the concept of approaching a study of films from the perspective of ‘genre’ while also offering the work of nine directors “who produced distinguished work in the gangster film and film noir”. In other words the book begins the process of moving away from auteurism and towards genre study. This and the similar book in the same series by Jim Kitzes, Horizons West (1969), were important in the gradual establishment of film studies and media studies in UK schools and colleges as well as in higher education. Colin McArthur is still a regular contributor to the Media Education Journal, the magazine of the Association for Media Education in Scotland. He writes about ‘Guns at Batasi (UK 1964) and the Kiplingesque’ in the current issue, Winter 2023-4. I’m enjoying reading this piece and it demonstrates the same close reading and historical, ideological and institutional analyses that recur in the collection described above as well as including an entertaining personal reminiscence of a soldier’s life during National Service.