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“...perhaps the Great American Desert's importance to the Western genre derives from the nineteenth-century view of the arid West as the natural refuge of Indians and, by extension, of all outlaws. The agrarian ideal, with its roots in Rousseau's thought, defined civilisation as arising from the agricultural life, so the migratory Indians - often compared in nineteent-century writings to Tartars and Bedouin - were, by reason of their socioeconomic organisation, outside the pale of civilised society and the area in which they moved was regarded as fit only for outlaws. It is as a milieu within which men outside civilised, agrarian society resolve their tensions, both personal and social, that the Western has used the myth of the Great American Desert, as in Riders of Death Valley (Forde Beebe and Ray Taylor, 1941), The Last Wagon (Delmer Daves, 1956), The Law and Jake Wade (John Sturges, 1958) and the Boetticher cycle.”

Civilized SocietyNative AmericansAmerican WestOutlawsRousseauWesternsThe Desert
Book:Cinema, A Quarterly Magazine, No. 4, October 1969
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“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.”

CaliforniaOregonWesternsAgrarianismPlowAmerican PsycheCovered Wagon1849California Gold RushWagon Train
Book:Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays
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“Actors such as Cagney, Robinson and Bogart seem to gather within themselves the qualities of the genres they appear in, so that the violence, suffering and angst of the films is restated in their faces, physical presence, movement and speech. By the curious alchemy of the cinema, each successive appearance in a given genre further solidifies the actor's screen persona until they no longer play a role but assimilate it to the collecive entity made up of their own body, personality and past screen roles. For instance, the beat-up face. tired eyes and rasping voice by which we identify Humphrey Bogart are, in part, selections we have made from his roles as Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and others.”

GenreHumphrey BogartHolywoodGangster MoviesScreen Persona
Book:Underworld USA
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“It is perhaps surprising that in eighteenth century travellers' accounts Glasgow is most often compared with Oxford for the beauty of its prospect and the excellence of its ambience. It was post-industrial Revolution accounts of the city that began to articulate the 'Glasgow discourse' which was to become hegenomic. Initially signalled in urban planning and public health reports of the nineteenth century, this discourse was powerfully accelerated by tabloid journalistic accounts of gang warfare in interwar Glasgow and by folkloric embellishments of these. The result was that a monstrous Ur-narrative comes into play when anyone (not least, it should be said, Glaswegians themselves) seeks to describe or deal imaginatively with that city. In this archetypal narrative, Glasgow is the City of Dreadful Night with the worst slums in Europe, its citizens living out lives which are nasty, brutish and short. The milieu of Glasgow is so stark, so the narrative runs, that it breeds a particular social type, the Hard Man, a figure whose universe is bounded by football, heavy drinking and (often sectarian) violence. The image of Glasgow, which beckons, Circe-like, to any who would speak or write of that city, is one of men celebrating, coming to terms with or (rarely) transcending their bleak milieu. An order of marginalisation, if not exclusion, is served on women.”

ViolenceIndustrial RevolutionSectarianismGlasgowHard ManHeavy DrinkingGlaswegians
Book:The Cinematic City
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“It would be tedious to relate the Gradgrindian detail - economic, social and cultural (in the anthropological sense) - with which Scottish Screen implemented its industrial model during the thirteen years of its existence between 1997 and 2010. Collectively, the Scottish Screen website's policy guidelines and application forms for its innumerable schemes at every level of production and training constituted a manual for how to crush the life out of a creative project.”

CreativityPolicyManualScottish FilmApplication FormsScottish Screen
Book:Scottish Cinema Now
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“Perhaps more than anything in The Maggie, the 'Spirit of Scotland' image is troubling, particularly for those concerned with the way women are represented in films about Scotland. In Ouainé Bain's apt phrase, the 'fey, winsome lass' who consummates Marshall's entry into the film's Celtic world offers one of the two ultimately limiting images of women which dominate Scottish culture (the other being the Ma Broon figure who holds the home together) and forbid entry to it of images of women which accord more with the needs of contemporary Scottish women.”

CelticFeyScottish CultureRepresentation Of WomenWinsomenessMa BroonThe Maggie
Book:Cencrastus No. 12: Spring 1983
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“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.”

CinemaSocial ClassFilmsAlfred HitchcockPetit Bourgeois
Book:Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays
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“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.”

FilmmakingAestheticsPatronageScottish Film
Book:Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays
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“By 1938, Scotland had for nearly 200 years lived within a classic peripheral identity assigned to it by the artists and ideologues of the great European core cultures through the mode of Romanticism and their control of the means of (ideological) production. However, the brute fact of subsequent uneven economic development compelled the Scots to bring into collision with that historically assigned identity a new-fashioned identity more appropriate to a dynamic modern nation. Great national moments of self-presentation, such as the Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938, were the occasions when the ongoing dialectic of modern/urban against rural/ancient emerged in its most public and delirious form. Such occasions therefore hold a political lesson. The process of speaking with two voices - the fissures; the uncertainties; the grating shifts of gear from one discourse to another - assert once more, the fluid, unstable character of national identity. Such occasions proclaim that national identity is not a set of inborn, natural characteristic in a people, but the product of that people's history. With the realisation of instability comes the realisation of the possibility of change.”

ScotlandRomanticismNational Identity1938Uneven DevelopmentGlasgow Empire ExhibitionPeripherality
Book:Popular Culture and Social Relations
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“The Maggie [Alexander Mackendrick, 1954] represents Scotland at its most self-lacerative. Precisely at the moment, the early fifties, when the massive penetration of American capital into Scotland was gathering pace, The Maggie actually sets the two halves of the contradiction - american entrepreneur and Scottish workers in opposition to each other, but with almost wilful perversity the film has the Scots win hands down. In true Kailyard style, what is not achievable at the level of political struggle is attainable in the Scottish imagination.”

ScotlandKailyard1954American CapitalistsAlexander Mackendrick
Book:Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television
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“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.”

Human ConditionMetaphysicsFilm NoirCrossfireFilm Criticism
Book:Cinema, Culture, Scotland: Selected Essays
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