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Scottish Film Quotes

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Scottish Film Quotes

“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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“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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“Another thing, documentary is not enough. It has its contribution - a valuable one - to make; in education, in exposition, in social argument, in training artist and audience to a feeling for physical material, in extending and sensitising kinetic responses, in extracting and communicating relevant paces and rythms from national life. But the effect of documentary, though it may be inspirational, will always be limited. John Grierson, Scotland's one cinematic genius and founder of British documentary, still leads the movement with his theory. He is, though he would hate to think it, an idealist with a naïve, little-boy feeling for the marvel and complexity of social organisations. He believes that Man has only to limit his vision and see himself and his world in a certain light and he will attain a kind of happiness. Regrettably or otherwise, Scotland has not the habit of half shutting its eyes to what it values as precious, and while it has appreciated and employed documentary for the potentialities listed above, it has not squared its shoulders very perceptibly before Mr. Grierson's simplifications.”

Scottish FilmDocumentary FilmJohn Grierson
Book:Jabberwock: Edinburgh University Review, Volume 3, No. 2: Summer 1950
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