The original brief I was given for this piece was: ‘four thousand words on the possibility of political cinema in Scotland’. Having been landed in London by the backwash of that inexorable wave of history which, in earlier generations, beached our compatriots on the shores of Canada and New Zealand, I feel it would be presumptuous to attempt to fulfil that particular brief. It is best engaged with by the film workers who earn their bread in Scotland.

However, since I too am a film worker – as bureaucrat with the British Film Institute and as journalist with Tribune – my reflections on a closely related question might have some relevance, especially at this particular historical conjuncture when Scotland could be on the verge of radical political-cum-economic change.

The question is: How might Scottish film culture be politicised?

That question in its turn needs re-posing, for it is evident that 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 (1925–2013) 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 attitudes and political arrangements have been the exception rather than the rule.

It was no accident that, at its Film Bang held in Glasgow last January, the Scottish filmmaking community should have concentrated on this predicament above all else as the particular cross it has had to bear. It is to be hoped that the momentum towards democratic organisation generated at Film Bang can be sustained and the strength flowing from it used to readjust that inheritance.