Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements of Original Publishers
- Personal Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Dedication
- Editor’s Introduction
- 1 Ashes and Diamonds
- 2 The Roots of the Western
- 3 Pickup on South Street
- 4 Extract from Underworld U.S.A.
- 5 Politicising Scottish Film Culture
- 6 Crossfire and the Anglo-American Critical Tradition
- 7 Breaking the Signs: Scotch Myths as Cultural Struggle
- 8 Scotland and Cinema: The Iniquity of the Fathers
- 9 The Maggie
- 10 National Identities
- 11 TV Commercials: Moving Statues and Old Movies
- 12 Tele-history: The Dragon Has Two Tongues
- 13 Scotland’s Story
- 14 The Dialectic of National Identity: The Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938
- 15 The New Scottish Cinema?
- 16 The Rises and Falls of the Edinburgh International Film Festival
- 17 A Dram for All Seasons: The Diverse Identities of Scotch
- 18 Scottish Culture: A Reply to David McCrone
- 19 In Praise of a Poor Cinema
- 20 Wake for a Glasgow Culture Hero
- 21 The Cultural Necessity of a Poor Celtic Cinema
- 22 Culloden: A Pre-emptive Strike
- 23 Casablanca: Where Have All the Fascists Gone?
- 24 The Scottish Discursive Unconscious
- 25 Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City
- 26 Artists and Philistines: The Irish and Scottish Film Milieux
- 27 Braveheart and the Scottish Aesthetic Dementia
- 28 The Exquisite Corpse of Rab(elais) C(opernicus) Nesbitt
- 29 Mise-en-scène Degree Zero: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï
- 30 The Critics Who Knew Too Little: Hitchcock and the Absent Class Paradigm
- 31 Caledonianising Macbeth, or, How Scottish is ‘The Scottish Play’?
- 32 Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Cultural Struggle in the British Film Institute
- 33 Transatlantic Scots, Their Interlocutors and the Scottish Discursive Unconscious
- 34 Scotch Myths, Scottish Film Culture and the Suppression of Ludic Modernism
- 35 Bring Furrit the Tartan-Necks! Nationalist Intellectuals and Scottish Popular Culture
- 36 Vanished or Banished? Murray Grigor as Absent Scots Auteur
- Author’s Afterword
- Select Bibliography
- Indexes
18 - Scottish Culture: A Reply to David McCrone
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 March 2025
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Figures and Tables
- Acknowledgements of Original Publishers
- Personal Acknowledgements
- Contributors
- Dedication
- Editor’s Introduction
- 1 Ashes and Diamonds
- 2 The Roots of the Western
- 3 Pickup on South Street
- 4 Extract from Underworld U.S.A.
- 5 Politicising Scottish Film Culture
- 6 Crossfire and the Anglo-American Critical Tradition
- 7 Breaking the Signs: Scotch Myths as Cultural Struggle
- 8 Scotland and Cinema: The Iniquity of the Fathers
- 9 The Maggie
- 10 National Identities
- 11 TV Commercials: Moving Statues and Old Movies
- 12 Tele-history: The Dragon Has Two Tongues
- 13 Scotland’s Story
- 14 The Dialectic of National Identity: The Glasgow Empire Exhibition of 1938
- 15 The New Scottish Cinema?
- 16 The Rises and Falls of the Edinburgh International Film Festival
- 17 A Dram for All Seasons: The Diverse Identities of Scotch
- 18 Scottish Culture: A Reply to David McCrone
- 19 In Praise of a Poor Cinema
- 20 Wake for a Glasgow Culture Hero
- 21 The Cultural Necessity of a Poor Celtic Cinema
- 22 Culloden: A Pre-emptive Strike
- 23 Casablanca: Where Have All the Fascists Gone?
- 24 The Scottish Discursive Unconscious
- 25 Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City
- 26 Artists and Philistines: The Irish and Scottish Film Milieux
- 27 Braveheart and the Scottish Aesthetic Dementia
- 28 The Exquisite Corpse of Rab(elais) C(opernicus) Nesbitt
- 29 Mise-en-scène Degree Zero: Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï
- 30 The Critics Who Knew Too Little: Hitchcock and the Absent Class Paradigm
- 31 Caledonianising Macbeth, or, How Scottish is ‘The Scottish Play’?
- 32 Two Steps Forward, One Step Back: Cultural Struggle in the British Film Institute
- 33 Transatlantic Scots, Their Interlocutors and the Scottish Discursive Unconscious
- 34 Scotch Myths, Scottish Film Culture and the Suppression of Ludic Modernism
- 35 Bring Furrit the Tartan-Necks! Nationalist Intellectuals and Scottish Popular Culture
- 36 Vanished or Banished? Murray Grigor as Absent Scots Auteur
- Author’s Afterword
- Select Bibliography
- Indexes
Summary
Originally written and published in 1993, this essay sought – and still seeks – to enter into dialogue with certain ideas proposed by the sociologist David McCrone in his 1992 monograph, Understanding Scotland: The Sociology of a Stateless Nation. In setting out to pursue that aim, the work of another eminent sociologist came swiftly to mind, for reasons that will become steadily more apparent as this essay's argument progresses. The second sociologist is Stuart Hall (1932–2014), who argues that:
Cultural identities come from somewhere, have histories. But, like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation. Far from being eternally fixed in some essentialised past, they are subject to the continuous ‘play’ of history, culture and power. Far from being grounded in a mere ‘recovery’ of the past, which is waiting to be found, and which, when found, will secure our sense of ourselves into eternity, identities are the names we give to the different ways we are positioned by, and position ourselves within, the narratives of the past.
The particular strength of McCrone's Understanding Scotland is to see Scotland in its specificity, but a specificity constrained, if not determined by, supranational economic and political institutions. Within this framework McCrone offers sociological data and perspectives on phenomena (for example, the myth of Scottish egalitarianism; the nature of the Scottish polity; the extent to which Scotland's relationship with the British state has been one of dependence) which many of us have tended to deal with impressionistically.
One of the chapters in the book deals with Scottish culture and McCrone poses the problem thus:
the last twenty years have seen a cultural renaissance in Scotland, in those aspects which confirm its separate identity. Yet the dominant analysis of Scottish culture remains a pessimistic and negative one, based on the thesis that Scotland's culture is ‘deformed’ and debased by sub-cultural formations such as Tartanry and Kailyardism […] While media representations of Scotland are often simplistic and distorted, the search for a pure national culture as an alternative is doomed to fail in a complex, modern, multinational world.
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- Information
- Cinema, Culture, ScotlandSelected Essays, pp. 205 - 218Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2024