Sound of Scotland: Music and nation in Scottish films of the 1930s.

Sound of Scotland: Music and nation in Scottish films of the 1930s. María Antonia Vélez-Serna Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Letters in Film and Television Studies Department of Theatre, Film and Television University of Glasgow Supported by the Programme Alβan, the European Union Programme of High Level Scholarships for Latin America (scholarship No. E07M400239CO). Glasgow, September 2008. Acknowledgements My studies at Glasgow University, including of course the writing of this dissertation, were supported by the Programme Alβan, the European Union Programme of High Level Scholarships for Latin America (scholarship No. E07M400239CO). I am immensely grateful to Alβan, and very concerned to see it come to an end with no equivalent opportunities currently on offer for future students. Beyond financial matters, this dissertation would have been unthinkable without the Scottish Screen Archive. Janet McBain and the staff at the Archive make research as enjoyable and uncomplicated as the wonderful films they treasure. I would like to thank my supervisor, Prof. John Caughie, for his interest and encouragement, and Prof. Ian Goode, who guided me through the first stages of the process. The Department Research Committee financed a crucial visit to the National Film and TV Archive in London. My mother and father will always deserve an acknowledgement on anything I write. And Alvaro, who has been the stoic victim of my unavoidable ‘dissertation mood’, will have to prove he can do better at writing-up. I can only hope I can be by his side to weather it out. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................................ II INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 1: SOUND AND NATIONAL CINEMA ............................................................................. 3 1.1. Mis-representing Scotland ............................................................................................................................... 3 1.2. National cinema as a historical constellation.................................................................................................. 4 1.3. The national as theme and address ................................................................................................................. 5 1.4. Music and the early sound films ...................................................................................................................... 6 1.5. Marking the national through film music ...................................................................................................... 8 CHAPTER 2: FILMMAKING IN SCOTLAND IN THE 1930S............................................................. 9 2.1. Filmmaking in Scotland: Antecedents ............................................................................................................ 9 2.2. Film societies and the amateur movement.................................................................................................... 10 2.2.1. Scottish Film Productions (1928) Ltd. ...................................................................................................... 11 2.3. Educational film.............................................................................................................................................. 13 2.3.1. Elder and Dalrymple ................................................................................................................................. 14 2.4. The Quota Act and British film production ................................................................................................. 15 2.5. The Documentary Film Movement ............................................................................................................... 15 2.6. Into the 1930s .................................................................................................................................................. 16 2.6.1. Necessitous Children’s Holiday Camps Fund........................................................................................... 17 2.6.2. The first Films of Scotland Committee..................................................................................................... 18 CHAPTER 3. PRODUCTION, THEMES, AND MUSIC – AN OVERVIEW .......................................... 19 3.1. Production modes ........................................................................................................................................... 19 3.2. Thematic Overview......................................................................................................................................... 20 3.3. General patterns in the use of music ............................................................................................................. 21 CHAPTER 4: FUNCTIONS OF BACKGROUND MUSIC ................................................................. 24 4.1. Dynamic function............................................................................................................................................ 25 4.2. Anchoring function: mood and setting ......................................................................................................... 26 4.2.1. The pastoral............................................................................................................................................... 27 4.2.2. Scottish themes in classical music ............................................................................................................ 28 4.2.3. Scots song ................................................................................................................................................. 29 iii CHAPTER 5. FUNCTIONS OF MUSIC IN SCOTTISH FILMS: FOREGROUND ................................. 32 5.1. The musical moment....................................................................................................................................... 32 5.2. Diegetic performances or ‘production numbers’ ......................................................................................... 36 CONCLUSIONS ............................................................................................................................ 40 BIBLIOGRAPHY .......................................................................................................................... 44 APPENDICES ............................................................................................................................... 49 1. FILM CORPUS ...................................................................................................................................................... 49 2. UNAVAILABLE FILMS, NEWSREELS, AND FEATURE FILMS ............................................................................... 49 iv Introduction This dissertation sets out to do two things: First, to provide a historical overview of film production in Scotland in the 1930s, and second, to try out a new angle of approach to the history of a national cinema, by focusing attention on music. The object of study is not music, strictly speaking, but a place and moment in cinema history. To say that this is a dissertation in film studies, rather than musicology, does not excuse the gaps in my musical understanding. However, it is important to emphasize that music is not here the specimen under analysis, but a torchlight helping the researcher to find a way into the jungle of the past. It is a tool, although I would hesitate to call it a methodology. This exploration, guided by sound and music, engages with issues of representation and discourse, but within a clearly bounded historical horizon. The argument is based on the viewing of sixty-two short films, made between 1930 and 1939, with sound, which could be loosely described as representing Scotland in one way or other. These films constitute what will be called the ‘corpus’ for analysis, and a summary of the data collected about these films can be found in Appendix 1. The films in the corpus are available for viewing either at the Scottish Screen Archive or the BFI National Archive. It must be understood that this is not a comprehensive list of all possible relevant titles, but only of those preserved and available in said archives. Appendix 2 is a list of other films not included in the corpus. Neither national newsreels nor feature films are included in the corpus. However, some instances will be discussed when appropriate. Finally, it must be stressed that sound film accounts for about one-tenth of 1930s material at the Scottish Screen Archive. What is written here pertains only to sound film, and is not therefore a complete picture of Scottish film in the 1930s, but a discussion of one of its aspects. My method has been largely observational and inductive: I watched the films in the corpus, and tried to describe them, situate them historically, and look for patterns. The exposition intends to lay out a map first, furnishing it with the most relevant landmarks, and then to enter the terrain armed with our metaphorical torchlight. I hope the reader will appreciate that presenting the major forces at play is not a distraction from the main topic, although music might not be in the spotlight all the time. Understanding the formal strategies deployed by the 1 films required an intertextual approach, in order to retrieve the connexions between films and with other cultural practices. The questions I was asking to the films were informed by the field of national cinemas as an area of film studies. This theoretical groundwork is explained in the first chapter. The second chapter investigates film culture in Scotland in the 1930s, identifying its main institutions and agents. Chapter three attempts an overview of the group of films, in terms of production mode, subject matter, and most common musical practices. This brief account is necessary since the films themselves are seldom seen. The fourth and fifth chapters comprise the detailed exploration of sound and music strategies, including both general assessments and individual text analysis. It seemed more natural in these chapters to follow the links from the films to other cultural artefacts directly in the text, and to let musical characteristics lead the way in passing from topic to topic. The structure of these discussions follows a narrative, connecting logic rather than a pre-designed analytical hierarchy. 2 Chapter 1: Sound and national cinema 1.1. Mis-representing Scotland A glance at the filmography gathered by Janet McBain on From Limelight to Satellite reveals the extent to which the international film industry has appropriated Scottish signifiers, from landscape to kilted ghosts, since the very birth of cinema.1 However, when Stanley Livingston Russell, a Glaswegian lawyer, proposed to produce a fortnightly Scottish news magazine in 1936, he stated that ‘at the present time, Scotland is not being reflected on the screen’.2 That same year, to take but two examples, Katharine Hepburn was starring in Mary of Scotland (RKO, USA, 1936), and Robert Donat was the dead clansman transported to Florida in The Ghost goes West (London Films, UK, 1936). 3 A decade later, Norman Wilson gloomily concluded that ‘the screen picture of Scotland, when it is not confused and derogatory, is bound to be inadequate from a national point of view’.4 From the perspective of several generations of Scottish intellectuals, it seems that the concern is not about a lack of representation, but about an abundance of misrepresentation, of Scotland on the screen. The contributors to Scotch Reels were neither the first nor the last to denounce the false ‘shortbread tin’ image of Scotland. 5 Beyond the exposure of such simplistic discourses, however, there is little hint as to how the aggravating situation could be improved. John Grierson held the common-sense idea that films made in Scotland by Scots would be healthier representations. 6 This is an example of the ‘nation-building’ argument for state support to indigenous filmmaking, as recounted and contested by Ian Jarvie,7 with the caveat that a state-supported Scottish cinema would have to negotiate the potentially disruptive claims of a ‘nation’ contained within a presumed larger ‘nation-state’. 1 Janet McBain, In Eddie Dick, (ed.) From Limelight to Satellite (Edinburgh: Scottish Film Council / BFI, 1990) pp. 233-255. 2 Stanley L. Russell (attrib.) ‘Scottish Film Productions Policy’ [typed ms] Scottish Screen Archive, document reference 4/1/6 (n.d. [1936]) 3 Several other American or Anglo-British ‘Scotch’ films of the 1930s are discussed by Forsyth Hardy in Scotland in Film (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990) pp. 9-29, and by Colin McArthur, ’Scotland and Cinema: The Iniquity of the Fathers’, in Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television (London: BFI, 1982) pp. 40-69. 4 Norman Wilson, Presenting Scotland: A Film Survey (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Guild, 1945) p.10. 5 Colin McArthur (ed.), Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television (London: BFI, 1982) 6 John Grierson, ‘The Making of Films in Scotland’, transcript of radio address broadcast on March 31, 1938. Scottish Screen Archive, box 9/1/56 (s.l., s.d.) 7 Ian Jarvie, ‘National Cinema: A Theoretical Assessment’, in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (eds) Cinema & Nation (London and New York: Routledge, 2000): 75-87. 3 1.2. National cinema as a historical constellation Writing about music, Hans Keller protested that the human mind will invent national characteristics whenever it gets a chance, and will erect national barriers more for the sake of the barriers than in view of what lies on either side of them.8 In a similar vein, Andrew Higson has denounced ‘the limiting imagination of national cinema’: [T]he processs of labelling is always to some degree tautologous, fetishising the national rather than merely describing it. It thus erects boundaries between films produced in different nation-states although they may still have much in common. It may therefore obscure the degree of cultural diversity, exchange and interpenetration that marks so much cinematic activity.9 However, as Vitali and Willemen argue, a national cinema is first of all an industrial practice, anchored by the institutions of the State.10 The importance of national boundaries for such institutional structures is undeniable, even when these boundaries do not correspond with the jurisdiction of the State (as in the Scottish case). The second chapter will substantiate the claim that, in an industrial and institutional sense, there was a Scottish cinema in the 1930s; that is, there existed a relatively autonomous field-force, including an indigenous institutional network and a group of commercial concerns. The dissertation as a whole, on the other hand, raises the question of whether the particularities of this field are expressed in representational terms. The ‘national’ in these films is then not taken for granted; it is posited as a question to films considered as ‘clusters of historically specific cultural forms’.11 The enquiry, following Vitali and Willemen, is about ‘the dynamics that shape a cultural practice such as cinema in diverse historical constellations’.12 It is as a ‘historical constellation’ that the nation becomes relevant. Scotland, on an elementary level, is the context of Scottish film, predates it and contains it. But film remains underdetermined. As Higson concludes, 8 Hans Keller, ‘National Frontiers in Music’, Tempo New Series No. 33 (Autumn, 1954): 23-30. Andrew Higson, ‘The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema’, in Hjort and MacKenzie (eds) Cinema & Nation, pp. 63-74, at p.64. 10 Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen, ‘Introduction’, in Valentina Vitali and Paul Willemen (eds), Theorising National Cinema (London: BFI, 2006): 1-14. 11 Vitali and Willemen, in Theorising National Cinema, p.7. 12 Vitali and Willemen, in Theorising National Cinema, p.7. 9 4 Yes, films will draw on identities and representations already in circulation – and often they will naturalize those identities. But films also produce new representations of the nation.13 Coming back to the issue of representation, it seems clear that the nation, taken as part of the historical context of cinematic practices, is still a pertinent concept. Thus, the ways that film studies has thought about national cinemas can become useful as a way to open up complex cultural clusters. 1.3. The national as theme and address To begin, it is necessary to construct a working definition of national cinema, apart from the ‘natural’ one (a national cinema is the sum of the films made on a national territory by the natives). A common one runs along thematic lines: films ‘about’ a nation might be considered part of national cinema. But when is a film ‘about’ a nation? Drawing on scholarly debates on the area of thematics, Mette Hjort concludes that, as a theme, the nation must be topical rather than perennial. As a way to identify this kind of emphasis, we are encouraged to ask questions such as: Is the subject matter dealt with in a given film likely to be comprehensible and interesting primarily to regional, national, or international audiences? Is the structure of address in the film such that these audiences are appealed to in more or less the same way, or is the film’s form of address at least dual?14 Furthermore, Hjort argues that, for a film to be considered as thematically ‘about’ a nation, its national elements must be ‘flagged’. When they are simply in the background, the national presence in the film amounts to what Billig has called ‘banal nationalism’.15 It can be argued that the inclusion of any element in the frame is already focusing attention on it; but the notion of ‘flagging’ suggests different intensities and modes of attention. Returning to Hjort’s questions, the emphasis is put on the moment of reception. In 1984, Philip Rosen had written about the national in cinema as an address or ‘an appeal to the spectator,’16 an idea that is taken up by Willemen thus: 13 Andrew Higson, Waving the Flag: Constructing a National Cinema in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995): 6. 14 Mette Hjort, ‘Themes of Nation,’ in Hjort and MacKenzie (eds) Cinema & Nation, pp.103-117, at p.106. 15 Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage, [1995] 2004) 16 Philip Rosen, ‘History, Textuality, Nation,’ [1984] reprinted in Vitali and Willemen, Theorising National Cinema. pp. 17-28, at p.25. 5 The issue of national cinema is […] primarily a question of address, rather than a matter of the film-makers’ citizenship or even the production finance’s country of origin.17 The ‘national’ mode of address makes the film’s intelligibility dependent on the audience’s command of cultural codes. This issue is raised by Hjort’s first question, and is also what Higson has in mind when he mentions the necessity to consider [T]he ways in which cinema inserts itself alongside other cultural practices, and the ways in which it draws on the existing cultural histories and cultural traditions of the producing nation, reformulating them in cinematic terms, appropriating them to build up its own generic conventions.18 The nation, as an imagined community, can thus be conceptualised as an imagined reception community: viewers come to the movies equipped with socially acquired mechanisms of meaning-making. No matter how idiosyncratic a spectator’s life experience might have been, the film addresses a presumed core of ‘culturally shared knowledges’ 19 that can be circumscribed as local, regional, national, or ‘universal’. An attempt to understand historically constructed audiences can start by constructing a cultural context as intertext. A dissertation like this cannot expect to cover the whole ‘network of discourses, social institutions, and historical conditions surrounding a work,’ 20 let alone a decade’s worth of filmic output. The bet here is to explore a productive ‘intertextual zone’: the soundtrack, and particularly music. This is a limited and controlled approach, but it should be useful as long as its limits are kept in mind. 1.4. Music and the early sound films Rick Altman has repeatedly advocated the benefits that an increased attention to film sound could bring to film studies. The most salient ones might be greater interdisciplinarity and a less text-centric approach: 17 Paul Willemen, ‘The National Revisited,’ in Vitali and Willemen, Theorising National Cinema. pp.29-43, at p.36. 18 Andrew Higson, ‘The Concept of National Cinema’ [1989], reprinted in Williams, Alan (ed.) Film and Nationalism. London: Rutgers, 2002, pp. 52-67, at 62. 19 Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992): 101-123.; Willemen, ‘The National Revisited’, 35. 20 Barbara Klinger, ‘Film History Terminable and Interminable: Recovering the Past in Reception Studies,’ Screen 38:2 (1997), pp. 107-128 6 Through the mediation of the culture’s other sound technologies – live and recorded music, radio, television, and many others – film sound is in a constant state of interchange with the culture at large.21 Film sound is a privileged space of intertextual crossings and convergences, which subvert the notion of the self-enclosed work, opening films up to the wider cultural sphere. Moreover, the early years of sound film constitute a striking moment in the negotiation between standardised and indigenous practices, between tradition and innovation. The lapse between the release of Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer (1927), and the gradual technological stabilization around 1932, can be called the ‘early sound period’ in Hollywood. However, film industries in other parts of the world reached a similar stage in different moments. In Scotland, the whole decade of the 1930s can be characterized as its ‘early sound period’, due to a continuing sense of experimentation in technology, industrial structure and aesthetics. The 1930s are a transitional decade, and no definite breaking point can be defined where the ‘silent period’ ends and a new one begins. After all, most of the films produced in Scotland as late as 1939 were silent. Sound film was a technological development following existing trends in popular entertainment. Synchronized sound satisfied the audience’s appetite for technical novelty, whilst the music soundtrack allowed the theatre manager to dispense with orchestra or organist, which had started being replaced by gramophones anyway. The introduction of synchronized sound by Hollywood was a way to normalize some practices that had started taking root during the 1920s. Rick Altman, for instance, reminds us that it was the style of the ‘picture palace’ which was ‘consecrated’ in early sound film, obscuring the previous variety of musical accompaniment (or lack thereof).22 Such process of standardization recognised and fixed some of the conventions previously at work, but also opened the field to the invention of new ones. As technology permitted further manipulation of sound, the relationship between music and narrative became increasingly complex. This was possible due to the audience’s increased familiarity with other media – radio, records and the telephone.23 Even so, many of the conventions were continuities from earlier ‘sound/narrative technologies,’ predating cinema itself – operetta, music-hall, popular 21 Rick Altman, ‘General Introduction: Cinema as Event,’ in Rick Altman (ed.) Sound Theory Sound Practice (New York and London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 1-14, at 14. 22 Rick Altman, ‘The Silence of the Silents,’ The Musical Quarterly 80:4 (1997), pp. 648-718, at 654 23 John Belton, ‘Awkward Transitions: Hitchcock’s Blackmail and the Dynamics of Early Film Sound’, The Musical Quarterly 83:2 (1999): 227-246, at 234. 7 song, and so on. Different traditions furnish elements for a ‘vocabulary’ of film music. These elements, transported into a new narrative context, are called upon to perform a series of functions, but for this instrumental role they depend on social meanings that musical styles have accumulated through a long history. 1.5. Marking the national through film music One of the devices that sound-period film music inherited from the traditions of live accompaniment was ‘correspondence’, the tendency to match certain musical conventions to some of the themes pictured. This became known as ‘mood music’, which ‘tapped the power of collective associations to create the time and place represented in the image’. 24 Roy M. Prendergast referred to this function of music as ‘colour’, and his example is telling: ‘Colour is associative – bagpipes call up images of Scotland.’25 A whole history of cultural struggles is condensed in that simple sentence, which Prendergast writes casually, as if it were obvious. What does a viewer need to know in order to make the association of bagpipes and Scotland? What Scotland do bagpipes represent? What Scotland do bagpipes not represent? The idea that sounds ‘call up images’ reminds us that a film’s meaning emerges in the interplay of sound and image. This relationship can be one of ‘flagging’: Music can direct the spectator’s attention towards a preferred reading, and can thus participate in ‘fixing’ the meaning, foreclosing ambiguous or deviant interpretations. Since it is an intertextual, rather than referential, process, recognising a song or a piece of music is a specialized skill, most often acquired through repeated exposure to it. Musical conventions work on the assumption that there is a majority of skilled listeners in the audience. In order to guarantee intelligibility, the musical ‘shorthand’ employed must adapt to the imagined reception community. Therefore, it is not unreasonable to predict that film music practices can have a national, regional or local dimension. In this space they would of course be closely entangled with the other ‘sound technologies’ mentioned by Altman. It is this entanglement that should constitute the starting point for a contextual understanding of the emergence of musical conventions in early sound films. 24 Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film (Madison and London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992): 91. 25 Roy M. Prendergast, Film Music, A Neglected Art (New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., [1977] 1992): 214. 8 Chapter 2: Filmmaking in Scotland in the 1930s Cinema was a hugely popular form of entertainment everywhere in the 1930s, and although Scottish exhibitors could tell remarkable success stories, they did not venture into production, beyond the occasional ‘local topical’. 26 Reliant on the pleasures of recognition, the ‘local topical’ is a genre of particular interest in the context of national cinemas; but it is only one example of the many kinds of film production tried in the 1930s. Although no feature films were made, Scotland did have active production companies and a very lively cinematic culture. In order to understand the relationships that sustained film culture in Scotland, it will be necessary to start with a brief sketch of the situation in the rest of Britain. This chapter will then introduce the two main local phenomena that nurtured filmmaking in the 1930s: amateur filmmaking movement, and educational interests. I have considered necessary to separate from the main text four ‘factual’ passages, summarising the stories of particular production companies (Scottish Film Productions, Elder & Dalrymple), and of two clearly defined sets of films (NCHCF and Empire Exhibition). 2.1. Filmmaking in Scotland: Antecedents David Cloy’s research on early Scottish cinema reveals a succession of ephemeral companies struggling to produce about half a dozen fiction films, of varying length, during the silent period. These bursts of enthusiasm, whilst sometimes successful, did not work towards consolidating a viable production activity. On the contrary, non-fiction film production grew steadily during the ‘teens and ‘twenties, on the back of expanded local topicals such as Green’s newsreel Scottish Moving Picture News.27 Newsreel production helped develop local skills and technology, but these ‘cottage industries’ could not afford the transition to sound. Hence, many silent films continued to be made during the 1930s. One noteworthy producer of local topicals and travelogues who does not seem to 26 Janet McBain, ‘As Others Saw Us’, Media Education Journal 21 (1996/7), pp. 16-18. David Cloy, ‘Scottish Film Production in the Silent Period,’ in Janet McBain (ed.) Scotland in Silent Cinema (Glasgow: Scottish Screen, 1998): 10. 27 9 have acquired sound was James S Nairn, whatever his – as yet unproven – claim to the first amateur talkie.28 On the other hand, some of the filmmakers that had started working during the silent period did cross over to sound, most notoriously Malcolm A Irvine, Paul Robello, and Ronald L Jay, of whom more below. Scottish exhibitors were quick to adopt the use of gramophone music records as a substitute for sound films in the summer of 1927, keeping pace with popular tastes in music until they could afford to get their venue wired for sound. 29 These developments were welcomed by an audience that had previously enjoyed the multifarious forms of accompaniment for silent films, from elocutionists to organs to full orchestras.30 But as the public grew used to the talking pictures, silent features became unconceivable in commercial theatrical exhibition. Factual films, on the other hand, could be circulated on different terms, and could also be ‘sonorized’ in simpler ways. Therefore, the transition to sound did not stifle the timid developments of Scottish production, but it cemented its concentration on factual genres. 2.2. Film societies and the amateur movement The initial activities of film societies in Britain, as in other countries, involved the screening of banned Soviet films, and continental art films. Fittingly, some film societies tried to be politicized, left-wing discussion groups, whilst others were more like bourgeois cinephile appreciation societies. Of the first kind, there were several Workers’ Film Societies in Scotland.31 It is the second kind of groups, however, which are more relevant to the present issue, since they mediate between the individual activities of amateurs and the larger institutional context. The Edinburgh Film Guild, led by Forsyth Hardy and Norman Wilson, was founded in 1930 and by 1932 it had started publishing Cinema Quarterly, which was later upgraded to World Film News by intervention of the Grierson group;32 the Guild is still active. The Glasgow Film 28 Scottish Screen Archive, Scotland’s Moving Image Collection (Glasgow: Scottish Screen Archive, 2003) p. 5. Michael Allen, “In the Mix’: How Electrical Reproducers Facilitated the Transition to Sound in British Cinemas,’ in K. J. Donnelly (ed.) Film Music: Critical Approaches (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001). Pp. 32-87, at p. 71. 30 Janet McBain, Pictures Past (Edinburgh: Moorfoot Publishing, 1985) p. 43-46 and 51-52. 31 Douglas Allen, ‘Workers’ Films: Scotland’s Hidden Film Culture’, in McArthur (ed.) Scotch Reels, pp. 93-99. See also Adrienne Scullion, ‘Screening the Heyday: Scottish Cinema in the 1930s’, in Dick (ed.) From Limelight to Satellite, pp. 41-52, esp. 50-51. 32 Rachael Low, The History of the British Film 1929-1939: Documentary and Educational Films of the 1930s (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979): 116-17. 29 10 Society was founded in 1929, but was short-lived. However, the Meteor Film Producing Society, a Glasgow group of film enthusiasts, started organising the Scottish Amateur Film Festival in 1933. Receiving nine entries on the first edition, this number was almost double in each consecutive year, as increasingly prestigious juries were appointed. One of the early winners was Stanley L Russell, a lawyer, who soon abandoned his profession and became a full-time filmmaker in Scottish Film Productions.33 The importance of these middle-class clubs is that they created an environment for filmmaking as ‘serious leisure’, and provided a medium-sized exhibition context that was neither the family nor the mass audience, what Ryan Shand has called a ‘restricted’ or ‘community’ mode of production.34 Within this space two separate traditions can be traced: an avant-garde, filmas-art side, and an entertainment interest that found different manifestations in factual and fiction films. However interesting their histories are, the avant-garde side and the more political cine-clubs are not represented in the corpus since they did not make sound films. The entertainment side, chiefly interested, as Shand puts it, in travel and children, does constitute the background in which several filmmakers featured here learned their trade before turning their hobby into a profession. Traces of those amateur interests, and especially of the notion of ‘serious leisure’, are embedded in the output of Jay’s Film Service and Scottish Film Productions, two companies formed by previous cine-club members. 2.2.1. Scottish Film Productions (1928) Ltd. Malcolm Irvine (d. 1945) was a pharmacist, botanist, and inventor who financed his filmmaking with the profits from his method of electric welding.35 According to David Bruce, Irvine was ‘a campaigner for film in Scotland’. 36 In 1926, Irvine had directed a successful film for English producer Maurice Sandground, The Immortals of Bonnie Scotland, which put together a short about Robbie Burns, and another one about Sir Walter Scott.37 Irvine founded Scottish Film Productions in 1928, only to be cut out of the market by the arrival of sound. Witnessing the forbidding royalties that RCA and Western Electric 33 Scottish Screen Archive, Scotland’s Moving Image Collection, p. 12. Ryan John Shand, Amateur Cinema: History, Theory, and Genre (1930-80). PhD dissertation, Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of Glasgow, 2007. esp. 12-40, 139, 152. 35 Scottish Screen Archive, Scotland’s Moving Image Collection, p. 12. 36 David Bruce, Scotland The Movie (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996), p. 147. 37 N.a. ‘Memorandum Regarding the Financial Position of Scottish Film Productions (1928) Limited at 15th May 1941’, Scottish Screen Archive 4/1/12. 34 11 charged for the use of their sound systems, Irvine decided to design a royalty-free sound system. The Albion Truphonic Sound System was a variable density sound-onfilm recording equipment, ‘similar to Western Electric’s but different enough to avoid the patent’38. It continued in use until the 1940s. Although it had glitches, it provided reasonable quality, and enabled Scottish Film Productions to record sound at the company’s India Street (Glasgow) studios, thus avoiding the mandatory trip to London that other producers were forced to arrange. The first trials of the Albion Truphonic were ‘short films starring well known music hall entertainers and actors’,39 mainly from the Scottish National Players. In 1932, some six of these fiction shorts were made, from contemporary plays, such as Diplomacy and the Draughtsman and The Neighbour’s Gramophone.40 Sadly, these films, priceless as they would be for cultural historians, do not seem to have survived; already in 1937 Stanley Russell argued they had ‘sold them all to an American company’.41 This suggests either wilful destruction or unwillingness to show the films five years later. However, the making of these films was recalled fondly by Irvine, who described it as ‘the happiest period of the life of Scottish Films’. Writing in 1945, the influence of the documentary movement surely drives him to vindicate these films as more documentary than they actually were: ‘The players included Dave Willis and Alec Finlay, Jack Anthony and Bond Rowell, Ellis Drake and Jack Fraser, Willie Lindsay, Bobby Telford, Millard Shevlin, Meg Buchanan, Grace McChlery, and many other[s.] A few films were released for special exhibition but the main object was to secure dialect recordings that were both interesting and entertaining’.42 Stanley Russell had been working occasionally for Gaumont-British and Pathe, but had first directed a Grand Guignol story, Hair (1933), with the Meteor Film Producing Society. He was contacted by Irvine to take charge of production and help organise the sound studio in May 1936. Since both Irvine and Russell evidently enjoyed fictional genres, economic reasons must have impelled them to stick to factual modes. The main line of work of Scottish Film Productions, afterwards, was the sponsored industrial documentary. 38 ‘Notes on Conversation with Joe Doyle 30th May 1990’, Scottish Screen Archive, box 4/15/1. Bruce, Scotland The Movie, p. 147. 40 Alan Douglas, ‘A Glimpse Inside Scotland’s First “Talkie” Studio’, Sunday Mail, Feb 21st 1932. Scottish Screen Archive, box 4/5/157. 41 Transcript from 1937 BBC interview with Stanley Russell. Scottish Screen Archive, box 8/7. 42 Malcolm Irvine, ‘Film Production from the Scottish Angle’, Educational Film Bulletin 33 (Sept. 1946): 39-45, at 41. 39 12 Most of the company’s output from then on credits Russell with direction and Irvine with production. Undoubtedly, Russell reinvigorated the company, starting new projects such as the short-lived cine-magazine called Things that Happen, and possessing an energetic, resolute attitude not dissimilar to Grierson’s. His zest dimmed somewhat after suffering a tragic accident in the autumn of 1938, although he kept working afterwards. Henry Cooper and Graham Thompson joined SFP as cameramen around 1938. James McKechnie was the first choice for commentary, and John McArthur acted as musical director in the projects that could afford it. 2.3. Educational film Another area in which silent film survived after the transition to sound was the often neglected educational films.43 These films, ranging from ‘classroom’ treatments of scientific subjects, to the Griersonian documentary, were produced and distributed outside the main studio circuits. Given this non-theatrical exhibition pattern, synchronized sound placed special difficulties for classroom films. If few schools could afford a projector, fewer still could be expected to install and operate sound equipment. The pre-recorded voice-over commentary posed a threat to the teacher’s control of the didactic discourse, and restricted the versatility of films which could be interrupted, re-edited, or re-contextualized. During the late 1920s and early 1930s, teachers, social scientists and policy-makers had conducted experiments and speculations regarding the effects of film-viewing (educational or otherwise) on children’s minds, including a 1933 report by the Glasgow Corporation Education Department.44 In 1932 the Scottish Educational Cinema Society was constituted in Glasgow with the aim of ‘organising demand and supply’, with J C Elder as president, and Sir Charles Cleland as honorary president. 45 A similar entity was formed in Edinburgh, the Scottish Educational Sight and Sound Association, with Forsyth Hardy of the Edinburgh Film Guild as part of the Executive Committee.46 Under pressure from the newly-constituted Scottish Film Council, the two organisations merged in the Scottish Educational Film Association (SEFA), 43 Low, Documentary and Educational Films of the 1930s. Low, Documentary and Educational Films, p. 15. 45 ‘Films in School’, The Scotsman, June 11th 1932, p. 14. 46 ‘New Aids to Learning’, The Scotsman, April 24th 1933, p. 10. 44 13 with J C Elder as secretary. SEFA recommended and distributed educational films, and organised lectures and exhibitions; production was not on the agenda.47 By the end of the decade, SEFA counted over five thousand members, and had established an impressive film library.48 It had a continuing connection to the amateur sector and to Campbell Harper productions of Edinburgh, who tried to mitigate the lack of appropriate educational material on Scottish topics. 2.3.1. Elder and Dalrymple Jack Elder was a crafts teacher when the Glasgow Corporation Education Department charged him with the technical supervision of the Department’s experimental scheme for film use in classrooms. After this experience, Elder produced the Carrick series of classroom films with J Blake Dalrymple.49 These films secured distribution in the UK through Educational and General Services, which also distributed Elder’s Spring on the Fields (1936).50 Elder’s contacts with the SEFA and the Glasgow Education Committee maintained the company occupied, making about fifty films to supply the local educational circuit but also to be distributed in the rest of the UK. Their main affiliation was with GaumontBritish Instructional films, run by Bruce Woolfe, John Buchan and Mary Field. 51 The films made under the title ‘G-B I Geography of Scotland’ are calm, dispassionate treatments of such topics as the Leith Docks and the communication routes in the Highlands. However, they made other films with different sponsors and distributors, as for example Bonnie Scotland calls you, a travelogue made by Elder for ABPC in 1938. In 1937, the company disbanded when Dalrymple set out to Africa to film a Cape to Cairo expedition, commissioned by the Education Committee.52 47 ‘Educational Films: Merger of Scottish Societies’, The Scotsman, June 17th 1935, p. 7. Ernest Dyer, ‘Film Appreciation in Great Britain’, Journal of Educational Sociology 12:2 (1938), pp. 129-136, at p. 135. 49 Low, Documentary and Educational Films, p. 15. 50 Scottish Screen Archive, Scotland’s Moving Image Collection, p. 9. 51 Low, Documentary and Educational Films, p. 20. 52 Bruce, Scotland The Movie, p. 224. 48 14 2.4. The Quota Act and British film production The mainstream British film industry was protected from the potentially devastating effects of the transition to sound by the 1927 Cinematograph Film Act. Before 1938, however, documentaries did not automatically count towards the renter’s quota obligations.53 Exhibitors had thus little incentive to include them in an already crowded double programme. All this, added to unequal competition from American producers, left the commercial short film sector in a desperate position. This situation further relegated documentaries to non-theatrical exhibition, and increased producers’ reliance on corporate sponsorship or public commissioning. When the 1927 Quota act was about to expire, the economic climate had changed, and it was more acceptable to protect and even subsidise national industries. The Films Act passed in March 1938 was, however, very mindful of American interests. But it did incorporate quotas for short films, including documentaries (15% for renters and 12.5% for exhibitors) 54 . Although the war and its special measures came too soon after this for the new law to have a significant effect, the provisions for short films reflect the political strength that documentary filmmakers had gained in a decade.55 2.5. The Documentary Film Movement Since the history of what came to be known as the documentary film movement has been told and debated extensively, I will restrict this profile to the aspects strictly relevant to Scottish production. Although the institutional arrangements that financed Grierson et al.’s documentary ventures were mostly connected with the British state (or Empire), the movement cannot be described as London-centric. Most of the young filmmakers involved were indeed from London or the home counties, frequently with a Cambridge education; however, there were also several Scots, most importantly John Grierson himself.56 It was when Grierson’s production unit moved from the EMB to the GPO, in 1933, that they acquired sound technology and made the movement’s best known films. Before that moment, 53 Low, Documentary and Educational Films, p. 69. Street, ‘British Film and the National Interest, 1927-1939’, pp. 22-24. 55 Paul Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989): 72-73. 56 Ian Aitken, The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998): 7. 54 15 EMB films had received unremarkable musical tracks and commentaries added by GaumontBritish. But owning the means to record and synchronize sound at their small studio in Blackheath meant that the production team had more time to experiment and come up with new solutions. 57 The new recruits, composers Walter Leigh and Benjamin Britten, and particularly sound designer Alberto Cavalcanti, made full use of the opportunity. This crucial period of innovation was somewhat tamed by the increasing privilege given to March of Timestyle commentary, and by the dispersion of the team after 1935. Shell Film Unit (Edgar Anstey), Strand Film Unit (Paul Rotha, Stuart Legg), and Realist Film Unit (Basil Wright) were the main outshoots of the GPO unit. These companies remained loosely linked to Grierson and his newly established coordinating agency, Film Centre. At the end of 1938 Grierson moved to Canada, and since the beginning of the war documentary film production was put under control of the Ministry of Information.58 There were many other companies and types of films being made outwith Grierson’s sphere of influence, but the documentary film movement is especially instrumental in setting out the palette of possible directions for Scottish filmmakers for three reasons: Grierson’s links with Scottish film societies and Cinema Quarterly made him a local opinion-maker. Several EMB and GPO films dealt with Scottish subject matter, and they did so in an engaged, interesting way. Finally, Film Centre had a direct hand at shaping, arguably, the definitive moment of Scottish film production in the 1930s – the 1938 Empire Exhibition. 2.6. Into the 1930s This chapter has set the scene on which a group of films will be situated. In economic terms, the start of the decade was a very tough passage for production companies formed before the transition to sound. The market for short films was restricted and shrinking, and silent films were commercially worthless. Even so, in Scotland, there were highly motivated individuals, fostered by a film-loving cultural atmosphere; there was a degree of official support, especially in the educational sector, and there was hope that industrialists would see the potential of cinematic propaganda. In short, there were good reasons to make films, and films were made. 57 John Grierson, ‘The GPO Gets Sound’, Cinema Quarterly 2:4 (1934), pp. 215-221. The following account is based on Ian Aitken’s introduction to The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology. 58 16 Having described general market conditions, it is necessary to comment on two special cases in which groups of films were planned and made with a certain coherence beyond commercial imperatives: The Necessitous Children’s Holiday Camps Fund (NCHCF), and the 1938 Empire Exhibition ‘Films of Scotland’ Committee. 2.6.1. Necessitous Children’s Holiday Camps Fund The NCHCF was an initiative of the Glasgow Corporation’s Education Department, with the aim of providing a fortnight’s seaside holiday, and feeding, for poorer schoolchildren. Although the Education Department contributed premises and volunteers, the NCHCF remained an ‘unofficial agency’ and did not receive upfront funding, so it relied on voluntary contributions.59 Sir Charles Cleland, who had been involved in educational aspects of film and radio since the 1920s, was one of the founders. Film emerged then as a way not only to record but also to promote, and raise funds for, the Camps: ‘Soon, the biggest single category of fundraisers was Glaswegian children themselves and their parents, entertained by the Education Authority’s NCHCF film shows’60 Fifteen films were made to support the scheme, but very little information on their production is available. At least five of them were made by Pathe Films, one by Jay’s Film Service of Glasgow, and another one by Scottish Film Productions. One film a year was produced, documenting the year’s holidays; but these newsreel-like material was frequently framed by a simple fictional story. Actors and playwrights from the Scottish National Players contributed to such films as The Goal (Pathe, 1935), Ivory Gate (Pathe, 1932), and Sam the Assassin (SFP, 1937), the latter claimed to have been ‘the first studio sound film in Scotland’ 61 , but now unavailable for viewing (a fragile nitrate copy exists at the BFI National Archive). 59 Elizabeth Lebas, ‘Sadness and Gladness: The Films of Glasgow Corporation, 1922-1938’. Film Studies 6 (2005), pp. 27-45, at 37. 60 Lebas, ‘Sadness and Gladness’, 37. 61 N.a. ‘Memorandum regarding the financial position of Scottish Film Productions (1928) Limited. At 15th May 1941’, Scottish Screen Archive 4/1/12. 17 2.6.2. The first Films of Scotland Committee This is not the place to explore the larger economic and cultural issues that motivated and informed the organisation by Glasgow of the 1938 Empire Exhibition. Out of the five goals clearly defined, four were related to fostering Empire trade; but one proposed ‘to stimulate Scottish work and production and to direct attention to Scotland’s historical and scenic attractions’, at a time when Scotland was recovering from economic crisis.62 In this context, the Exhibition committee considered that films should be made, and created the first incarnation of the Films of Scotland Committee. Walter Elliot, who was at the time Secretary of State for Scotland, was the main political muscle of the project.63 At Grierson’s instance, he convinced John McTaggart, an industrialist, to shore up the Committee with £5000.64 Grierson, or rather the Film Centre, was appointed adviser for the making of seven films, and used his position to give a documentary-movement slant to the project. By no means, however, did he exclude non-affiliated companies. Of the seven films directly sponsored by the Committee, two were made by Gaumont-British Instructional, one by Pathe, and one by Scottish Film Productions. Strand and Realist made the three remaining films. There were other privately sponsored films also screened at the Exhibition, including those made by SFP for Beardmore & co and Colvilles, and one about ‘Paraffin Young’ by Realist for Scottish Oils. Having been seen by over twelve million people at the Empire cinema, they went on commercial release aided by the reformed quota regulations, and reached an audience of twenty-two and a half million. 65 Much outrage ensued when the British Council refused to take the films to the New York World Fair, considering they did not paint a pretty enough picture.66 This decision says much about the films: they are very optimistic, in the sense that they see lots of room for improvement. They are concerned above all with the Scotsman as worker in different roles, from traditional agriculture to modern industry, and the social issues that industrialisation brought to Scotland. Part of their optimism depends on a quest for essence, for a national spirit, that would provide the strength to overcome present challenges. This weaving of past and future is helped, in some cases, by musical cues, as will be discussed later. 62 Bob Crampsey, The Empire Exhibition of 1938: The Last Durbar (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1988): 912. 63 Elliot was apparently well known of the film-making community, since all five newsreels carried items on his wedding in 1934. According to Forsyth Hardy, O’er Hill and Dale had been shot in his sheep farm (Scotland in Film, p. 33) 64 John Grierson, ‘The Making of Films in Scotland’, Transcript of broadcast given on March 31st 1938, n.d., n.l. Scottish Screen Archive 9/1/56. 65 Jo Sherington, “To Speak its Pride”: The work of the Films of Scotland Committee 1938-1982 (Glasgow: Scottish Film Council, 1996): 9. 66 Forsyth Hardy, interview on Scotch Reels, pp. 73-92, at 75. 18 Chapter 3. Production, themes, and music – an overview 3.1. Production modes Two main modes of financing films have been mentioned so far: ‘sponsored’ and ‘commercial’ films. Individuals or companies did not stick to only one mode; it was a project-by-project decision. Sponsorship could come from public or private entities, and could be local, Scottish or British. A wide range of industrial forms were tried, with varying financial results. It was not easy to convince a conventional industrialist to commission the making of a film about the activities at his factory, but with growing awareness of the persuasive powers of good publicity, film companies were able to do business. In Scotland, several Clydeside industries got films made by the local film companies. Local topicals can in many cases be counted as privately sponsored films. In many cases, however, sponsors preferred to hire more experienced producers from London, or contact local agents of London-based companies such as Gaumont-British or Pathe. These companies either hired Scottish-based filmmakers to make complete films on local subjects, maintained ‘stringers’ ready to shoot footage for newsreels, or sent their own team over the border. Depending on the approach taken, they could offer access to London sound recording studios, and could have pre-planned distribution channels. Public authorities represented the main source of commissions for most documentary filmmakers. The Glasgow Corporation, for instance, was particularly interested in keeping and publicizing cinematic records of their urban interventions, financing a considerable number of films since the 1920s.67 They would also have the choice between local producers and agents of larger companies. The Empire Marketing Board and the General Post Office provided the sustenance for the ‘documentary film movement’, although this form of sponsorship was a long-term commitment, as opposed to a single-project contract. Although the EMB and the GPO privileged non-theatrical exhibition, these films could also sometimes secure theatrical screenings.68 Guided more by honest ambition and a pragmatic ethos than by orthodox industrial procedures, the economics of this group of films are quite 67 68 Lebas, ‘Sadness and Gladness’, p. 29. Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, p. 74-75. 19 entangled. When a similar model was brought into action by Film Centre for the 1938 Films of Scotland Committee, a similarly complex financial pattern emerged, with films being screened first at the Empire Exhibition and subsequently put on commercial distribution. Non-sponsored films, on the other hand, are destined for the market from the start, although it might well be the non-theatrical market, as in the case of Gaumont-British Instructional ‘classroom films’. Small companies depended on the filmmakers’ own capital, and the sale of shares, for investment capital. Most of the films made in this way by local companies had rather meagre budgets and sub-prime technical means. Larger companies could offer slightly better conditions, but still the expected returns were low, and so was the allotted budget. 3.2. Thematic Overview All of the films in the corpus can be described as factual in a loose sense. There are many instances of reconstruction or fictionalisation, but always in the context of a discourse about the real world. Technical and aesthetic characteristics vary greatly, from sleek cinematography and editing with dull, professional sound, to shabby scraps of newsreel footage assembled with a charming, if incomprehensible, soundtrack, to ambitious symbolism and experimental soundscapes. In thematic terms, they can be clustered around three non-exclusive emphases: landscape, industry, and events. Landscape is the province of the picturesque travelogues: Land O’Clans (CJ Cayley, 1938) or Bonnie Scotland calls you (Howard Gaye, 1938) are suitable examples. However, there are other contrasting approaches to natural scenery. Several educational films (e.g. Elder and Dalrymple’s The Highlands of Scotland, 1936) have a neutral, detached way of showing the land as a material fact to be transformed by human toil. There is a clear-cut contrast between the travelogue’s contemplative gaze, that constitutes arid rocks and coarse heather as sublime beauty, and the instructional film’s pragmatic view, that sees a rough environment as an obstacle to be overcome. The struggle against the unyielding soil can reach epic dimensions when it is presented as the constitutive moment for national character, as in They Made the Land (Mary Field, 1938). As will become clear, the music linked to landscape scenes plays an important role in situating it within one of these divergent discourses. 20 Industry is, unsurprisingly, the focus of most sponsored documentaries, such as A Romance of Engineering (1938), made by Scottish Film Productions for William Beardmore and Co., the Glasgow steel manufacturers, or Cargo for Ardrossan (1939), by the Realist Film Unit for the Petroleum Films Bureau. Here again one can find heroic, masculine accounts (A Romance of Engineering), matter-of-fact descriptions (Heavy Industries, JC Elder, 1936), and humanist votes for the improvement of the urban industrial way of life (Wealth of a nation, SFP, 1938). The working classes are approached cautiously, although the stereotyping is usually endearing rather than condescending (e.g. Tam Trauchle’s Troubles, Pathé, 1934). Bridging the gap between crofter and shipbuilder, fishermen are the subject of several remarkable pictures, including Harry Watt’s gripping North Sea (GPO, 1938) and Grierson’s atmospheric Granton Trawler (GPO, 1934). Finally, the tradition of the local topical extends to many more or less structured accounts of particular events: the children’s summer at the holiday camps (Sunny Days, Jay’s Film Service, 1931), a shinty match (Oban Celtic meet Newtonmore, SFP, 1937), a new civic attraction (Saltcoats Gets New Esplanade, British Movietone, 1933). Things that Happen, the cinemagazine started by Scottish Film Productions, does not really cover events in the way a newsreel would, but relies instead on less urgent ‘interest’ pieces. This strand of films can be related to other ‘information’ pictures such as Sport in Scotland (SFP, 1938), which includes images of particular sporting events but placed within a general public discourse. This thematic overview is, of course, unable to account for all the topics, characters and motifs in the sample. But it suggests the way in which nuances in representational conventions can construct different discourses around the same broad topic. My argument is that the use of musical conventions goes a long way towards understanding how these discourses are constructed. The following section groups the films according to different, overlapping criteria, creating grounds for comparison that will help tease out the relevant patterns in the use of sound and music. 3.3. General patterns in the use of music Out of the sixty-two films, 31 have a continuous musical soundtrack; 18 have music cues in selected moments, and the remaining 13 have no music, although five of these do have a title tune. Although towards the end of the decade the use of separate music cues seems 21 proportionally higher, this can be attributed to the greater output of the documentary movement, which favoured this approach. There does not seem to be a significant transformation in the use of music during the decade, which is surprising given that the accelerated technological transition brought about large changes in other sound practices, e.g. direct recording of dialogue. As suggested before, the pervasive presence of music corresponds, in part, to a continuation of some accompaniment practices that had been in use during the late silent period. This style was not far from the illustrated lecture, or even the radio lecture, and thus it was well suited to the audience’s perception habits. When technical means were precarious, furthermore, previously recorded music and a commentator was the simplest way to justify the ‘sound’ label for a film. Most of the films made by English commercial producers in Scotland were travelogues, and all of these featured a continuous musical track. This is hardly surprising, given that recording equipment was cumbersome, and the company of a huge sound van would have greatly restricted the cameraman’s mobility. Travelogues were meant to be cheaply made, and their budget was frequently not enough to hire a music composer to write precise cues; it was better to paste wall-to-wall easy-listening standards. In this case, economic necessity became an aesthetic convention, which arguably clipped the genre’s potential for transformation. On industrial topics, on the other hand, occasional or no music is more frequent than continuous music, thus deviating from the general trend. However, before deriving any conclusions from this observation, it must be noted that the differences are equally related to the production companies and contexts. For instance, Elder and Dalrymple products for Gaumont-British Instructional are always completely devoid of music, whether their topic is land or industry. Scottish Film Productions, on the other hand, would use continuous background for their newsreels, travelogues and sponsored industrial documentaries; but their contributions to the 1938 Empire Exhibition group of films are typical of this latter series, in that they use music sporadically and deliberately. Thus far no mention has been made about the sort of music featured in these films. Most of it, predictably, consists of selections from the Romantic European art music repertory, with a preference for string pieces in adagio or pastoral modes. ‘Dramatic’ pieces – mainly from opera or programme music – are used in certain contexts, most notoriously for storms and gales. But there is also a wealth of ‘light’ music: orchestration for operettas or music-hall, 22 employing a smaller orchestra, higher pitches, simpler patterns in rhythm and melody, and so on. Close to this strand are a considerable number of martial pieces with brass winds and percussion. A few titles include some instrumental jazz. In all this there is little surprise, since pragmatic needs dictated the choice of music: The ‘masterpieces’ of classical music were readily available on record, and free of copyright duties. A string quintet was about the largest number of musicians one could fit into a cheap sound studio, gathered around a microphone. There were many such small ensembles, being trained for the microphone by working on the radio. Simpler tunes meant shorter rehearsal time and quick recording, very important when the studio is charging by the hour. Of course, within these constraints there are many possible alternatives, but these represent broadly an international standard closely associated with the development of sound technology. It is therefore more revealing to look at the moments in which sound practice deviates from this ‘standard’ in meaningful ways. But these departures must be considered as one side in a dialectic relationship: what they mean, they mean by opposition and difference. We are led back thus to the question about the specificity of the national. If a film is made ‘national’ by its reliance on culturally shared knowledges – which somehow differ from ‘universal’ knowledge –, then the national difference in film-musical practices should be also related to a shared musical culture. This chapter has drawn a sketch of the economic, thematic, and musical characteristics of the films studied. It has shown that conventional categories such as genre, theme, and production company, do not provide reliable predictions about a film’s sound strategy. This does not mean, of course, that such categories bear no relation to the way music is used in a film. It means that music remains under-determined, since there are other factors at play. The next chapter will tackle the issue of what music does in these films – a functional approach. By identifying the different functions assigned to different kinds of music, and by asking how music takes up these functions, some insights on the social workings of film music might be gained. 23 Chapter 4: Functions of Background Music Different functional taxonomies of film music have been proposed to suit the needs of the authors who have written about it.69 The main problem with these categories is that they have been constructed for narrative cinema, with classical Hollywood as the standard by which all deviations are measured. Music in documentary and educational films has received comparatively little attention. Although certainly a documentary film is, in its particular way, a narrative, notions such as the diegetic world cannot be simply imported from narrative film theory. Therefore, ad-hoc taxonomies must be constructed to deal specifically with music in the factual films that form this dissertation’s corpus. As with most classificatory schemes, these functional categories do not exclude each other rigorously; nothing prevents a given piece of music from fulfilling two functions at a time. The first functional division that must be made is between music heard and unheard. That is, music that demands the spectator’s attention, and music that is subdued by the primacy of image or narrative. For simplicity, I will use the terms background and foreground, and I shall begin this discussion with ‘background’ or ‘unheard’ music. Unobtrusive, incidental music constitutes the bulk of what is called ‘film music’ – part of the language of cinema, as opposed to a fully-fledged autonomous art form. Claudia Gorbman thus entitled his book on narrative film music, Unheard Melodies.70 Gorbman’s central concern is the ‘bath or gel of affect’ in which film music immerses the spectator. The book adopts a cautious psychoanalytical/semiotic/cognitive approach, but its eclecticism is bounded by an interest on the constructions of subjectivity in the individual spectator. Thus, Gorbman explains the ‘two overarching roles of background music’ as semiotic ancrage and psychological bonding.71 What Gorbman describes as psychological bonding is a complex concept, related to that of ‘identification’. It is not my intention to tackle the fierce theoretical debate around it, as it is not a central issue for the present topic. The rhetorical or didactic discourses that predominate 69 For instance, the American composer, Aaron Copland, What to listen for in music (New York: Signet Classics, 2002[1939]) pp. 205-206, and Douglas W. Gallez, ‘Theories of Film Music’ Cinema Journal 9:2 (1970), pp. 4047. 70 Claudia Gorbman, Unheard Melodies (London: BFI; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987) 71 Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, p. 55 24 in the corpus do not, arguably, strive for the ‘identification’ effect, whatever it may be on a psychological level. The seriousness of some films, and the playfulness of others, both depend on a relatively detached form of spectatorship. But background music still works as a unifying force, a familiar amalgam that makes temporal discontinuity more palatable. 4.1. Dynamic function What Douglas Gallez calls ‘dynamic’ music is that used as punctuation, somehow ‘bonding’ the film to itself.72 This is music used to emphasize the rhythm of the action or the editing; to bridge transitions and fill gaps in the dialogue. It creates a sense of continuity between disconnected images. Due to the way that most films in the corpus were shot, and the rhetoric that guided their editing style, the need for music to fulfil a dynamic function is prominent. More than half of the films considered use music in this way. A few examples will give an idea of the way this technique was deployed. Films that have a continuous musical background are more likely to be using music to give a sense of continuity to footage that was shot newsreel-style. The two Glasgow-based companies, Jay’s Film Service and Scottish Film Productions, did not have mobile sound equipment, and would therefore only use synchronic sound for studio scenes. Glasgow’s Festival of Fellowship (SFP, 1937), documenting the events organized by the Glasgow Corporation to celebrate the coronation of George VI, engaged the John McArthur’s Quintet to provide an array of upbeat tunes. The Quintet performed frequently on BBC’s Scottish Service, playing either Scottish dance music or incidental music for radio plays and revues. Their several contributions to SFP films do not stray very far from this experience, and thus Festival of Fellowship comprises mainly light marches, waltzes (for sailing scenes) and simplified jigs, played on piano and strings. Light marches, either on pianoforte and violin (the cheapest form of film scoring), or played by a martial marching band with brass wind instruments, glockenspiels and percussion, are a staple of dynamic functional segments. They were the standard accompaniment for newsreels and for news broadcasts, and in this Scottish productions were following an international trend. The film world had been taken by assault in 1935 by the new series, The March of Time (with plenty of suitably grandiose, domineering music). For a quick advertising job, a cheerful march 72 Gallez, ‘Theories of Film Music’, 40-47. 25 was as good as anything: Thus Ronnie Jay entitled his ad for the Co-op’s Shieldhall furniture line, The march of progress (Jay’s Film Service, 1938), and fitted it with a triumphant background that sounds very much like progress. Related musical genres, all played by dance bands which were in high supply in the 1930s, are used to convey a sense of movement and activity. Lacking direct recordings of machine noises, busy factories are animated by brass, bass and piano in such films as How SCWS Cigarettes and Tobaccos are Made (Jay’s, 1938), World of Steel (SFP, 1938), and Dundee (SFP, 1939). Urban life in Glasgow (not in Edinburgh) tends to be evoked by brass sounds when it is portrayed as busy and modern. And, although several forms of transportation and movement are set to fast paced music, waltz reigns on water-bound transport. But whilst the fitting rhythmical properties of waltz must not be underestimated, this musical genre is not insolubly welded to marine scenes. Waltz is used to construct sailing as a leisure activity: A genteel pleasure in travelogues like Isles of the West (Cayley, 1939), and a popular one in Sunny Days (Jay’s, 1931), which actually features ‘Blue Danube’. On the other hand, ship launchings are situated in an Imperial context by ‘Rule! Britannia’, and sailing for business (eg. fishing, as in Sea Food, Pathe 1938) is more frequently associated with energetic music such as that used for industry scenes. This becomes then an example of how musical convention is used to situate an ambiguous image – say, sunset at sea – as either leisure or work. It must be stressed, then, that there is no exclusion between the categories proposed here. Hence, dynamic music inevitably does something to set the ‘mood’ of a film, although it might do so inadvertently. 4.2. Anchoring function: mood and setting Ancrage, or anchoring, a term taken from Barthes, is a way to ‘ward off the displeasure of uncertain signification’. It gives information and ‘interprets’ the image. That is what Prendergast meant with his example about bagpipes and Scotland: If we see a landscape and hear bagpipes, is just as well as if the image had a caption. As Prendergast wrote that ‘colour’ is associative, Gorbman writes that mood ‘originates in the complex of all connotative elements in the filmic system and beyond, in the “texts” of the spectator’s existence’.73 In the following paragraphs I will treat musical ‘colour’ as an anchoring device that situates the 73 Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, p. 58. 26 action in time or space, calling this a ‘setting’ function. ‘Mood’ is more elusive, but I will characterise it as an anchoring device that situates the action emotionally. Both functions are most commonly assigned to background, instrumental music.74 4.2.1. The pastoral There are in the films many instances of what can be described as music in a ‘pastoral’ mode. Characterised by simple, ‘folk-like’ arrangements, lilting melodies harmonised in thirds and sixths, and wind instruments imitating peasants’ panpipes, the pastoral mode has a double funtion.75 A pastoral undertone not only situates the action in a rural setting, but also interprets said location as ‘fit habitations for shepherds or their equivalents’, as Paul Alpers puts it.76 The audiovisual trope of shepherding plus pastoral music is not hard to find in the corpus: A calm version appears in O’er Hill and Dale (EMB, 1932), a sentimental one in Misty Isle (Cayley, 1939), and a more purposeful one on West of Inverness (Ventle, 1939).77 The musical conventions of the pastoral mode have been said to express a rhetorical opposition between art and nature or country and city, glorifying an escapist image of rural life.78 This conventional meaning is frequently invoked in travelogues made by English companies, such as Scotland, The Magic North (National Progress, 1935), and Clyde River (LMS, 1939). The Scottish outdoors are constructed as a place for bourgeois leisure. West of Inverness, to cite an alarming case, seems to celebrate the depopulation of the Highlands (after practically denying the Clearances) because it leaves the place completely free for tourism. There is, however, a more complex version of the pastoral mood. It is linked to a rural past, and more specifically to the crofting communities. This past is then connected to the present, establishing a historical continuity that serves certain ideological purposes. An early, problematic travelogue, Western Highlands (Alba, 1933), provides a fascinating case. The soundtrack pieces together a series of recognisable Scottish songs, in peaceful harp and 74 The most notorious exception is Eriskay: A poem of remote lives (Kissling, 1935), since its soundtrack is made up of Gaelic vocal songs; but it is hard to treat these as ‘background’ music in any case. 75 Geoffrey Chew. "Pastoral." In The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, edited by Stanley Sadie. Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/O007964 (accessed August 26, 2008). 76 Paul Alpers, ‘What is Pastoral?’ Critical Enquiry 8:3 (1982), pp. 437-460, at 459. 77 It must be remembered, in this context, that O’er Hill and Dale was one of the six films the EMB handed over to Gaumont-British to add a soundtrack and distribute; Grierson was never happy about the conventional musical treatment they received. 78 Alpers, ‘What is Pastoral?’, p. 437. 27 woodwind versions, each playing for less than 40 seconds in average. Over well-crafted scenic views, the commentary recounts the gory history of clan warfare in the region. As it describes the massacre of Glencoe, the image changes to a crofter’s house with carefree chicken and children running around, and Thorpe Bates starts singing ‘The bonnie banks of Loch Lomond’. Bathed in music, the violent history of Scotland becomes a Romantic tale, naturalized in such a dramatic landscape. At the same time, the travelogue seems to recommend Scotland because it is peaceful and pastoral. The contradiction is paralleled by the rendition of ceol beag (the ‘minor’ Highland pipe repertory of dance music) into Mozartian instruments. A comparable case can be found among the seven Empire Exhibition films of 1938. The Face of Scotland, a celebrated work by Basil Wright, begins with a melancholy ballad played on a high-pitched reed, with strings backing, as the commentary describes the crofter’s struggle with an arid land. After a musical silence (whilst Calvinism is mentioned), the film arrives in the industrial age with the expected fast-paced, brassy music. But then a brief image of a thatched house brings back the pastoral melody, which this time continues over close-ups of urban workers and is mixed with their conversations at the pub. As mentioned before, the Empire Exhibition as a whole had the goal of invigorating Scottish industry after the Depression. One of the ways in which films did this was by suggesting that modern Scotsmen were hardy workers and meticulous craftsmen, being ‘of the same stock’ as the crofters and weavers. They have, after all, been born in a land ‘fit for shepherds’. In The Face of Scotland, pastoral music posits the country-city opposition, and then bridges it, in accordance to the Griersonian remit of the Films of Scotland Committee. The argument is made by the commentary, the editing, and the images themselves; the music can be seen as simply reinforcing it. I do not wish to exaggerate the importance of music in this case, but to show one of the functions that it took. 4.2.2. Scottish themes in classical music Since film music has tended to privilege Romantic composers, and Romantic composers were quite taken with the Ossianic verses, there is no dearth of classical material from which a musical director could compile a score. Mendelssohn’s ‘Fingal’s Cave’ (Hebrides overture, Op. 26) shows up in a reduced string version in Glasgow’s Festival of Fellowship and in The Key to 28 Scotland (Strand, 1935). Grierson had also chosen it to be performed with his silent film, Drifters (EMB, 1929), along with some Wagner and Rimsky-Korsakov.79 That the first two films were scored by professional musicians (John MacArthur for SFP, Lucas Leighton and Ursula Greville for Strand) suggests that Mendelssohn was for the initiated, even though his works were performed fairly frequently. In any case, ‘Fingal’s Cave’ is used exclusively for maritime scenes, for which it is well suited both rhythmically and tonally. Alexander Mackenzie’s Scottish Rhapsody No. 2 (Opus 24, 1880) quotes ‘Hey Tuttie Tattie’, the melody of ‘Scots Wha Hae’, which is also the motif of Berlioz’s Rob Roy Overture. Any of these pieces would be a grand, stylized way to instantly evoke nationality. Given the fragmentary use of music, and the reduction of almost any piece to a piano and violin version, it is hard to know whether the classical work or the ‘folk’ song is being played; it appears in Scotland, the Magic North over images of Aberfoyle, and in The Key to Scotland over images of monuments to Great Scots. Max Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy (Opus 46, 1880), Berlioz’s Waverley (Opus 1, 1839), and many other Scots-themed works by European composers, would also seem appropriate for the task, and complicate the researcher’s work enormously. The point is, however, that classical music with Scottish referents is not used very frequently, and only by rather more ‘learned’ films. On the one hand it was impossible to record properly in a precarious studio, so producers would depend on the availability and affordability of existing recordings. On the other, their investment would most likely go unnoticed. Classical works require a stronger command of specifically musical codes in order to be read as ‘Scottish’. Whilst there might be instances in which this Scottish classical music was used, to the less musically enlightened spectator, as to me, it is indistinguishable from the mass of background orchestral music. If it was intended to function as a mark of nationality, then, it was a rather elitist one. Much more frequent is the semantic marking of Scotland through instrumental versions of a small group of well-known melodies. 4.2.3. Scots song That music is used as a shorthand reference to location can be argued from the fact that almost a third of the films considered use recognisable Scottish music on their title sequence. This 79 Sir Arthur Elton interviewed by Elizabeth Sussex in The rise and fall of British Documentary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975): 6; Ian Aitken, The Documentary Film Movement, p. 10. 29 trend is inversely proportional to the general amount of music in the film: The less background music a film has, the more likely it will have a semantic rather than dynamic function. For this function of background music the privileged choice is ‘Scots songs’, if we are to understand this term as a publishing category rather than a musical form. As Cedric Thorpe Davie points out, this ‘customary term’ covers a variety of musical genres from folk ballads to parlour songs.80 A portion of Scottish country dance music must be included too, since it is part of the same canon that began taking shape in the eighteenth century, with the publication of volume upon volume of ‘Scotch song’ compilations.81 For illustrative purposes, the six songs that Erno Rapée recommended to silent cinema pianists, in 1924, to represent Scotland, are quite revealing. They are ‘Auld Lang Syne’, ‘The Campbells are Coming’, ‘The Bluebells of Scotland’, ‘Annie Laurie’, ‘Scots wha hae’, and ‘Comin’ through the rye’.82 This is not as reductive as it appears. This core group of Scottish tunes is heard in many permutations, fast and slow, on fiddle, accordion, brass band or symphony orchestra. Scottish music, due to its own history of adaptation, proved remarkably flexible, as will be evidenced below. It must be said, however, that it was often used rather unimaginatively: Land O’Clans (Cayley, 1938) is one of the travelogues that use back-to-back Scottish standards in bland string versions. Newsreel items would frequently use a lively jig to underline the Scottish setting of such events as the Jedburgh Handba’ (Gaumont, 1935) or the crossing of the Tweed (Universal, 1932). Since no other location markers are given – apart from the occasional kilt – a highly characteristic tune such as ‘The Campbells are coming’ takes on a geographical role. This melody, transported into full orchestral slickness, is also part of the introductory music in The Little Minister (RKO, 1934), along with ‘Comin’ through the rye’ and ‘Loch Lomond’. Colin McArthur identifies music as central in signifying ‘Scottishness’ in this Hollywood production.83 The musical director for The Little Minister was none other than Max Steiner, one of the most revered film composers in classical Hollywood. The year after, he would score John Ford’s The Informer (with a Northern Irish setting), presented by Kathryn Kalinak as an example of Steiner’s use of folk tunes: 80 Cedric Thorpe Davie, Scotland’s Music (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1980) p. 4. The most notorious of these editorial projects is still The Scots Musical Museum, published from 1787 by James Johnson, with a considerable input from Robert Burns. But this collection was already part of a trend initiated by Ramsay’s Tea-Table Miscellany. For more on the formation of the Scottish national canon, and its role in constructing a representation of national culture appropriate to Enlightenment sensibility, see Steve Newman, ‘The Scots Songs of Allan Ramsay: “Lyrick” Transformation, Popular Culture, and the Boundaries of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Modern Language Quarterly 63:3 (2002), pp. 277-314. 82 Erno Rapée, Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists (New York: G. Schirmer, 1924). 83 Colin McArthur, ‘Scotland and Cinema: The Iniquity of the Fathers’, in Scotch Reels, pp. 40-69, at 44. 81 30 ‘The film depends upon these standard ballads to evoke a mythic representation of Ireland which it has neither the budget nor the time to create visually’84 Even Muir Mathieson, the Scottish conductor, introduces his score for Rene Clair’s The Ghost goes West with an instrumental reel followed by a ballad, but then re-takes the initial tune on trumpets. This unorthodox twist hints towards the musical smartness of the whole film, which includes many jokes at the expense of American romanticising of Scottish traditions. A comedic high point, the ‘Cubanised’ version of ‘Hielan laddie’ played by a tropical music ensemble (maracas and all) can be seen as parodying philistine appropriation or conservative self-importance. Either way, Mathieson, who was at the time very young but would become the musical director at Gainsborough studios for years to come, had put the finger on the spot by addressing the tension between conventionally ‘national’ music, and contemporary, predominantly American dance music, as two separate but closely related modes of popular sensibility. 84 Kalinak, Settling the Score, p. 118. 31 Chapter 5. Functions of music in Scottish films: Foreground There are moments in films when music demands the spectator’s attention, and when cinematic pleasure is closely allied to musical pleasure. Although some scholars place the division between background and foreground along the same lines as the diegetic/non-diegetic divide, this is a habit from visual hegemony, implying that only what is seen (eg ‘source’ music) is part of the diegesis. Furthermore, there are other instances of foreground music that do not require synchronisation or performance. I will start by discussing the recurrence of one such instance in the corpus. 5.1. The musical moment There are many ways to direct the spectator’s attention to the music apart from ‘production numbers’. The commentary might mention the name of the melody that is playing; superimposed titles might appear with the lyrics; the voiceover can go silent as the music’s volume rises; the editing might follow the rhythm of the song. In Wealth of a Nation, for instance, the commentary mentions that tourists have enjoyed ‘the beauty of the mountain country, celebrated by generations of Scotsmen in song and story’, and now Scots are discovering it too. As we see images of the new-found national love of hiking, an accordion starts playing a jig. The rest of the film has had only classical music on strings, which makes the accordion sound more startling. The landscape motivates the music, the idea being that in rediscovering the outdoors, Scots are reconnecting with some lost cultural identity.85 In Misty Isle, a Gaelic song of spinning and weaving is introduced by the commentary, and the song extends over close-up images of hands and looms as weavers work. Images are not synchronised with the music, but the to-and-fro movements of the shuttle and the spinningwheel reinforce the rhythmic pleasure in the song. Since the images are tightly framed and balanced, they are easy to read, allowing the spectator to concentrate on the music and the Gaelic language, sometimes presented as exotica. A remarkably modern example is found in Dundee, where a vigorous rendition of the jig ‘Bonnie Dundee’ takes over a driving scene 85 For an interesting discussion on other aspects of Wealth of a Nation that I cannot address here, see Richard Butt, ‘Wealth of a Nation: Citizenship and the Public Sphere’, in Janet McBain and Kevin Cowle (eds) ‘With an Eye to the Future: Donald Alexander and Budge Cooper, Documentary Film Makers (Glasgow: Scottish Screen, 1997), pp. 17-22. 32 around the docks. And an audiovisual cliché seems to have consolidated around ‘Auld Lang Syne’, sunsets, and the end of a movie. The same function can also be taken by a languorous version of ‘Loch Lomond’ and the dreaded words, ‘so we bid farewell…’ In all these examples the song is there to be heard and enjoyed for its own sake, as well as for its pleasant fit with the image in formal, rather than thematic, terms. But it is in the Necessitous Children’s Holiday Camp Fund series that most examples of the ‘musical moment’ can be found. This is in part due to the newsreel-style way of gathering footage, which, as discussed above, calls for a unifying dynamic track. But the practice remained even in later years, when at least part of the shooting was done with direct sound. A highly musical approach, and frequently a theme song, was a staple in NCHCF films. Since these films had special conditions of distribution and exhibition, the fact that they also show remarkably distinct sound strategies is of great interest. The first noteworthy characteristic is the prominence given to ragtime or ‘novelty’ jazz songs. Recent American hits are featured in Sunny Days, Tam Trauchle’s Troubles, and Song of Happiness (Pathe, 1934). Hits of the Scottish variety circuit are featured in all the films in this series that are available for viewing. This embracing of twentieth-century popular music is only found in this set of films; as with background music, the choice of foreground songs is otherwise restricted to the eighteenth-century Scots songs canon. The NCHCF’s strategy is, thus, unique in its context. That it extends across six years and four different production companies suggests that the reasons for featuring so many songs are not accidental or capricious. The films are instances of a relatively consistent mode of address, intent on achieving a series of specific effects on the audience. Whether this approach succeeded or failed, the films are a fascinating trace of an attitude towards the popular in the urban industrial environment of Glasgow. In Sunny Days, the theme song is ‘Happy days are here again’, a Tin Pan Alley standard written by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen in 1929 and used in the 1930 film, Chasing Rainbows (MGM). In the NCHCF short, the song’s full semantic effect depends on the audience’s ability to recognise the tune and recall the lyrics. In the United States, the song derived its success partly from its timely references to the Depression. It is then a highly topical song, even for 1931 Glasgow, where the global consequences of the stock market crash were being sourly felt. It is, on the other hand, rooted on 1920s musical style, not too far from ragtime, and the title itself suggests the completion of a cycle, back to a happier state. 33 The image of industrial Glasgow as a dark age, which was coming to an end as Scots rediscovered the outdoors and a proud tradition linked to the land, is as much an undertone in these carefree films, as in the straight-faced efforts of the Empire Exhibition. As the previous example of Wealth of a Nation suggests, however, Empire Exhibition films promote a more endogenous cultural identity, not too far from the pastoral even when the topic is industrial. In Sunny Days, the jazzy Tin Pan Alley song is, at some point, rather incongruously synchronized with the image of a girl dancing a Highland fling in shallow water. The dance is emptied of its national specificity and re-imagined as a spontaneous display of joy (which it probably was in a Highland context, anyway). The Song of Happiness features the eponymous song, written by Meyer Davis and Uriel Benjamin. It was a well-known dance band song, recorded by Harry Roy’s British Dance Band in 1931. Besides playing over intertitles and transitions, the song is performed and tap-danced vigorously by two girls aged about nine. Tam Trauchle’s Troubles features a veritable avalanche of songs, but we shall begin here with the ones that are not part of a live performance. Although there is a brief reprise of ‘Happy days’, the theme tune for Tam Trauchle is ‘In the Good Old Summer Time’, which was an older Tin Pan Alley hit (from 1902), which is sang cheerfully though disorderly by the girls at Port Edgar camp from their bedroom windows. After this performance, an intertitle appears: “IN THE GOOD OLD SUMMER TIME” many of our young campers have “THE ROAD TO THE ISLES” opened up to them by the Fund Revealing the title of the song that has just been heard is the film’s way of acknowledging it, thus addressing the audience in a tone of camaraderie. This prepares the ground for the last segment of the film, with heightened sentimentality – the collection box would go around when the lights went on. The same intertitle thus prepares the audience for a strong musical moment, during which in all probability there would be a collective singalong. 34 Over three and a half minutes, the resort towns down the Clyde slide by on the screen. Children sing and eat chocolate on board rather flimsy puffers, and seagulls fly by the British flag. This sequence is in the tradition of the ‘illustrated song’ that was popular long before sound film. But its pleasures are markedly local: the song names the places we see on the screen, familiar places for the Glasgow audience. A montage of footage that could be prosaic, non-specific (eg. seagulls), and spatially incoherent, becomes intensely comforting and coherent. ‘The road to the isles’, crucially, is not a traditional Scots song. It is at the same time a product of the mass entertainment industry, and of a somewhat engineered version of local identity closely related to geography and language. The melody was noted down by Marjory KennedyFraser and the lyrics were written by Kenneth McLeod, in time to be released at the beginning of the Great War as a Scottish counterbalance to the Irish ‘Tipperary’.86 The song, moreover, appears in Tam Trauchle as recorded by Sir Harry Lauder, who was already a world-famous, aging entertainer, and he probably waived the copyright for this use of the song since he had previously supported the NCHCF’s cause. Of the 1930s Scottish films, the NCHCF films are the most closely targeted to a particular audience. The main goal was to persuade better-off children and their parents to contribute to the Fund. As Elizabeth Lebas argues, a second goal was to persuade those receiving the benefits to come in contact with the authorities.87 The audience would then have been primarily Glasgow children and mothers. Respectability was as important as entertainment. A wellestablished compromise was at hand, in the tradition of Scottish seaside holiday resorts. The point of the NCHCF, of course, was that not everyone could afford a seaside holiday; but the same artists would extend their performing styles to pantomime, thus creating a certain continuity of working- and lower-middle-class cultural consumption. The best evidence that these local performing traditions inform the popular address of the NCHCF is not their local specificity, but precisely their lack thereof. As Frank Bruce concludes in his study of Scottish show business, the success of variety entertainment was in its ability to adapt to gradual change, and accommodate passing fads, whilst preserving a sense of immutability: 86 87 Margaret Kennedy, Letter to the editor, The Scotsman 11th October 1932, p. 11. Lebas, ‘Sadness and Gladness’, p. 39. 35 ‘the idea of a Scottish music-hall tradition […] focuses too narrowly on those elements that played up a sense of shared “Scottish” identity. In reality, the popular stage always overlapped with the legitimate, and was hungry for the new and cosmopolitan’88 Apart from Tin Pan Alley songs and dance band music, the privileged genre of the Holiday Camp films is the ‘action song’, nursery rhymes with matching hand gestures performed by huge groups of children. Rowdier, saucier, or more political popular forms are absent from the NCHCF films made by Pathe, committing only to a light-hearted treatment of topics that are neither ‘serious’ nor demanding. The model for this view of actuality could be found in another Pathe series, Eve’s Film Review (1921-1933), a cine-magazine ‘for women’ with interest pieces on fashion, health, crafts and so on. The font and decorative style used in the title cards is the same, and some of Eve’s crew worked in the NCHCF films. Jenny Hammerton has written an insightful and amusing appraisal of Eve’s Film Review, discussing, among other topics, the notions of ‘femininity’ circulated by these films, and their somewhat paradoxical mode of address.89 These are films ostensibly for women, but offering mainly a masculine point of view. In the refusal to engage with ‘serious’, adult topics, there is a trace in the NCHCF films of this ‘gendering’ of entertainment, and the infantilisation of women. This is more strongly felt when the Pathe films are compared with a NCHCF short made by Strand, a GPO outshoot, Give the Kids a Break (Strand, 1937). This film does not have a guiding narrative with characters and does not have a theme song; it has instead statistics (how many kilos of meat did children eat?), committee meetings, an emphasis on efficiency and organisation, and two singing boys. But, lest we stray too far from topic, their sync performances provide a good starting point for the next section. 5.2. Diegetic performances or ‘production numbers’ The second, most obvious, way of foregrounding music is by showing on screen, synchronically, the thing or person that is inferred to be producing the sound. Music is then ‘source’ music and the scene is frequently called a ‘production number’. Even with precarious technology, from early on it was feasible for small companies to record simple production numbers in studio. However, the use of the term in this section does not refer to the way a 88 Frank Bruce, Scottish Showbusiness: Music Hall, Variety and Pantomime (Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 2000): 132. 89 Jenny Hammerton, For Ladies Only? Eve’s Film Review, Pathe Cinemagazine 1921-33 (Hastings: The Projection Box, 2001) 36 sequence was shot. Sound could have been recorded at other time and place; the point is that it is paired with the image in such way that we are meant to read it as direct sound. In Give the Kids a Break, then, a young comic delights his peers with an impersonation of Harry Lauder in ‘Roamin’ in the Gloamin’. Later, a very serious boy with no shirt sings ‘Misty Islands of the Highlands’, a 1935 hit by Jimmy Kennedy and Michael Carr. This song was part of a brief revival of interest in sheet music, fuelled by the Peter Maurice Company’s decision to compete against Tin Pan Alley with ballads instead of more jazz. Looking at the most successful titles by the composers, it is clear that ‘Misty Islands’ was one more in a string of nautically-related romanticism: ‘The Isle of Capri’, ‘Red Sails in the Sunset’, ‘Did your mother come from Ireland?’, and so on.90 The boy’s utterly serious pose was no doubt inspired by the many ‘straight’ tenors and baritones that lent a touch of virtuosity to the variety bill. Similar (and rather uncomfortable) instances of languid parlour singing in Tam Trauchle’s Troubles are offered by young James Sutherland (‘O for the wings of a dove’ and ‘Wee Willie Winkie’), and a girl called Margaret, with ‘How many miles to Dublin town?’ Irish songs are not infrequent, reflecting the history of Glasgow’s working classes. But the definitive compendium of serious Scottish song is a strange travelogue entitled Bonnie Scotland Calls You (ABPC, 1938), which stitched together three silent short films by J.C. Elder, adding an inaudible instrumental background, and three individual performances. ‘Hail! Caledonia’, ‘Flora MacDonald’s Lament’, and ‘The road to the isles’ are sung by three different singers against a tartan backdrop. We first see them in a medium length shot, and then the travelogue images continue over the song. The first song is edited with shots of canals, bridges and Loch Ness; the second, with monuments and graveyards in Inverness; and the third with views of two men hiking, camping and cooking. Apart from linking Inverness and Flora MacDonald, which the voiceover does anyway, there does not seem to be much premeditated interaction between image and music. The songs are presented on the same status as the monuments and mountains: as a spectacle, somewhat remote and sacralised. However, notice that ‘The road to the isles’ remains attached to a more domestic, light-hearted image. 90 James N. Nott, Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) p. 112. 37 The spectacular version of Scotland is more clearly associated with pipes and drums bands or, as Frank Bruce puts it, ‘the ornate and ubiquitous Scot of Victorian military spectacle’.91 If we remember Prendergast’s assertion that ‘bagpipes call up images of Scotland’, it is rather surprising that bagpipes are virtually never used as background music. It is indeed more likely to see the piper and not hear the pipes, than to hear the pipes without seeing the pipers. So bagpipe music, whether ceol mor (the most complex variant) or ceol beag, is not actually used to denote Scotland. The full audio-visual spectacle of the military pipe band is invoked instead, which in turn tends to restrict the musical repertory. Claudia Gorbman, in the mere paragraph that she devotes to the spectacular foregrounding of music, describes this ‘epic’ mode as a dimension of collective bonding: here music ‘bond[s] the spectator not to the feelings of the characters but to his/her fellow spectators’.92 In a cine-magazine piece about the funeral of the poet R. B. Cunningham Grahame, a lone piper can be seen among the mourners, playing a moving lament with the improvisational variations that are the mark of ceol mor and display the piper’s virtuosity. 93 But this is exceptional, since the main context for bagpipes in the films is the military tattoo or civic parade, which in the nineteenth century had been ‘an enormously popular free entertainment for all classes of society’.94 Army reviews were an extraordinary audio-visual spectacle, and the Highland regiments had of course a distinctive look, matched to a distinctive sound. As military spectacle served to spread a ‘military paradigm’ of civilian organization, we find pipe bands as an attractive to join the territorial corps (Our Citizen Army, G-B Equipments, 1935), as a social group for workers in a factory (A Romance of Engineering, SFP, 1938), as a tourist reception service (Highland Hospitality, SFP, 1939) and as a student joke (The Glasgow Student Between the Wars, Rank, 1939). The marching pipe band, then, is a powerful iconic presence in at least ten of the films. In all of these cases the band is as much to be looked at as heard, and the privileged playing style is ceol beag or ceol aotrom (‘light music’). As Seumas MacNeill notes, however, ‘pipers do not find it easy to play ceol mor together [and] in any case, nobody can march to ceol mor.’95 Therefore 91 Bruce, Scottish Showbusiness, p. 27. Gorbman, Unheard Melodies, p. 68. 93 Cedric Thorpe Davie, Scotland’s Music, p. 32. 94 Scott Hughes Myerly, “The Eye Must Entrap the Mind”: Army Spectacle and Paradigm in Nineteenth-Century Britain’. Journal of Social History 26:1 (1992) pp. 105-131, at 106. 95 Seumas MacNeill, Piobaireachd (Edinburgh: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1968): 83. 92 38 most of the music played by pipe bands comes from a repertory of dance music shared with the fiddle, and from which many of Burns’ tunes were derived. 96 There is thus a great amount of melodic redundancy between ostensibly diverse musical genres featured on the films. The same basic tunes are heard on many different rhythms and instrumentations. This is a familiar pattern in the history of Scottish music – a song can easily exist, for instance, as port à beul (vocal), fiddle, and bagpipe music, and be played sometimes as a strathspey and sometimes as a march. Therefore, the same song can function in many different ways. This ability to retain a recognisable core whilst permitting many expressive variations makes Scottish music remarkably manoeuvrable as film music. Many versions of the national can be articulated through it, and they can only be understood in context. 96 Cedric Thorpe Davie, Scotland’s Music, p. 30. Although fiddle music was a living popular tradition, it is almost never used in these films (except for a few SFP titles), perhaps for that very reason. Michael Powell’s feature The Edge of the World (1937), on the other hand, does contain a diegetic fiddling performance called ‘The Foula Reel.’ 39 Conclusions Music has guided the path in the exploration of a quite diverse group of films in the last chapters. By placing music in the spotlight, attention has been directed to the way these films are traversed by other cultural trends, and how these associations work to construct meaning for different audiences. The present dissertation can then be seen as a case study, testing the relevance of music for a better understanding of the social role of cinema. But, first and foremost, this essay has tried to shed some light on a scarcely considered period of cinema history in Scotland. Any conclusions should then be bounded by this horizon. The question that was posed in the first chapter was: As ‘clusters of historically specific cultural forms’, how do these films communicate ideas about the nation? In other words, in what musical way are these films 'national'? After the foregoing considerations about the functions of different kinds of music, in different semantic contexts, a pattern seems to emerge. I want to argue that the films in the corpus reveal three broad musical strategies, which can in turn be related to ‘ways to be national’, that is, to different discourses about Scotland. The first strategy relies on unremarkable light instrumental pieces for dynamic purposes, and on a restricted repertory of Scottish music for semantic and spectacular functions. I am referring in particular to the Burns canon of Scots songs, privileging ballads and lyrical songs over dance tunes. Many travelogues take this approach, which avoids ambiguity by using only the most recognisable tunes in highly orthodox versions. In using music thus, these films appropriate an existing version of Scottishness that has been available, especially for English audiences, since the eighteenth century. This is neither a Kailyard nor a Tartanry Scotland, but a bourgeois 'leisure' Scotland, where people spend their time hiking, sailing, and singing the auld sangs. This representation corresponds to what could be called, misquoting Mette Hjort, 'banal nationality'. 97 Scotland is understood, in essentialist terms, as a place, and signalled by unequivocal but un-waved flags. Travelogues depend on a narrative of ‘visit’, with an arrival and a departure, and the implication that everything will remain the same should the spectator 97 Hjort uses Michael Billig's term, 'banal nationalism', but in fact her use of the concept is at some remove. Here we are talking about how films are national, rather than whether they are nationalist. Mette Hjort, ‘Themes of Nation,’at p.106. 40 wish to become a tourist too. Music has a role in constructing this representation as part of a mode of address. In this case, the privileged perspective is that of an English, relatively affluent, leisured viewer (notice that this refers to the implicit viewer, not to the actual filmmaker or spectator). Thus, whereas some of the Empire Exhibition and NCHCF films try to recuperate the touristic outdoors for Scots themselves, they do not display such a coherent musical strategy. In the case of most works related to the documentary film movement, the sound strategy is more layered and purposeful. The approach could be succinctly described as ‘serious’: light music was abandoned in favour of ‘proper’ classical music. These scores contain fragments from Romantic programme music, such as overtures from operas, and incidental music was sometimes composed specially for the film. In this latter case the score could include modernistic gestures, as in Night Mail (GPO, 1936). Music was hardly ever remarked upon. The semantic function is subtly served by classical pieces with Scottish references, or by evocative pastorals with vaguely Celtic melodies. Foreground music includes a wider repertory, not relying solely on the Scots song canon. Traditional music, such as Gaelic songs and metric psalms, is surrounded by a discourse of anthropological interest rather than touristic curiosity. The function of this music is not then primarily denotative; these pieces are not unambiguous, easily readable markers of Scotland, since considerable education and attention are required to recognise them. Their function is to communicate something about Scotland and Scottish people. If ‘mood’ music can be described as pastoral, heroic, dramatic, and so on, these meanings become attached to the visual referent, helping define industrial labour or sea-faring, for instance, in terms of ‘universal’ human values. This is a particular way to ‘thematise’ the nation, that is, to make nationality itself a topic of the film. This is very evident in films like Wealth of a Nation. Whereas Hjort considers the nation to be primarily a topical theme, what these films do is ‘flag’ topical elements by linking them with perennial themes. This is a self-conscious, serious discourse that tends to address the viewers as citizens and as part of the nation. But the double dimension of signification (topical and perennial) makes these films accessible to an audience defined in terms of cultural capital rather than place of birth. This is linked with Griersonian ideas about democracy, and is founded on aspiration: national representation is geared towards the future, and the viewer it addresses is a citizen of the future. 41 The last strategy I will discuss is the one I have found most revealing. It is the fragmented, compiled soundtrack made up mostly of twentieth-century popular music. As it has been shown, no particular attention is reserved for recognisably Scottish music. When it is present, it is as part of a popular, rather than simply national, form of entertainment. Popular entertainment had developed in its own particular way in Scotland, and these local ways are adopted, because they are popular, not because they are local. I understand ‘popular’ here, following V.F. Perkins, as a category of access – those cultural forms that require command of ordinary social codes, not privileged ones. 98 This definition overlaps with the idea of ‘culturally shared knowledges’ as a way to understand how a mode of address can be considered ‘national’. The range of music that is summoned to appeal to this audience is outstanding. From ragtime to waltz and from Mendelssohn to Lauder, the repertory reflects the transnational dimension of the musical marketplace. The Scots canon is irreverently mixed into a functional free-for-all, where the remarkable flexibility of Scottish music is put to work. In 1937, Grierson wrote that the English music hall was ‘true British cinema's only contact with reality’99. Without saying so much about Scottish cinema, it is however my view that the Variety tradition was the most vital force in an endogenous representation of Scotland in the 1930s, precisely because it let in so much external influence. The adaptation and appropriation of styles builds up a musical mix that I would call ‘localised internationalism’. Films adopting this sound strategy, of which the NCHCF productions are the best example, are highly fragmented and imperfect, lacking in closure. This 'imperfection' is perceptible because these films fail to gloss over the many historically specific influences that inform them. The seams show, different textures and modes come together without blending completely. This is because these films speak in the present tense, with an urgent intimacy – not to the timeless shepherd on a hill, not to the future citizen in a new house, but to a contemporary audience that enjoys popular music, melodrama, and variety shows. This is then an intensely topical representation of the nation, that which is more likely to be understood by local audiences. It is too easy to be sentimental about the Variety days, as it is to assume that popular culture is necessarily progressive (or reactionary). However, the cheapness, the amateurish quality, the 98 V.F. Perkins, ‘The Atlantic Divide’, in Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau (eds) Popular European Cinema (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p. 196. 99 Quoted by Lawrence Napper, ‘A Despicable Tradition? Quota Quickies in the 1930s’, in Robert Murphy (ed) The British Cinema Book (London: BFI, 1997) 37-47, at 37. 42 audience's familiarity and participation, and the highly adaptable character of the shows, made this entertainment form a very promising ground for the development of a more open, unfinished version of national cinema, renouncing Hollywood's slickness and closure. This can in turn offer evolving, fragmented representations of the nation, avoiding essentialism. The Empire, however, could not be held together during the war by such a flimsy symbolic framework. It is perhaps no wonder that more robust representations held sway, and a more polished image of Scotland emerged after the war. Greater institutionalisation and professionalism also played their role, and the ‘experimental’ early sound period gradually faded from memory. But vestiges of it remain in archives and people’s attics, waiting for the age of the well-made feature film to fade away too. 43 Bibliography I have consulted the Glasgow University Library, the research library at the Scottish Screen Archive, and the British Library. The manuscripts and documents cited in the text are preserved by the Scottish Screen Archive; the archival reference number has been given in the footnote. Aitken, Ian. The Documentary Film Movement: An Anthology. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Allen, Douglas. ‘Workers’ Films: Scotland’s Hidden Film Culture’, in McArthur, Colin (ed.) Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television. London: BFI, 1982. pp. 93-99 Allen, Michael. “In the Mix’: How Electrical Reproducers Facilitated the Transition to Sound in British Cinemas,’ in Donnelly, K. J. (ed.) Film Music: Critical Approaches. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. Pp. 32-87 Alpers, Paul. ‘What is Pastoral?’ Critical Enquiry 8:3 (1982), pp. 437-460. Altman, Rick ‘General Introduction: Cinema as Event,’ in Rick Altman (ed.) Sound Theory Sound Practice. New York and London: Routledge, 1992. pp. 1-14. Altman, Rick. ‘The Silence of the Silents,’ The Musical Quarterly 80:4 (1997), pp. 648-718. Belton, John. ‘Awkward Transitions: Hitchcock’s Blackmail and the Dynamics of Early Film Sound’, The Musical Quarterly 83:2 (1999): 227-246. Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. London/Thousand Oaks/New Delhi: Sage, [1995] 2004. Blain, Neil and Katherine Burnett, ‘A Cause Still Unwon: The Struggle to Represent Scotland.’ In Blain, Neil and David Hutchison (eds) The Media in Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. pp. 3-19. Blain, Neil and David Hutchison (eds) The Media in Scotland. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008. Bruce, David. Scotland The Movie. Edinburgh: Polygon, 1996. Bruce, Frank. Scottish Showbusiness: Music Hall, Variety and Pantomime. Edinburgh: National Museums of Scotland, 2000. 44 Butt, Richard. ‘The Films of Scotland Documentaries’, http://sites2.scran.ac.uk/films_of_scotland/History/index.htm (accessed July 25th 2008) Butt, Richard. ‘Wealth of a Nation: Citizenship and the Public Sphere’, in McBain, Janet and Kevin Cowle (eds) ‘With an Eye to the Future: Donald Alexander and Budge Cooper, Documentary Film Makers. Glasgow: Scottish Screen, 1997. pp. 17-22. Chew, Geoffrey. ‘Pastoral’, in Stanley Sadie (ed.) The New Grove Dictionary of Opera, Grove Music Online / Oxford Music Online, http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/ article/grove/music/O007964 (accessed August 2008). Cloy, David. ‘Scottish Film Production in the Silent Period,’ in McBain, Janet (ed.) Scotland in Silent Cinema. Glasgow: Scottish Screen, 1998. pp. 5-13. Copland, Aaron. What to listen for in music. New York: Signet Classics, 2002[1939]. Crampsey, Bob. The Empire Exhibition of 1938: The Last Durbar. Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1988. Davie, Cedric Thorpe. Scotland’s Music. Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1980. Dick, Eddie (ed.) From Limelight to Satellite. Edinburgh: Scottish Film Council / BFI, 1990. Dyer, Ernest. ‘Film Appreciation in Great Britain’, Journal of Educational Sociology 12:2 (1938), pp. 129-136. Gallez, Douglas W. ‘Theories of Film Music’ Cinema Journal 9:2 (1970), pp. 40-47. Gorbman, Claudia. Unheard Melodies. London: BFI; Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Grierson, John. ‘The GPO Gets Sound’, Cinema Quarterly 2:4 (1934), pp. 215-221. Hammerton, Jenny. For Ladies Only? Eve’s Film Review, Pathe Cinemagazine 1921-33. Hastings: The Projection Box, 2001. Hardy, Forsyth. ‘Interview’ In McArthur, Colin (ed.) Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television. London: BFI, 1982. pp. 73-92. Hardy, Forsyth. Scotland in Film. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990. Higson, Andrew. ‘The Concept of National Cinema,’ [1989], reprinted in Williams, Alan (ed.) Film and Nationalism. London: Rutgers, 2002, pp. 52-67. Higson, Andrew. ‘The Limiting Imagination of National Cinema’, in Hjort and MacKenzie (eds) Cinema & Nation. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. pp. 63-74 Hjort, Mette. ‘Themes of Nation’, in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (eds) Cinema & Nation. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. pp.103-117. Irvine, Malcolm. ‘Film Production from the Scottish Angle’, Educational Film Bulletin 33 (Sept. 1946): 39-45. 45 Jarvie, Ian. ‘National cinema: A theoretical assessment’, in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (eds) Cinema & Nation. London and New York: Routledge, 2000. pp.75-87. Kalinak, Kathryn. Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film. Madison and London: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Keller, Hans. ‘National Frontiers in Music’, Tempo New Series No. 33 (Autumn, 1954), pp.2330. Klinger, Barbara. ‘Film History Terminable and Interminable: Recovering the Past in Reception Studies,’ Screen 38:2 (1997), pp. 107-128. Lebas, Elizabeth. ‘Sadness and Gladness: The Films of Glasgow Corporation, 1922-1938’. Film Studies 6 (2005), pp. 27-45 Low, Rachael. The History of the British Film 1929-1939: Documentary and Educational Films of the 1930s. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979. Low, Rachael. The History of the British Film 1929-1939: Films of Comment and Persuasion of the 1930s. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979. MacNeill, Seumas. Piobaireachd. Edinburgh: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1968. McArthur, Colin. ‘Scotland and Cinema: The Iniquity of the Fathers’, Scotch Reels, pp. 40-69. McArthur, Colin (ed.) Scotch Reels: Scotland in Cinema and Television. London: BFI, 1982. McBain, Janet. ‘As Others Saw Us’. Media Education Journal 21 (1996/7), pp. 16-18 McBain, Janet. ‘Scotland in Feature Film: A Filmography’. In Eddie Dick, (ed.) From Limelight to Satellite. Edinburgh: Scottish Film Council / BFI, 1990. pp.233-255. McBain, Janet. Pictures Past. Edinburgh: Moorfoot Publishing, 1985. Murphy, Robert. ‘Coming of Sound to the Cinema in Britain’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 4:3 (1984), pp. 143-160 Myerly, Scott Hughes. “The Eye Must Entrap the Mind”: Army Spectacle and Paradigm in Nineteenth-Century Britain’. Journal of Social History 26:1 (1992) pp. 105-131. Napper, Lawrence. ‘A Despicable Tradition? Quota Quickies in the 1930s’, in Robert Murphy (ed) The British Cinema Book. London: BFI, 1997, pp. 37-47. Newman, Steve. ‘The Scots Songs of Allan Ramsay: “Lyrick” Transformation, Popular Culture, and the Boundaries of the Scottish Enlightenment’, Modern Language Quarterly 63:3 (2002), pp. 277-314. Nott, James N. Music for the People: Popular Music and Dance in Interwar Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Perkins, V.F. ‘The Atlantic Divide’, in Richard Dyer and Ginette Vincendeau (eds) Popular European Cinema. London and New York: Routledge, 1992. 46 Prendergast, Roy M. Film Music, A Neglected Art. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Co., [1977] 1992. Rapée, Erno. Motion Picture Moods for Pianists and Organists. New York: G. Schirmer, 1924. Rosen, Philip. ‘History, Textuality, Nation,’ [1984] reprinted in Vitali and Willemen, Theorising National Cinema. London: BFI, 2006. pp. 17-28 Russell, Michael W. A poem of remote lives: images of Eriskay 1934: the enigma of Werner Kissling 1895-1988. Glasgow: Neil Wilson, 1997. Scottish Screen Archive, Scotland’s Moving Image Collection. Glasgow: Scottish Screen Archive, 2003. Scullion, Adrienne Clare. Media Culture for a Media Nation? Theatre, cinema and radio in early Twentieth-Century Scotland. PhD dissertation. University of Glasgow: Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, 1992. Scullion, Adrienne. ‘Screening the Heyday: Scottish Cinema in the 1930s’, in Dick (ed.) From Limelight to Satellite, Edinburgh: Scottish Film Council / BFI, 1990. pp. 41-52. Shand, Ryan John. Amateur Cinema: History, Theory, and Genre (1930-80). PhD dissertation. University of Glasgow: Department of Theatre, Film and Television Studies, 2007. Sherington, Jo. “To Speak its Pride”: The work of the Films of Scotland Committee 1938-1982. Glasgow: Scottish Film Council, 1996. Staiger, Janet. Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992. Street, Sarah. ‘British Film and the National Interest, 1927-1939,’ in Murphy, Robert (ed.) The British Cinema Book. London: BFI, 1997, pp. 17-26. Sussex, Elizabeth. The rise and fall of British Documentary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975. Swann, Paul. The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Vitali, Valentina and Willemen, Paul. Theorising National Cinema. London: BFI, 2006. Willemen, Paul. ‘The National Revisited,’ in Vitali, Valentina and Paul Willemen (eds), Theorising National Cinema. London: BFI, 2006. pp.29-43. Wilson, Norman. Presenting Scotland: A Film Survey. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Guild, 1945. 47 Online Resources (Active links as of August 27th 2008) BFI Film and TV Database http://www.bfi.org.uk/filmtvinfo/ftvdb/ British Universities Newsreel Database http://joseph.bufvc.ac.uk/BUND/search.php Film and Sound Online http://www.filmandsound.ac.uk/ Oxford Music Online http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/ Scottish Archive Network http://www.scan.org.uk/ Scottish Screen Archive http://ssa.nls.uk/ The Scotsman digital archive http://archive.scotsman.com 48 Appendices 1. Film Corpus 2. Unavailable Films, Newsreels, and Feature Films 49 Appendix 1: Film Corpus. Page 1 of 5 Title Year Production company Director Producer Camera Cinemat. Other cast and crew Sound recording A romance of engineering 1938 Scottish Films (1928) Limited Stanley Russell William Beardmore and Co. Graham Thomson Henry Cooper Comm. Writ. Stanley Russell; read James McKechnie Albion Truphonic Sound System Arbroath's new swimming pool 1935 Gaumont British News Bonnie Scotland calls you 1938 Associated British Picture Corporation Howard Gaye John C Elder, sponsor David McBraynes John C Elder Assist Isabel Elder; Titles Donald McLaren Cargo for Ardrossan 1939 Realist Film Unit for Petroleum Films Bureau Ruby Grierson Petroleum Films Bureau A. E. Jeakins Comm. Writ. Ruby Grierson. Clyde River 1939 LMS Railway Advertising and Publicity Department Crossing the tweed 1932 Universal News local topical Possibly commissioned by Pavilion, Galashields Dundee 1939 Scottish Film Productions (1928) Ltd Donald Alexander Stanley L Russell Graham Thomson Comm. Writ. Donald Alexander. Read Alastair Borthwick, Tom Smith Malcolm M Irvine (Albion Truphonic) Eriskay: A poem of remote lives 1935 Dr Werner Kissling Dr Werner Kissling Dr Werner Kissling Editor John Gifford Imperial Sound Studios Flood at Dumfries 1936 Girls' clubs appeal 1939 Give the Kids a Break 1937 Strand Glasgow's festival of fellowship 1937 Scottish Film Productions (1928) Ltd Granton Trawler 1934 Empire Marketing Board Music credits Background* Background Details Foreground Comments Length Seen at** Disc. Light symphonic with brass winds, becoming dance-band over shots of Glasgow streets. No music over factory interiors. Inspection of cadets: Scene is 1:30 min long. Cadet corps, shown in kilt uniform being reviewed. Some shots are sync, some inserts - prob only one camera. Piping continues to end of sequence, when name 'Beardmore' floats on the screen. Then music stops for the final sequence Made for Beardmore's of Glasgow, to be shown at their pavilion at the Empire Exhibition. Print in poor condition. 30 min SSA 0750 Diegetic' ragtime background to fashion show Probably a local topical. 5 min SSA 2372 Songs (solo performances): "Hail Caledonia!", by Murray Stewart (tenor), "Flora MacDonald's Lament", by Rita Stirling; "The road to the Isles" by Alex Henderson (baritone) Made up of three previous silent travelogues by JC Elder: Road Through the Sunset Isles, Honeymoon Cruise 1 and 2. 16 min BFI 17 min SSA 3649 None H. G. Halsted (Piezo-electric sound) Glasgow Orpheus Choir, Pipe band of HM Scots Guards, Rita Stirling, Murray Steward, Andrew Reid, Alex Henderson Cont. Almost inaudible instrumental, including fiddle jigs. Composer Alan Rawsthorne Disc. Light, unremarkable string music. Mood changes notoriously from rural to urban settings. Cont. Light instrumental, changing according to the film's themes thus: Woodwinds and harp, repetitive melody on origins of the Clyde; waltz on Lanarkshire landscape; Faster, brass on Glasgow streets; Brass-band march on shipyards; waltz on Greenock and Gourock; playful brass/string allegretto on holiday resorts; heroic symphonic on Arran. Disc. Only introductory music ('The Campbells are Coming') continuing from titles Bagpipe band marching on street Disc. Violin, piano, percussion arrangements of classical music, ranging from dramatic to sentimental. Very lively fiddle/pianoforte version of 'Bonnie Dundee' Film combines fictional scenes with National Players actors, travelogue-mode scenics, and industrial statistics. Disc. Gaelic songs collected by Duncan Morison. See book by Michael Russell, p. 12. Songs (non-diegetic): Waulking song (luadh); Morag Bheag nean; Mhurachaidch an t-saoir; Leannan Mo Ghaoil Mairi Bhan (male voice); Mac An Airidh Much importance given to traditional music. Production history and analysis in Michael W. Russell, A Poem of Remote Lives (1997). Cont. Continuing from titles, dramatic classical None No music besides song on titles The bonnie, bonnie banks of Loch Lomond', sung by group of girls by the waterside. Sword dance and girl playing bagpipes are shown, but with no music. Disc. Scottish nursery rhyme (children wash at Tantallon); lively instrumental march (kids running and walking to a castle and doing other outdoors activities); other instrumental song (children go to the sea) Several action songs e.g.. Gooseberry bush. Boy impersonates Harry Lauder doing "Roamin' in the Gloamin'"; other kids watch and join in in final chorus. Boy sings "Misty Islands of the Highlands". Other kids hum in harmony. Stately music on piano+strings (Glasgow cathedral); bright marching band music (City chambers parade featuring two pipe bands, which are not heard); Piano+fiddle jig (massive country dancing); waltzes (sailing); Scottish dance tunes on fiddles and pianoforte or organ Comm. Read Frank Phillips Mus. Dir. JS MacIntyre; The London Gaelic Choir Regal Cinema, Dumfries Donald Taylor John Grierson dist Technique Assist Ruby Grierson Glasgow Corporation Education Department Graham Thomson, Stanley L Russell Comm. Read Tom Smith Ted Crowther (Albion Truphonic) Mus. Dir. John McArthur; John McArthur's Quintet Cont. John Grierson John Grierson Editor Edgar Anstey E A Pawley (Visatone Marconi) Mus. Dir. A Cavalcanti [not credited] None *Background: Cont. = Continuous; Disc. = Discontinuous. ** SSA = Scottish Screen Archive. F & S Online http://www.filmandsound.ac.uk SSA 1787 LMS was the largest railway company at the time. "The creator of the [film] unit was Bill Brundell (...) Much of the photography and editing was contracted out to ‘Topical Press Agency’." Paul Smith, http://www.britishtransportfilms.co.uk/histor y/LMS.html [acc 02/06/08]. 4 min SSA 0764 18 min SSA 1061 SSA 1701 1 min SSA 2363 2 min SSA 0862 NCHCF 22 min BFI My bonnie' (instrumental) - inferred diegetic, although not sync. 'Fingal's Cave', from Mendelssohn's Hebrides Op. 26, mentioned on commentary. Massive dancing exhibition at Hampden Park: Scottish, English and Czech dances. Tap dancing performance on steamer, accompanied by two pianists. From SSA website: "Described as reel 3. Reel one (13 mins) and a second reel (11 mins) preserved by NFTVA. 'Reel 3' is likely to be reel 2 in effect as the second of the two reels held by NFTVA has end credits". 35 min SSA 0257 and BFI Someone is heard whistling and playing the concertina, but not seen. Film&Sound website: "Cavalcanti is known to have added the sound track of straightforward noises, including music played on a concertina, mingled with snatches of Scots conversation." 10 min F&S Online Appendix 1: Film Corpus. Page 2 of 5 Heavy industries 1936 GaumontBritish Instructional J C Elder Highland Hospitality 1939 Scottish Film Productions (1928) Ltd Malcolm M Irvine Allied Hotels Malcolm M Irvine Historical Scotland No. 1 The story of Culross How SCWS cigarettes and tobaccos are made Isles of the West 1938 Scottish Film Productions (1928) Ltd Henry Cooper Stanley L Russell Henry Cooper 1938 Jay's Film Service Ronald L Jay SCWS Ronald L Jay 1939c C J Cayley C J Cayley C J Cayley C J Cayley Ivory Gate 1932 Pathe Donald MacLaren Land O'Clans 1938 C J Cayley Misty Isle 1939 C J Cayley Mony a pickle 1938 Night Mail British Acoustic Full Range None Comm. Writ. Charles Davidson. Read James McKechnie Malcolm M Irvine (Albion Truphonic) Cont. Interior hotel scenes have generic dance-band music, whereas exterior scenics have Scots songs on an instrumental, sophisticated medley. Inc. Scots Wha Hae (Braemar gathering). Wedding march. 'Auld Lang Syne' at end. Comm. Read Tom Smith Malcolm M Irvine (Albion Truphonic) Cont. Violins, piano, harp: Medley of light music, waltzes, marches, etc. Cont. Cheerful march Cont. Piano, harp, woodwinds, strings. Sentimental waltz, with pedals. Gracefulness of some waltzes is at odds with the hard labour depicted. None [only on intertitles] Organ waltz Cont. Instrumental versions of Scottish songs inc. 'Annie Laurie', 'The Campbells are Coming', 'Loch Lomond'. On woodwinds and strings. Children dancing a reel described as 'the national reel' with shots of pipers. This has bagpipe music but rhythm does not fit. Cont. Mostly violins and woodwinds. Lively light music with quick editing. Sentimental music on shepherding and fishing scenes. Song of spinning and weaving, by the Portree Ladies' Gaelic Choir. Over images of said activities. Disc. Stately, courtly waltz is used to cover transitions. Some piano and woodwind notes are used to convey thrill. J Blake Dalrymple Comm. Read Morton King Imperial Sound Studios Cast: CRM Brookes RCA Photophone Mus. Dir. John McArthur Mus. Dir. W Trytel GBI Geography of Scotland; others in series include "Gateway of the East", "Gateway of the West", "Southern Uplands" Review on Scottish Educational Film Review Volume 1, Review No. 63. Teaching Notes at SSA, box 11/1/284. Pipe band receives tourists at Perth foregrounded by introductory poem mentioning pibroch and by commentary. 6 min SSA 0500 20 min SSA 0362 10 min SSA 0191 SSA 0425 Games at Barra: Highland dancing to bagpipes. NCHCF. Incomplete. Starts with long title asking young audience to be quiet. 16 min SSA 2592 13 min BFI 17 min SSA 0302 16 min SSA 2593 10 min F&S Online 22 min SSA 0103 and F&S Online 30 min F&S Online 4.4 min SSA 2371 Widgey R Newman John Miller C J Cayley C J Cayley C J Cayley GPO Film Unit Richard Massingham Alberto Cavalcanti 1936 GPO Film Unit Basil Wright, Harry Watt John Grierson Jonah Jones, Chick Fowle Comm. Writ. J Grierson, Watt, Wright, WH Auden AE Pawley, Sullivan, supervision Cavalcanti (Visatone Marconi) Mus. Dir. And comp. Benjamin Britten Disc. Modern instrumental score by Britten, with melodic and discordant parts, evoking the sound of the train. Mellower tones over Scottish landscape. More metallic timbre on images of Glasgow. Final sequence (with Auden's poem) could be considered as a musical piece… North Sea 1938 GPO Film Unit Harry Watt Alberto Cavalcanti H Fowle and Jonah Jones Editor Richard Q McNaughton Harry Watt, Alberto Cavalcanti, G. Diamond (Visatone Marconi) Mus. Dir. Ernst Meyer ['with Trawlermen and Townspeople of Aberdeen and Post Office Radio Operators'] Disc. Incidental symphonic music, evoking the rhythms of the sea and helping dramatize the storm. Mostly andante on strings, storm uses heavy percussion. Eternal Father, Strong to Save' - Church hymn/psalm (choir) - mixed with minister's voice. Oban Celtic meet Newtonmore 1937 Scottish Film Productions (1928) Ltd Cont. Bright waltzy music sandwiched between segments of commentary. O'er Hill and Dale 1932 Empire Marketing Board and GaumontBritish Cont. Shepherding scenes use bright adagios on violins, harp, woodwinds. Communal work at rounding-up set to waltzy piano and violin, and storm evoked through intercrossing scales. One of the 'Imperial Six' films given by the EMB to Gaumont for sonorisation and distribution. Opening of Green's Playhouse, Dundee 1936[?] Green's Film Service None Solemn but cheerful organ on titles. Impressive collection of optical effects. 4 min SSA 0842 Our citizen army 1935 G. B. Equipments Ltd. Clifford J Strain Strain Limited G. B. Equipments Ltd. None Land of Hope and Glory' on start and end titles. Recruitment propaganda. Clifford Strain had belonged to the Meteor Film Producing Society. 22 min SSA 1693 Paraffin Young: Pioneer of oil 1937 Realist Film Unit for Scottish Oils Ralph Bond Arthur Elton (Film Centre) A E Jeakins None Trumpet fanfare on start and end titles. Made for the Empire Exhibition, later shown in schools. 14 min SSA 0167 Comm. Read Morton King Imperial Sound Studios Playhouse, Oban Basil Wright John Grierson Basil Wright Comm. Read Andrew Buchanan Cast: Don Gemmell *Background: Cont. = Continuous; Disc. = Discontinuous. ** SSA = Scottish Screen Archive. F & S Online http://www.filmandsound.ac.uk Gaumont WF Elliot (British Acoustic Full Range) Mus. Dir. W Trytel; choral arrang. AM McNab. Portree Ladies' Gaelic Choir Massed pipe bands of all battalions perform the ceremony of retreat. Two men dance highland fling with a piper in front. Review in Monthly Film Bulletin 10:109/120 (1943) says "The musical background is a nuisance except in one section where the rhythm of Skye songs is seen to fit the rhythm of the spinningwheel and loom". Cost 2000 pounds; 'delighted and impressed documentarists as well as the public, the critics and the trade' (Low 144) SSA 0389 Appendix 1: Film Corpus. Page 3 of 5 River Clyde: A survey of Scotland's greatest river 1939 Scottish Film Productions (1928) Ltd Saltcoats gets new esplanade 1933 British Movietone News [Scottish Films?] Scotland for fitness 1938 GaumontBritish Instructional Brian Salt Assoc prod Stanley L Russell GW Pocknall Comm. Read Sir Iain Colquhoun British Acoustic Film Full Range Scotland, The Magic North 1935 Wardour Films / National Progress Albert H Arch dist Associated British Albert H Arch Comm. Read Leonard Caplan British Screen Service Scottish Cup Tie 1937 [Jack Johnstone?] Scottish News Magazine: Funeral of the late Mr. R. B. Cunningham Grahame 1936 Sea Food Cont. First 15 minutes are filled by two indistinct sentimental waltzes, on strings and woodwinds. Then leisure steamer scene - lively reel on strings, woodwinds, percussion. This blends into an energetic march on piano, strings and percussion, that, in turn, becomes 'Land of Hope and Glory' for the closing images. Land of Hope and Glory' (on violin+piano), for launching of ship 'Queen Elizabeth'. Many aerial images 20 min SSA 0377 None Slow reel on violin and pianoforte on title. Pipe band marching. They stand and play in front of the camera for a while. Camera pans slowly over audience, then back to band. Impressive use of sound. All speeches and clapping are recorded live; crowd noise is also picked directly. Carbon microphone can be seen on clip available online. Followed by "(Goodnight from Harry Kemp)" (3658) 5.3 min SSA 1330 Disc. Women exercise to jolly dance music. After end of commentary, a light brass band march plays over montage of different fitness activities. Films of Scotland Committee (Empire Exhibition) 11 min SSA 0231, F&S Online Cont. Sentimental orchestra versions of Scottish standards blending into each other, including 'Loch Lomond' and 'Auld Lang Syne' - also some less characteristic music used for storm setting and pastoral mode. The storm scene, created entirely by music (no storm on image) uses a furious symphonic rendition of 'Scots Wha Hae', with thundering percussion and piano (from Mackenzie's Scottish Rhapsody?) The commentator screams hysterically over all this. 9 min BFI Disc. Jazzy, dance band music. 2 min SSA 0159 Scottish Film Productions (1928) Ltd Cont. Lament on single bagpipe Included in longer versions of newsreel Things that Happen. 2.20 min SSA 5936 1938 Pathe Cont. Music alternates between dramatic symphonic pieces (for sea scenes) and light brass band songs (for market scenes) Films of Scotland Committee (Empire Exhibition) 11 min SSA 1060 and F&S Online Song of Happiness 1934 Pathe Disc. Song of Happiness' ((Meyer Davis/ Uriel Benjamin), on a very lively dance-band instrumental version, plays over intertitles and transitions. The rest of the film has diegetic performances. NCHCF. Acknowledgements to RCA Photophone 'for their generosity' probably waived royalties. 32 min BFI Southern Uplands 1940 GaumontBritish Instructional John C Elder GBI Geography of Scotland; Review on Scottish Educational Film Review Volume 1, Review No. 96. 9 min SSA 0630 Sport in Scotland 1938 Scottish Film Productions (1928) Ltd Stanley L Russell Basil Wright for John Grierson Henry Cooper, Graham Thomson Comm. Writ. Albert Mackie, Jack House; Read James McKechnie Sunny Days 1931 Jay's Films for Glasgow Corporation Ronald L. Jay Glasgow Corporation Education Department Ronald L. Jay Comm. Read H Williamson Stanley L Russell Clyde Navigation Trust Henry Cooper, Graham Thomson Comm. Writ. George Blake; Read James McKechnie Malcolm M Irvine (Albion Truphonic) Mus. Dir. John McArthur Attrib. Harry Kemp National Progress Orchestra conducted by Horace Shepherd Regal Picturehouse, Dumfries Jock Gemmell A. Simon (RCA Photophone) J Blake Dalrymple Piper seen amongst funeral cortege. Many action songs. Also: 'A Song of Happiness'; 'Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag'; 'She'll be coming round the mountain'; rhythmic percussion; West End Banjo, Mandolin and Guitar Band - march; 'Will ye no come back again?'; 'John Brown's baby has a cold upon his chest'; 'McNamara's band'; 'Daisy, Daisy' (Song titles from BFI website) None *Background: Cont. = Continuous; Disc. = Discontinuous. ** SSA = Scottish Screen Archive. F & S Online http://www.filmandsound.ac.uk H Weir at Vocalion (Western Electric Sound on Disk) Arrang. John C Raymond; Conductor HW Wilson Cont. Light music - fast-paced brass band marches (sports, tree felling), string adagio (fishing), lively allegretto (swimming, yachting, city, football). Pipes and drums on Highland games tossing the cabre. Films of Scotland Committee (Empire Exhibition) 10 min SSA 0314 and F&S Online Cont. Diverse music from 'sad' to cheerful. Tenement scenes: slow, melancholy piano+violin; "Happy days are here again" (Milton Ager) piano, violin, castanets version - repeated on several scenes of happy children; Slow instrumental "The end of the road" Dunoon; Religious hymns on violin+piano - church scene, thanksgiving; Zoo - playful piano rendition of classical tune; Nursery rhymes; Ragtime; Blue Danube waltz; choral - children sleeping, end titles. Happy days are here again' (Milton Ager and Jack Yellen) instrumental. Other songs [see left] - piano, violin and occasionally castanets, mandolin, ukulele. Boys seen playing mouth organs, not heard. NCHCF. Production history published in Sunday Mail 22/02/31, SSA box 4/22/2. 33 min SSA 0893 Appendix 1: Film Corpus. Page 4 of 5 Tam Trauchle's Troubles 1934 Pathé Pictures Limited Tartan Galore 1934c Fraser Neal Production The Children's Story 1938 Strand for Films of Scotland Alexander Shaw Stuart Legg Jo Jago The face of Scotland 1938 Realist Film Unit Basil Wright John Grierson A E Jeakins The Gateway of the East 1937 GaumontBritish Instructional J C Elder The Glasgow student between the wars 1939 Rank Film Studios C A Oakley (compilation) U of Glasgow for C A Oakley Pathé Gazette Additional shots by Stanley S Russell and D Gray Piano: Douglas Steen Cont. Piano accompaniment The Goal 1935 Pathe Pat Wilson Kenneth Gordon Ken Gordon Cast: Caroline Fletcher, CRM Brookes, R McKell, A Osprey, J Millar, W McCulloch. Music Publisher Association Incidental Medley of popular Scottish songs and marches on guitar, piano, violin. End with fast violin+piano rendition of 'The road to the Isles' The Highlands of Scotland 1936 GaumontBritish Instructional John C Elder The Key to Scotland 1935 Strand for the Travel Association Marion Grierson The march of progress [Shieldhall Furniture] 1938* Jay's Film Service [Ronald L Jay] The rugged island: A Shetland lyric 1934 Zenifilms Jenny Gilbertson [Brown] Boosey & Co, Chappell & Co. (music rights) Scenario Harold 'the Gangrel' Stewart (Daily Record/Mail). Cast: C. R. M. Brookes, Catherine Fletcher, Alex Osprey, Alex Liddle, Archibald Rennie, Archibald Frew, Robert Tulloch and Miss M.B. McDonald Glasgow Corporation Education Department Comm. Writ. Basil Wright. J Blake Dalrymple *Background: Cont. = Continuous; Disc. = Discontinuous. ** SSA = Scottish Screen Archive. F & S Online http://www.filmandsound.ac.uk 40 min Advert for a wintertime variety show at the Metropole Theatre, Glasgow. Still images with optical effects SSA 0253 SSA 3533 Simple instrumental pieces by a youth orchestra, including reels and marches. American jazz over young stenographers practising. Children's orchestra shown playing title music. Films of Scotland Committee (Empire Exhibition) 15 min SSA 1059 and F&S Online WF Elliot (British Acoustic Full Range) Mus. Dir. And comp. Walter Leigh Disc. Melancholy adagio on woodwinds and strings, incongruous with hard toil depicted. Music stops with mention of Calvinism and educational system. Lively dance-band music (percussion, strings, metals) reappears over images of heavy industries and shipbuilding. Returns to initial adagio later. Psalms sung in church. Films of Scotland Committee (Empire Exhibition) 13 min SSA 0034 and F&S Online The GBI Geography of Scotland. Teaching notes at SSA box 11/1/284. 8 min SSA 0463 Different carnival years feature a student pipe band with fake beards, and also some country dancing. A bagpipe reel plays over this, although it is obviously not sync. Compilation film arranged by Oakley from newsreel footage. 16 min SSA 1601 Margaret, of Tam Trauchle, sings 'Now the day is over' inducing a reverie in other characters [title: 'Memoryland' - sunsets]. 'Cockiebendie' (action song); 'We don't want to march like the cavalry' (action song); Cleland Dance Band (slow jazz tune); 'O Susannah' played on banjo by blind boy (song titles from BFI website). 'White Zulus' game song (rudimentary percussion). Scottish country dancing. Tambourine song. NCHCF. Music Publishers Association thanked for "generously granting all recording rights". Kenneth Gordon was producer and cameraman in Eve's Film Review. 38 min BFI GBI Geography of Scotland. Teaching notes at SSA box 11/1/221. 9 min SSA 3301 13 min BFI 11 min SSA 0427 None British Acoustic Full Range Scenario Aline Gordon Bright music-hall march. NCHCF Disc. None [Ronald L Jay] Jenny Gilbertson [Brown] Cont. Songs: 'The road to the isles'; 'Auld Lang Syne'; 'Here's to the next time'. Trauchle boys sing 'Home! Sweet Home!'; 'Camp fire concert', kilted man conducting children; Trauchle boys lead a version of 'McNamara's Band' with changed lyrics (camps anthem); Boys play piano; Margaret, blind girl sings fragment of 'How many miles to Dublin town?'; James Sutherland sings 'O for the wings of a dove', 'Wee Willie Winkie'. Action songs 'Impsey Wimpsey Spider' and 'Punchinello' - accompanied at girls' camp by an accordion/mandolin/ukulele ensemble; Girls sing 'In the good old summer time'. Mus. Dir. George Reith; The Orchestra of Trinity Academy, Edinburgh Comp/Arrang. Ursula Greville and Leighton Lucas SCWS (Scottish Cooperative Wholesale Society) Instrumental versions of featured songs, dance-band light music. Marylebone Studios (Piezo-electric sound) British Acoustic Full Range J Blake Dalrymple Disc. Leonard Hartley, Ian H McKeown (Visatone) Mus. Dir. De Wolfe; Comp. Kennie LeslieSmith Cont. Several varieties of dramatic incidental music, polite country dances (old and new town), reduced versions of Mendelssohn (Hebrides - over fishing villages) and other classical, piano concerto (education, science, medicine), repetitive motif on trumpet (shopping, modern life in Edinburgh) Cont. Bright marches on brass and strings, gentle string piece, waltz, military fanfare. Cont. Musical interpretation': art music score for small ensemble. Based on a theme which is re-stated in many rhythms and styles. Edinburgh Tattoo - many pipe bands. 'Hielan laddie' and other similar piece. SSA has papers and dossier prepared for restoration of film in 1996. SSA 0991 Appendix 1: Film Corpus. Page 5 of 5 The Tocher 1938 GPO Film Unit Lotte Reiniger Lotte Reiniger They made the land 1938 GaumontBritish Instructional Mary Field George Stevens Things that happen No. 1 1936 Scottish Film Productions (1928) Ltd Malcolm M Irvine Things that happen No. 3 1937 Scottish Film Productions (1928) Ltd Stanley L Russell Two sisters 1937 Up-stream 1932 Wealth of a Nation Stanley Russell Visatone Marconi Comm. Read EVH Emmett Malcolm M Irvine, Martin Wilson Mus. Dir. And Arrang. Benjamin Britten; themes from Rossini. Cont. Rossini themes arranged in a comic, maybe parodic way. Castanets and other unusual instruments. Called 'a filmballet'. The silhouette of a piper is seen, and other characters are clearly in Highland garb. Apart from that, its 'Scottishness' is contestable. 5 min F&S Online British Acoustic Film Full Range Disc. Emphatic, heroic march on titles, continues on soft violins. Same returns for closing flourish. Films of Scotland Committee (Empire Exhibition) 19 min SSA 1063 and F&S Online Albion Truphonic Sound System Cont. Light music by small ensemble, including waltzes and marches; dramatic symphonic piece on Loch Ness monster item. SSA box 11/1/327 has more info on Nessie item and photocopy of interview with Malcolm M. Irvine in the Scottish newspaper The Sunday Post, 01/11/36. 12 min SSA 0373 Albion Truphonic Sound System Cont. Light waltzes and marches, military march on police games; Romantic classical piece on bank robbery item. Features female commentator. 9 min SSA 0193 Cont. Cheery bright music, wedding march in relevant scene Semi-amateur, family movie. 6 min SSA 0323 Alec McGregor sings 'Maggie Lauder' with piano accompaniment. Lyrics from a bookpage shown. Stanley L Russell Stanley L Russell Stanley L Russell Comm. Writ. Stanley Russell EMB / GaumontBritish Arthur Elton John Grierson Jack Miller Comm. Writ. Andrew Buchanan RCA Photophone Cont. Symphonic - selections from classical repertoire, including Mendelssohn. Skye Boat Song / "O'er the seas to Skye" (instrumental) One of the 'Imperial Six' films given by the EMB to Gaumont for sonorisation and distribution. SSA 0039 1938 Scottish Film Productions (1928) Ltd Donald Alexander Stuart Legg Harry Rignold, Jo Jago Comm. Read Harry Watt; Assist Bladon Peak Marylebone Studios (Piezo-electric sound) Incidental Starts with peaceful woodwinds on a Scottish melody, then industrial noises. Music returns as transition over extreme ls of the Clyde shipyards. . Classical Romantic piece on building of Hillington state. Films of Scotland Committee (Empire Exhibition). Clearly Griersonian, with reconstruction of events. SSA 1062 and F&S Online West of Inverness 1939 Julian Ventle Stephen Durrell Charles Heath Comm. Read McDonald Hobley Imperial Sound Studios Cont. Slow instrumental ballad; strathspey on fiddle; Scottish symphonic; dreamy slow lilt with harp and strings, a modern stylized composition, similar to Mathieson. Lively reel - people at train station Symphonic Scottish music. Melody stated by solo reed and taken up by flute over strings and harp strums. Sheep scene is guided by music; v-o is quiet for a while as we see faces of sheep, of shepherds, and hilly landscape. Western Highlands 1933 Alba Films Duncan Robbins D P Cooper Comm. Read Harry Clifford Imperial Sound Studios Cont. The soundtrack pieces together a series of Scottish airs, including 'Comin' thro' the rye', 'The Campbells are Coming'. Each air plays for an average of 37.6 seconds. Mostly slow, pastoral music with harp chords and woodwinds. The bonnie banks of Loch Lomond' (sung by Thorpe Bates) over images and history of Glencoe. World of Steel 1938 Scottish Film Productions (1928) Ltd Stanley L Russell Colvilles Ltd Henry Cooper, Graham Thomson Comm. Writ. Geroge Blake; Read James McKechnie, Tom Smith Malcolm M Irvine (Albion Truphonic) Cont. Zetland Birds 1939 Bury Productions John Mathias and Cyril Jenkins Cyril Jenkins. Dist. Technique Cyril Jenkins Comm. Read Charles Spencer; Advisor James Fisher British Acoustic Film Disc. * Background: Cont. = Continuous; Disc = Discontinuous. ** SSA= Scottish Screen Archive. BFI = National Archive, London. F&S Online = http://www.filmandsound.ac.uk/ *Background: Cont. = Continuous; Disc. = Discontinuous. ** SSA = Scottish Screen Archive. F & S Online http://www.filmandsound.ac.uk Mus. Dir. Alfred Filer; Thorpe Bates Mus. Dir. John Reynders 9 min SSA 2593 From "Our Island" series. 11 min SSA 7090 Light modern music with a music-hall, parodic inflection. Playful string andante with castanets. Sentimental string waltz on images of Exhibition tower, then modernistic dissonant piece with metallic noises, which covers a montage sequence of objects made of steel (toys, cutlery, planes, etc) Made for Colville's to be shown at their pavilion in the Empire Exhibition. 6 min out of 30 SSA 0111 Light classical on oboe, turns more serious introducing strings and trumpets. Shots of cliffs go with a calm larghetto in violas, pizzicato violins, brass and percussion. Music is introduced stealthily again, covering the transitions. Very impressive cinematography with great close-ups and a lot of interesting animal activity. Telephoto following of a seagull, for instance, is a technical feat 17 min BFI Appendix 2: Unavailable Films Title Angling Banks and braes Beautiful Trossachs Caledonia stern and wild Come up and see me some time Crews corageous Family life of the Golden Eagle Glasgow – City of achievement Year 1932 1934 1938 1934 1934 Company Widgey Newman BIP Topical Press Agency BIP LMB Mentioned in Gifford 06498 Gifford 06650 Gifford 07263 Gifford 06655 Gifford 06662 1939 1935 1939 Grey seal Harvest of the North Hearty thanks Hyndland Secondary School Isle of the winds Jeannie Wilson Loch Lomond Loch Ness Misty Islands of the Highlands 1937 Priority Productions Scottish Film Productions Scottish Film Productions for Films of Scotland Committee Bury Productions C.J. Cayley Productions Pathe Musical gems of Scotland [series] North of the border On the Fishing banks of Skye On the slate Over the border Sam the assassin Scotland Scotland marches on Scotland, a land of romance Skye High Templeton Carpets The Loch Ness monster There she blows Ye banks and braes o' Bonnie Doon 1930 1936 1938 1933 1935 1934 1936 British Foundation Pictures Pathe Eagle Wetherell Ace Films Gifford 07395 Low 1979 Wilson 1945, Gifford 07398 Wilson 1945 Wilson 1945 Gifford 06447 BFI website Gifford 07319 BFI website Gifford 06873 Gifford 06668 Gifford 06927 1936 Viking Films Gifford 06930 1938 1935 1938 1939 1937 1935 1937 1933 1938 GPO Film Unit GPO Film Unit British Foundation Pictures Fidelity Scottish Film Productions Cooper Pathe National Progress Stanley Watson Scottish Film Productions Wardour Films Anglo-American Eagle Wilson 1945 Wilson 1945 Gifford 07337 Gifford 07446 BFI website Gifford 06881 Gifford 07091 Wilson 1945 Gifford 07266 Wilson 1945 Gifford 06635 Gifford 07324 Gifford 06872 1934 1938 1935 References: Denis Gifford, The British Film Catalogue: Vol 2, Non-Fiction Film 1888-1994 (London: Routledge, 2001); catalogue number given. Rachael Low, The history of the British film, 1929-1939. Documentary and educational films of the 1930's (London: Allen and Unwin, 1979); Norman Wilson, Presenting Scotland: A Film Survey. (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Film Guild, 1945);BFI Film and TV Database (http://www.bfi.org.uk/filmtvinfo/ftvdb/); Paper documents at Scottish Screen Archive. Appendix 2b: Feature Films and Newsreels Title Bonnie Scotland Highland fling Hoots Mon Year 1935 1936 1939 I know where I'm going! Kidnapped Marigold Mary of Scotland Owd Bob Red ensign Said O'Reilly to McNab Shipyard Sally 1945 1938 1938 1936 1938 1934 1937 1939 Spring handicap Storm in a teacup 1937 1937 Tam O'Shanter The Cohens and the Kellys in Scotland The edge of the world The ghost goes west The little minister The loves of Robert Burns The old lady shows her medals The rugged island The secret of the loch The thirty-nine steps Thistledown 1930 1930 Company Hal Roach Studios Fox British Warner Brothers First National Archers 20th Century Fox ABPC RKO Gainsborough Gaumont Gainsborough th 20 Century Prods ABPC London – Victor Saville BIP Universal Genre Comedy Quota quickie? Romance Drama Drama Comedy Musical – Gracie Fields Comedy Comedy Director James W. Horne Manning Haynes William R Neill Michael Powell Otto Preminger Thomas Bentley John Ford Robert Stevenson Michael Powell William Beaudine Monty Banks Herbert Brenon Victor Saville R. E. Jeffrey William James Craft 1937 1936 1934 1930 1937 Rock studios London Films RKO B&D Drama Comedy Romance Musical Michael Powell René Clair Richard Wallace Herbert Wilcox British TV 1934 1934 1935 1938 Zenifilms Wyndham Gaumont Warner Brothers First National Drama Fantasy Crime Musical Scottish romance' Jenny Brown Milton Rosmer Alfred Hitchcock Arthur Woods Till the bells ring 1933 BSFP Comedy, 46 min Graham Moffat What every woman knows 1934 MGM Gregory LaCava Newsreels at Scottish Screen Archive Benny Lynch clips Black Watch newsreels British Movietone News 465A, His Majesty opens Empire Exhibition British Movietone News 465A: His Majesty opens Empire Exhibition British Paramount News 242: Scots honour the Prince Gaumont British News 555, Ambassador Kennedy Receives the Freedom of Edinburgh and Speaks on World Affairs Gaumont British News No. 116, Jedburgh Handba' Gaumont British News No. 234, The "Queen Mary" goes down the Clyde to the sea Great Bridge over the Forth Mr Walter Elliott, minister of agriculture, marries Miss Tennant at North Berwick Pathé Super Sound Gazette No 35/68: His Majesty in Scotland Perth presentation Universal News 355: Royal visit to Dundee Universal News 394: Rolling along - Skating on the roads Universal News No. 438, The fishers' walk Universal News No. 440, No. 534 [Queen Mary] Launching Ceremony