"Films of Scotland for the World:" Trans/national Media Flows and The Films of Scotland Committee in the 1950s and 1960s

Abstract

This dissertation considers Scotland’s position in the global media-scape of the mid-twentieth century by examining how the Films of Scotland Committee, a small film commission established by the Scottish Council on Development and Industry in 1954, navigated the transnational media flows between Britain, Hollywood, and beyond. With a consideration of contemporary understandings of the national and transnational in cinema and media studies, I contend that the Films of Scotland Committee facilitated and encouraged film production in the small nation when there was virtually none and aimed to project what they deemed a positive representation of the country’s people, industry, and culture on cinema and television screens around the world. Their awareness of, and active participation in, the global media flows during this time evidenced what I term a distinctly trans/national perspective in an effort to update antiquated notions of the nation. This shorthand is applied in two manners: first, as a concept to demonstrate industry practices that purposefully foregrounds both the nation and transnational circulation simultaneously; and second, as an analytical approach that helps determine how and why texts produced by a given country are purposefully either, or both, at a given time.

Utilizing an historical media industry studies approach, I apply discursive analysis to archival materials culled from the Margaret Herrick Library in Los Angeles, the Films of Scotland Committee’s administrative records and films housed in the National Library of Scotland’s Moving Image Archive, and a variety of industry and popular presses. Through this examination I demonstrate that while full scale film production did not exist in Scotland for the majority of the twentieth century, the Films of Scotland Committee situated itself as an official body responsible for monitoring and facilitating production in the nation to ensure its interests were represented on both domestic and international screens. Each chapter in this dissertation considers how the social, economic, industrial and political factors surrounding the re-establishment of the Committee in the mid-1950s and its existence into the 1960s, impacted its manner of operations and ability to fulfill its remit.

Analyzing the Films of Scotland Committee’s activities and surrounding contexts serves to (re)situate Scotland at the intersection of contemporary understandings of the national and transnational in cinema and media studies and foregrounds the mid-twentieth century film and television industries in relation to Scottish studies. Doing so not only fills a veritable gap in scholarship on this particular period of media industry history in Scotland, but also recounts the hitherto untold story of the Committee’s early years through an excavation of their rich archive.