Cinema, Culture, Scotland

Selected Essays

Author: Colin McArthur and Jonathan Murray

Anthologises key works from the oeuvre of Colin McArthur, a pioneering critic within Anglophone film and Scottish cultural studies.

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Summary

Anthologises key works from the oeuvre of Colin McArthur, a pioneering critic within Anglophone film and Scottish cultural studies.

Description

This book anthologises selected key works from the oeuvre of Colin McArthur, a pioneering figure within Anglophone Film and Scottish cultural studies since the 1960s.
Collecting together thirty-seven essays written between 1966 and 2022, twenty-one of which were hitherto out-of-print, the book identifies and illustrates the central strands of scholarly interest that have defined one of British Film Studies and Scottish Cultural Studies' most influential careers: critical investigation and legitimisation of mid-twentieth-century Hollywood cinema and popular American film genres; the cinematic representation of Scotland and the gradual development of a Scottish film production sector; and Scotland's status as a distinctive visual and material cultural signifier within a diverse range of international popular cultures from the eighteenth century to the present.

Critic Reviews

Cinema, Culture, Scotland is an autobiography of ideas by a pioneering, deeply committed writer on film and the wider culture, from angry young man to internationally recognised authority; it is also a history of English-speaking Film Studies since the mid-1960s by one of the discipline's key contributors. Much more than a 'legacy' volume set in stone, it should be a continuing inspiration to new generations of writers, thinkers and practitioners who take film seriously.

--Professor Sir Christopher Frayling, Former Rector of the Royal College of Art and Chair of Arts Council England; Award-winning Writer and Broadcaster

Ranging from pioneering analyses of popular American cinema to ground-breaking studies of the representation of Scotland in visual and material culture, Colin McArthur's writings have always, from the 1960s to the present day, constituted major interventions in their fields. It is thus particularly welcome that some of the finest examples are now readily accessible, and in such a diligently edited collection.

--Professor Julian Petley, Brunel University

About the Author

Colin McArthur is former Head of the Distribution Division at the British Film Institute and former Visiting Professor at Glasgow Caledonian University and Queen Margaret University. He has written extensively on Hollywood cinema, British television and Scottish culture. His most recent book is Along the Great Divide (2020).

Jonathan Murray is Senior Lecturer in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Edinburgh. He is the author of The New Scottish Cinema (2015) and Discomfort and Joy (2011), a Contributing Writer for Cineaste magazine and co-Principal Editor of Journal of British Cinema and Television.