The Major Minor Cinema: the Highlands and Islands Film Guild (1946-71)

The proposal focuses on the contact with cinema during 1946-71 by isolated, religiously- conservative, linguistically-distinctive and economically-vulnerable communities in the Highlands and Islands. This contact divided communities, threatened the Gaelic language, and it was feared, fostered young people's desire to out-migrate. The project seeks to explore this in detail, before the generation that experienced it dies out. The formation of the Highlands and Islands Film Guild continued a pre-war initiative of the Scottish Film Council to make non-commercial cinema available to rural areas through the substandard gauge of 16mm. This continued during the second world war via the Ministry of Information and the Evacuation Film Scheme. The Film Guild was proposed to counter depopulation and improve leisure facilities for remote communities forming part of wider economic and cultural initiatives to bolster community activity, cohesion and recreation. It is a widely remembered but still unwritten part of Scottish cinema history in the period stretching from before television and extending into its early penetration into these zones. The service was often delivered personally by travelling operators with the assistance of local communities in spaces such as village or school halls not constructed for film exhibition. Localised exhibition projection in spaces shared by the operators, projector and audience, generated a different kind of cinema-going experience which is reflected in the depth of feeling and stories attached to remembering it. The current international turn in film history towards other cinemas underlines the shifting geography of enquiries into where and what cinema has been. Given the geography of Scotland, the history of the Film Guild adds a distinctive contribution to this research. The research will look at the operations of the Guild in terms of local community reaction (popular memory), schools, churches and third sector institutions) the local authorities, and the Scottish Office (including the Scottish Education Department, the Home and Health Department and the Highlands and Islands Development Board). It will combine archival, oral and creative research, building a historical record of rural cinema-going through a series of case studies. The project will be promoted in local media prior to each study. National and local archival research will investigate how the organisation provided and managed its cinema service. The National Archives of Scotland will provide records of programming, distribution and exhibition, promotion, revenue, attendance and audience feedback. Oral history enables the past experiences of residents and Guild operatives to be added to the historical record. A pilot study of the Orkney rural cinema scheme confirmed the importance of the operators in guaranteeing programmes, the effects of improvised exhibition demanded by the variable spaces that accommodated the cinema and a preference for programmes containing local content. A network of contacts has also been accumulated in response to project publicity. The volume of respondents demonstrates the importance of carrying out the study while it is possible to make this audience this cinema part of our cultural history. The PI Dr. Ian Goode has researched and published on rural cinema exhibition and will be supported by a research assistant specializing in oral history. Ian is part of a leading research strand concerned with 'other' cinemas and early cinema in Scotland. He has expertise in Scottish Film and Television and post-war cinema culture. The CI Dr. Sarah Neely specialises in Scottish Cinema, the Orkney based director Margaret Tait, and archival research. Neely has a background in facilitating creative writing. The CI Professor Callum Brown is a leading historian of religion and society in the west, with expertise in Scotland in the 19th and 20th centuries, and with extensive experience in oral history.