Early Cinema in Scotland

This collection makes incisive interdisciplinary contributions to the discussion of Scotland’s formative cinema years before and during the transition to sound. Scotland’s intertwined film and cinema histories are set against historical details of geography, culture, politics and economics, and invite readers to question the interplay of variables, both local and from beyond national borders, that helped to make these narratives simultaneously distinctive and aligned with trends elsewhere…intellectually rewarding and highly enjoyable. -- Heather Norris Nicholson * SCREEN *
Early Cinema in Scotland represents an important benchmark in what has come to be called the "new cinema history." The fruit of three years of dogged research by a talented team of cinema historians, it situates the emergence of cinema within the complex political, social, and cultural contexts of "place." In do so it productively complicates notions of the local, the national, urban and rural; modernity and tradition. It is revealing in its account of the particularities of "Scotland" and "Scottishness," while, at the same time, establishing a framework for comparative analysis. John Caughie and his colleagues have set a new standard for cinema historiography. -- Professor Robert C. Allen, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill