Isolated Figures in a Remote Scottish Landscape:Place and Identity in the Films of Scott Graham

The relationship between place and identity has had a very specific significance in the development of Scottish cinema. Until the 1980s Scotland tended to be depicted as an essentially rural and remote, a fantasy space characterised within the interlinked representational discourses of tartanry and kailyard by romantic and picturesque highland and island locations or parochial and backward villages and small towns. With the emergence of a New Scottish cinema in the 1990s, this was subsequently replaced by a focus on more realist narratives located in the urban centres of Glasgow and Edinburgh. In this essay, I will explore the work of Scott Graham, whose three features to date - Shell, Iona and Run – have provided a renewed engagement with a contemporary Scotland that (re)incorporates both the highland and island landscapes that provided the backdrop to the romantic tradition of tartanry, and the small-town setting familiar from the kailyard tradition. These settings are central to the identity and predicament of Graham’s protagonists, who are struggling with a sense of isolation, loneliness or lack of connection, alienated from place, community and even family. Consequently, Graham provides evidence for the continuing relevance of a distinctive Scottish cinematic tradition.