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World Film Locations: Glasgow explores Scotland’s biggest city and the many locations in which its films are viewed, set and shot. Taking in the important moments and movements in its rich cinematic history, this book seeks to discover the city’s culture, character and comedy through its cinematic identity. Essays cover a variety of topics including a background of Glasgow’s cinema-goers and picture houses, the evolution of Scots comedy, and the role of the city as inspiration for grassroots and underground filmmakers, as well as big Hollywood productions. Thirty-eight films are featured, from classics like Forsyth’s Gregory’s Girl and Loach’s Carla’s Song to cult hits like Boyle’s Trainspotting . Bollywood is also represented, alongside European titles and grim Scots realism like Sweet Sixteen , My Name is Joe , and Red Road , and new titles including Fast Romance , Perfect Sense , and NEDs , making this an essential guide to Scotland in film.

Maps/Scenes Scenes 1-7 1973 - 1984 Scenes 8-14 1984 - 1998 Scenes 15-20 1998 - 2001 Scenes 21-26 2001 - 2003 Scenes 27-32 2003 - 2005 Scenes 33-38 2005 - 2011 Essays Glasgow: City of the Imagination - Paul Gallagher Cinema City: Glasgow’s Passion for Cinema - Neil Johnson-Symington Glaswegian Comedy: A Distinct Sense of Humour - Keir Hind The Gift of Constraint: Danish-Scottish Collaboration and the Advance Party - Pasquale Iannone Glasgow’s Kitchen Sink: The Cinema of Ken Loach and Peter Mullan - David Archibald Dear Green Shoots: Underground Film-Making In Glasgow - Sean Welsh Glasgow: Hollywood’s Film Set - Nicola Balkind

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Publié par	Intellect Books Ltd
Date de parution	01 janvier 2012
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781841507460
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	4 Mo

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WORLD FILM LOCATIONS GLASGOW
Edited by Nicola Balkind
First Published in the UK in 2013 by Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First Published in the USA in 2013 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written consent.
A Catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright 2013 Intellect Ltd
Cover photo: NEDs 2010 Blue Light / The Kobal Collection
World Film Locations Series
ISSN: 2045-9009
eISSN: 2045-9017
Copy Editor: Emma Rhys
World Film Locations Glasgow
ISBN: 978-1-84150-719-4
EISBN: 978-1-84150-746-0
Printed and bound by
Bell Bain Limited, Glasgow
CONTENTS
Maps/Scenes

Scenes 1-7 1973 - 1984

Scenes 8-14 1984 - 1998

Scenes 15-20 1998 - 2001

Scenes 21-26 2001 - 2003

Scenes 27-32 2003 - 2005

Scenes 33-38 2005 - 2011

Essays

Glasgow: City of the Imagination Paul Gallagher

Cinema City: Glasgow s Passion for Cinema Neil Johnson-Symington

Glaswegian Comedy: A Distinct Sense of Humour Keir Hind

The Gift of Constraint: Danish-Scottish Collaboration and the Advance Party Pasquale Iannone

Glasgow s Kitchen Sink: The Cinema of Ken Loach and Peter Mullan David Archibald

Dear Green Shoots: Underground Film Making In Glasgow Sean Welsh

Glasgow: Hollywood s Film Set Nicola Balkind

Backpages
Resources
Contributor
Filmography

INTRODUCTION
World Film Locations Glasgow
DISSECTED AS IT is by the River Clyde, Glasgow is certainly a city of meandering divisions. The shipyards to the south speak of industry, while the affluent West End architecture and sprawling parks make for a lovely sunny day. All across its urban landscape Scotland s unofficial capital of the west teems with contradictions. At first thought, Glasgow s reputation and its cinema call to mind similar attributes. It is an industrial city of engineers known for its knife crime and penchant for fried foods. Its cinema is home to hard men, gritty social realism and an undercurrent of black humour. But the second city of the Empire - so called because it was once Britain s second-largest port - is also a city of grand architecture and rich cultural heritage.
Both trends continue to shape Glasgow and its cinema, but as the city grows and will shortly become home of the Commonwealth Games, stereotypes begin to crumble. Glasgow is breaking out of the cultural moulds of Just Another Saturday s workers strikes and A Sense of Freedom s gang fights and (though these topics are often revisited), the city has come into its own, beginning a trend of gentle comedies with dark undertones, kitchen sink slices of life with varying levels of grit, and even Hollywood-style escapism.
Glasgow has transformed from industrial seaport to mini-metropolis, yet it is still a Dear Green Place. Following the meandering Clyde, its banks are propped up by cranes and home to stunning vistas and modern architecture. Home to the tallest cinema in the world as well as Charles Rennie Mackintosh and Alexander The Greek Thompson s grandest designs, Glasgow s identity is as unique as it is versatile - it can embolden first-time film-makers or disguise itself as San Francisco at will. If you ve ever pointed at a corner of Glasgow on film in recognition or wonder, this book is for you.
The World Film Locations series seeks to circumnavigate the globe, finding the real-world counterpoints to the most eye-catching cinematic backdrops. This series does not seek to be encyclopaedic, but aims to tease out the interesting spaces captured on film and place them in a new context, exploring how the location relates to the film at hand and how it looks stripped bare in its natural habitat. Neither is this book a travel guide, though it would service as one. Our goal is to find the identity of the city through an examination of some of - rather than the sum of - its parts. We hope you ll find your own way to enjoy and enhance your experience of these films in your reading.
Nicola Balkind, Editor
THINK OF GLASGOW ON FILM and chances are you think of crime, gangsters, poverty and hardship. Looking over the list of films covered in this book, it is clear where that thought would come from: a large proportion of them deal with at least one of those themes. But to go deeper is to find that beneath that narrow thematic surface lies a breadth of different interpretations of Scotland s largest city through cinema history. The title city of the imagination is apt here, for despite - or perhaps because of - the hard and often bleak stories played out in Glasgow on the cinema screen, film-makers have continually allowed their minds to wander free from the limitations of tangible reality when looking at the city.
The camera uncovers beauty in places where it is least expected, and this is a key way that Glasgow has captured the imaginations of filmmakers. Both Ratcatcher (Lynne Ramsay, 1999) and Neds (Peter Mullan, 2011) are set in the broken-down housing schemes of 1970s Glasgow, but in both cases the bleakness of the characters situations is contrasted by the artful work of the films cinematographers, Alwin Kuchler and Roman Osin, respectively, who find images of beauty in lines of rubbish bags, graffitied swing-parks and seemingly bland architecture. In the apocalyptic romance Perfect Sense (2011), David Mackenzie presents an equally bleak imagining of a possible future, but the beauty in this scenario comes from the poignancy of Michael (Ewan McGregor) and Susan s (Eva Green) doomed love. It s a poignancy that is given weight by what could be termed the soul of the city in which it plays out: the cobbled streets of Glasgow s Merchant City and the West End s century-old sandstone tenements remain firm, speaking of the city s own ability to withstand the pressures that will ultimately wear down these human protagonists.

The same tenements are also a visual marker in On A Clear Day (Gaby Dellal, 2005) on the steep streets of Partick, overlooking the River Clyde and the dockyards where the film s story begins. But the effect is opposite and hopeful as the camera s raised perspective foreshadows the hope that will ultimately be restored to the main character, Frank (Peter Mullan), by the story s triumphant end. While such unmitigated success is exceptional for a character in a Glasgow-set film, the lightness and humour of the character s outlook is not; just as film-makers have uncovered beauty in the unlikeliest of Glasgow locations, so they have often revealed the city s humour in places where it wouldn t - and some might say shouldn t - be expected. This is less about the city as a location, more as a state of mind, and a Glasgow state of mind appears to be one that is laughing most of the time. It s found in Comfort and Joy (Bill Forsyth, 1984), a sweet and funny film that tells a very sad story, and also in Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself (Lone Scherfig, 2002), a film of humour and life in spite of its title. But it is another Peter Mullan film, Orphans (1998), that pins down something much darker and more quintessentially Glaswegian: that brand of gallows humour that asserts that no subject is beyond joking about. Indeed, the story of four adult siblings grieving their mother, with its mix of violence, religion, magical realism and hilarity, is one that could arguably only have been brewed in Glasgow.
Opposite Ratcatcher (1999) / Below Death Watch (1980)

Above 1980 Selta Films, Gaumont, SFP Opposite 1999 Path Pictures International, BBC Films
Mullan is clearly a key figure, both in front and behind the camera, in terms of Glasgow on film. Of equal significance, but bringing a very different focus, is Ken Loach, the film-maker who directed Mullan to global recognition as recovering alcoholic Joe Kavanagh in My Name is Joe (1998). Loach has made three Glasgow-set films with writer Paul Laverty, four if you include Greenock drama Sweet Sixteen (2002), and the pair returned to the city to film a new feature, The Angels Share , in 2011. Loach always centres his stories on marginalized people and issues of social justice, and he and Laverty
While Glasgow has often been and continues to be used as a stand-in for other major world cities on film, it is in the moments when film-makers have captured the city unadorned, as itself, that the most enduring images have been created. enduring images have been created. In Red Road (Andrea Arnold, 2006), as the camera seems almost awestruck taking in the sight of the looming tower blocks of the title street, or in the deeply evocative opening shot of Death Watch (Bertrand Tavernier, 1980), beginning in the Necropolis and craning up to take in the whole sprawling city; in these moments Glasgow seems made for the cinema screen.
Moments like these are paradoxical, as they simultaneously make the city into a new, imaginary character on film and capture a specific historic moment in terms of the real city s life beyond the screen. The Glasgow that Robert Carlyle s George drives his bus around in Carla s Song (Ken Loach, 1996) is, in the film s fiction, the Glasgow of 1987, but at the same time, beyond the minor period adjustments, it is Glasgow as it looked when the film was shot in 1996. Bill Forsyth, Scottish director of cinema classics Gregory s Girl (1981) and Local Hero (1983), summed up this paradox in typically pointed style with the onscreen note that introduced his first, Glasgow-shot film That Sinking Feeling (1980): The action of this film takes place in a fictitious town called Glasgow. Any resemblance to any real town called Glasgow is purely coincidental. It is in that contradiction, in the space between real physical locations and the camera s tric