From Scotland With Love
Director Virginia Heath | UK 2014 | 1h15m | cert PG
You can tell an awful lot – and yet also very little – from the title of From Scotland With Love. Director Virginia Heath
and composer King Creosote’s remarkable collaborative venture frames itself as a postcard from the Scottish
twentieth century in some ways while striving to be anything but in several others. The postcard typically tries to
communicate something about a given place through use of a carefully selected single image of the latter; but From
Scotland With Love fashions a byzantine collage of Scottish cultures, communities and customs from thousands of
archival film reels. The postcard typically keeps things short and sweet (even if, in the age of Twitter, its messages
can retrospectively seem more like Tolstoy); but From Scotland With Love attempts nothing less than an ambitious
portrayal of the diversity and detail of a whole nation’s experience over an entire century’s span. The postcard
typically puts the best gloss on both the location and situation it describes; but From Scotland With Love is at pains
to balance sentiment, scepticism and sorrow in its depiction of twentieth-century Scotland’s story. The postcard
typically invites, even if only in a rhetorical sense, its addresses to share in the experience of those who write and
send it (‘wish you were here’); but a large part of From Scotland With Love’s power stems from the fact that it
fleetingly reanimates places and people that often seem lost to us from the vantage point of 2014.
None of this is to suggest, however, that From Scotland With Love’s name is a red herring, deliberate or otherwise.
Like the postcard, this film ought to be understood and experienced as a collective communique. Heath and
Creosote’s movie is something fashioned by, or on behalf of, multiple people (a family enjoying a week doon the
watter, say) and addressed to multiple others (the friends and kinsfolk waiting for news of the jaunt back home).
From Scotland With Love’s central structuring conceits – the remarkable closeness of the creative collaboration
between its credited director and composer, the work’s emergence from the painstaking and time-consuming
compilation, selection and reorganisation of acres of found archival footage shot by other (often nameless)
individuals – mark it out as a film proud to be multiply authored. Moreover, this movie’s title also flags from the very
outset certain of its key thematic preoccupations. The latter include the importance of precisely who and what was
extracted and exported from the land during the twentieth century. Moreover, the film makes no attempt to ignore
or occlude the extent to which many of those local resources (coal, steel and mass emigration, for instance) are no
longer deemed viable and/or valuable in the early twenty-first. From Scotland With Love is both affecting and acute
in its account of the closeness (physical, professional and emotional) of many twentieth-century Scotswomen and
men to the local landscapes they lived and worked on. It deftly underscores the historic (and still ongoing)
importance of the nation’s natural resources for its economic and social life. It also reminds local viewers that, in the
words of opening song ‘Something To Believe In’, it could be said that “our story […] has only begun.” Watching From
Scotland With Love, one is struck by the extent to which Scots in the twenty-first century arguably face many of the
social, economic and political questions that confronted our forebears. This is so even if the answers we collectively
agree and articulate might often be very different from those proffered by (or to) our great-great-grandparents.
It’s not enough, however, to simply note and praise the notable complexity and consideration of From Scotland With
Love’s cultural politics. We also ought to acknowledge the extent to which such qualities emerge from the film’s
comparably accomplished cinematic and musical form; the latter comprises no fewer than nineteen distinct short
essay films, each accompanied by its own specifically tailored King Creosote composition and performance. The
work’s opening moments, for example, counterpoint images of trams running through early-twentieth-century
central Glasgow with the accordion strains that introduce King Creosote’s ‘Something To Believe In’. Although less
than a minute old by this point, From Scotland With Love already foregrounds one of the main axioms that will
underpin the remainder of its historiographical journey and enquiry. The contention in question involves the extent
to which the apparently opposing poles of tradition and modernity might profitably be understood as profoundly
mutable entities. Though once deemed modern, the mode of public transport seen on screen today looks –
Edinburgh City Council’s best efforts notwithstanding – attractively antiquated. At the same time, a musical
instrument and idiom once deemed (and often dismissed) by many as outmoded have their contemporary relevance
reasserted via the pen, hands and voice of Scotland’s most prolific modern-day musician. Equally important in terms
of an immediate establishment of authorial method and audience expectation is the manner in which the
‘Something To Believe In’ sequence ends. Images of one married couple reunited at the end of the working day are
carefully introduced into the hitherto dominant footage of large urban shoals shuttling back and forth between work
and home. In this way, From Scotland With Love announces its desire to document the broad collective sweep of
twentieth-century Scottish experience without sacrificing the ability to depict that story in an emotionally
meaningful and engaging way, through recourse to intimate individual instances of social change. In other words:
Heath and Creosote’s film understands its narrative to be a story that is human and historical in equal measure,
respecting the legitimate claims of feelings as well as those of facts.
Numerous equally deft and sensitive constructions of sound and image abound as From Scotland With Love unfolds.
One sequence, for example, moves from the manufacture of steel and the making of mint humbugs to images of
children learning at school. Human beings, the film observes, are as malleable in nature as molten metal or sugar:
people can thus be added to the long list of raw materials that nation states seek to mould in particular ways in
order to pursue profit and security. Equally acute in its analysis is the part of the movie which inserts brief images of
the mass manufacture of light bulbs into a wider montage of Scots drinking and dancing after dark at the weekend.
Here, potentially unwieldy concepts such as ‘work’ and ‘pleasure’ are elevated above the level of conveniently
compartmentalised abstracted opposites. They instead become elegant reminders of the complex qualities of
interpenetration and interdependence that characterise all human lives and experience. One person’s play, for
example, is predicated upon another’s profession, and vice versa. I can’t swig drink on a Saturday night unless
someone else is being paid to serve it at the same time; you can’t trip the light fantastic unless others have already
made the fantastic lights that illuminate and decorate a city-centre dance floor. Perhaps most fundamentally of all in
this regard, however, From Scotland With Love refuses to draw any absolutist distinctions between ideas of ‘now’
and ‘then’, the present and the past. On one hand, the film fascinates precisely because it never seeks to ignore or
obscure just how much has changed within Scotland since 1900. But on the other, it also finds a surfeit of surprising
and sophisticated juxtapositions of sound and image that underscore the extent to which an ostensibly departed
century and society still have much to say to us, if we are but ready and able to listen.
Jonathan Murray
Edinburgh College of Art