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THE DROUTH
Mhairi Brennan
THE FORGOTTEN AUTEUR: THE FILMS OF FINLAY J MACDONALD (1926–1987) With the Referendum fast approaching, the debate about nationalism and identity is raging. Just who do the Scots think they are? The Hebridean film-maker and writer Finlay J Macdonald (1925-1987) made it his life’s work to answer this question. Born at the edge of the Scottish map on the island of Harris, he is best known for his bittersweet autobiography, Crowdie and Cream and Other Stories (1983). But Macdonald was also a visionary film-maker, bringing his innate gift for storytelling to the collection of documentaries about Scottish life he produced for BBC Scotland in the 1960s and 70s. During his lifetime Macdonald’s influence on his contemporaries and the popularity of his programmes was immense. His films were given prime-time slots and A Song of Crotal and White (1969) was one of the first colour documentaries to be made by BBC Scotland. Ken MacQuarrie, the current Head of BBC Scotland, was mentored by Macdonald, and during his time as head of Gaelic he advised his staff to learn from Macdonald’s films, viewing them as documentary storytelling at its finest. Donalda Mackinnon, now Head of Programmes at BBC Scotland, was so inspired by Macdonald’s work that she became the driving force behind the acclaimed 2002 BBC2 drama, ‘Crowdie and Cream’, which was based on Macdonald’s childhood, and is still the biggest
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production the BBC’s Gaelic Department has ever made. While Macdonald’s more famous counterpart, John Grierson, had his own documentary series over on ITV (This Wonderful World, 1957-65), MacQuarrie believes that if the Scottish public were asked in the 60s and 70s whether they preferred the films of Macdonald or Grierson the answer would have been resoundingly in Macdonald’s favour.
But Macdonald wasn’t stuck in the past and he embraced television as the future. He identified his own journey, from a tiny island croft to the metropolitan life of Glasgow, with Scotland’s story and his television documentaries record a country on the cusp of change, steeped in tradition and history but ready to embrace modernity. His series of symphony films, Poets Places (1966) eulogise the grit and glamour of modern life, while his Hebridean masterpieces, A Boy in Harris (1966) and A Song of Crotal and White (1969) (documenting the lives of crofters and weavers) are elegiac love letters to a traditional way of life which was starting to disappear from view.
And yet, despite the regard he was held in, Macdonald the film-maker has somehow disappeared from both public memory and film history. This could perhaps be attributed to a snobbery about television as a cultural form, but also to a lack of vanity on Macdonald’s part. He was a man too modest to chase fame, more interested in other people’s stories than hogging the limelight. The son of a crofter and a weaver who went on to make it big at the BBC (he was made head of documentaries in 1969), Macdonald was a quiet trailblazer who used his gift with language (in both Gaelic and English) to move up the ranks in an institution which, since its inception, has been criticised for being an ‘old boys club’. Not only did the outsider from the Outer Hebrides become an insider at the BBC, but he did it on his own terms. In the 40s it was not unusual for the bright son of a poor crofter to be offered a place at Glasgow University to study Divinity (the islands provided a large percentage of the Scottish ministry, especially in the Free Kirk), but it was much less common for that island boy to pursue a career in broadcasting. According to his son, Macdonald officiated at a funeral and realised that in all good conscience, the ministry was not for him. As he was wrapping his shoes in newspaper for the journey home to Harris he noticed an ad for an assistant producer in the Gaelic department at BBC Radio Scotland and decided to apply. Fate had intervened and the rest is history. Starting as an Assistant Producer Macdonald quickly showed his flair for storytelling and was put to work adapting novels and plays for radio. Family legend has it that the celebrated writer, Neil Gunn, was so impressed with Macdonald’s adaptation of his novel, Highland River (1934) he announced he had found the successor to his crown. Macdonald, like Gunn, understood the importance of celebrating Scotland’s history and heritage through a plurality of voices.
Remembered by friends and family as a deeply thoughtful man, full of warmth and humour, proud of his country and interested in the stories of everyone he met, Macdonald’s character shines through in his films. A fascination with Scottish identity permeates his work; with a lyrical style that saw the poetry in the ordinary, he documented all aspects of Scottish life, capturing the idiosyncrasies and unique outlook of ordinary folk. While the likes of Whisky Galore! (1949) and Brigadoon (1954) were pushing a fantasy of wily islanders and Highland flings, Macdonald realised that certain parts of the country were as much of a mystery to its inhabitants as they were to the outside world. Thus he aimed to introduce the highlands and islands to the city folk and vice versa. From lighthouse keepers in the Orkneys (Northern Lights: For the Safety of All, 1969), to town planners in Glasgow (Escape from the Concrete Jungle, 1974) and itinerant workers (or ‘tinkers’ as they were known then) in Perthshire (The Travelling Folk, 1975) his snapshots of everyday life captured the essence of the Scottish spirit with a masterly touch. Long lenses and a meditative editing pace give a poetic quality to the prosaic; the circular rooms of a lighthouse keeper’s quarters, the crowded nick-nacks in a ‘tinker’ caravan and the roiling chains of a ship leaving dock in Govan become relics, while folk queuing for buses and waiting for trains, or watching life go by from a park bench, become tableaux vivants, an important part of our heritage to be preserved for posterity. An avid listener and observer with a passion for storytelling, Macdonald’s desire to share his experiences with as wide an audience as possible was behind his decision to write and broadcast in English despite Gaelic being his first language. But although he wanted to ‘educate’ the nation about the reality of Scottish life, Macdonald’s films are not didactic. While Grierson announced that ’I look on cinema as a pulpit to preach from, and use it as a propagandist’, Macdonald the lapsed Divinity
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student had no appetite for writing instruction manuals on film-making or giving sermons to his audience. His tone is inclusive and welcoming; his films are a conversation, not a lesson, similar in spirit to the portrayal of ordinary people in landmark films of the Free Cinema such as Lindsay Anderson’s Every Day Except Christmas (1957) and Karel Reisz’s We are the Lambeth Boys (1958). But while Reisz and Anderson could be accused of cultural exploring, investigating working-class subjects outside of their own middle-class experience, Macdonald saw himself as an ordinary working man from the islands trying to find out more about his countrymen. He makes his allegiance known subtly in The Corncrake and the Croft (1977), summing up the amused indifference of his fellow Hebrideans to the arrival of a Royal society from the English capital 700 miles south, dedicated to the protection of birds. ‘Here’, he says, ‘birds are just birds. Unless they’re good to eat’.
In the Poets’ Places series Macdonald dispensed with formal narration altogether. Sadly, most of the episodes of Poets’ Places have disappeared from the BBC archives, but the two that remain – Glasgow: This is My Story and The Borders – are exquisite examples of the delight Macdonald took in pushing boundaries in order to elevate social observation to an art form. While Grierson berated television for ‘failing to honour this splendid area of opportunity which is wide open to the camera; to the master of montages; to the poet… and the other creative figures of film-making’, with Poets’ Places Macdonald practiced what his counterpart preached. With their careful positioning of music and poetry over a patchwork of images of daily life, the films are monochromatic masterpieces reminiscent of the GPO classic Night Mail (1936) and Humphrey Jennings’ seminal wartime propaganda piece Listen to Britain (1942).
Macdonald would often provide the voice-over to his films, his lilting Harris accent and the ease with which he could paint a picture with words lending a warmth and lyricism to his work. But although he loved to tell a story, Macdonald was not a man unduly smitten by the sound of his own voice. He understood instinctively when to pause, to let the story breathe. A Boy in Harris is as full of eloquent silence as it is of language; in a haunting scene the boy and his grandmother comb the beach for sand worms and cockles, ethereal figures moving through time and space. In A Song of Crotal and White as much importance is given to songs and psalms as to the spoken word, with music woven into the narrative. Macdonald also knew when to step back and let his subjects – experts in their own life – tell their own story. The narrative of A Boy in Harris belongs as much to the boy as it does to Macdonald and so they share the voice-over; while the director muses about the boy’s position in history, the boy contemplates his future ‘If I would get four lambs it would be excellent, if I got five lambs it would be out of this world’ he says.
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Lindsay Anderson described Jennings style as ‘based on a peculiar intimacy of observation and a pattern of relationships and contrasts, endlessly varying, but each one contributing to the rounded poetic statement of the whole’. He could easily have been talking about Poets’ Places. Inspired by the Scottish Renaissance literary movement of the early twentieth century - founded by the poet Hugh MacDiarmid and including Neil Gunn and Lewis Grassic-Gibbons in its number – which explored notions of identity and modernity and the celebration of the Scots language, Macdonald took his camera around a different part of Scotland for each episode, creating a montage of images showcasing a day in the life of its citizens. In the Borders folk hurry to work or amble home along country paths. In Glasgow children play amongst the rubble of demolished tenements in the shadow of brand new tower blocks, those symbols of a bright future that now look so worn. There is no commentator, no interviewer. Instead the soundtrack is a poem, written about each place in its own dialect, glorying in its mother tongue. The sonorous Lallans dialect created by MacDiarmid sings the praises of the Borders in the eponymously titled poem and film. As the poet surveys his beloved landscape, the soundtrack tells us, ‘there’s nae wee stretch o’ land on earth, that only a hunert times its size, has ge’en birth to such a raucous size of prose and great inventions likewise’. Meanwhile the Glasgwegian poet, Tom Wright, denounces the stereotype of Glasgow ‘sold to strangers by a slogan, No Mean City’. Both pieces are a rallying call to remember this ‘wee land’s’ worth. While the Network in England was serving up the Black and White Minstrel Show, Macdonald was giving BBC Scotland’s viewers poetry at teatime, showing them the beauty of their reality. Look, his images say, this
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is who you are; profound, prosaic, ordinary, unique. ‘Listen’, says Wright’s poem, ‘this is my story. This is my song’. It is fitting that Macdonald chose to visualise the poetry of MacDiarmid as he shared many of the passions and interests of the Scottish Renaissance. Like MacDiarmid and Gunn, celebrating Scottish identity in all its many aspects was at the heart of his work and letting folk speak in their own words was perhaps his answer to the issues MacDiarmid and Gunn posed over the ability of the English language to express the complex Scottish Psyche. His films were constructed as visual poems and his use of music and song was reminiscent of the ‘choral voice’ in Grassic-Gibbons’ classic Sunset Song. But unlike his literary predecessors, Macdonald’s work was never overtly political. While MacDiarmid was involved in setting up the SNP, and like Gunn was a Marxist, Macdonald was a nationalist with a small ‘n’. He was perhaps too fascinated by life in all its rich complexity to restrict himself to one set of beliefs – be it Divinity or Dialectical Materialism. However, the great respect Macdonald had for his fellow countrymen and their stories can be seen in the films he contributed to the long-running BBC2 series Look, Stranger (Travelling Folk and Concrete Jungle). Although the series’ format was more conventional than Poets’ Places, focusing on one subject’s story and following a straight narrative, Macdonald still managed to put his own personal stamp on his programmes. Travelling Folk is ostensibly about a charity worker helping to house ‘tinkers’, but the title belongs to the travelling folk, and at every opportunity Macdonald hands over the narrative to them, letting them tell their own unique story and show the truth behind the stereotype. He gives the same gravitas to their thoughts and opinions as to those of the renowned civic planner Sir Robert Grieve in Concrete Jungle. Although the word ‘tinker’ might stick in the throat today, the humanity with which Macdonald treats them is in stark contrast to the sensationalist and manipulative format of My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding (2011) The black and white cinematography gives an elegiac quality to the travelling folk interviewed, like a Walker Evans photograph come to life. Their poverty might seem archaic, but their concerns are shockingly current; an urgent need for housing, a worry about the lack of work, a concern for their children’s future. But there is a determination for a better life that has perhaps been browbeaten out of our current austerity generation. A young girl, filthy from potato picking and ragged from a life on the road, stares at the camera and declares that she wants to be a scientist when she grows up.
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There is a sharp jag of laughter from her mother at this preposterous ambition. The girl grins at her own audacity but remains determined. Yes, she says, ‘maybe a space scientist’. Macdonald holds the shot, letting her take charge of the scene. Hopes and dreams; myths and realities; tradition and modernity; all are recurring themes in Macdonald’s work and all make an appearance in Who Brought the Light? (1970) and Northern Lights, two tales of lighthouse keepers which echo and reflect each other. Who Brought the Light?, is Macdonald’s personal journey to the lonely archipelago of rock islands off the coast of Lewis that make up the Flannan Isles, to investigate the story of three lighthouse keepers who mysteriously disappeared from the island without a trace in 1900. For him the story is intertwined with memories of his father telling him tales of the isle while cutting peat on the croft. The film is as much about his own past as it is about the legend of the Flannan Isles. Presented as an elegantly eerie visual poem, the camera lingers over the rocks and pounding waves or creeps round the lighthouse as Macdonald recounts the rituals and superstitions crofters and mariners once upheld to keep themselves safe against the sea. We carry the past with us, in personal history and shared heritage, and the ghosts of the Flannan Isles return in Northern Lights with the current keepers musing on what happened to their predecessors. They are philosophical about the complex relationship between man and nature in such a desolate spot, where waves can claim lives in a second. ‘I think that… owing to stormy weather they had gone out to save some equipment and… they were all washed away’ suggests a lighthouse keeper matter-of-factly about one of the disappeared men. Meanwhile the camera peers down at the angry waves crashing against the jagged rocks at the base of the lighthouse. Being washed away here would not be an easy death. The stoicism with which the lighthouse keepers accept the perilous nature of their work is highlighted by the moments of breath-taking drama played out with quiet subtlety as Macdonald follows the crew of the Pole Star ship on a mission to deliver food and water to a remote rock island lighthouse. The camera is our eye, staring with grim fascination as sailors are winched onto the landing station, clinging on for dear life to rain-slicked ropes, whilst being battered by waves. They remain quietly professional throughout. After all, it’s just another day at work for them. But what is truly remarkable about the shot is that it is not taken from the safety of the island on a long lens.
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Macdonald is in the tiny rowing boat with the sailors and lighthouse keepers. As ever, he is actively involved in the story.
An exceptional auteur in the style of John Houston, Macdonald’s work spans a variety of genres and formats which at first glance seem wildly disparate, but which upon closer inspection reveal the filmmaker’s presence. Whether he was providing the narrative, or finding a shared point of reference with his subjects, Macdonald poured his life into his work, weaving his experiences into the fabric of his films. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his Hebridean masterpieces, A Boy in Harris and A Song of Crotal and White. In an age of brash reality TV these elegiac and elliptical pieces might at first glance seem like relics, but their beauty lies in their timelessness. Like the work of Orcadian film-maker Margaret Tait – they are tone poems highlighting the human condition. Indeed Tait and Macdonald shared a sense of affinity with their islands. Just as Tait cross-cuts snippets of island life with her poetry and animation in Colour Poems (1974) to reinforce the point that she and the island are one, so Macdonald juxtaposes snapshots of daily life and snatches of conversation with songs and poetry to tell stories of love, loss and longing on his island. They are Macdonald’s best work, the works of a man who knew he had to leave his island life to fulfil his dreams, but spent the rest of his days wishing he could go back.
The close working relationship Macdonald had with his long-term camera operator, Stuart Wyld, contributed to the aesthetics of his films. An experienced cinematographer who worked mainly on dramas (including the 1971 television adaptation of Sunset Song), Wyld instinctively understood how to tell a story with images. Working in tandem with Macdonald, he sensed when to hold back and when to zoom in, and the pair had no qualms about hanging over a cliff-edge or getting into a rowing boat to get the best shot. Like the lighthouse keepers, they considered it to be all in a day’s work.
As an islander Macdonald understood the lighthouse keeper’s stoicism. Hard work and deprivation had been an integral part of his youth, but he saw beauty everywhere. In The Corncrake and the Croft a scene of a cow giving birth goes on for too long to be of comfort to man or beast, but is followed immediately by the same crofter musing on the local legend that swans are in fact cursed maidens. For islanders, myth and gritty reality are two sides of the same coin, all part of the story about the beauty and cruelty of nature. This is evident in Sulisgeir (1962), an unflinching portrait of the guga hunters of Ness, who sail to the eponymous rock island once a year to hunt baby gannets (or gugas as they’re known in Gaelic). The film does not hide the harsh reality of the bird hunters’ work and there is an absence of sentimentality for the birds’ welfare. Macdonald knew from first-hand experience that their catch was a matter of life and death as it would be one of the few sources of nutrition for the isolated islanders during the long, harsh winter. Instead of judging the hunters’ ‘cruelty’ he documents their bravery and humanity. The camera peers over the edge of the sheer cliff-face which they scamper up and down to catch the birds. They don’t have ropes or climbing gear, they only have each other for a hand or leg up. They are a tight knit community taking care of each other and their fellow islanders. Rightly, Macdonald’s heart is with them, not the birds.
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His most autobiographical work, A Boy in Harris is a portrait of life in the tiny village of Scarista, on the southernmost tip of Harris. Like fellow Scot, Bill Douglas, (My Childhood, 1972) Macdonald gives a poetic account of his tough childhood. The Boy – Donnie - is the only schoolchild in the village and the film documents the loneliness and companionship that rub shoulders in such an isolated area. Donnie is introduced to us sitting on the beach, staring out to sea as Macdonald’s voice-over announces, ‘the boy looks West… someday he may sail… but meantime his physical boundaries are the sea and the mountains of his Atlantic village’. His words are as descriptive of his own childhood as they are of the boy’s. Donnie takes up the narrative, recounting his daily routine, along with his hopes and ambitions, but the story belongs to Macdonald too. Donnie lives next door to the tiny shack where Macdonald grew up. The beach where he searches for cockles is where the young Macdonald looked out to sea, dreaming of the world. Just as Gunn explores the concept of the collective unconsciousness in Highland River (his protagonist seeks the source of a river in order to find himself) so Macdonald’s film muses on the shared history that Donnie embodies – ‘he is a boy of this year but he is a product of his place’.
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Wide-angled lenses and crisp black and white photography highlight the smallness and solitariness of the boy against the wide open spaces and huge skies of Harris. The pace is meditative as he milks the cows and wanders the beach. In Harris; the saying goes, ‘when God made time he made plenty of it’ and in Scarista, unchanged for centuries, never a truer word was spoken. But Macdonald sees the modern age creeping onto the island and charts the beginning of the end for the old way of life. Cross-cut with the traditional Gaelic psalms chanted in a tiny church is the sound of Petula Clark belting out Downtown from the neighbour’s television, which Donnie is occasionally allowed to watch. He gazes entranced at the screen as the song entices him to leave his worries and loneliness behind in the music of the city. The television is luring Donnie off the island, just as it did the young Macdonald.
On Lewis there is a song for every part of life. Centuries old, their harmonies and cadences have an other-worldly quality, reinforced by the strange sounds and rhythms of the Gaelic language. A Song of Crotal and White showcases what a marvellously versatile instrument the human voice can be, building the narrative around renditions of the songs which for hundreds of years accompanied each laborious step of making tweed. They are as emotive as the most powerful of Vauhn Williams’ orchestrated eulogies to England. By the 1960s the traditional methods of making tweed were dying out as factories moved in, but in A Song of Crotal and White fresh life is breathed into both the fabric and the music as the MacDonald sisters revisit the traditional methods of making tweed from start to finish. The songs are the story of the cloth, reflecting the scrape of the paddles that tease the wool into yarn, the rhythm of the shuttle working back and forth and the clatter of the foot pedals on the weaving looms.
Set in Lewis (separated by a mountain range from Harris) A Song of Crotal and White is a geographical, emotional and visual counterpoint to A Boy in Harris. While Donnie’s tale is full of longing and regret, A Song of Crotal and White is full of love for the island, its inhabitants and its traditions. The sumptuous yellow, greens and blues of the landscape give a joyful aspect to the film, which records for posterity the traditional methods by which Harris tweed is made. There is joy too in the voices of the MacDonald Sisters weaving the cloth. A Gaelic singing group from Lewis who at the time were finding international success with their modern rearrangements of traditional songs, the MacDonald Sisters’ voices are an integral part of the narrative.
The ‘waulking songs’ are the epitome of the Hebridean attitude to music. Traditionally sung by groups of women to keep time as they ‘waulk’ the cloth (beat it clean), beauty and reality are intertwined in the searing virtuosity of the MacDonald Sisters’ voices harmonising effortlessly at breakneck speed, while the thump of the cloth on wood keeps the beat and gives a visceral quality to the overall effect. It is the most joyous part of the film; four young women who have made it big outside the island singing in delighted harmony as they lovingly complete the cloth they made together, their history, their songs and their stories woven into its fabric.
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As Scotland turns the spotlight on itself this year there has never been a better time to reintroduce Macdonald’s films to the public and to the canon. It is perhaps also time to question how a film-maker of such prowess could fall between the cracks of history. The masterful way in which he connected Scotland’s past and present and celebrated Scottish identity by creating poetry from the lives of ordinary people marks Macdonald out as a worthy successor to the more celebrated members of the Scottish Renaissance. And yet his name is missing from their ranks. Cultural snobbery about the medium of television could be to blame for this omission and Grierson’s dismissal of television as a ‘bad version of the motion picture… predisposed to the amateur’ gives credence to the theory that television was (and still is) considered a poor relation to literature and even cinema. Perhaps Macdonald’s position as a film-poet put him in the cultural no-man’s land between the Mainstream and the Fine Arts that also claimed Margaret Tait for so long. Tait, too, would have been a worthy addition to the Scottish Renaissance, but, like Macdonald, her decision to work in so undervalued and ‘cutting edge’ a medium, left her overlooked. The lack of importance given to television can be seen in the haphazard approach to archiving material in the 60s. Many programmes, including all but one episode of Grierson’s This Wonderful World, were simply not considered worth keeping for posterity. The transmission tapes were wiped, copied over or misplaced. As a result, gems from Macdonald’s oeuvre are lost forever. There is all the more reason, then, to cherish and celebrate the works that are left. Poets Places, Look Stranger and the Hebridean films offer a unique view of Scotland’s history and people. The also serve to highlight the case for archiving Scotland’s film-makers with more care, for through their eyes there is much to be learned about ‘this wee stretch o’ land’. In a year when Scotland’s future is in the balance, that message has never been more important.
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