A look at the work of talented Glasgow filmmaker James Price ahead of our retrospective at Summerhall this month.

The Price is Right

Ahead of The Skinny’s retrospective of short films by talented Glasgow filmmaker James Price at Summerhall in Edinburgh, we look back at what makes Price’s work so special with Glasgow Short Film Festival director Matt Lloyd

Interview: Jamie Dunn

Some filmmakers are so wedded to the milieu in which they live that it becomes hard to discuss their films without doing so in the context of their surroundings. Think of the work of Martin Scorsese or Spike Lee and one automatically pictures New York. Talk of Wong Kar Wai conjures images of Hong Kong while Pedro Almodóvar brings to mind Madrid; with Mike Leigh, it’s London. James Price has only made a handful of short films in his career so far, but already he’s staked a claim as one of our best chroniclers of Glasgow. Anyone with one eye on Scotland’s film scene will be familiar with Price’s films and their roughhewn poetics. He’s been a regular fixture at Glasgow Short Film Festival (GSFF) since 2015, when Dropping Off Michael, a short written by Price and commissioned through Film City’s short-lived youth training scheme Jump Cut, won the festival’s audience award that year. Matt Lloyd, director of GSFF, recalls being immediately taken with the film and Price’s writing in particular: “Although well directed by a professional, Zam Salim, it was James’ script which really shone through; well-paced and structured, it held your attention without scrabbling for gimmicks or quirkiness.” Over its fat-free 16 minutes, the film follows the young teen of the title during his last day of freedom ahead of sentencing at a criminal court hearing. He’s been cajoled into spending the morning with his uncle Duncan, a larger than life rapscallion who it soon becomes clear, doesn’t have the boy’s best interest at heart – far from it. It’s a heartbreaking watch, but also angry, bellicose and peppered with the gallows humour that’s become Price’s trademark. “Dropping Off Michael had a confidence and polish you wouldn’t usually find in young people’s summer film school project,” says Lloyd. “I’m sure James would be the first to credit the support of Zam and Catriona MacInnes, who was running the scheme, but it was very much his project.” Themes explored in Dropping Off Michael would crop up again in Price’s later work, which often focuses on young men forced to grow up quick in their tough urban surroundings and their uneasy relationships with the roguish authority figures in their lives. You’ll find both motifs in Price’s finest film so far, Boys Night. It’s a ja ed

“People keep calling James the Springburn Scorsese”

‘dark night of the soul’ movie following an exasperated young lad who’s walking his paralytic father through Glasgow’s neon-lit city centre and back to their flat in Springburn, in the north of the city. Boys Night improves on the earlier film by marrying its gritty subject matter – alcoholism, toxic masculinity, sectarian violence – with absurdist wit and a slick visual vitality that doesn’t dampen in the slightest its authenticity or anguish. Like Dropping Off Michael, Boys Night won the audience award at GSFF. People have certainly taken note of Price’s talent. The Edinburgh International Book Festival commissioned him for their Reading Scotland series, teaming him with Graeme Armstrong, writer of the instant Scottish classic The Young Team, which tells of the author’s teenage years embroiled within gang culture, and challenged the pair to make a short film inspired by Armstrong’s novel. The result was the elegant and dreamy Infectious Nihilism and Small Metallic Pieces of Hope, a profoundly cinematic exploration into the swirling grief and drug-addled headspace of a young man being indoctrinated into the local gang after his brother’s murder. And Price was recently tapped by Peter Mullan to direct a brace of episodes of the fantastic BBC4 monologue series Skint. The finest of the two, The Taking of Balgrayhill Street, which Price wrote, is a tragicomic and deeply humane study of poverty starring Mullan as a proud, hardworking guy who’s now contemplating the unthinkable:

Diamonds into Dust

diving into his block’s food bank for the microwave curry sauce that’s he’s craving but can’t afford. Price is not above his own self-promotion, however. Just ask The Sopranos’ actor and Zopa frontman Christopher Moltisanti. Dropping into Insta DMs, Price sweet-talked Moltisanti into hiring him to make the official music video for his band’s single Diamonds into Dust. Gallus? Too fucking right, but the resulting video has enough swa er and style to back up Price’s cocksure attitude. The promo was so good it led The Skinny to dub this young filmmaker the ‘Springburn Scorsese’. It’s a title that seems to have stuck. “People keep calling James the Springburn Scorsese,” says Lloyd, “and the last thing I want to do is blow more smoke up his arse, but I do see a comparison. James has a huge appetite for and knowledge of cinematic storytelling, but he’s not just copying his favourite filmmakers – he’s not seduced by style. Instead, like Scorsese, he’s considering form and how it can serve the story he wants to tell. Also, he’s a cocky wee shite who seems to have no trouble persuading people to do what he wants.”

The Skinny is screening a retrospective of James Price’s films in a double bill with the Safdie Brothers’ Good Time for the first edition of The CineSkinny Film Club; Summerhall Cinema, Edinburgh, 18 Mar, 6.30pm

Who was Dr David Livingstone, and why should we care?

David Livingstone's life was full of contradictions. He was a man of science and God. He was an abolitionist and key to the colonisation of Africa. He was celebrated as a lone pioneer but travelled with many companions. We unpick these paradoxes Words by: Jamie Dunn

Who was Dr David Livingstone, and why should we care? “When the legend becomes fact,” so the old adage goes, “print the legend.” That’s largely what happened to the Scottish explorer, geographer, medical missionary and abolitionist Dr David Livingstone. His epic and often treacherous expeditions across sub-Saharan Africa in the mid-19th century made him hugely famous in his own time and a larger than life hero of many a Victorian boy’s own adventure book.

His achievements became legendary. The stories go he “discovered” the Victoria Falls – although more accurately, he became the rst white European to see the majestic Mosi-oa-Tunya situated on Zimbabwe’s border with Zambia, which he renamed in honour of the Queen. He’s also famous for being discovered himself, by Welsh-American explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley who’d been sent to nd the Scot when he’d gone o -grid in Africa, greeting him with the famous line “Dr Livingstone, I presume?” He’s also remembered for battling a lion, clashes with the Boer, and his death while searching for the source of the Nile. Among all this adventure and derring-do, he also tried to end the East African Slave Trade.

Like all legends, there are grains of truth to be found in the potted history above but much has been elided. Thankfully it’s become easier to unpick and examine the various con icting elements of Livingstone’s legacy thanks to the reopening last summer of the David Livingstone Birthplace in Blantyre. Located in the tenement where Livingstone lived as a boy and worked at a neighbouring mill, this redeveloped museum aims to break the various myths about Livingstone and dig into the many sides of the explorer that are still little-known or misunderstood.

For Natalie Milor, the museum’s curator, one of the chief preconceptions about Livingstone that she’s keen to quash is the romantic notion of him as a solitary pioneer. “I think the narrative around Livingstone, and all the statues and art that was made about him, particularly just after he died, in the period of the late 19th and early 20th century, was really representing him as a lone explorer.”

Going back to Livingstone’s diaries and expedition papers, it becomes clear that Livingstone had many companions on his adventures, both white Europeans and Africans he recruited on his travels. At times, he essentially led a small village across the continent. “There’s an awful lot of evidence we can look through to learn more about his relationship with his crew members and about crew members themselves,” says Milor. “It has been convenient for speci c people with speci c political ideologies to see Livingstone through this lone explorer lens and as a lone spreader of Christianity in Southern and Central Africa. A lot of our exhibition is about looking at who’s missing from these narratives and showing that the story is much more interesting and relevant with everybody being represented as far as we can.”

The exhibition goes to great lengths to give Livingstone’s crew members their due, but particularly the vital roles played by two gures whose huge contributions to Livingstone’s story have been diminished, those of Abdullah Susi and James Chuma.

The pair, who hailed from Central Africa, began working with the doctor during his troubled Zambezi Expedition, which ran from 1858 to 1864. They were then recruited again to join him as part of the Nile expedition. “In prevailing narratives, Susi and Chuma were always seen as ‘faithful companions’ and they weren’t really given the kind of recognition that they deserved as really pivotal members of his crew,” says Milor. “Particularly during the Nile Expedition, where Livingstone was heavily dependent on them, not just helping with the expedition but literally physically taking care of him at some points when he got really ill.”

Their signi cance is certainly explored across the exhibition at David Livingstone Birthplace Museum, particularly in the Tales of the Tableaux, a series of animations created using a screenplay by Petina Gappah, that complement the newly restored Pilkington Jackson Tableaux, eight sculptures created by Charles d’Orville Pilkington Jackson in the late 1920s that helped perpetuate the romantic myth of Livingstone as a lone heroic gure in Africa. Tales from the Tableaux bring Pilkington Jackson’s tableaux to life, expanding his story to include the various Southern and Central African people who helped make his expeditions possible. “Tales from the Tableaux make clear Susi and Chuma were missionaries and explorers in their own right,” explains Milor. “They’re not widely recognised gures. Given their contribution to Livingstone’s achievements, it is a travesty they’re not better known.”

Livingstone himself has become less well-known in recent decades, in part thanks to the complexities of his legacy. “Livingstone is seen as a very controversial gure in some respects,” says Milor, “and challenging for teachers to teach, which kind of explains why he’s fallen out of the curriculum essentially, even for local children.” With the best intentions, Livingstone tried to open up sub-Saharan Africa for trading, working with local communities, and his pioneering work undoubtedly did contribute to the abolishment of the East African Slave Trade. But his ndings in Africa were put to more sinister use after his death, with his records used by the various European powers in the ‘Scramble for Africa’ that saw huge parts of the continent colonised and its resources plundered. “As soon as you scratch the surface of Livingstone’s life, you do start to see these contradictions,” notes Milor.

The Livingstone Birthplace Museum doesn’t sugarcoat these contradictions. The exhibition opens by exploring Livingstone’s humble beginnings working as a child labourer at Blantyre Works Mill, where he worked from the age of ten. Elsewhere, the exhibition explores the con ict he felt as a young man between his religious upbringing and his ambition to be a man of science.

“Livingstone did have a crisis of faith moment before he became part of the independent church movement,” says Milor. “Livingstone really wanted to be a doctor but his father, Neil, wanted him to have some sort of career that was related to his religious upbringing.” It was reading Thomas Dick’s Philosophy of a Future State, a book which essentially argued that science and religion could be married together, that helped Livingstone connect these two sides of himself. “It was reading Dick’s book, as well as going to visit him in Broughty Ferry, that helped Livingstone put his mind at rest in terms of what he wanted to do,” explains Milor, “combined with the rise of missionary societies, which meant becoming a medical missionary was a legitimate career option.”

“As soon as you scratch the surface of Livingstone’s life, you do start to see these contradictions”

Natalie Milor

Image: Walnut Wasp Image: Walnut Wasp

Image: Walnut Wasp

This epiphany not only changed Livingstone’s career path but arguably changed the world, with history telling us that this one missionary from Blantyre was responsible for the spread of Christianity in Central and Southern Africa. But like much of the history written about Livingstone, this is only a small part of a story. “We show that Livingstone actually only baptised two people,” says Milor, “one of whom was Chief Sechele I of the BaKwena, whose commitment to the faith led to Christianity being widely adopted in places like Botswana. That’s something that’s still not widely known, and if you look at the origins for why it’s not widely known, it is inherently linked back to racism and historians’ biases in terms of who they thought deserved credit for what stories.”

Livingstone’s life undoubtedly caused a ripple e ect across the world, and that legacy can still be seen today. It’s a story ripe for reappraisal, and one that can be used to examine all sorts of contemporary issues, from racism to climate change. The Livingstone Birthplace Museum attempts to put this story straight by cutting through the Victorian tall tales so that his life can be properly discussed and re ected upon. “Throughout the exhibition we outlined the good, the bad and the ugly of Livingstone’s legacy,” says Milor. “Ultimately we show he was human and full of aws, but ultimately a man who made a di erence in the world. I think that is more interesting than seeing him as an icon, really. Our job is to make sure people know and understand that there is a fuller picture, and they can make up their own mind as to whether or not they think Livingstone deserves to be on his pedestal still.”

David Livingstone Birthplace is open seven days a week, 10am-4pm

Tickets are available at david-livingstone-birthplace.org