Introduction: From Silent to Sound: Cinema in Scotland in the 1930s

Abstract

Like any other moment of industrial and institutional transformation, the transition from silent to sound cinema was less linear and inevitable than hindsight would suggest. There was nothing obvious about the emergence of the feature-length fiction film with its unbroken soundtrack of dialogue and music. This special issue uses a tight focus on a few hectic years, and on a peripheral region within a hegemonic power: Scotland, a film-hungry nation with an oversized filmic image. Scotland shared a language with, and exerted a strong diasporic influence on, Hollywood as a film metropolis and London as a seat of the global cinema trade. At the same time, its internal market was too small to sustain production beyond local actualities, so most of the fictional representations of Scottishness that appeared on Scotland’s screens were crafted elsewhere. In relation to the centres of production, Scotland was a marginal nation, but fantasy Scotlands proliferated in films produced in those dominant centres. The transition to sound, as a moment of consolidation but also of instability, presents an ideal opportunity to observe these contradictory forces of proximity and marginality at play. This special issue has a connection with two research projects funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council – in not only its subject matter, but also its academic contributors. The Early Cinema in Scotland project, which involved Marı́a Vélez-Serna, one of this issue’s guest editors, as Research Assistant, ended in 2015 and produced an edited collection, as well as a number of other outputs, which sought to trace developments in production, exhibition, and distribution up to 1927. ‘British Silent Cinema and the Transition to Sound’, a project that ended in 2017, examined the arrival of sound cinema in Britain between the years of 1927 and 1933, focusing on a broad range of topics such as economics, employment, technology and infrastructure, as well as the shift in film form and style, including its impact on production, distribution, exhibition, reception and critique. Sarah Neely, the second guest editor of this issue, served as one of the project’s Co-Investigators, alongside John Izod, another contributor to this issue, in leading the project’s research, focusing on the period of transition in Scotland. The project will eventually include two book-length studies by two members of the project team, Geoff Brown and Laraine Porter, the project’s Principal Investigator, as well as a number of other publications, including two further special issues of academic journals: one already published in 2018 for Music, Sound and the Moving Image, and another forthcoming with the