Charting Scottish Tourism and the Early Scenic Film

Access, Identity and Landscape

Samantha Wilson

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030391522
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030391539
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

What impact did walking tours and scenic films have on leisure activities? In what ways did working class travel disrupt normative narratives concerning nature and identity? The appreciation of nature and leisure travel have a complex and interrelated history in Scotland. In Charting Scottish Tourism, Wilson looks at how scenic filmmaking altered the construction of the tourist map and spatial identities at the turn of the 20th Century. Scenic film, the author argues, played a key role in the expansion of regional travel and national tourism during the period. In addition, scenic film provides the modern researcher with an unrivalled source of documentary evidence relating to the manner in which Scottish working and middle class communities explored and reclaimed the natural spaces around them. The author examines the central role of the Scottish scenic within leisure performances and the way in which these films promoted and challenged normative spatial narratives. These discursive shifts, she argues, had a wide-reaching impact on popular assumptions concerning space, nature and identity both home and away. Charting Scottish Tourism provides a fascinating case study and numerous methodological insights for students and researchers interested in documentary film as well as the construction of identity and the natural world.

© The Author(s) 2020

S. WilsonCharting Scottish Tourism and the Early Scenic Filmhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39153-9_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Samantha Wilson¹

(1)

Glasgow, Scotland

Samantha Wilson

Abstract

This introductory chapter explores how the interplay between material forces and aesthetic and cultural discourses paved the way for nature appreciation to be embedded within the tourism industry in Scotland between the late eighteenth and early twentieth centuries. Several representational technologies played a role in this process including photography and film. The latter, in the guise of the scenic film, renegotiated one of the central debates surrounding first-hand contact with nature and its aesthetic parameters—that is how to frame the embodied gaze. This question was particularly important within the Scottish context because of the impact of transborder tourism and the circulation of landscape imagery during the period. Both regional and international leisure patterns transformed not only how individual communities moved and looked at the spaces they called home but also how they conceptualised their relationship with the natural world.

Keywords

Nature appreciationScenic filmmakingAesthetic philosophyTravel and tourismScotland

End Abstract

Jean Adamson spent her childhood holidays outside of the Highland village of Ardentinny. In her private memoirs she described that period of her life with reverent detail. It was there in the forest that she created her own magical world detached from the cultural and economic pressures that surrounded her family back home in the mining town of High Blantyre. When revisiting these memories Jean describes herself as being completely “absorbed” by the natural world around her, where “Life itself seemed to proliferate faster than at home”.¹ With a heavy sense of nostalgia, these periods of leisure became a “timeless world” with “some atavistic power that made us think and behave like our ancestors… extracting the savour of life from the rhythm of nature and getting myths from the lips of the story tellers”.² The experiences she retells and the rhetoric she uses to do so are, of course, not entirely unique. They reflect a complex set of discourses and performed behaviour embedded in the foundations of the cultural identity of her home country of Scotland, discourses which would have a profound effect on the spatial patterns and expectations which would drive the domestic tourism industry for the next several decades.

Over a period of a few hundred years, looking at and moving through natural spaces became central features of what particular socio-economic groups did while away from home on holiday. In fact, the emergence and valorisation of nature appreciation as a performed set of first-hand experiences went hand in hand with the development of a range of technological, economic and political changes which made increasing amounts of leisure travel possible for a larger and larger percentage of the British population. Individuals and groups chose to spend their often-precious time outside of work in natural landscapes because, in the words of John Urry and Jonas Larsen, they “anticipate[d]” those experiences would provide a kind of pleasure or benefit that was unlike anything they could acquire in their regular day to day lives.³ Those benefits, whether physical, psychological, aesthetic or intellectual were constructed by a series of overlapping discourses which circulated through a number of texts and devices such as topographical literature, guidebooks, photography, and by the turn of the twentieth century, cinema. Each of these representational technologies contributed to “formalizing” particular “patterns of appreciation and mobility” extending the reach of the initial philosophical debates to the middle and working classes .⁴ In Tourist Gaze 3.0, Urry and Larsen argue that this combination of the “means of collective travel”, “the desire for travel” and the rise of representational technologies set the foundation for the emergence of the “tourist gaze ” which became “a core component of western modernity”.⁵

Charting Scottish Tourism and the Early Scenic Film interrogates how one of these technologies, the moving image, not only reconstructed the Scottish tourist map but renegotiated the already complex relationship Scottish communities had with looking at and moving through natural spaces . The book uses one genre in particular, the scenic film , as a way of tracing the rise of domestic nature appreciation by the Scottish middle and working classes. While the scenic genre remains largely underrepresented in the field of early cinema , it is an unrivalled source of material detailing the expansion of both regional travel and national tourism. Scottish scenics not only documented the manner in which different socio-economic groups explored and reclaimed natural spaces but also played a central role in actual leisure performances, with the embodied gaze remaining a central motif throughout the rise and fall of the genre . The scenic did not solely display one single model of spectatorship , rather throughout its lifespan it portrayed competing models while also juxtaposing complex and historically wide-reaching debates about the role natural spaces play in defining personal and cultural identity structures. The early scenic was in fact defined by its own precariousness and remains a potent cultural symbol of the gaze’s contentious relationship to the dichotomies which often define leisure travel .

Framing the Gaze

How to look and move through a space lies at the heart of environmental aesthetics. When appreciating and making judgements about any space or object, a spectator draws on a particular framing mechanism to derive significance and meaning. These framing mechanisms construct the parameters of the view which typically involves the isolation of a series of elements from the rest of the visual field and their union into “a consistent whole”.⁶ The frame becomes, as Michael Snow describes, an epistemological tool: “That’s to say that out of the universal field, knowledge isolates, selects and points out unities or differences which were not previously evident. Identification, definition is a matter of limits, of recognition of limitations, bounds, boundaries”.⁷ For example, landscape painting depends on a frame in order to distinguish between the world of the painting and the world of the observer, reinforcing what belongs in the view and what does not. Natural spaces often exceed the parameters of these rules or guides, they demand something from the spectator which is by its very nature subversive, testing the foundations of aesthetic experience and knowledge formation.

This resistance to being easily attained and controlled by a framework lies at the forefront of contemporary environmental aesthetics. The field’s problematic nature has been defined by the role of immersion , especially at the time of its revival in the late 1960s. In “Contemporary Aesthetics and the Neglect of Natural Beauty”,⁸ published in 1966, R. W. Hepburn analyses the differences between the form of embodied experience which is central to environmental appreciation and the main aesthetic models of the day which attempted to construct a unified system for aesthetic judgements. He states that,

Some writers have been impressed by the fact that certain crucial features of aesthetic experience are quite unobtainable in nature – a landscape does not minutely control the spectator’s response to it as does a successful work of art; it is an unframed ordinary object, in contrast to the framed, “esoteric”, “illusory,” or “virtual” character of the art object. And so the artifact is taken as the aesthetic object par excellence, and the proper focus of study.⁹

In this account objects which can be appreciated aesthetically are necessarily framed and bounded. By contrast, a person experiencing a natural space remains within that space and is forced to integrate a large variety of visual detail and sensation into the overall experience. Here the detachment which is necessary in order to reach a state of contemplation is almost impossible to achieve if both it and immersion remain defined in their conventional manner. For Hepburn, one of the most important aspects of these differences is the participatory nature of the latter. This participation allows for a reflexive internal free play where we engage in a transformative dialectic between performing the role of actor and spectator, allowing our creativity to be “challenged, set a task; and when things go well with us, we experience a sudden expansion of imagination that can be remarkable in its own right”.¹⁰ Here the very thing which is valued about the frame, specifically its stability and determinateness, is challenged by the accompanying possibilities provided by...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Home and Away: The Rise of the Walking Tour and Guidebook
• 3. Mapping, Ordering and Recording the Tourist’s Landscape
• 4. Reclaiming Space and Fortifying Identity: Working Class Travel During the Glasgow Fair
• 5. I Never Leave Home Without It: Amateur Filmmaking in the Interwar Period
• 6. Conclusion
• Back Matter