Discomfort and Joy

Filmmaker Bill Forsyth is one of the most important and fondly regarded of all living Scottish artists. His filmmaking career, beginning with That Sinking Feeling (1979), paved the way for the emergence of an indigenous Scottish cinema. It also established Forsyth as one of the most distinctive and original voices in late twentieth-century European film. This book offers the first integrated and comprehensive study of the director's complete uvre. Through extended textual analysis and contextual discussion of each of Forsyth's eight features, it traces the key formal and thematic characteristics of a remarkable career, one which encompasses both three-figure production budgets in Glasgow and multi-million-dollar adventures in the heart of Hollywood. The book also uses Forsyth's films to explore the diverse range of film industrial contexts the director has worked within. Most importantly, it sheds light upon the hitherto under-documented zero-budget travails of 1970s Scotland and inflated expectations of early-1980s British film.

Autorentext

Jonathan Murray lectures in Film and Visual Culture at Edinburgh College of Art. He received his PhD in Film and Television Studies and Scottish History from the University of Glasgow and has published widely on various aspects of Scottish cinema past and present.

Zusammenfassung
«The remarkable oeuvre of Scotland's most significant writer/director has had to wait a long time for the kind of serious critical engagement that it clearly deserves. [...] Painstakingly researched and thoughtfully written, 'Discomfort and Joy' is indispensable for anyone interested in Scottish or British cinema of the last thirty years.» (Professor Duncan Petrie, University of York)
«Murray re-enchants us about this master filmmaker. He shows why Forsyth's movies matter, and how they matter [...] one of the best books ever written about Scottish film.» (Mark Cousins, filmmaker)
«Murray has produced an impressively thorough guide to Forsyth's films (backed up by an exhaustive fifteen page Bibliography).» (Douglas Allen, Media Education Journal 56, 2014)

Inhalt
Contents: Bill Forsyth History of Scottish cinema British cinema studies Contemporary Scottish culture Modern European cinema.