Morvern Callar, art cinema and the ‘monstrous archive’

1. Morvern Callar, art cinema and the ‘monstrous archive’ John Caughie

2. Alasdair Gray, Unlikely Stories Mostly (1983) • ‘Work as is you were living in the early days of a better nation.’

3. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image (1985) • ‘Art, and especially cinematographic art, must take part in this task: not that of addressing a people, which is presupposed already there, but of contributing to the invention of a people.’ • ‘Not the myth of a past people, but the story-telling of the people to come.’

4. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time-Image (1985) • ‘Black American cinema makes a return to the ghettos, returns to this side of a consciousness, and, instead of replacing a negative image of the black with a positive one, multiplies types and ‘characters’, and each time creates or re-creates only a small part of the image which no longer corresponds to a linkage of actions, but to shattered states of emotions or drives, expressible in pure images and sounds: the specificity of black cinema is now defined by a new form, “the struggle that must bear on the medium itself”’.

5. David Martin-Jones, ‘Orphans, a work of minor cinema from post-devolutionary Scotland’, in Journal of British Cinema and Television, (2004) • ‘Deleuze’s theory illustrates how Mullan’s film performs a minor action on an aesthetic which has previously been used to create an Anglo-centric, consensual view of British national identity, and how, in doing so, it aids the recreation of Scottish national identity after devolution. Thus Orphans’ textual renegotiation of social realism parallels the nation’s, and the film industry’s, attempts to recreate a sense of Scottish national identity in relation to the vestiges of “Britain”’.

6. Paul Willemen, ‘The National revisited’, in Theorising National Cinema (2006) • ‘there is a diametrical opposition between identity and subjectivity. The former, being what the institutionally orchestrated practices of address seek to impose, constitutes a never-quite-fitting straitjacket; the latter is an ambiguous term designating individuals as the crossroads or condensation points of multiple sets of institutionally organised discursive practices. […] Subjectivity always exceeds identity, since identity formation consists of trying to pin ‘us’ to a specific, selected sub-set of the many diverse clusters of discourse we traverse in our lifetimes, and that stick to us to varying degrees. […] Some aspects of our subjectivity may be occupied or hijacked by the national identity modes of address, but there are always dimensions within our sense of ‘subjective individuality’ that escape and exceed any such identity straitjacket.’

7. Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, (1999) • ‘When a culture loses its means of transmission, man is deprived of reference points and finds himself wedged between, on the one hand, a past that incessantly accumulates behind him and oppresses him with the multiplicity of its now-indecipherable contents, and on the other hand a future that he does not yet possess and that does not throw any light on his struggle with the past.’ • ‘the infinite accumulation of the old in a sort of monstrous archive’

8. Glasgow Film Office • Creating businesses of scale is essential for the sustainable growth and development of the sector. GFO will work with local production companies and facilities & service companies to help develop more businesses of scale within the city, working with businesses that have demonstrated high growth potential whatever their size.’

17. Alan Warner, Morvern Callar (1995) • I placed both hands on my tummy at the life there, the life growing right in there. The child of the raves. I put my head down and closed my mouth. I started the walking forward into that night.

29. Alan Warner, Morvern Callar (1995) • I started the walking forward into that night.

30. Susan Sontag, ‘Against interpretation’ (1964) • ‘Real art has the capacity to make us nervous. By reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art. Interpretation makes art manageable, conformable.’ • ‘In place of a hermeneutics, we need an erotics of art.’

31. Giorgio Agamben, The Man Without Content, (1999 • ‘Wherever the critic encounters art, he brings it back to its opposite, dissolving it in non-art; wherever he exercises his reflection, he brings with him non-being and shadow, as though he had no other means to worship art than the celebration of a kind of black mass in honor of the deus inversus, the inverted god, of non-art.’

32. Scottish Malt Whisky Society • Whisky barrels, being made from natural material, cannot be perfectly sealed. Indeed the ability of the barrels to ‘breathe’ is vital to the final taste of the product. When a barrel is filled, there is an initial ‘in-drink’ of about 2% and then during the years that a barrel spends in the bonded warehouse about two percent of the contents are lost to evaporation each year. When barrels are opened after say four years maturing, around 10% of the contents will have disappeared. • This loss is known in the trade as ‘the angel's share’