Browsing by Person "Munro, Robert"

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Adapting Sunset Song: Authorial, Industrial and National Discourses in the 2015 film adaptation of Sunset Song
(Edinburgh University Press, 2024-06-23) Munro, Robert
This article traces the discourses shaping the 2015 film adaptation of Sunset Song, directed by Terence Davies. In doing so it shows how the film, and Gibbon’s original novel, are involved in complex negotiations of ideas about Scottishness. In the case of the film, this can be seen through a sophisticated and poetic visual engagement with some aspects of the novel’s characterisation of Chris Guthrie, its use of language and its representation of landscapes. But it can also be seen in paratextual materials which demonstrate the route taken by the producers and director in negotiating the fraught economic terrain of feature length filmmaking in Scotland, both in terms of its funding applications to national funder creative Scotland, and the way it mobilised particular discourses of art-house and auteur cinema in its marketing and production materials. Finally, through a close look at the emphasis on militarism, femininity and landscape in the film text, the article considers how the film performs a kind of Scotland that is both amenable to the tastes of the filmmaker, desires of the public funder and the art-house, film festival circuit where it will primarily be consumed.
Back to the Future: Recalcitrance and Fidelity in Julieta
(Edinburgh University Press, 2020-05-31) Stewart, Michael; Stewart, Michael; Munro, Robert
Pedro Almodóvar’s adaptation of three Alice Munro short stories – ‘Chance’, ‘Soon’ and ‘Silence’, which appear consecutively and as episodes in one character’s life in the collection Runaway (2006) – was a much-anticipated project. Not only has Almodóvar noted frequently his great admiration of Munro’s work, but the planned film (provisionally entitled Silence) was to be the director’s first English language feature, and the first of his films to be set and shot outside of Spain – i.e. in Canada, the setting of the stories. The disappointment, then, was palpable when the director returned to Spain announcing that the project, in Canada at least, was off. Ignominy was then added to discomfort when, shortly before the Spanish release of Julieta, Almodóvar and his brother Agustín were embroiled in a tax scandal – leaked documents from a Panamanian law firm revealed that El Deseo (founded by the brothers) had set up an offshore company in the early 1990s (Romney 2016b).
Co-creating film education: moments of divergence and convergence on Queen Margaret University’s Introduction to Film Education course
(UCL Press, 2023-06-17) Munro, Robert
This case study reflects on the first iteration of a new course in film education, titled Introduction to Film Education, which ran for the first time at Queen Margaret University in Scotland in 2021. It considers the upskilling of both teachers and film education practitioners in film education, while reflecting upon the co-creation of a film education curriculum through the course’s collaborative, peer-driven nature. Finally, it wonders whether any settled film education curriculum is possible, or even desirable.
Creative Scotland on screen: Film strategy 2014-17
(2015-07-17) Munro, Robert
Exploring the place of animation and the role of the classroom-based film-maker within a wider field of Scottish moving image education
(UCL Press, 2021-06-10) Munro, Robert; Charles, Jonathan
This article explores animation as a popular mode of moving image education in the wider field of Scottish film education, through a discussion with film education practitioner Jonathan Charles. We reflect on Jonathan’s pedagogic approach to film education, the way in which it is shaped and aligned with changing institutional and funding imperatives, and the affordances of animation, through a detailed look at a film-making project with a primary school in West Lothian, Scotland. We reflect upon the challenge to maintain in-depth film experiences for young people, with training and working with teachers to allow film experiences to be scalable and multiply to reach a wider range of young people. We also discuss the drive to give young people agency throughout the film-making process, and how film education practitioners and teachers can best facilitate that.
Intercultural screen adaptation: British and global case studies
(Edinburgh University Press, 2020-05-31) Stewart, Michael; Munro, Robert; Stewart, Michael; Munro, Robert
Intercultural Screen Adaptation offers a wide-ranging examination of how film and television adaptations (and non-adaptations) interact with the cultural, social and political environments of their national, transnational and post-national contexts. With screen adaptations examined from across Britain, Europe, South America and Asia, this book tests how examining the processes of adaptation across and within national frameworks challenges traditional debates around the concept of nation in film, media and cultural studies. With case studies of films such as Under the Skin (2013) and T2: Trainspotting (2017), as well as TV adaptations like War and Peace (2016) and Narcos (2015 – 2017), Intercultural Screen Adaptation offers readers an invigorating look at adaptations from a variety of critical perspectives, incorporating the uses of landscape, nostalgia and translation.
Irvine Welsh and the Adaptation Industry: Filth, a case study
(Queen Margaret University, 2014-06-01) Munro, Robert
Performing the National? Scottish cinema in the time of indyref
(Edinburgh University Press, 2020-09) Munro, Robert
This article looks at Scottish cinema during the period 2012-2017, assessing the ways in which the nation’s constitutional debate, Scottish-English relations and discourses of national identity were engaged with thematically by films produced in this period. It argues that Scottish cinema in this period ‘performs the national’, in that a number of films flag their national status and engage with discourses of national identity at a distance, unburdened by any serious demand for national representativeness, as might be the case with a ‘national cinema’. From a corpus of texts in the period which offer the possibility of being read through discourses of the nation, two genre films, White Settlers and Sunshine on Leith, are analysed in detail for their differing narrative takes on Scottish-English relations in the contemporary moment. The article concludes by surmising that while film criticism in Scottish cinema has historically been overly-determined by an ideologically driven pursuit of national representativeness, perhaps the welcome emphasis which has been placed in contemporary criticism on broadening the scope of Scottish cinema studies beyond the national has implied a false dichotomy between the two, where it is more likely we can locate Scottish cinema somewhere in between.
Remake and decline in Scottish cinema: Whisky Galore 1949 and 2016
(Edinburgh University Press, 2021-03-01) Munro, Robert; Stewart, Michael; Cuelenaere, Eduard; Willems, Gertjan; Joye, Stijn
Scottish cinema now (Book Review)
(Taylor & Francis, 2016-09-28) Munro, Robert
Review of: Scottish cinema now, edited by Jonathan Murray, Fidelma Farley and Rod Stoneman, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009, 244 pp., £39.99 (hbk), ISBN 978-1443803311.
SCREENING SCOTLAND’S STORIES: Film Adaptations in Twenty-First-Century Scottish Cinema
(2017) Munro, Robert
This thesis surveys book to film adaptations in Scottish cinema in the period 2000-2015. It is the first examination of this practice in a Scottish context which also analyses the operations of Creative Scotland, the public arts body responsible for funding and promoting screen production in Scotland. This thesis asks two central questions: what are the processes by which film adaptations are produced in Scottish cinema? And: do contemporary film adaptations in Scottish cinema engage materially and thematically with ‘the nation’? I do this to test whether or not film adaptation is particularly well suited to speak to a national cultural imaginary. I map out a corpus of film texts produced in the first fifteen years of the twenty-first century, and analyse a selection of those texts in the second half of the thesis. I consider the extent to which industrial and thematic discourses of ‘Scottishness’ are engaged with through and by these films. The understanding of these films as ‘Scottish’, and what that means for both their production and reception, nationally and globally, will be discussed. I argue that the importance of national branding in the production of film remains a crucial component of the global film industry, into which Scottish cinema aims for viability. I categorise my four case studies within the categories of arthouse and popular cinema, in order to better understand the ways in which these films are marketed to, and received by, local and global audiences. Furthermore, this thesis uses these film adaptations to consider the discourses prevalent in Scottish culture in the twenty-first century, by examining those pre-existing texts which are selected for cinematic adaptation. How does the success of prior adaptations shape the range of future texts, and therefore what is deemed viable in Scottish cinema? What recurring representative tendencies are to be found in those film adaptations? How do they relate to the socio-political discourses of their era? This thesis attempts to answers those questions, and in doing so examines how particular discourses are mobilised throughout industrial processes of production, distribution and exhibition, and are readable within the film texts themselves.
T2 Trainspotting’s obsession with the past says a lot about today
(The Conversation, 2017-01-30) Munro, Robert
A review of T2 (2017), the sequel to Trainspotting (1996), which arrived in UK cinemas in January 2017.
‘To see oursels as ithers see us’: Textual, individual and national other-selves in Under the Skin
(Edinburgh University Press, 2020-05-31) Munro, Robert; Stewart, Michael; Munro, Robert
In Robert Burns’ To a Louse [1786] (2001), the narrator reflects upon the sight of a louse upon the head of a pompous woman in a church. The host body is unaware of its alien invader, and Burns’ narrator cannot help but reflect upon the impropriety of the louse marauding upon its aristocratic body. By the end of the poem the entire congregation of the church titters at the haughty woman with the louse on her head, leading Burns to reflect: O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us To see oursels as ithers see us! [1786] (2001: 133) Burns’ poem is a call for greater self-awareness and objectivity, a desire that we can view our affectations and pretensions from a distance. The congregation has gained this at the expense of the woman with the louse in her hair. They have gained a little greater insight into their selves by their look at an ‘other’, the haughty woman, whose lack of self-awareness causes their mirth. In this chapter I examine the film Under the Skin (Glazer 2013) which performs a meditation on selves, others and other-selves in its depiction of an alien predator in the form of a human female who begins to explore its (her) potential to adopt a human, and female, consciousness with fatal consequences. I will begin by exploring Hegel’s work on self-consciousness and his dialectic on self and other which, I argue, is one level to read the film’s narrative concern as outlined above.
Vernacular cinema, self-concept and the perceptual–conceptual shift: exploring conversations between film education and developmental psychology
(UCL Press, 2023-12-12) Chambers, Jamie; Munro, Robert; Ross, Josephine; Wimmer, Marina