Edinburgh on Film
‘This could have been any city. They’re all the same.’
So remarks Christopher Eccleston’s narrator in the Edinburgh-set Shallow Grave: a comment which underlines the universality of the film’s themes. Greed. Mistrust. Obsession. The waking nightmare of sharing a flat with a chartered accountant. You don’t have to live in Edinburgh to relate; I didn’t. I was fortunate enough not to be stabbed when I left towels on the floor or tea-bags in the sink, but I was ever-conscious that I was treading a thin line. Danny Boyle’s film, although set in the Scottish capital, can be viewed as an allegory for all cities, and for all the grasping, self-obsessed city-dwellers therein.
Yet viewers of the BBC’s recent adaptation of Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South could be forgiven for assuming the programme’s makers have taken Eccleston’s words a bit too literally. Set against the backdrop of Victorian Manchester, the drama boasts a faithful script, solid performances, and rather unfortunately, some stunning panoramas of North Bridge, shot from Calton Hill. That’s because this mid-nineteenth century tale of England’s industrial north was filmed, for the most part, in Auld Reekie.
While it would be absurd to suggest that the makers of North and South chose Edinburgh as stand-in because they somehow saw it as uniform or interchangeable (on the contrary, one assumes they chose it precisely because of the unique Victorian characteristics which set it apart from so many other cities) the endurance of these tell-tale signs suggests a failure to anticipate audience recognition of the city. Parts of London, for instance, boast similar Victorian and industrial aspects to Edinburgh, but were perhaps deemed too familiar to double as a setting for the fictionalised Manchester of the text. What the programme makers may have forgotten is that Edinburgh also, has a long and rich screen heritage, and that her winding hills and towering stairways; her cobbled streets and crooked alleyways; her Georgian townhouses and palatial mansions, have long been a familiar sight to cinema-goers the world over.
There are classic features, such as Ronald Neame’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, filmed on location in Edinburgh in 1969, which draw upon the wealth of visual history offered by the Old Town. Maggie Smith’s Oscar-winning role as the unorthodox schoolteacher sees her take her class on trips through Greyfriars Kirkyard and the vennel off the Grassmarket. It is amidst these settings that the audience sees the Calvinistic ideals which helped to shape those parts of the city, take root in the mind of the young Sandy Duncan. This year will see the release of Burke and Hare, a black comedy about the two 19th century grave robbers, and it can only be assumed that director John Landis will strive to take full advantage of the archaic, Gothic elements of the Old Town setting.
For many, the subject of Edinburgh and film will instantly bring to mind the image of Ewan Mcgregor running down Princes Street, security guards in hot pursuit, to the strains of Iggy Pop’s ‘Lust for Life’. Danny Boyle and John Hodge’s adaptation of Irvine Welsh’s seminal Trainspotting is credited not only as the cultural defining point of 90’s Scotland, but also 90’s Britain itself. This film, more than any other, played a major role in helping to establish the cultural tour de force known as Cool Britannia. Moving away from traditional Edinburgh landmarks, it introduced us to the urban decay of Leith and to the lives lived quite literally on the Fringe of society’s mainstream. This underside of the city has continued to be depicted in countless gritty crime dramas, from the televised adaptations of John Rankin’s Rebus detective stories, to Adrian Shergold and Simon Donald’s Low Winter Sun. From Fleshmarket Close to the Caves, and the Salisbury Crags to the Ross Bandstand, these everyday locales have played host to some gruesome screen deaths, following in the long tradition of Edinburgh ghost stories, and forever cementing them in the national viewing conscious.
There are times, though, when the city transcends its role as backdrop and becomes one of the principle focuses of a film; almost a character in its own right. Annie Griffin’s Festival would be an obvious example of this, but for me, it is director David Mackenzie who finds the perfect union of setting and character in his adaptation of Peter Jinks’s Hallam Foe. The landscape of Edinburgh’s rooftops, which serve as our young protagonist’s playground, lend themselves so well to the film that it is difficult to separate the idea of the two. Certainly, it is impossible to imagine the film set anywhere else. In the same way that the city leaves its mark on the film, watching the film engrains itself upon your view of the city, almost becoming part of Edinburgh’s mythology, so that some days it might not seem like the least likely thing in the world to look up and see Hallam making his way along the edges of the Balmoral clock tower. In terms of a marriage between person and place, it almost equates with Spider-man and New York City. (Spider-man, incidentally, made an appearance of his own in Edinburgh, gracing our city’s rooftops in a one-off special published last year.)
Alasdair Gray once wrote of Glasgow that it was hard for people to live there because no one had done so in their imaginations. No tourist is ever a stranger to London, Paris or New York because they have all visited them in their minds, through the art, literature and film that these places produce and inspire. He equated Glasgow’s contribution to the world’s imagination as ‘a music hall song and a few bad novels’. Times have changed and so has Glasgow. Edinburgh, however, has always belonged to that other category, to the places that capture the imagination and contain a feeling of familiarity to those who descend upon them even for the first time. Its continued presence in cinema has only contributed to this. The city will make its next appearance in Sylvain Chomet’s animated feature The Illusionist which will open the 2010 Edinburgh International Film Festival.
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