The Modern-day council area of Angus traces its name to an eighth century Pictish king, Óengus son of Fergus (ruled 732-761). Óengus (Angus) hailed from Circinn, one of the four principal Pictish kingdoms roughly coextensive with the modern county of Angus. The signing of the Declaration of Arbroath at Arbroath Abbey in 1320 marked Scotland’s establishment as an independent nation, and so Angus has become known as the birthplace of […]
Tag: film
Zoom into East Renfrewshire
Historically, East Renfrewshire formed part of the larger Renfrewshire county. In the 1970s, most of the area broke away to become a new council district called Eastwood. The area was later renamed East Renfrewshire after gaining a part of Renfrew District (namely Barrhead) in 1996. Neighboured by the City of Glasgow to the northeast and […]
Don’t Have Nightmares… When archive films get scary
Dr Emily Munro, National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive Watch our Halloween video This compilation was made for Halloween and, inspired by the footage we have in the moving image archive, references American ‘B’ movies from the 1950s. The compilation includes extracts from many different films and, in particular, work by Wishaw filmmaker Enrico […]
Politics, publicity and potatoes: Scotland’s tattie howking films
Dr Emily Munro, National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive Watch our video ‘Tattie Howkin’ Today commercial potato crops are usually gathered by machines but, in the past, the job of lifting potatoes from the soil was done by hand. The Scottish potato harvest once employed thousands of men and women (often migrant workers from […]
In the General Reading Room, you’re not allowed to scream…
40 years ago, in May 1979, a film burst onto cinema screens which still terrifies and immerses audiences to this day. Following the unexpected success of Star Wars in 1977, Twentieth Century Fox wanted to follow it up with another science fiction film aimed at a more mature audience. They optioned Dan O’Bannon and Ron […]
Pride of Islands
Blog written by Gordon Park, Film Curation student at the University of Glasgow As part of my MSc Film Curation course I have been undergoing a placement with the Moving Image Archive at the National Library of Scotland. The outcome of my placement will be two screening events at Kelvin Hall that focus on Scotland’s […]
Happy Birthday Beano!
The Beano is Britain’s longest running comic and celebrated its 80th birthday on 30th July 2018. So a slightly belated happy birthday. We did though throw a party for the Beano at our Kelvin Hall premises in Glasgow on Saturday the 28th of July. We showed for one day only our copy of Beano issue […]
Skills for the Future traineeship placement
Helena Robson began a two week placement in the Library’s Conservation Unit on 16 April. Helena had worked with the conservators as a volunteer in 2015, and she is about to complete her Skills for the Future traineeship on collections digitisation, as part of the programme run jointly by the National Galleries of Scotland and […]
Utopian Nostalgia: Murray Grigor’s Space and Light (1972)
“The twentieth century began with utopia and ended with nostalgia.” Svetlana Boym One of the Moving Image Archive’s treasure troves is a collection of films produced for Films of Scotland, an agency set up by John Grierson for the Empire Exhibition of 1938 to make films promoting Scotland’s social, cultural and industrial heritage to the […]
Frustration, Fascination and Film Identification
From first viewing, it’s nothing very much to look at, a rather grainy piece of silent colour film lasting just under two minutes. Simply recorded as (Lifeboat Launch) the film was dated rather vaguely as ‘1950s’ with an ‘unknown location’. Time to send in the cataloguers.