Innovative Craft at Dovecot Studios

It’s been a funny old festive season. We’re culturally programmed to long for a white Christmas (that Irving Berlin has a lot to answer for!), but when it comes, chaos ensues. Among all the many other victims of this prolonged period of exceptionally bad weather, spare a thought for all the cultural venues that must be losing out at what, at least for theatres and cinemas, should be their busiest time. With most Scottish Arts Council funding at standstill, Local Authority funding often reducing, sponsorship deals crashing, and (of course) fuel bills rising, anything that then affects the box office income as well is just another among a positive rain of blows which the cultural sector is having to withstand.

Judith and I did at least make it to Edinburgh for the weekend before Christmas (and thus before the snow locked everything down). We were very seasonal, and took in both It’s a Wonderful Life and The Red Shoes at the Filmhouse. Both these classics were in digitally restored prints, and it was my first experience of fullscale digital projection (as opposed to projection from conventional DVDs, now the mainstay of most small film festivals and film clubs). Well, I was suitably overwhelmed. I doubt if even the original audiences back in the 1940s enjoyed these films in such pristine condition, given how quickly and easily 35mm prints can be scratched, marked, and shortened. The lustrous black and white photography of It’s a Wonderful Life was a particular revelation, and seeing this Christmas perennial on the big screen emphasised what a dark story it tells—it’s really much more of a film noir than a cosy family favourite!

The timing for experiencing these digital prints was just right, as the Screen Machine goes back out on tour this month fully equipped with top of the range digital projection, just in time for James Cameron’s much-hyped Avatar. Most cinemas are hedging their bets with digital projection, and keeping 35mm projectors alongside their new digital counterparts, but given the Screen Machine’s inevitably small projection booth, that isn’t an option. So from now on, every film shown in the mobile cinema will be in sharp, crisply focused digital. And that should open up great possibilities for a much wider choice of programmes for Screen Machine audiences, as well as the thrill of 3D.

While in Edinburgh I also had my first chance to visit the fine new exhibition space IC: Innovative Craft, based in the former Infirmary Street Baths, just across the road from Robert Adam’s Old College (and next door to Infirmary Street School, where in 1976 I was stage manager for two Fringe shows from my alma mater, Glasgow University). This is a beautiful space, and the three exhibitions on display were of stunning quality. The building also houses the relaunched Dovecot Tapestry Studio, so it was appropriate that the main exhibition, Follow a Thread, focused on contemporary approaches to the tapestry medium.

Now I often have a problem with the craft/visual arts cross-over. There are many makers of the very highest quality who somehow stumble when they attempt to make work which they consider is ‘art’ not ‘craft’. The technical ability may be outstanding, but the artistic concept can often be weak, even bathetic. Somehow, that doesn’t happen so much in tapestry, perhaps because as a medium it has a longer history of being thought of as ‘art’ (think of those Raphael tapestry cartoons). And so it proved with this exhibition, which married breathtaking technical achievements with exciting and thought provoking artistic concepts. IC: Innovative Craft is clearly going to be a regular stop on future Edinburgh trips.

Once back home, and the car safely dug in through a foot of snow, we settled in and barely moved for the two weeks of Christmas and New Year. Christmas Day for us was in one sense very traditional, with buck’s fizz, salmon and scrambled eggs for breakfast, and turkey and all the trimmings for Christmas dinner. But in another way it was very different. Our soundtrack for the day came, not from the BBC, but from Spotify. The MacGarrigles’ Family Christmas Album over breakfast (perhaps the best Christmas album ever?), Heifitz encores while preparing dinner, and, for the meal itself, the recording of last year’s Nine Lessons and Carols from King’s College Cambridge. And, later in the break, as the snow continued to fall, we sat by the fire with our books, and explored the music of Arnold Bax, whose wintry Celtic soundscapes seemed ideal for the weather and the season. On Spotify, again, of course.

Christmas TV, apart from some treasures on BBC 4, seemed very disappointing. Is it just because I’m getting older that the funniest thing I saw all season was the ‘play’ in the Morecambe and Wise Christmas special, repeated from the early 1970s? And, for those Whovians who read my last blog, wasn’t David Tennant’s much-anticipated departure from the role of Dr Who just a bit of an overly complicated, overly sentimental, anti-climax? Of course, one MP has already objected to the talented Mr Tennant’s ubiquity over the season, with some 75 appearances (counting repeats) over a three week span. And what maybe underlies that ‘eggs in one basket’ approach is a sense of desperation and lack of direction on the part of the BBC and other broadcasters—with so many alternatives on offer, like Spotify, just how do you make the Christmas schedules special?

The best response to being snowed in, of course, is to turn to books. I can thoroughly recommend William Dalrymple’s new book on India, Nine Lives, and I’ve also been enjoying two Scottish classics—Johnson’s and Boswell’s accounts of their Highland tour, in the cleverly collated edition by Ronald Black for Birlinn, entitled To the Hebrides, and John Buchan’s Witch Wood, almost the last of Buchan’s novels I’ve got round to reading, and apparently his own favourite. Buchan’s historical novels are much less well known than his thrillers but they contain some of his best writing, and in some ways perhaps they have stood the test of time better than the sometimes embarrassing Imperial attitudes of the Hannay adventures.

Now it’s back to work, a new decade, and (let us hope) soon a new cultural agency in the shape of Creative Scotland. Perhaps it’s been beneficial that the weather has enforced inactivity, and a chance to reflect, and look back, before launching into all the changes that 2010 will bring.

© Robert Livingston, January 2010