'Clyde Film' Screening + Q&A

Clyde Film Screening + Q&A with Alistair McCallum
6.30pm Friday 11th December
Livestreamed through Facebook

Clyde Film (1985) by Ian Venart, Charlie Tracy, Ian Miller, Mandy Merrick, Alistair McCallum & Ken Currie
Running Time: 32mins 23secs

Cranhill Arts Project was set up in 1981 by local activists and working-class Glaswegians living through what was a low point for the city and for communities like Cranhill. They were a budding group of earnest young photographers and amateur film makers looking to tell it like it was. 

In 1984/85 they hired the backroom and Steenbeck editing table at Oscar Marzaroli’s Ogam Films studio in Park Terrace to edit a 16mm documentary – ‘Clyde Film’, which was premiered in Moscow at the World Festival of Youth and Students; shown in Glasgow during May Day, and at GFT in 1985.

The film utilises a pictorial documentary style using music and images to tell the story of Glasgow and its people, montaging scenes shot in Glasgow with archive footage and stills. It uses traditional Glasgow and political songs to do the storytelling and sits in a lineage of films about the city which include  Marzaroli’s ‘Dear Green Place’ (1968), ‘Glasgow 1980’ (1971) and the Dawn Cine Group’s ‘Let Glasgow Flourish’ (1956).

Cranhill Arts then concentrated on photography as a more accessible and democratic medium, and inspired, in part, by Marzaroli’s stills they went on to  undertake the biggest photographic survey in Scotland with the project ‘Glaswegians’ by taking 29,000 photographs up to and during Glasgow City of Culture 1990.

This is only the second time that ‘Clyde Film’ has been shown in 35 years in a public event (the last time being at Glasgow’s Short Film Festival in 2015), and it will be followed by a Q+A with founding member of Cranhill Arts, Alistair McCallum discussing the film, and the photography initiatives of Cranhill Arts, including the exhibitions ‘Out of the Biscuit Tin’ and ‘Glaswegians’ at Cranhill Arts Gallery in the Saltmarket in 1990 and ‘Future Memories’ at The Tramway in 1991.

Alistair McCallum is s digital designer and he will also participate in the Oscar & Me event on 19^th December.

All Images: Alistair McCallum