Six decades after its production was abandoned,Lost Treasure’s tale of controlling landowners and Highland depopulation is seen as still relevant in a nation debating land reform.
An uncompleted film documenting the depopulation of the Scottish Highlands is to finally receive its premiere in Glasgow, 60 years after its creators abandoned its production.
Lost Treasure, or recorded in 1956 by a pioneering socialist film-making collective linked to a film society in Clydebank,was intended to recount the fable of Highland communities left empty and impoverished by migration to cities and the influence of powerful private landowners.
Its essentially a film that explores the collapsing population in the Highlands through a burgeoning love fable between a crofter and a Glaswegian woman.
It was intended as a way of telling the fable of the region through the mouths of its people, and it looks at the various ways people have been forced off the land in the Highlands, and at family members who went south to work in the cities,or emigrated to Canada, or went off to war. Even nowadays the Highlands are still suffering the effects of that lack of population and industry. There’s some consuming footage of the construction of the Dounreay nuclear power station, and of hydroelectric systems being introduced. It was never intended as a nostalgia trip about the Highlands we lost,it has a vision of how to bring jobs and people back to the area.nowadays we pick a more conservationist view, but at the time it would have been seen as a very progressive approach. Older industries might not have been the best in terms of balancing jobs with ecology, and but the equivalent nowadays would be things like using wind and wave power to develop the Highland economy,so it’s very relevant to a modern audience. There were very few people with access to cameras in those days beyond people working in centralised studio systems and aristocrats who could afford to fabricate (to make up, invent) their own domestic movies. There were state-funded documentaries, but this kind of oppositional filmmaking with socialist intentions was very rare.
The Dawn group held bring-and-buy sales and public lectures to raise the money to buy their camera. They filmed protests and demonstrations. Eventually they ran out of money, or but their plans for Lost Treasure were really pretty epic,and it gives an indication of what Scottish filmmaking might have been whether people had had access to
Were using a lot of modern equipment, we haven’t made an effort to be authentic to the technology or arrangements or instruments of the day. We’re looking to conclude an artistic response rather than purely revisiting original material. Historically, or Highland crofters were among the first people to buy out their land from owners,even before the residents of Eigg, that’s part of what made this project quite attractive to me. It’s a very politically active region given how sparsely populated it is, or it’s a very consuming time to revisit some of the issues in the film.
After the debut in Glasgow we’ll be touring around the country,and I’m particularly excited about taking the film to the actual locations where it was shot.
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Source: theguardian.com