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Artists’ adoption and adaption of film have long been underwritten by benevolent, if often underpowered, pipelines of funding. With the devolution of British cultural policy in the twentieth century, however, public subsidy for this marginal practice began to develop unevenly, brokering discrepancies that left artists in Scotland economically disadvantaged for a measure of decades. Holding that artistic production cannot be untethered from socio-economic context, this article advances compromise and contingency as immutable conditions whose sympathetic reconstruction yields much in the recovery of overlooked and dismissed film practices. In surveying the production and circulation of artists’ film in Scotland before 1982 as a case in point, it exposes a formative correlation between policy and the prevailing canon in the United Kingdom. Though an analysis of organizational archives, collected oral and written testimony and the film work of Norman McLaren, Margaret Tait, Enrico Cocozza, Murray Grigor and Lesley Keen, it locates key discrepancies in infrastructure and opportunity which challenge the centrality of national narratives, beckoning a wholesale reconsideration of what taxonomies of practice like ‘avant-garde’ are really upholding.
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https://doi.org/10.1386/miraj_00139_1 Published content will be available immediately after check-out or when it is released in case of a pre-order. Please make sure to be logged in to see all available purchase options.