Western Isles life in the 1970s brought back on screen

BBC News

25-02-2025

It was an attempt to use cutting-edge video technology to chronicle the daily lives of people in the Western Isles. Cinema Sgire ran from 1977 to 1981 and involved training local people to use some of the first commercially available portable video cameras to tell their own stories in their own ways.At the end of the project, more than 100 tapes were packed away for 15 years before being rediscovered.They have now been digitised and made available online and are being shown in Glasgow on Wednesday as part of Scotland's World Gaelic Week.
Over the course of four years, the project covered village hall openings, royal visits, concerns about ferry services and the daily stories about communities, businesses and family gatherings which would otherwise have never been captured on media.The person who ran the scheme was Michael Russell, who would go on to become chief executive of the SNP and then an MSP and cabinet secretary.Back in 1977, he was in his mid-20s and working to combine his love of Gaelic language and culture with an ambition to work in television.It was a challenging role for the budding producer-director."It was very much a child of its time, devised by the old Scottish Film Council to do two things. We had a cinema circuit, we showed 'blockbusters' so to speak, round the islands," he says."But we also had a video unit and that was very, very 1970s, where the idea was that people would make their own television. "If only we had smart phones and iPads and Tik-Tok we would have done the things we really wanted to do. We were working with open reel, half-inch black and white video tape and in the first year no editing facility at all."What we were trying to do was to say to communities 'go tell your own story' and some of it was really ground-breaking."
Kay Foubister is acquisitions curator of the moving image collection at the National Library of Scotland (NLS). They have taken over the Cinema Sgire archive and put it online."It was Michael's project. He took the new technology to the area and asked the community to film themselves," she says."It was not an external party filming these. The community themselves decided what they would do and how they would film it."The tapes show both the advantages and shortcomings of the emerging video technology."It's early video, brand new technology. For the first time they didn't have to send the film away, you could see what had been filmed straight away," Kay says."But they also had to get people used to using heavy equipment. For the first year there was no editing equipment."Michael Russell believes the basic nature of the technology and scheme contributed to its success. "We were the only people working in video in Gaelic for about a year-and-a-half. We were getting communities to prioritise what was important to them," he says. "Because of the technological limitations it didn't produce the wonderful finished products that people were used to seeing. But we were also working in communities where television was still available in black and white 405 line when I first went to Uist in 1977. "So with those limitations, people got quite a lot out of it, found a way of expressing themselves, recorded what was important to them."
Cinema Sgire wrapped up in 1981, and Michael believes they failed to plan for what happened next with the archive which had been built up."I don't think any of us expected that these tapes would still be around and they were indeed lost for quite a period of time."They were left in our studio when the project came to an end and, miraculously, somebody took them, kept them, and they emerged about 15 years later," he says. The 100-plus tapes were digitised by the NLS in 2023.They have since been fully catalogued thanks to local company UistFilm, which has also taken the archive to communities across the Western Isles."We really had no idea of the quality of the archive after nearly 50 years," Kay says."Some of the tapes have video signal loss but the footage that has been kept shows the natural way the people are speaking to camera and is really quite unique.""Not much could be done with a lot of the footage. They did a lot to enhance and level out some of the sound."Where there was more than one copy of the same tape, they were able to edit them together to get the best version available, cutting out some of the more technically-degraded footage."Really restoring the footage would need more money to get technicians working on it," Kay says.
The archive may not be in pristine condition but the powerful stories it tells seems to be connecting with audiences.Kay says: "Everyone reacts in a different way. It depends on what they are interested in. One man said he felt he had met the person who had lived on his croft before him. It gave him the chance to hear him speak."People commented on the quality of the Gaelic spoken, which has changed. Some of the words used are not so common now."One woman said she had to look up words that were being spoken because she had forgotten what they meant".For Michael, seeing the tapes again is a chance to re-connect with an important period in his life."I lived in Uist from 1977 to 1982 and of course out of the project came not only the Cinema Sgire tapes but the Celtic Media Festival which I founded in 1980," he says.The project's other legacy is its continuing relevance. In Gaelic and English, the people captured on tape almost 50 years ago talk about education, employment, ferry services. The very things people in the isles talk about now.For Kay, that is an important lesson the archive tell us."It shows that while some things change, some things don't," she adds.