Hearing the Lost Voices of the Community. Distance and Contact Zones in the St Kilda Movies

Abstract

This article examines how St Kilda was depicted in the only two fictional films about life on an island that has assumed mythical status since Martin Martin’s travel account (1698): Michael Powell’s The Edge of the World (1937) and Bill Bryden’s Ill Fares the Land (1983). After a presentation of St Kilda, I examine the artistic and ideological objectives of the directors. I then more specifically examine how both directors represent distance and how they present the irruption of what Deleuze and Guattari called striated forces. I describe in the following part the various contact zones where islanders and mainlanders meet in the two films. The notion of St Kilda’s lost voices is central to my article and allows us to see how these films tried to provide the St Kilda community with a means of expression.