The Haunted Landscape of the Uncanny North: Scott Graham’s Shell (2012) and Gordon Napier’s 1745 (2017)

Abstract

Focussing on the spatial dimension of historical haunting, this article analyses the depiction of northern scenery in contemporary Scottish cinema, to highlight a shift from the romanticised landscape of historical figurations of Scottish identity to a territory haunted both by the nation’s past traumas and its dark secrets. I examine Scott Graham’s film Shell (2012) and Gordon Napier’s 1745: An Untold Story of Slavery (2017) to demonstrate how, while they reference the sublime aesthetics and identity politics conventionally attached to the representation of the north and the cultural construction of the Scottish Highlands, these films also interrogate the relationship between history and landscape. Shell and 1745 consequently point to an ambivalent definition of belonging, made more complicated by the specific historical and political references rooted in the landscape. The Scottish north is unveiled as an uncanny territory, where a sense of belonging based on established national history narratives is replaced by the subversive (re)possession of the landscape by the less visible stories that continue to haunt it: the contemporary legacy of Highland Clearances in Shell and Scotland’s involvement in Empire and slavery in 1745.