ABSTRACT
Numerous Scottish films explore national identity via the conduit of a child protagonist, from Bill Douglas's My Childhood and My Ain Folk to Venus Peter, Small Faces, and Ratcatcher. The history of film production in Scotland is often conceived in relation to the canon of art films which have garnered international recognition. McTaggart, whose work is discussed by Murdo MacDonald, was from a Gaelic-speaking family in Kintyre. According to Macdonald, in his earlier work Scottish Art, owing to McTaggart's background in a fishing and crofting family 'when he painted a coastal scene he understood what he was painting from a socially engaged perspective'. Like many of McTaggart's paintings, the figures in Machrihanish, Bay Voyach are rendered almost transparent. Just as in McTaggart's paintings, then, so too in Gaelic filmmaking is the Gaidhealtachd represented as a virtual repository of cultural heritage. The Gaidhealtachd itself offers a new frontier for Gaelic culture.
