Low Rent | Dir. Cloudberry MacLean | 1hr 15mins | Scotland | 2024
Low Rent spans the year I spent secretly living in a hut I built on my allotment in Edinburgh back in 2005. It follows the full cycle of the seasons and captures moments such as early dawn from the hut doorway, a fox running with a scavenged egg in her mouth and trees bending with fruit. In its course I explore questions that continue to preoccupy me about land ownership in Scotland, class, poverty, colonialism and how the violence of capitalism and the joy of life meet in our bodies. With a unique score created by Jer Reid drawing from live improvisation by Jer Reid (guitar) and Una MacGlone (double bass).
Content note: references to colonialism and chattel slavery.
Reading & Resources
Acknowledgements:
The two most influential books in the creation of Low Rent were:
Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation by Silvia Federici
&
The Conspiracy of Good Taste: William Morris, Cecil Sharp and Clough Williams-Ellis and the Repression of Working Class Culture in the 20th Century by Stefan Szczelkun
I also want to note that the conceptualisation of colonialism as 4 pillars:
- taking the land
- killing culture
- use of force
- control of mind
came from an essay entitled Between Radical Theory and Community Praxis – Reflections on Organizing and the Non-Profit Industrial Complex by Amara H. Perez on behalf of Sisters in Action for Power that was part of the book The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex Edited by INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence
The quote “Mourn the dead and fight like hell for the living” is from Mother Jones
Other core books that I drew on for research or closely relate to the themes explored in Low Rent are:
Scottish History
The Highland Clearances by John Prebble
Culloden by John Prebble
The Summer Walkers: Travelling People and Pearl-fishers in the Highlands of Scotland by Timothy Neat
Enemies of God: The Witch Hunt in Scotland by Christine Larner
The Lowland Clearances: Scotland’s Silent Revolution 1760-1830 by Peter Aitchison
White People, Indians, and Highlanders: Tribal People and Colonial Encounters in Scotland and America by Colin G. Galloway
Healing Threads – Traditional Medicines of the Highlands and Islands by Mary Beith
The Making of the Crofting Community by James Hunter
UK History
The Blood Never Dried by John Newsinger
Cotters and Squatters by Colin Ward
Colonial Mentality
White Innocence: Paradoxes in Colonialism and Race by Gloria Wekker
Conquest: Sexual Violence and American Indian Genocide by Andrea Smith*
Indigenous Resistance in the USA
Not Vanishing by Christos
Prison Writings by Leonard Peltier
500 years of Indigenous Resistance by Gord Hill
Black History & Resistance In the USA and the Caribbean
Nine Black Women: An Anthology of Nineteenth-Century Writers from the United States, Canada, Bermuda and the Caribbean Edited by Moira Ferguson
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs
The Black Jacobins by CLR James
Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis
ain’t i a woman by bell hooks
Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center by bell hooks
Assata: an Autobiography by Assata Shakur
Anarchism and the Black Revolution and Other Essays by Lorenzo Kom’boa Ervin
Reading on Lucy Parsons
Resistance in the USA and the Caribbean
Pirate Utopias – Under the Banner of King Death
Revolutionary Letters by Diane di Prima
The Autobiography of Mother Jones by Mother Jones
How Non-Violence Protects the State by Peter Gederloos
A People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn
*Note: This statement about Andrea Smith, speaks to the complexities of her abusive assumption of Cherokee identity. I include her work above because it is an incisive analysis that was important in the development of my thinking.