BFI: Trainspotting

Murray Smith's BFI: Trainspotting (2002) is a comprehensive look at a seminal 90s film by the production team of director Danny Boyle, producer Andrew Mcdonald, and screenwriter John Hodge. The book is divided into nine sections. The first section, "Arriving," gives the context in which the film was made as inspiration from Irvine Welsh's inventive, ground-breaking novel from which it was adapted. Section 2, "Young Americans", discusses not only the American stylistic influences within the film, but also the regional and national aspects of the film-being Scottish and British. Section 3, "The City's Ripped Backside", looks at the importance of the setting of Edinburgh in the film. Smith identifies friendship and loyalty as key themes in section 4, "Like Friends." In section 5, "Bad Person", Smith analyzes Johnny Renton, whose self-criticism in the film self-identifies himself as a bad person.This is something that Murray questions if we can take this analysis at face value or not. Smith identifies and discusses rapid-speed and propulsion forward as key visual elements in section 6, "Speed of Life." The next section 7, "Scoring Trainspotting", argues that the popular and eclectic soundtrack adds great value to the effectiveness of the film overall. Another original aspect of the film, called "black magic realism" by Smith is discussed in section 8. in section 9, Murray argues that Trainspotting is a modern classic-it is my estimation as well. I thought this was one of the better BFI film books, I tend to prefer these thematic and stylistic discussions of films rather than the production history types of film discussions.