WHAT’S THE STORY?

A FILM credited with helping to restore the reputation of one of Scotland’s greatest architects has been remastered and will receive its premiere next week.

The screening of Mackintosh Redux is particularly poignant following the destruction of Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s great work, the Glasgow School of Art (GSA).

First released 50 years ago, the newly revised film contains wonderful images of the building which highlight the tragedy of its loss.

Award-winning filmmaker Murray Grigor is still incredulous that such an internationally significant creation has been destroyed.

He believes there should be a public inquiry into the first fire which ravaged the building in 2014 and the next one which destroyed it just as its restoration was nearing completion last year.

“It is a work of art that survived over 100 years and they managed to protect it during the Second World War then this happens,” he said. “There has to be a public inquiry.”

WHAT ELSE DOES HE SAY?

THE conflagration at GSA is, for Grigor, typical of the carelessness in which Mackintosh and his works have been treated by his home city over the years. In the late 1960s, when he decided to make a film about Mackintosh and his legacy, he had difficulty in raising much interest.

Fortunately, the new BBC2 channel was scheduled to start broadcasting in 1968 and wanted some fresh ideas. Grigor’s Mackintosh was one of the first art films to be broadcast on the new channel.

The film complemented Andrew McLaren Young’s 1968 Charles Rennie Mackintosh Centenary Exhibition, which showed at the Edinburgh Festival and went to cities around the world – apart from Glasgow.

With Eddie McConnell’s photography, Bill Forsyth’s editing and Frank Spedding’s exuberant score, the film won five international awards.

It has now been painstakingly digitally re-mastered by Alan Russell at NLS Moving Image Archive with the lost score re-recorded by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

WHY IS IT IMPORTANT?

THE revival of Mackintosh’s reputation can be traced to Grigor’s film and Young’s exhibition. They alerted a new generation of architects to his genius, leading to many making the pilgrimage to Glasgow.

Among them was a young Italian architecture student, Bruno del Priore, who made drawings of Mackintosh’s chairs which were then replicated and exhibited in Milan, where they were such a hit they propelled Mackintosh to his current international prominence.

At the time, Glasgow’s Kelvingrove had only one of Mackintosh’s chairs so Grigor approached the gallery to see if they could show more.

“All these chairs at the Milan Biennial looked fantastic so I went to Kelvingrove where there was just one but I was told they couldn’t marry Mackintosh to the building, whatever that meant,” remembered Grigor.

DID ATTITUDES CHANGE?

EVENTUALLY – but Grigor is also frustrated that it took so long before there was any restoration of Mackintosh’s Ingram Street tearooms, bought by Glasgow City Council in the 1950s for £22,000 with the idea of making them into a museum and cultural centre.

“Within five or six years the council had rented them out to a retailer,” says Grigor. “Rodents got in and bits of Mackintosh’s work were moved around the city.

“It’s another terrible tragedy. I tried to get them into the Burrell which would have been fantastic but I was told it was a closed collection.”

He is pleased one of the six rooms has now been restored, at a cost of £1.4m, for the new V&A museum in Dundee.

Other parts of Mackintosh’s work in the city have also been neglected or destroyed.

“Within six years of his death they had half demolished the Queen Margaret College which was a significant Mackintosh building,” said Grigor.

WHAT ABOUT THE FILM?

MACKINTOSH Redux takes a fresh look at Charles Rennie Mackintosh.

“The first film took the line that Mackintosh was a pioneer of modernism and a founder of the Bauhaus movement but looking back now I see him as standing alone in the history of architecture because he was also an artist and a designer and a master builder and all these things came together in him – that was his genius,” said Grigor. “He was the first person in Scotland since Robert Adam to design a whole building right down to the door knobs which he did at the GSA.”

Grigor, who is nearing his 80th year and funded the remastered film himself, says he is “thrilled” to have completed it. “There is a happy ending as the film ends up in the south of France where he did all these wonderful paintings and there are now three interpretation centres along the Pyrenees with wee reproductions of his paintings where he painted them,” he said.

The premiere of Mackintosh Redux is on February 21 at the Glasgow Film Festival