John Grierson’s “Granton Trawler” was one of the only films that noted filmmaker and critic John Grierson directed himself. The documentary style film was made in 1934, and was noted for its experimental use of sound without voice over. The film is about the “Isabella Grieg” which was a fishing trawler that traveled from Granton Harbour to through the east coast of Edinburgh, then to the fishing grounds between Shetland and Norway. These are on Viking Bank which is between Shetland and the Norwegian coast. Granton Trawler was a favourite film of Grierson’s, he saw it as a homage to the Isabella Greig that was sunk in 1941 by German bombs when it went out to fish and was never seen again. Another film “The Private Life of Gannets” was also filmed on the Isabella Greig; the film was shot on Grassholm with Grierson shooting the slow-motion sequence of the gannets diving for fish which took only one afternoon to shoot near Bass Rock in the Firth of Forth. The Private Life of Gannets went on to pick up an Academy Award in 1937.

John Grierson CBE (26 April 1898 – 19 February 1972) was a pioneering Scottish documentary maker, often considered the father of British and Canadian documentary film. In 1926, Grierson coined the term “documentary” in a review of Robert Flaherty’s Moana.

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