Margaret Tait
︎ https://lux.org.uk/artist/margaret-tait/ ︎︎︎
Born in 1918 in Kirkwall on Orkney, Scotland, Margaret Tait qualified in medicine at Edinburgh University 1941. From 1950 to 1952 she studied film at the Centro Sperimentale di Photographia in Rome.
Returning to Scotland she established Ancona Films in Edinburgh’s Rose Street. In the 1960’s Tait moved back to Orkney where over the following decades she made a series of films inspired by the Orcadian landscape and culture. All but three of her thirty two films were self financed. She wrote poetry and stories and produced several books including three books of poetry.
Screenings include National Film Theatre (London), Berlin Film Festival, Centre for Contemporary Art (Warsaw), Arsenal Kino (Berlin), Pacific Film Archives (San Francisco), Knokke le Zoute, Delhi and Riga. Tait was accorded a retrospective at the 1970 Edinburgh Film Festival and has been the subject of profiles on BBC and Channel Four.
The feature length Blue Black Permanent (1993) opened the Edinburgh International Film Festival. Her final film Garden Pieces was completed in 1998.
Margaret Tait died in Kirkwall in 1999
Three Portrait Sketches
1951, 10 min, DCP
Early experiments in portraiture, made in Italy, when Margaret Tait was a student at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematographia, Rome. Portraits of 1: Claudia Donzelli; 2: Saulat Rahman; 3: Fernando Birri.
‘I like the idea of making a film equivalent of portrait painting. I did 3Ps of 3 of my friends in Rome [Three Portrait Sketches], and the next year, home in Orkney, I made a portrait of my mother [A Portrait of Ga] […] I was trying for a sort of formality – a juxtaposition of images related to colour, composition, movement.’ – M.T.
Portrait of Ga
1952, 5 min, DCP
An intimate portrait of Tait’s mother, the film was made in Orkney shortly after Tait returned from Rome. Like the other film portraits Tait would go on to make, the film’s focus is on capturing the more elusive qualities of its subject. The camera lingers on fragmentary details: her mother’s hands waving in time to the music, fingers unwrapping a boiled sweet, the sun-lit creases of her eyes as she smiles to camera. In this way, Tait’s camera mimics the close-up gaze of a child and establishes the intimate style of filmmaking which would eventually characterise the body of her work.
Where I am is Here
1964, 35 min, DCP
“The kind of precision which holds Where I Am Is Here together doesn’t depend on words: about half a dozen recurring themes – a stone thrown in the water, a car door shutting, traffic, buildings seen from passing buses, and so on – act upon each other, and are then accompanied by Hector MacAndrew’s music for my poem ‘Hilltop Pibroch’.” – M.T.
Aerial
1974, 4 min, DCP
A short, lyrical film invoking all things elemental. A perfect distillation of Tait’s idea of the film poem as it evolved over time. It is one of her shortest films at just over four minutes long and features no spoken words at all.
“The intention in AERIAL is condensation, so that the emotional effect is direct, as in poetry.” – M.T.
Colour Poems
1974, 12 min, DCP
“Nine linked short films. Memory, chance observation, and the subsuming of one in the other. The titles within the film are: Numen of the Boughs, Old Boots, Speed Bonny Boat, Lapping Watter , Incense, Aha, Brave New World, Things, Terra Firma. A poem started in words is continued by the picture, part of another poem is read for the last of the nine. Some images are formed by direct-on-film animation, others are found by the camera.” – M.T.
Tailpiece
1976, 10 min, DCP
“The film was conceived as a coda to a longer (colour ) film, Place of Work, made in the same year. It covers the time of finally emptying a long-time family home, with its personal memories and connection with some of my own work. Fragments of verse, along with young childrens voices released into the emptying rooms and staircases, and an ersatz pop music track, clarify the familiar and the alien in the situation.” – M.T.
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