Margaret Tait: Subjects and Sequences
One of the UK’s most valued media organizations, LUX is committed to the preservation and distribution of artists' moving image work. In 2004 LUX organized two programs of new and restored prints from one of Britain’s most individual filmmakers, Margaret Tait (1918-1999). Tait studied at the Centro Sperimentale de Cinematografia in Rome during the height of the neorealist movement before founding her own film company and returning to Scotland in the early 1950s. Over 46 years she produced over thirty films and published three books of poetry and two volumes of short stories. Tait described her films as poems, and often quoted Federico García Lorca’s phrase of “stalking the image” to define her philosophy and method, believing that if you look at an object closely enough it will speak its nature. She once said that her films are born of “sheer wonder and astonishment at how much can be seen in any place that you choose… if you really look.”
PROGRAM
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Three Portrait Sketches
Directed by Margaret Tait.
UK, 1951, 16mm, black & white, silent, 6 min.
Made while Tait was still studying in Rome, the three portraits of the title are: Claudia Donzelli, Fernando Birri and Saulat Rahman.
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Portrait of Ga
Directed by Margaret Tait.
UK, 1952, 16mm, color, 4 min.
A portrait of Tait’s mother, filmed on Orkney.
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Aerial
Directed by Margaret Tait.
UK, 1974, 16mm, color, 4 min.
Touches on elemental images; air, water, (and snow), earth, fire (and smoke) all come into it. – MT
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Hugh MacDiarmid, A Portrait
Directed by Margaret Tait.
UK, 1964, 16mm, black & white, 8 min.
An affectionate study of the poet, seen at home and in Edinburgh, is accompanied by his poems “You Know Who I Am,” “Somersault,” “Krang” and some lines out of “The Kind of Poetry I Want.”
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Colour Poems
Directed by Margaret Tait.
UK, 1974, 16mm, color, 20 min.
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Nine linked short films. The titles within the film are: Numen of the Boughs, Old Boots, Speed Bonny Boat, Lapping Water, Incense, Aha, Brave New World, Things Found, Terra Firma. A poem started in words is continued in images - Part of another poem as an addition to the picture - Some images formed by direct-on-film animation - Others ‘found’ by the camera. – MT
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Where I Am Is Here
Directed by Margaret Tait.
UK, 1964, 16mm, black & white, 33 min.
A film poem in seven parts: Complex, Here and Now, Interlude, Crocodile, Come and See, Out of this World, The Bravest Boat. “Starting with a six-line script which just noted down a kind of event to occur, and recur, my aim was to construct a film with its own logic, its own correspondences within itself, and its own echoes and rhymes and comparisons, through close exploration of the everyday, the commonplace, in the city, Edinburgh, where I stayed at the time.” – MT
