Les films de 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 before returning to Scotland, where she founded her production company, Ancona Films, in Edinburgh. 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. Her films, marked by a singular approach situated between poetry and visual symphony, received international recognition. Margaret Tait was the subject of numerous documentaries and profiles, and was also the focus of Luke Fowler’s feature-length film Being in a Place – A Portrait of Margaret Tait (2023). Her final film, Garden Pieces, was completed in 1998. Margaret Tait died in Kirkwall in 1999.

"There are many things I like about Margaret Tait’s films, but I especially love how there is often a playful undercurrent present, encapsulated by the opening titles that adorn most of her works: from block letters like the kind you might find in a box of toys, to handwritten titles chalked on pavements, to shards of pottery arranged into words. It’s reminiscent of the playfulness of childhood, that period of our lives when curiosity and wonder seem to come to us so much more easily. This comes across in many different ways in Tait’s films, like the child’s repeated “Aha!” in Colour Poems, or the puns and wordplay in A Portrait of Ga, or the music-box soundtrack in Aerial, or in the images of a well-known poet balancing precariously on the curb of a pavement in Hugh MacDiarmid: A Portrait. Rather than just an aesthetic choice, this playfulness is, I think, also instructive. Tait’s films seem to often be asking us to join her in a sort of seeking — not to explain, in the way one might seek an answer, but to explore."

Jack Guariento
Filmmaker and programmer