Colour Poems

In a section of the written poem that also serves as a voiceover to Colour Poems (and which was the initial impetus for the film), Tait describes memories of seeing newsreels of the Spanish Civil War. She would have been a young adult at the time, and her memories of that event seem to be hazy and unreliable. This sense of incompleteness shapes the film aesthetically. Pictures—of birds, sailboats, bent figures—are drawn as simple line images onto the film strip, pulsing and shifting erratically at 24 frames per second. We hear partial snippets of news items on the radio (talk of Venezuelan guerrillas, Labour Party machinations, the rising price of oil, the weather). In another section, we see an old pair of wellies standing upright and empty, one of them moving gently and rhythmically in a breeze as if tapping out some kind of catchy tune. And in the various shots of men marching solemnly along the road, Tait films them from the shoulders down, never showing us their faces. It’s a way, perhaps, to suggest a kind of fragmentation of memory and experience: a half-remembered image of the act of marching, but not of any specific men. But looked at differently, it could also be read as the point of view of a child watching adults—those odd, unknowable beings—performing some odd, unknowable ritual.

Jack Guariento
Filmmaker and programmer