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.
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Garden Pieces
Duration: 11 minutes
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"_Garden Pieces_ is a set of three pieces: _Round the Garden_ is literally a look right round a back garden, from a central point, repeated da capo. As a garden, it’s a place of potentiality still, but it is a place all right. _Fliers_ is an animated piece, scratched-on, with added dyes. _Grove_, the longest of the three, studies and contemplates a group of trees planted maybe sixty years ago i...
Colour Poems
Duration: 22 minutes
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"Nine linked short films. Memory, chance observation, and the subsuming of one in the other. [...] 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." – Margaret Tait
Aerial
Duration: 4 minutes
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"There’s a general theme of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water – in a different order – air, water, earth, fire and then air again, with all the elements intermingled. But just as a sort of song or even a kind of nursery rhyme. Although I don’t understand musical structure – I can’t really follow the structure of piece of music when I’m listening to it – but I think that film- struct...
A Portrait of Ga
Duration: 10 minutes
Subscription access
"My mother seemed a good subject for a portrait, (she was there), and I thought it offered a chance to do a sort of 'abstract film', in the sense that it didn’t have what you might call 'the grammar of film'. It’s mostly discontinuous shots linked just by subject, in one case by colour, only rarely by movement." – Margaret Tait
Garden Pieces
Duration: 11 minutes
Subscription access
"_Garden Pieces_ is a set of three pieces: _Round the Garden_ is literally a look right round a back garden, from a central point, repeated da capo. As a garden, it’s a place of potentiality still, but it is a place all right. _Fliers_ is an animated piece, scratched-on, with added dyes. _Grove_, the longest of the three, studies and contemplates a group of trees planted maybe sixty years ago i...
Colour Poems
Duration: 22 minutes
Subscription access
"Nine linked short films. Memory, chance observation, and the subsuming of one in the other. [...] 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." – Margaret Tait
Aerial
Duration: 4 minutes
Subscription access
"There’s a general theme of the four elements, earth, air, fire and water – in a different order – air, water, earth, fire and then air again, with all the elements intermingled. But just as a sort of song or even a kind of nursery rhyme. Although I don’t understand musical structure – I can’t really follow the structure of piece of music when I’m listening to it – but I think that film- struct...
A Portrait of Ga
Duration: 10 minutes
Subscription access
"My mother seemed a good subject for a portrait, (she was there), and I thought it offered a chance to do a sort of 'abstract film', in the sense that it didn’t have what you might call 'the grammar of film'. It’s mostly discontinuous shots linked just by subject, in one case by colour, only rarely by movement." – Margaret Tait
