Necktie Films

Time Moving, Time Being Moved In: Margaret Tait

When her first feature film, Blue Black Permanent, was released in 1993, the British press made much of the fact that Margaret Tait, its director, was 74 years old. In fact, Tait had been making films—short films—since she was 34, but it took Blue Black Permanent to make people outside her native Scotland take notice.

            Tait started her career not as a filmmaker, but as a doctor. In 1944, she was drafted into the British war effort and sent to India. Tait had always loved movies, and during the war she considered writing a screenplay for the Crown Film Unit about the Chindits, the British soldiers who went behind enemy lines in Burma.

            But it wasn’t until after the war that Tait really got her feet wet in the art of film. When the war was over, she returned to Scotland and bought an amateur movie camera. Her plan was to work as a doctor for six months and then spend six months making films. She worked as a doctor in a variety of surgeries in Scottish villages, driving from one to the next, saving money by sleeping in her car.

            In 1950, she had saved enough money to enroll at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome, Italy—Italy’s premier film school, frequented by the top Italian film directors of the time and housed at Cinecittà studios.

            Back in Scotland a year later, Tait started making films, including Portrait of Ga (1952), a study of Tait’s mother; Orquil Burn (1955), “from sea to source, the whole course of the burn” (burn is Scottish for stream); The Drift Back (1956), a study of two families who return to farm on the Orkney islands on the coast of Scotland; and the 35-minute Where I Am Is Here (1964), a poetic tribute to Edinburgh.

            Where I Am Is Here put Tait on the map of experimental filmmakers to watch. In the program notes to a 1993 retrospective of her work at London’s National Film Theatre, Tait said of Where I Am Is Here: “Starting with a six-line script which just noted down the kind of event to occur, and recur, my aim was to construct a film with its own logic, its own correspondences within itself, its own echoes and rhymes and comparisons, all through close exploration of the everyday, the commonplace, in the city, Edinburgh, where I stayed at the time.”

            In 1981, she made the 32-minute Land Makar, which Tait has described as “a landscape study of an Orkney croft [farm], with the figure of the crofter, Mary Graham Sinclair, very much in the picture, and enriched throughout by her vivid comments. Filmed over several seasons between 1977 and 1980, it takes in many of the human activities which alter the look of the land. The croft is on the edge of a small loch [lake] where swans and other birds nest in the grass. It is worked in the old style and, although mechanized aids are brought into use when appropriate, much is done by one woman’s labor.” Tait also noted that makar is a Scottish word, meaning poet, and that “the film is worked out so that the sequences are like a number of canvases.”

            In 1981, following the release of Land Makar, Tait decided to devote her time to developing feature-length screenplays, although she continued to make short films. In 1992, she began shooting Blue Black Permanent, which was financed by England’s Channel 4 TV and the British Film Institute. Blue Black Permanent, set in the 1950s, is about Greta, a poet who drowns herself in the sea, and her daughter Barbara, who is haunted by memories of her mother.

            Blue Black Permanent wasn’t Tait’s first fictional work. Some of her short films, such as 1969’s A Pleasant Place, which portrays a marriage from which passion has long ago fled, provide a meeting place for the experimental and the narrative. As Tait told Jan Moir of The Guardian when Blue Black Permanent was released, “Like all of my films, every single moment is based on my own life and all the characters are me. But it is not the story of my life.”

            The majority of Tait’s work was self-funded with revenues from rentals of her films. Tait also credited her ability to “live cheaply” as playing a major role in funding her films. Until 1983, when she was able to afford an office, Tait edited her films in her kitchen.

            Tait’s husband, writer Alex Pirie, summed up her work when he said that she “searches for what Gaels call an seann stugh [the real stuff]—got by doing what Rilke mentioned, ‘looking at the object until it speaks from its nature’; using, too, Gongora’s method, as defined by Lorca, of ‘stalking the image.’ From this dedication has come the mastery of a form that contains, indeed becomes, a poetry of presence, offering ‘the privilege of the instant,’ perspectives of duration, of time moving, of time being moved in.”

            Tait died in 1999; in 2010, the Glasgow Film Festival created the Margaret Tait Award, “to recognize artists who are experimental, innovative, and who work within film and the moving image.”

From Film Fatales: Independent Women Directors. Copyright 1997 by Judith M. Redding & Victoria A. Brownworth

Now out of print, you can find used copies at:

http://www.amazon.com/Film-Fatales-Independent-Women-Directors/dp/1878067974  or  http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Film-Fatales/Judith-M-Redding/e/9781878067975/?itm=1&USRI=film+fatales+redding

Margaret Tait

Stills from Where I Am Is Here (1964)

 Still from Rose Street (1956)

Still from Ariel (1974)

Still from Tailpiece (1976)

"A must-read for future Jane Campions." --Entertainment Weekly