MARGARET TAIT FILMMAKER – Free

Director: Margaret Williams

34 min (1983) N/C PG

Come enjoy hearing about the life of Scottish artist and filmmaker Margaret Tait in this documentary of her life by Margaret Williams.

‘This film includes extracts from many of her productions. In interview with video artist Tamara Krikorian, Tait talks about her introduction to the cinema in Italy and her move to Scotland where she began to make her own films. She discusses the important influences of poetry, music and Eastern philosophy on her approach to film-making.

You are introduced to the wide range of styles Tait has adopted in her career, from documentary, film portrait to the use of poetic and musical structures and direct painting on to the film strip. Tait explains that her films are akin to poetry, using felt rather than logical connections, and playing on the relationship between image and sound.   For Tait, it is important that the films are ‘open-ended’, needing the response and participation of an audience to bring them to life.

Extracts are included from:

• ON THE MOUNTAIN (1956-74),
• a record of a street in Edinburgh which juxtaposes new material with an earlier film of the same street,
• the film poems WHERE I AM IS HERE (1964) and,
• AERIAL (1974),
• The BIG SHEEP (1966), which commemorates the clearances in the Highlands and,
• COLOUR POEMS (1974), illustrating a “shaky memory” of the Spanish Civil War: and,
• landscape films made in Orkney.’

(Synopsis record from British Universities Film and Video Council Website)

Pre-movie: LIMINAL Director Janet Lees

In honour of Margaret Tait we bring you the work of modern film poet Janet Lees.