Dialogue: 'Quite unique' Reviving Margaret Tait

‘… quite unique’: Reviving Margaret Tait In conversation with Peter Todd For many, the highlight of the 2004 Edinburgh International Film Festival was its retrospective on Margaret Tait. Peter Todd, curator of the five Tait programmes showing, took some time out from a hectic schedule to talk with film editor Mitchell Miller.

What is behind the re-emergence of Margaret Tait as a figure of historical and critical interest?

I have been involved myself in making a number of short films, and part of the importance of that is showing them in context. I have put on a number of programmes of ‘Film Poems’ and there was one devoted to no-budget, self-made films. As a result Margaret and I corresponded and talked a bit about these and we showed Margaret’s work. We also discussed a new programme, which was possibly to do with hand painting in films, animation and poetry – and that was the point at which she died, and I organised a tribute screening at the Lux Cinema in London, and asked people for their recollections of Margaret and got some obituaries written. And I started to connect with others and started to find opportunities to programme her work. And then it dawned on me that there was all this other work that I was aware of – she had sent one or two other prints down for me to include in other programmes, so I realised she had a lot of materal. I just felt there was this body of work that needs to be preserved, because at the moment it was all in the studio, in piles of cans.

There were a lot of papers about making the films as well, and they have all gone to the Scottish Screen Archive as well, which is alright, so that is there – it is l a lifetime’s body of work.

And the other thing is just to get people to see the films! And the opportunity with the Edinburgh Film Festival was to do the biggest retrospective possible; although there had been a retrospective in 1970 in Edinburgh, this would range across all her work and her career. So other programmers could see it, and other people who are interested could find out more. I think her work offers a range of things for hopefully various people – interested in literature or poetry or of course, for other filmmakers. And because she lived in very specific places, so that there is also a record of these, yet they are not the traditional kind of documentary. One of the things I find very interesting about her work is that she has filmed these things quite often to deal with times and changes, but they are not sentimental and they are open to a more meditative way of viewing, which I think people can bring their own interpretation to.

So you had this body of work to deal with, and represent to film audiences. How did you approach that?

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I was hoping that at these screenings there would be other programmers or people like yourself who would find connections. I tried to programme it as openly as possible so people could see it fresh.

Because, having spoken to one or two people and somebody like the writer, Ali Smith, who has written the essay on the Lux website, you know, she was sort of saying that she was born in the Highlands, educated at university there and wasn’t aware of Margaret Tait’s poetry or the films, and she found out to her surprise they existed about three years ago. So I think hopefully there will be a generation of people who weren’t around in the 1970s who will rediscover her … and she is almost known more as an international figure at the moment. So what is nice is to allow people who have maybe a more specific engagement with the places where she grew up and have a view of them to see how she captured it. I see it very much as the start of the process, an ongoing engagement.

Tait’s work does seem very fresh and very contemporary – and in this era where amateur and no/low budget filming is enjoying a revival, seems very much of the current time.

I think she is quite unique. She was part of that generation who did grow up with mainstream and Hollywood classic cinema. So she saw that and she was aware of that, and at the same time she went to study in Rome after the neo-realist period where people like Rosselini were around and very influential.

But there were also ideas of things like short filmmaking, short documentary, things for communities.

And I think when she returned to Scotland she always thought that she would be part of a group or something that would happen, and it never did quite happen. I think that she didn’t really fit in with the kind of films of Scotland and the documentary tradition … she realised that she didn’t fit in. But she got on with it – just did it. And that is an achievement, wherever you are, for anybody who is interested in trying to express themselves. But on the other hand I do think that some of the make up, growing up in Orkney, being based in Edinburgh and her interest in poetry, this mix

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of backgrounds, all fed into this, and her determination to get these films made. And as you say, I think it is amazing that it does feel really modern, contemporary – it doesn’t seem encumbered by the past, it seems to speak to people now.

What do you know about her actual working methods?

For 30 years she used only one camera, with three or four fixed lenses, and it was only with the very last ones that she actually had to get another camera – like the garden pieces she used one where she used a zoom lens. Nowadays, people have to reinvest in new technology every few years to keep up with digital technology. People say it is cheaper, but on the other hand you could say across 30 years she used just the one camera and a lifetime’s engagement in film and with her films. As with On The Mountain, she revisited them many times. There are a number you feel are ‘signed off’ that she probably wouldn’t return to in her life, but there are others she would have returned to like Aspects of Kirkwall – are they individual films, or if she had lived would she maybe have returned to them or re-edited them into one? And again, people talk about something like the Blue Black Permanent – because she made that at what turned out to be towards the end of her life, people often talk about it like it was the end of something. But it was her first feature – she had written other feature scripts, more a beginning. I think that one of the things that again maybe comes out of documentary traditions or how she works with people is that she is good with people… you notice it in her portraits, the dialogue she has with people when she is filming them – they are aware of her, it is not like taking an image or something, it is quite a unique engagement. It is not like I am running away afterwards … I am here to do a documentary and then I am going away. You know, I am here like the fabric. That may or may not cause other problems with people. When she was doing Hugh MacDiarmid, occasionally he is going ‘oh yes’, like that – when she does Portrait of Ga, there are a couple of times where she is spinning round and you can tell Margaret is saying ‘can you spin round again’ and she is going ‘not again’. But it’s engaged and open and I find it quite moving.

It is interesting you mentioned Grierson and the Gairson documentaries – and his dominance of the scene in Scotland, and those who ‘never fitted in’ – such as Enrico Cocozza, the Wishaw filmmaker, who was actually in Italy at the same time as Tait, I think.

I have seen the name and I was aware of him – and that’s an interesting Italian connection. I was really keen to see some of the films some time. You know, we are always looking for films to programme and connections. But no, that would be really interesting because I came across his name and read some of the stuff in the Scottish Screen Archives. I think he maybe put out one of the things on video or something. Hopefully by doing these screenings and festivals you become aware of other people who have done bits and pieces. But certainly now it probably is

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quite a rich thing for someone looking across a period of the last century to find these kind of individuals or ‘islands’ of activity. I think that would be really interesting to bring it all together. In 1952 Tait actually ran her own film festival, the Rose Street Film Festival … and one of her friends wrote a few poems, she had some of her own films, some other filmmakers’ films – a kind of ‘chamber cinema’.

I think we are increasingly rediscovering that up here in Scotland our amateur cinema was remarkably vibrant in a way our official ‘national’ cinema probably wasn’t …

I would be curious to know more about her links to that, both in terms of filmmaking and showing films – I don’t know if there was any sort of crossover at any point or whether there were these different things going on at different times. But there were occasional crossovers, maybe at the Festival time people would see different works and stuff like that. But there certainly seemed to be quite a number of traditions at work.

You yourself are a filmmaker in your own right of course …

I’m very interested in the idea of a space for films that are poetic and not narrative-driven – maybe dealing with mood, or as with a piece of music, in the same way people would be quite happy to go along and just listen to someone playing a guitar … With poetry you are dealing with textures and moods and things like that – and films can also deal with this, and are dealing with. So over about five years now I have done this sequence called ‘Film Poems’ of which there are now five. Each time I made a new film, rather than try to distribute it through Festivals, I would create a programme and show it through that. It allows a dialogue with my filmmaking, seeing how it worked when presented with my other films and films I was interested in. So each programme has emerged out of my filmmaking, so each of those Film Poems programmes had one of Margaret’s films in, they all had one of my films in it and other filmmakers as well of what was available – sometimes more documentary-driven, sometimes what people would call more ‘artist films, experimental’. And so in a way they are a continuing dialogue rather than something that is fixed.

The going back and forward – recycling through things – that seems very much in the spirit of Margaret Tait’s work.

She went back and reworked material in some cases and in other times not, so seeing films can be a new experience each time. You know, you can see a film several times and maybe see different things in it, and it is an engagement with it – it is not just like ‘oh I have seen that one now’, but it is also how somebody else might programme it and what they might choose to juxtapose it with. I have probably seen her films three, four, six, seven times – and I am still seeing things new or different. It’s an interesting way of thinking that

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your work is alive, rather than the film is all signed off and it is gone. And she was very much working to the end and active to the end.

You very much get the feeling that there is an untold story about mid-twentieth century cinema in Scotland, that has to some extent been lost in Grierson’s shadow.

A lot of people are now doing low budget digital stuff or documentaries – in the end they would probably like their stuff to be shown at a Festival or be showcased, as well as to be shown to a community group. And then, as you said, those kind of lost histories and alternative traditions start kicking in. The documentary tradition, now includes activist films being shown in community centres or screened on the web. It is amazing how strong those different traditions are. But, you know, there is something there in the kind of mix and letting people know … hopefully what is interesting at the moment is that there is that crossover between some people maybe working more from a fine art perspective, coming out of the colleges and stuff like that – others coming out of local video and community video and kind of documentary filmmaking, and then very personal film making … people just coming across the technology and being aware of other filmmakers doing it. It seems quite an exciting time really, and its only the second century of cinema. And I think it is nice to have Margaret Tait’s work as another reference point, you know, for that which will hopefully be something that people can pick up and run with. It’s a bit like archaeology, because you do feel that some of them are lost and you are finding them – it is great that people see them again and they can live again.

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