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The Orcadian, Thursday, 28th March, 2013
Inspired by Orcadian film-maker Digital artist’s journey to recreate 1960s’ Margaret Tait film . . . ANDREW STEWART A digital artist made a trip to Orkney earlier this month, on the hunt for information on the famous Orcadian film-maker, poet and artist Margaret Tait Oliver Mezger is the artist in residence at Timespan, a creative heritage and arts development hub located in Helmsdale, Sutherland. He spent two days in the county gathering information for a project celebrating the life and work of one the county’s unique and groundbreaking artists. Oliver’s project, Air Sgath — for the sake of Margaret Tait, will see him produce a film that will serve as a response to Margaret Tait’s film The Big Sheep, which she made whilst living at Slowbend, Helmsdale. In his mission to create an accurate and appropriate response, Oliver is gathering every scrap of information he can and is also using the same model of camera and type of film-editing equipment used by Margaret to make her film in the 1960s. Oliver explained his role at Timespan and the idea behind his project on Margaret Tait’s work: “At Timespan, I work as part of the digital society programme. Fifty per cent of the time I work with older people within Helmsdale and east Sutherland introducing them to digital technology through heritage. “The other half of my time, I work on a project celebrating the work of Margaret Tait. She lived in Helmsdale, roughly 50 years ago, for about five or six years, and I’m trying to just make people aware of what she did because I think her films are just incredible. They contain such a unique atmosphere and sense of place. “I’m trying to revisit those places and capture how the locations have changed since she was there, and I’m responding to her film, The Big Sheep, and bringing it up to date. Oliver explained further what he gained from his trip to Orkney, some of Margaret’s story, and how there has been a “resurgent interest” in her work recently: “I spent the two days in the Orkney archive. Where, in the early 2000s, Alex Pirie, Margaret’s widower, had placed all of the material that was in Margaret Tait’s studio in Evie. “I was checking the records, but also trying to understand her. She had this unique way of making film, which is neither documentary nor diary, but instead she called them ‘film poems’. “She developed this technique and style and I’ve been trying to figure out in my head what were the factors in play at the time that caused her to work in this way. “She had no budget, and all of her films were self-financed, so she didn’t have a crew or anything like that. She used a hand-held camera, called a Bolex, which you have to wind up, and the film only runs for about a minute before the spring motor runs out and then you have to wind it up again. Also, you often have to edit within the camera itself. I’ve got one of these cameras, but I don’t have a complete understanding about Margaret’s thinking.” He added: “I also had an afternoon
interviewing Alex himself, who is going to be 80 this year. He was 14 years younger than Margaret, and they came to live together for the last 30 years of Margaret’s life, until she died in 1999. “By me coming to Orkney, meeting him and spending time with him, I got a little bit closer to Margaret herself, and you start to understand the kind of person that she wanted to spend most of her life with. “He’s a poet as well, but he gave most of his life to supporting Margaret because he saw that her work was more significant in some ways — history will be the judge of that. He still has a lot of material in his own house waiting to be investigated and considered.” According to Oliver, what Margaret was trying to do was far ahead of her time and, in his opinion, she has the reputation of being a true original. “Alex gave me insight into why they moved. She was very much a part of the Rose Street intellectual scene, down in Edinburgh, and I wanted to find out what steadily pushed them north to return to Orkney. Margaret was in her 40s when they came back to Orkney in 1970; and she died in her mid-seventies in 1999. “It’s not necessarily key facts that I was looking to get. I just wanted to find out what kind of person he was and what his character was like, the kind of person Margaret wanted to surrounded herself with and what her work ethic was like. “He told me that they worked an awful lot and they were seperate from the community in Helmsdale, although they didn’t purposely cut themselves off. Margaret was especially driven, and I think Alex was inspired by that and I think that he worked very hard on his writing at the same time. “While in Orkney, she continued to edit her films and she developed her screenplays, and in the early 1990s, she produced a feature film called Blue Black Permanent. so her first feature came out when she was in her seventies, which is just inspiring. “The film was kind of a culmination of her life’s work but she approached her filmmaking with a real acceptance that she wasn’t necessarily going to be a Hollywood blockbuster. She always planned to produce feature films but, in many ways, her ideas were too ahead of their time, and she had to wait for her time, and finally at the end of her life someone funded her. “I think there has been a resurgent interest in Margaret’s work. I think my project in Helmsdale is timely because there’s been a recent book by Sarah Neely published about Margaret Tait’s poems, stories and writing. “She was part of the same scene as Sorley MacLean and George Mackay Brown, she was slightly younger than that lot, but is now considered equally significant. However, partly because she was a woman and partly because there were pressures to return home to Orkney, she just hasn’t gained the same kind of attention in the past. “More recently, a lot of artists have been really captivated by her films because of their unique way of reflecting on the world. Oliver described, in detail, the appeal and facets of Margaret’s work and how it continues to set her apart from other film-makers in the world. “She made some really interesting portraits of people and of places and I’m trying to not directly copy what she did, but just try and interpret what she was doing then and make it relevant for today, so people can understand and get an idea of how unique she really was. “She had a special eye for the detail of people and places, and she saw things differently. She gave a real sense of place but that Digital artist Oliver Mezger, who has been in Orkney on the trail for information about the Orcadian film-maker Margaret was in no way nostalgic or Tait. sentimental.
Top: A picture of the Orcadian film-maker Margaret Tait and a Bolex camera, the same model which she used to make her films in Edinburgh, Helmsdale and Orkney. (Picture: Gunnie Moberg) Above: Margaret Tait’s husband, Alex Pirie, and Oliver Mezger.
“The Big Sheep, she insisted, was not about the clearances, and that part of east Sutherland has got a particularly strong history relating to the clearances. She said you could feel the presence of those events, they were always present, but she wasn’t making a film about the clearances in itself. She was trying to present the future and what people had to look forward to and all the things that made that community special at that time. “I’ve been trying to understand the influences and the things that were going on in her head while she was at Slowbend, in Helmsdale, and therefore understand how they affected the way she made her films at that time. “These insights will also show me the things that also continued to affect the way she made her films, such as Colour Poems and Aspects of Kirkwall, when she returned to Orkney.” “She had developed this way of editing that was like a Russian doll approach, where there’s a story within a story within a story, steadily focusing in more and more on the detail. “In Blue Black Permanent, it’s someone’s psychology but in films like Aspects of Kirkwall its about a public conciousness; it’s about the personality of a place, as if the town is a being and trying to understand the personality of the place, which is a really hard thing to do. “She wasn’t afraid of complexity, and she would make these things that were sprawling and complicated and convoluted. And she wasn’t interested in the parts of the side of the town that the tourism industry put forward because that didn’t ring true for her sense of the place.” “Unlike a historian, she was exploring how you would write a human biography for Kirkwall or Sandwick over a year, or over 20 years. And she was not phased by that massive task and she would keep returning to places and see how they’d changed and find the unique or distinct colours, light and people that make a place special and distinct.” Oliver’s project will see him recreate The Big Sheep, using the same locations today, but also using the same equipment as used by Margaret Tait. “My response is what I’m calling a
companion piece which I’m intending to show using the same technology she used. “I’m going to be showing the final film in the autumn in Helmsdale. The process is incredibly long. You need to develop the rushes and then cut them, and the film, before physically gluing the negative together. It will take maybe three months for the actual editing and print process before I actually have something which I can see and compare and edit afterwards. “It is very labour intensive, but what’s great, and I think she got this as well, is that it’s a really tangible process — you’ve actually got the stuff in front of you and it’s not detached. It’s very engaged and takes all of your attention.” Oliver firmly believes that Margaret Tait’s work needs to be seen by people in the areas in the films, so they can see the areas and people from days gone by. “I think it’s really important that the people these films were made for and would really resonate with — being the people living in the areas filmed — get to see them and understand what a special gift they are from Margaret to Orkney and to Sutherland and I’m trying to celebrate that legacy. “It’s really special when you get to see people’s reactions to the films. When I showed The Big Sheep in Helmsdale, it had exactly the same reaction, I suppose, as if I’d shown one of the Kirkwall or Orkney films in Kirkwall. There are people that recognise friends and family and it’s totally mad — they go wild. “I want to recreate that experience for another generation, and give the films another layer of meaning and give them a new life, another layer of resonance. Sometimes it’s easy to forget that history is happening now, and before we all know it, things will pass away and so I feel incredibly lucky to be capturing an area of east Sutherland as it wrestles with the impact of digital culture in the community.” To follow Oliver’s work on the project, visit his blog with Timespan at www.timespan.org. uk/category/digital-society. Anyone with information that might be relevant to Oliver’s work can contact him at art@ timespan.org.uk