re: margaret tait

The renewed interest inthe ‘film poetry’ of theOrcadian poet MargaretTait (1918-1999)‘changeling’ in the cribof Scottish Film historywas possibly the mostsignificant event inScottish cinema of2004. Despite a longand productive careerstretching from the1950s to the 1990s,Tait had been amarginal, neglectedfigure, ill at ease withthe predominantdocumentary traditionand near invisibleunder the masculineshadow of Scotland’smuch-lauded literary‘renaissance’.

And yet her HughMacDiarmid, A Portrait (1964) finds vulnerability andsympathy in its edificial subject and demonstrates asure touch in uniting the moving image with themoving word. A line from the film, read by MacDiarmidfrom his own chapbook speaks of poetry ‘that like thebreadknife cuts three slices at once’ and is a fittingcoda to Tait’s own corpus. Her film Rose Street, madein 1964 about the side avenue overshadowed (as wasTait) by the national thoroughfare of Princes Street, isa triple cut from the cosmic loaf. On the one hand itfunctions as a documentary record of Edinburgh in thefifties, an aspect only reinforced by her later muchmore experimental ‘follow up’ On The Mountain (1974),which reproduced many of the original shots to captureboth change and continuity between time periods. It isalso a poem of a place and one artist’s particularsense of the local, the poetic elements derived from itsinterplay of visual forms – shop windows, handsworking at workbenches, the constant criss-crossing infront of the lens. Finally, there is its function as simplystraightforward realisation – this innocuous backstreetcould be any street in the Western world, the ‘shock’ ofthe film stems from the recognition of what is commonto all. Quite apart from the ‘local colour’, it conjuresthe nature of a street recognisable – and reverberantwith – anyone.

By showing films such as Rose Street as part of atouring programme of shorts along with Tait’s onlyfeature Blue Black Permanent (produced by BarbaraGrigor, whose husband Murray kept tabs onMargaret’s career and wrote admiringly of her

appearances at theEdinburgh Film Festival inthe 1970s) this uniquefilmmaker has enjoyed arapid (posthumous)rehabilitation, securing aplace in all subsequenthistories of Scottish art andculture. This revival hasbeen UK-wide and indeed,initiated from outsideScotland – the agency ofpersonal friend Peter Todd,an English filmmakerwhose own work similarlyfocuses on the cycles andvariations of daily life. Hecame to know Tait on theart-film and independentcircuit and created the tourand the generousretrospective given to herwork at the 2004Edinburgh InternationalFilm Festival.

But why, is a filmmaker who made only one feature soimportant – is obscurity not indicative of artisticisolation and subsequently, little that is transcendent orinfluential? Tait’s singular style and technique is only apartial answer – there are trends here that her curatorhas successfully harnessed. The Tait collectiondemonstrates a startlingly contemporary approach tofilmmaking, and there is an innate historical value in afilmmaker whose long career spanned the days fromnitrate film to the openness of video and theemergence of digital. In interview, Todd relates analternative history of filmmaking, of subcultures ofamateurs and experimenters that amounts to agenealogy of such genres as video art and video films.Tait was an active part of these tight but influentialcircles, and far from isolated, was well known on thesetight circuits. Video as a form of poetry, even punning,has been fruitful territory for the likes of Peter Smith,whose works such as Gargantuan and Aum work aspoetic jokes, playing on words that work somewhatcounter-intuitively against an initial image.

In the case of Tait however, it is perhaps moreremarkable that as an independent whose work defiedeasy definition, she got to make a feature at all. InScotland Todd has struck a fertile ground for cinematicrevivalism. Part of the reason for this is just good PR– the morale boost derived from the fruitfulScandinavian-Scottish collaborations (such as WilburWants to Kill Himself and Beyond the Waves) that hasbrought Dogme values to Scottish film. This infusion

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RE: MARGARET TAITReverberation, Recognition, Rediscovery

Mitchell Miller

of is still, admittedly a modest contribution to a nationalcinema in permanent identity crisis, but then there arealso the personalities – such as Lynne Ramsay, PeterMullen and Ewan McGregor – that have at leaststimulated activity and given the impression at least, ofrelative (if precarious) good health. Add to this KenLoach’s increasingly tiresome obsession with the Westof Scotland and a number of home grown schemesand initiatives to encourage filmmaking, such as ThisScotland, Cineworks and the much maligned but stilluseful Tartan Shorts and the industriousness ofScotland’s non-film industry makes some sense.

Another factor is surely the blossoming of the ScottishScreen Archive into an active and proactive resourcefor preservation and rediscovery. The work of itsexperts has been appreciated by the BfI, BBC andSTV, and recently featured in the television seriesbased on the Mitchell and Kenyon archive. Throughcataloguing and distributing its contents, frequentlyextraordinary footage has been rediscovered andencouraged the re-emergence of lost talents such asEnrico Cocozza and Frank Marshall, while theprofessional expertise of its staff was instrumental inrestoring many of Tait’s films, such as the audaciousabstract animation Calypso (1956), which makes aninteresting comparison with the work of Germany’sWalter Ruttman in Die Seiger (1923).

The process of restoration and restitution of Tait’s filmsand reputation is told in some detail in A Margaret TaitReader (Lux 2004) and it unlocks a third aspect to theTait revival. The unprecedented explosion in no andlow budget digital filmmaking has led to a renewedinterest in the history of amateur, independent andexperimental filmmaking, the spiritual sires of today’sindependents, guerrilla and activist filmmakers. Taitwas unabashed in running contrary to the‘documentary’ motive popular with her contemporaries.Her aim was not to record, but to make films that hadan everpresence, an impact and immediatereverberation. A similar impulse, albeit much morepolitically directed and enraged, drives much low andno budget filmmaking, film becoming, for the first time,a democratic medium through the perfection of thecamcorder and the ability to film with minimal crew orauxilliary equipment. Hence, an atmosphere oframpant autodidactism, of grassroots and activist films,homespun shorts and even CGI produced on a laptop.In such an environment, the work of gifted ‘amateurs’such as Cocozza, working out of an ice cream shop in1950s Wishaw has immediacy and relevance.Likewise Tait’s work is at once very specific anduniversalist, avant garde and neo-realist yet homespun

Autodidactic as such filmmaking approaches sound,they were hardly bereft of external influences – notleast through the nearest picture-house. It was rathera local and homespun interaction with an internationallanguage of cinema being developed in variousdifference countries in a profusion of ‘dialects’, some ofwhich would go onto to become a lingua franca. Italy’spostwar cinematic stylings were just one, but theireffect on Scotland was significant – evident in LynneRamsay’s work today, but also strong in a number of

Scottish filmmakers, including the Grierson coterie.Cocozza and Tait attended the Centro SperimentaleCinematographia in Italy at roughly the same time,both schooled in what would become Italian neo-realism. Their editing, framing and ethos reveal theirdebt to the latter, as well as, in the case of Cocozza,soaking in American movies that were alreadyoverspilling national boundaries (albeit scented by awhiff of Cocteau and Bunel).

Modest as their surroundings were, both filmmakerswere thus learning from the techniques of aninternational discipline and indeed industry but broughtto it an ethic suited to their time and their place. InCocozza’s mad fantasies, an industrial town became aBlakean dystopia, a utopia or the mean streets of filmnoir. For Tait, the camera was far more personal. Itbecame an existential amputation, a means ofunderstanding the world as it surrounded her. ‘Isometimes use it,’ she relates, ‘to actually see thething.’ As Todd remarked of her work:

‘One of the things I find very interesting about her workis that she has filmed these things quite often to dealwith times and changes, but they are not sentimentaland they are open to a more meditative way of viewing,which I think people can bring their own interpretationto.’

Indeed, in Tait’s extension of herself through thecamera, incrementally liberated through trial and errorfrom its tripod are to be found the somewhat seditiousjoys of a language that attacks or questions its owngrammar, a trait associated with the work of Tait’scontemporary Tom Leonard. ‘The demotic’ in hispoetry, where Glaswegian is a valid language becauseit allows an individual his own form of native existentialexpression, led him to investigate further the role of‘the local’ in relation to the wider environment.Similarly, an interest in the ‘secret’ history of Scottishfilm, outside of the auteur or industrial worldview hasgrown along with the posthumous reputations of Taitand Cocozza. For the first time, amateur filmmakersare the subject of disciplined, critical appreciation, andthere are bound to be more discoveries’ of this type asreel by reel, the archives open up – and when they doare, we find the shaky, vulnerable yet emotionallyimmediate ‘unsteadycam’ of Tait, surveying anOrcadian farm in Land Makar, or the stream near herhouse in Orquil Burn. In fact the latter film led her,organically, to unseat her camera from the tripod forthe sake of attempting to capture local detail andnuance – self-consciously akin to the unconsciousprocess experienced in local dialects.

But to return to the ivory towers for a moment, onecould be cynical and argue that film academics willnaturally seek to exploit new areas such asamateurism. Professions and Professors depend on it,after all.

First Cousins?

Which also goes for critics – and this writer by nomeans excuses himself from such processes ofprofessional self-perpetuation. Critical immortality is


often achieved through consistent negativity – themethod being to clutch tightly to the wickerwork of thehand-basket as it bounces down Dante’s circles. MarkCousins, however, is not a basket-case of this type. Inhis fondly remembered Moviedrome programmes forBBC 2 he resolutely sought out the merits of B-movies,cult films and box office flops, alongside moredistinguished, if lesser known features. His Scene byScene series trod a delicate line between measuredcritical appreciation of various cinematic careers –such as Scorsese, Connery and Shohei Immamura –and an often infectious, incorrigible enthusiasm for themedium. But is it enthusiasm or a historical sense thatleads him to open his new book The Story of Film withthis challenging proposition ‘… it is proposed that farfrom being a fallow time for cinema, filmmaking fromthe 1990s has undergone an unparalleled revival’?

Already a prolific essayist on the medium, ex-Directorof the Edinburgh Film Festival, film producer anddocumentary maker in his own right, The Story of Filmfeels like a defining moment in Cousins’ career. Fromits outset the book is audacious, attempting as it doesto recast the last century of filmmaking across theworld into a coherent narrative. His timing isprecipitate. Film is undergoing a period of renewaland rediscovery, where grassroots has snaked its waydeeper into a renewed interest in roots and beginnings– before the late-industrial model of film productioncame into existence. Just how dramatic this processof rediscovery can be was emphasised in BillMorrison’s masterful Decasia (2002), a featureconstructed from offcuts and fragments of old andneglected film stock that in an age of re-masteredprints and director’s cuts, made an aesthetic virtue ofdisrepair. The thrill (and pathos) rests in the lost orrare nature of the footage and its state of advanceddecay, a whirling Dervish spins himself into oblivion asthe degraded film stock deteriorates into blots andgashes before us. The scarring of age is an abstractanimation made by the course of time – a reminderthat film, whatever its promises of preservation andposterity, is in fact frail andmortal, something Tait wouldhave appreciated. The painfulaspect of ‘rediscovery’ lies in therealisation that sometimes thereis rarely any opportunity forrecovery; the lost artist mightgain recognition but remainsbeyond reach.

Beyond the visceral thrill ofrediscovery, there is also itsimportance in reclaiming asense of perspective on thedevelopment of cinema as aform. Post-modernism,sociology and the establishmentof film studies in universities hasmitigated against this process, as it has in otherdisciplines, fragmenting the discourse into varioussects and specialist enclaves. For film though, asopposed to painting, music or even photography theimpact is much more meaningful. It is a young

artform, only a century old, and postmodernism cametoo quickly before parallel processes of settlement andmaturation could take place. Instead, Film Studies hasfound (and in some respects owes) its theoreticalspace to the rise of sociology and cultural studies,where the hyphen replaces Grammar as the godheadof language and ‘the construct’ is identified in order tobe demonised.

Yet Cousins constructs a story, a sweeping, inclusivepurposively broad narrative that attempts toencompass the multiple aspects of cinema:

‘Film theorists are suspicious of such attempts to seethe history of the movies in story terms, as if doing sois trying to shoehorn it into a formula. This is to under-estimate narrative, which can be as fluid, multi-layeredand responsive to subject as a writer wants it to be.’

His hope is to plot a ‘reliable path’ through the world ofcinema and on to the ‘more learned volumes’ thatcurrently fuel film studies. Fluidity is achieved throughtechniques analogous to the medium, flashing backand forward between Edward G Robinson andReservoir Dogs, David Lynch and Luis Bunuel. Thenthere is the montage – Cousins knowledge isencyclopaedic, and this allows him to present side-by-side, well worn critical favourites such as Das Kabinetder Dr Caligari (1919) with Alfred Hitchcock’s early filmThe Lodger (1926) and Teinosuke Kinugase’s ‘asylumfilm’ A Page of Madness (also 1926). His propositions,while occasionally bending the proverbial limb, arefrequently interesting – remarking on the advent ofsound (1939), he notes that it took 45 years beforeany philosophical capital was made in mainstreamfilms. It was Francis Ford Coppola (see The DrouthIssue 3 for past character assassinations) whose TheConversation (1974) has Gene Hackman succumb tothe voyeuristic thrills of eavesdropping.

True to the ideals of rediscovery and restoration,Cousins is out to confront his readers with

rediscovered facts and newunderstandings about cinematicgivens. Most important perhaps,is that contrary to conventionalbeliefs, the first filmed imageswere shot and exhibited in Leedsin 1888 by the Frenchman Louside Prince. He also adds toexisting knowns – it is widelyknown that the earlydocumentarian Francis Doublierfilmed Pancho Villa’s battles inreal-time, but Cousins also tells usthat eventually, Villa was planninghis battles for maximum cinematiceffect – the tail wagged the dog,easily surpassing Barry Levinson’sWag The Dog in every

conceivable way. There is a definite dialectic edge toCousins’ analysis that attempts to bring in widerconcerns and movements into the debate, a refreshingchange from the autistic style of many film critics whospeak of films entirely with reference to other films


(think Mark Kermode at his most tedious). Suchtendencies are probably a hangover from thedefensiveness of early film critics who had to defendthe medium as well as their views.

Yet while admittedly pushed for space and time in suchan ambitious project, there are some missedopportunities for Cousins to emphasise the directphysical, even political effects of film on society asexemplified in Villa and Doublier’s grisly collaborations.He is somewhat cursory in hissurvey of Weimar Germany, thekey cultural ferment of GermanExpressionism and could havesaid more on the influence theNazis took from German directorsin the 1920s and 30s. Yet he isvery good at exposing Mad Maxas an extension of RupertMurdoch’s gradual takeover ofAustralia, if not the world, thebattered bruised yet ‘proved’ bodyof Mel Gibson (plus wide-eyedstare) was a Vitruvian proxy forThatcherite viscerality andpuritanism, and sure enoughCousins brings in Leonardo’sfamous drawing as an illustrationof the precedents to cinema’sinterest in and centring on thebody. Western though theprecedent was, it was theJapanese director Yasujiro Ozu who pioneered thisform of composition in the 1930s.

Juicy, political provocations are nevertheless balancedby a sufficiency of lean meat; a section on Japanesedocumentary makers such as Noriaki Tsuchimoto andKazuo Hara in the 70s and 80s is enlightening andtimely given the contemporary vogue. But Cousins’largely successful attempt to establish a coherentchronology for developments in technique makes thebest argument for his broad approach. A goodexample of this is his treatment of the development ofthe ‘dolly-shot’ – where a camera moves into andaround the mise en scene. An old orthodoxy was thatthe Germans first developed the means to do this,namely the world famous UFA which produced talentssuch as Lang, Murnau and von Sternberg. But therediscovery of Evgennii Bauer, the Russian pre-Revolutionary filmmaker in the 1990s pushed back thisinvention, and Cousins shoves it even further back tothe earliest films.

Cousins’ appreciation of the importance of suchtechnology and developing technique is the criticalbasis of the entire book. This is a ‘Gombrichian’adventure, taken for E. H Gombrich, the famous artcritic, who denied the existence of Art, seeing onlyartists. His ‘schema plus correction’ approach centredon the perfection of technique, is adapted andupgraded by Cousins to ‘schema plus variation’.Hence the book focuses only on Directors whose worktook existing techniques and expanded, improved oradded to them – there are no Ealing Comedies or

Jean Rohmer, but paragraphs on the ‘stick’ used inearly Hollywood films to keep Douglas Fairbanks at anequal distance to the camera while fencing. It makesfor an exciting, or dramatic read, but risks esotericismand myopia (it does seem at times as if Directors areonly listening to and learning from other film Directors),though Cousins deserves credit for largely avoiding it.

His other innovation – and his greatest risk, which fullybends the critical limb while stretching the neck – is to

challenge the predominantorthodoxy that terms mid-centuryAmerican Hollywood films as‘classical’ or ‘classic’. The term hasbeen used, often cynically, byHollywood to promote their cinemaand inflate its importance. Fired bya revisionary zeal Cousins takesdictionary in hand and dismissesthe label. ‘Classicism’ in fact refersto a harmonic balance betweenform, content, emotion and ideas,and in only one country and perioddid this happen, and that wasJapan. Cousins refuses to applythis to ‘golden age’ Americancinema, which ‘draws in’ theaudience, encourages them toforget the line between reality andinvention, revels in excess andgrandeur and finds ‘form for feelingsthat are missing’. He quotes

Richard Dyer’s astute assessment of the genre: ‘WhatUtopia might feel like rather than how it would beorganized.’

Cousins instead suggests the term ‘closed romanticrealism’ as an alternative definition. It does not exactlyroll off the tongue, but is pleasing in its accuracy if notits aesthetics. It is in this surely, that his bid for criticalprominence, even immortality rests – few thingsguarantee it more than the invention of a new cliché.But the risk of hubris is considerable if the term is notaccepted or adapted by his fellow critics and it is hardnot to admire his gambler’s guts. Or the oftensurprising and amusing way in which he plays with hisnew invention. He casts Laurel and Hardy as beingthe first significant rebels against it; Hardy’s sufferingglances to camera have a wider significance than thismaster clown could ever have thought – breaking thefourth wall not just of cinema but of Cousins’ criticaldetachment: ‘The 1920s had three master comedians,but only as I write about Laurel and Hardy, theirsuccessors, do I laugh.’

The duo return at the end of the book for Cousins’optimistic denouement – his hopes for the digital eraare high, even as cinema audiences decline. In theend of chemical film he sees a beginning, citingSokurov’s Russian Ark as a digital feature that fullyopens up the possibilities of the new format, a singletake, many shots within one, the dolly shot and itsclones worked to the limit. Admittedly, theGombrichian approach does lead Cousins to overlookmuch of filmmaking at what would have been Margaret


Tait’s highly local level, and tends to favour theindustrial, mob-handed films of studios over thesingular and grassroots – video does not feature,although art and experimental films are tackled. Yetthe gaps show the value of narrative existing as aconstruct as something to attack, question andinterrogate. He gives non-academic film theory andhistory a centre as much as a path.

In fact, the rediscovery of Tait’s work complimentsCousins’ own rediscovery of the creative dialoguebetween auteurs as a critique of the partial andincomplete nature of current film history/theory. Tait’sre-existence emphasises the need to go beyond thefragmentary processes of post-modernism and attemptto consolidate our sense of how film came to be whatit is. This gives us a better understanding then, of howsingular and independent spirits such as Tait, in theirown way, ‘varied the schema’ at their particular level.

One of Tait’s most startling variations on the cinematicschema occurs in her own act of artistic revisionismand self-rediscovery, On the Mountain (1974). In themiddle of this film, without warning and with all thetheatrical trimmings of certificate and credits, RoseStreet re-appears in its entirety. It is a startlingreminder of the artist as a presence and a part of theenvironment being predicted, and a brutal fracture ofany sense of ‘Closed Romantic Realism’. Perhaps iteven precludes any need to ‘rediscover’ Tait as shehad already rediscovered herself.

*************

January 2005

‘Hold it – Hold it simple – Hold it direct.’Margaret Tait’s reverberant notes

Mitchell Miller

Speaking of his late friend Margaret Tait, Peter Toddsaid this of her filmmaking style:

‘... the dialogue she has with people when she isfilming them – they are aware of her, it is not liketaking an image or something, it is quite a uniqueengagement. It is not like “I am running awayafterwards … I am here to do a documentary andthen I am going away.” I am here like the fabric.That may or may not cause problems with people.’1

‘Here like the fabric’ is an apt way to sum up Tait’scorpus of film poetry, a director who elevated thecommonplace to a cinematic art of power and dignity.Place and time served as theme and medium. Shefilmed places she belonged to (Kirkwall in Orkney),


had adopted (Edinburgh’s Rose Street) or felt for.She zoomed in on rubber boots blowing gently in thewind, or watched with autistic fervour the bubbles ina stream. She let these things exist in themselveswithin the frame, ever-present and forever. Sheapplied the skills taught her by the neo-realists tocreate a demotic style of filmmaking routed in hersurroundings that nevertheless has found a wideappeal.

By demotic, I mean that every day she took hercamera and filmed, like the poet, adopting acontingent understanding of her world as it changedaround her. The ‘language’ she used was that ofcinema – but here was local variation. Her concernsextended equally towards people – her A Portrait ofGa (1952) captures her mother as a mobile, animatedindividual of quirks, ticks and fine, smile-stretchedcreases, indulging a daughter who had come, in herown words to ‘… peer at things, I really peer atthings through my camera viewfinder … I dosometimes actually use it to help me to see thething.’2

The poetic impulse, at its most basic, is about forginglinks and finding a resonance within that link. It is aquest, or to be more exact, a question. Tait’s filmsare a collection of questions she asked of hersurroundings through her camera lens. As with allsimple questions, the answers run deep.

The Dialect

Since the 1970s Scottish culture was preoccupiedwith matters national or supra-national: the return ofa Parliament to Edinburgh, the often savage forces ofmodern phase economics – heavy industry, inwardinvestment and the inevitable bust waiting to happen.Yet running parallel to the argument over self-rule,home rule or status quo was a more (apparently)introspective strand, best voiced by the Glaswegianpoet Tom Leonard in ‘On Reclaiming the Local’:

‘Locality by Locality, by A to Z of behind-the-counterlibrary stock, old newspaper by old newspaper,people must go on with the work of release.’3

Like his contemporaries Alasdair Gray and JamesKelman, Leonard saw art – in this case literature – asa constant interplay of past, present and future inrelation to the individual. That is, it was notinstitutional, it was not businesslike and it took placeat all times, in the locality. Local concerns (in theircase Glasgow and its outliers) were not parochial.Far from it. They were Universalists who saw theurban neuroses of Pollok or Renfrew as differentfrom those in Clapham or East Berlin only in thelanguage it was expressed in. The demotic maydiffer, but the demos, as always, faced the sameproblems, issues and woes, such as the decay of the

industrial city. They did not expect the OED toreplace standardised English with Clydeside demotic,but did make a case for the validity of this everydaylanguage as a means of expression, thinking andsimply being.

While all three writers were committed small nnationalists, part of the somewhat bizarre project ofcultural nationalism that attempted to write a ScottishState into existence, their work emphasised that aparliament was (and is) nothing unless it recognisesthe dignity of ‘the local’ – that space where theindividual engages and negotiates a relationship withthe rest of the world. Furthermore, old library stock,newspapers and documents in general were to be seenas more than record or history – they were livingmaterial that had agency in the modern era, once youunderstood it as a part of this continuing dialoguebetween past and present.

The Film-Makar (Mah-kar)

Past and present, especially in relation to the land is auseful way to understand Tait’s late masterpiece LandMakar (1981). Makars were Scots language poets,and we associate the title with Dunbar, Henryson andLindsay, contemporaries of Chaucer, compulsiveflyters and satirists. It is possible then that LandMakar may have been ironically intended – a filmabout the rural cycle and the poetics of making thesoil fertile referencing urbane Renaissance courtpoets.

In any case, Tait as a filmmaker (or Makar?) can onlybe fully understood through her other career as a poetand prose writer. The word in both its formal andexpressive values was important to her, despite thescarcity of her notes or set film-scripts. Indeed, sizewas hardly everything – Where I am is Here (1964),one of Tait’s most sustained and complex piecesbegan with a six line script. One example of herlinguistic fastidiousness is in the careful distinctionshe makes between‘landscape’ andscenery in herwritings4 –seemingly very fine,but they are at theheart of her work. Alandscape is inclusive(of warts and all),scenery is selective,and she was less thaninterested in thelatter.

Her passion forwords and the imagecame together inHugh MacDiarmid, A

Portrait (1964). The old poet’s broad Langholmcadences accompany a set of strange, comical set-pieces, in which he tightropes along Edinburgh kerbsand bowses in the capital’s pubs, setting himself tohis own words – the poem being somersault, thecircus performer being the poet. MacDiarmid’sfeatures are a gift to photography and his antics – asdiscordant and unexpected in an old man as Ga’sgirlish spinning in her portrait – as he imagineshimself turning the earth with his foot are strangelymoving, an old man’s undimmed delight in workingmischief. The onscreen capers mesh effectively withthe poet’s linguistic capers on the soundtrack.‘Gangs wallopin owre’ booms out, a well-made punin Somersault that accompanies as the onscreenavatar teeters on the kerb. To gang in Scots is to go,in English a body of people (presumably, Grieve’sRaidin’ Reiver ancestors with some poor sap’ssevered hand bouncing on their pommels). The Scotsseize the land, the English its owners, trying tocontrol it with nothing more than a placing of the foot– multiple meanings spring from a single root,‘poetry’, as MacDiarmid says ‘that cuts three slices atonce’.

Via Documentary?

Even as debates over matters of constitution andidentity played themselves out in Glasgow andMacDiarmid’s Langholm, Tait had set her ownprocess of reclaiming the local in her twin homes ofOrkney and Edinburgh. Ancona Films was anindependent company she founded with the help ofAlex Pirie, the title often scrawled onto a blackboardand filmed at the start of her pieces, the ultimate inDogme style making-do.

Ancona was sited on Rose Street, ‘local doppelgängerof the national boulevard’ of Princes Street. A placeof tenements, pubs and closes, the subject of her 1956film Rose Street on which Tait writes:

‘Rose Street, Edinburgh, is astreet I knew well in all theyears that Ancona Films hadpremises there. I saw itchanging from a place ofovercrowded tenements,children playing in thestreet, pubs and small shopsserving people who livedthere, among others, into apedestrian precinct withtrendy boutiques and blocksof offices.’5

Despite a superficial familyresemblance to thedocumentary shortspioneered by the Films of


Scotland Committee or the GPO, Rose Streetgradually reveals itself to be a film that exploresmuch less didactic or journalistic territory. From itsopening where a girl sings the ballad On TheMountain (whose chorus of ‘all fade away’ is sweetyet strangely chilling), memory is established as afleeting, fragile thing.

In later pieces Tait would move to freehand camera-work, but here her earlier reliance on the tripod6 isthe film’s strength. Her shots are composed, still butnot static. Tait’s own stillness as observer contrastswith the constant movement of the street. The streetis mobile, active, catalytic. People animate the staidcourses of stone cobbles through their owndawdlings, skippings or ambles. Her technique wasto find a detail, some natural collage of street corners,entrances and alleys, then hold it. And hold. Thegaze draws attention to the street for its own sake,and the wide shots, encompassing a breadth ofactivities but establishing no hierarchies betweenthem. A game of peever (called Hopscotch inEngland) is as valuable as the business in the localshops or the concerns of the beer drinkers whomooch in and around the pubs.

The lingering shots on the details of this street giveus time to realise its components – people,architecture, things, atmospherics – first asethnographic features and eventually, as rhythmicbeats in the fabric of the film. As Tait said: Thephotographs … all 24 of them in every second – arethe equivalent of notes, or works (or letters might benear it) or blobs of paint, and it’s a matter ofcomposing them so that the effect is in a sensemusical, or poetic, if that’s a better word for it.’7

And a constant interest in cycles; shops open, peopleemerge, lorries squeeze between parked cars – shopsclose, people leave, others appear. But within thecycles of routine are those of work, husbandry andcreation – a jeweller patiently burnishing and heating,a window cleaner honours his job title. It is in asense a mesmerising urban counterpart to LandMakar, which reflected at length on farming as aprocess of creation and custodianship.

Creation (and its many demands) as a cyclical – ever-present – moment was a fascination that Tait heldonto throughout her career, through many evolutions.In Place of Work (1976) ambient sound is used inaddition to the montage of images to root the act ofcreation in the place it happens. Tait re-examines herown locality, her house of Buttquoy and along withLand Makar, this is a ‘painterly’ film – Taitcomposed shots as she might a landscape paintingand makes them linger long enough for us to examineits every detail. Everything here is worth seeing.

Yet as well as a personal (even sentimental)

examination, Buttquoy comes across as a historicallyenergised space. It has been the site of creations andis pregnant with the potential of others yet to come.

And there were many – shot, edited and sharedseemingly in isolation to the explosion ofdocumentary and actuality-based filmmaking, of thebrief resurgence in Scottish realist pieces such asGregory’s Girl or even the naturalism of Mike Leighor Ken Loach. Her Italian training had exposed Taitto the early surges of Italy’s neo-realist school andshe spoke enthusiastically of an art that ‘surged upout of the place, out of themselves and how they feltabout things … I mean a true art of the country, nowthis does seem to be kind of lacking in Scotland’.8

According to Todd, Tait returned from her timestudying film in Italy expectant of a movement thatfailed to materialise:

‘She went to study in Rome after the time Rosselliniwas around. She had these ideas of shortfilmmaking, short documentary, films forcommunities. And I think when she returned toScotland she always thought that she would be part ofa group of likeminded people, and it never did quitehappen. I think that she didn’t really fit in with the‘Films of Scotland’ and the big documentary tradition… she realised that she didn’t fit in.’

For Scotland was wedded to Grierson’s FirstPrinciples of documentary making9 and wasscandalised at the idea of an early divorce. Inmitigation though, these were times whenrevolutionary socialism still meant something,Clydeside could still hurt a distant Londongovernment, massive ships still careered off theslipways and submarines docked at Rosyth that couldkill every man woman and child north of the Tweed.Filmmaking on ‘big subjects’, big landscapes thatexcited political and social engagement and educatedthe masses drove this small northern adjunct of theBritish film industry. Tait’s examination of theminute and domestic, had it been noticed at all,would have seemed indulgent in such a setting.

Contemporaries

As an early essay in Tait’s craft, Rose Streetcontained many elements that would manifestthroughout her career – an interest in time passing, inplace being what it was, in the transcendentalqualities of the everyday – a visual demotic. Thefilm bears some comparison with Glasgow Docklands(1959), a Films of Scotland documentary by EnricoCocozza that showed a similar and atypical interest inthe poetic over the prosaic. Cocozza was in his ownway an extraordinary character, the eccentric,prodigiously talented ‘movie-mogul’ of Wishaw.Like Tait, Cocozza was a graduate of the Centro


Sperimentale di Cinematografia, and may have mether there, as the two both studied there in 1951.

As contemporaries, these two independentfilmmakers are examples of how a common source ofinspiration can have divergent results; Docklands,like Rose Street, shows an eye for local detail and apoetic sense of the place. But the treatment isfantastical; extreme shadows, chiaroscuro effects anddramatic foregrounding. Both graduates also sharedan interest in time and its effects – Cocozza’sCocteau tribute Nine o’ clock turns the second beforea gun goes off into a journey through hell. Cocozza’staste was for weird fantasy and his attitude to time isbest summed up in Porphyria where, as withBrowning’s poem, a crazed lover strangles hisgirlfriend to freeze a moment of happiness.

But Tait lets time flow – forwards and backwards. InOn the Mountain (1974) she films Rose Street onceagain, capturing the trendy boutiques, pubs and officeworkers. Then, it happens: the earlier film suddenlyemerges from the fabric of the later piece in itsentirety – including Academy Leader, Certificate andtitles. In this sudden jolt from one reel to another,three slices are cut at once: we are reminded that filmis a material, tactile object, that the creative artistnever truly leaves her work behind, and that morethan wide Georgian streets can run parallel – andovershadow – each other.

Tait takes on a conversation with herself and her pastwork. Scenes from Rose Street are re-shot in colourand woven into the piece, referencing the early filmas the after to its before. Is this a simple ‘before andafter’? Is it an attempt the cinematic equivalent of anecho? One can only imagine that the experiencewould be somewhat difficult emotionally – re-readingor re-watching can expose unrealised hopes for thematerial and artistic compromises. It would havebeen easy, and entirely the norm for Tait to skim thebest scenes from Rose Street and splice them into anew piece, burying the older study. Her choice is toconfront the past, let it live again alongside itsantecedent. Tait instead chose shots that referenceand interrogate the earlier piece. In one scene, thesame window cleaner cleans the same window –except the shop has been renamed. This is a clevercomment on the fleeting nature of purpose and theeternal nature of actions (here, simply the need toclean), but also turns the 1956 Rose Street into aghost that haunts the younger.

Lucy Reynolds picks up on Tait’s concern for film asa material and a cycle of time in her insightfulcontribution to the recently published The MargaretTait Reader (Lux, 2004), in which much of thematerial quoted here can be found. Edited by PeterTodd and Benjamin Cook, its publication punctuatesa year in which Tait has enjoyed a long-overduerediscovery, with five programmes appearing in this

year’s Edinburgh Festival and screenings due to takeplace around the country. Beautifully illustrated,writers and film archivists have contributed someinteresting essays to the piece, one of which by AliSmith firmly identifies Tait as forerunner to the latetwentieth century cultural renaissance that wasinspired by the Glasgow triumvirate.

As Reynolds discovers, Tait went much further in herexploration of film as a tactile medium in that time isexamined as a substance in itself, to be manipulatedas any other.10 Further along this unique line ofdialectical materialism, we come to such films asCalypso, where she painted directly on to film stock,using abstract colour to create textures, moods andresonances of colour and form.

But without doubt the gold in the Lux volume are theseams laid by Tait herself, an invaluable record of hermotives, ideas and working practices. Herexplanation of why and how she finally plucked upthe courage to take the camera off the tripod speaksof a filmmaker willing to let her art guide her:

‘… there’s a shot in Oquil Burn which led me to this.It was just a particular little bit of following the waterrunning along and at a certain moment some littlebeetle or something gets on maybe just a leaf, getscaught in a current and goes whipping into some podsthat are at the side of the burn, and I was able tofollow it you see, and it just made all the differenceto the thing.’11

Once Tait found her freehand, her own demotic useof the camera, it made an unforgettable mark on herfilms, sometimes shaking involuntarily, reminding usof her hand underneath it. Her excitement to capturethe diversity, range and richness of life before herwould enervate the shot itself.

Hen to pan

Ouroboros orCencrastus was thegreat snake ofalchemy, pre-eminentin Gnostic ascetictraditions. Celticaestheticism curledand intertwined theserpent into aknotwork – localkinks and accents on an international symbol. UteAurand recounts how Tait shared with him her ‘VideoPoems for the 90s’ – a set of notes for a nine-partcycle of lyrical sequences, that put Cencrastus at itscore. The notes begin:

‘With Celtic art – Celtic culture very much in mind,ie. (inc) the end in the beginning, the beginning in the


end (eg. intertwined serpents with the headswallowing the tail) in so much of Celtic design –jewellery, book illumination, crosses, stonework …

Animated title using this design idea – then ninethemes, interlocking.’12

As a side note, Tait may or may not have been awarethat the motto accompanying her curling snake was‘Hen to pan’. (Meaning the One, the all.) This punsnicely in Scots as a self-imperative for the filmmaker– as a Scotswomen she would be ‘hen’ to the menoccupying the bars in Rose Street that her camerapans over in Rose Street and On The Mountain.MacDiarmid13 might have preferred its northeast ofScotland root-word, quine.

As for Tait’s notes, the words ‘working title’ areincluded in parenthesis, and it is perhaps of note thatso many of her inter-titles and credits were written inchalk, ready to wipe over and start again. This slimdocument was offered up by Tait as a model forothers to use, to interpret freely and re-imagine asthey saw fit. As with the snake, the video poems forthe 90s could coil and recoil over time.

And it may be worth someone’s while to pick themup. Tait’s touch was light, her suggestions nudgingthe reader towards ever wider associations from themost humble – or should we say local – ofphenomena.

Note 8, for instance, calls for ‘the crash of a wave – adirect statement – an irrefutable image’ while 5 ispositively apocalyptic: ‘Rust everywhere. Plenty ofinstances of this. Rather inanimate, rather static butnevertheless implied in the crumbling machinery, thedwindled fencing and gateposts, is that nothing everstays the same.’

If further proof were needed of Tait’s continuedresonance, then consider Chain, a poetic feature byAmerican filmmaker Jem Cohen, completed in 2004after six years of everyday, occasional filmmaking.Like Tait, Cohen works from accruals of film stock,interrogated for ‘submerged narratives’ and poeticconnections in the landscapes. In a film aboutshopping malls, much grim humour is derived fromthe clear signs of decay on candy-coloured roadsigns, shop fronts and drive-thrus. He, too, makesTait’s careful distinction between scenery andlandscape.

The ‘Notes’ would never be entirely realised; Tait andAurand would attempt it, but no end result wasreached. As Aurand notes however: ‘It was anunforgettable beginning without end.’ A tellingcomment, that reaches something of what Tait wasabout. To her the process of seeing mattered as muchas the product. As she explained in ‘On Recording’

her work was for ‘the sake of reverberation than forthe sake of record’.

This quest for ‘reverberation’ is as old as thatcinematic moment where the famous ‘Fred Ott’s firstsneeze’ is captured in Edison’s laboratory.Commonplace maybe, yet such simple realisations ofthe most common human acts of being (howeversnottery) were what first enchanted audiences withthe medium. It is a gift of looking that cinema givesus, which Tait chose to develop to its fullest extent inher quest for ‘the one, the all’.

In an interview with Channel 4 in 1983, she let thepoet Lorca explain her, and her extraordinary body ofwork, best: ‘An apple is no less intense than the sea,a bee no less astonishing than a forest … the kind ofcinema I care about is on that level.’

Peter Todd and Benjamin Cook (ed) Subjects andSequences – A Margaret Tait Reader. Lux, 2004ISBN 0-954856-90-2.

Footnotes

1. I was fortunate enough to interview Peter Todd,friend to Margaret Tait and curator of her body ofwork at the Edinburgh International Film Festival inAugust 2004.2. Margaret Tait, ‘On Seeing’ in Peter Todd andBenjamin Cook (ed) Subjects and Sequences – AMargaret Tait Reader, Lux, 2004 pg 96.3. Tom Leonard, Reports from the Present, RandomHouse 1995 pg 43.4. Tait makes the most of this distinction in aninterview on Where I Am is Here, excerpted in PeterTodd and Benjamin Cook (ed) Subjects andSequences – A Margaret Tait Reader, Lux, 2004 pg81.5. Margaret Tait, quoted in the ‘Filmography’ inPeter Todd and Benjamin Cook (ed) Subjects andSequences – A Margaret Tait Reader, Lux, 2004 pg164.6. On her early reliance on the camera tripod, Taitrelates: ‘… earlier on I wouldn’t have dreamt oftaking it off the tripod, you know. I wasn’t exactlytaught to do that, but you sort of take it in that thecamera is meant to be firmly on the tripod …’ from‘On Seeing’ in Peter Todd and Benjamin Cook (ed)Subjects and Sequences – A Margaret Tait Reader,Lux, 2004 pg 164.7. Margaret Tait, ‘On Recording’ in Peter Todd andBenjamin Cook (ed) Subjects and Sequences – AMargaret Tait Reader, Lux, 2004 pp 92-93.8. Margaret Tait, ‘On Seeing’ in Peter Todd andBenjamin Cook (ed) Subjects and Sequences – AMargaret Tait Reader, Lux, 2004 pg 94.9. John Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, Collins1946 pp79-80.10. Lucy Reynolds, ‘Margaret Tait: Marks of time’ in


Peter Todd and Benjamin Cook (ed) Subjects andSequences – A Margaret Tait Reader, Lux, 2004 pp57-77.11. Margaret Tait, ‘On Seeing’ in Peter Todd andBenjamin Cook (ed) Subjects and Sequences – AMargaret Tait Reader, Lux, 2004 pg 94.12. Margaret Tait, ‘Video Poems for the 90s’ in PeterTodd and Benjamin Cook (ed) Subjects andSequences – A Margaret Tait Reader, Lux, 2004 pg135.13. It is more than possible that MacDiarmid’s greatpoem ‘To Circumjack Cencrastus’ (enfold the snake)inspired Tait to explore it through video. It certainlyseems as apt a description of her career as it doesMcDiarmid’s.

***************

In the Lux Margaret Tait Reader, there is muchessaying on Tait’s use of time. Film supposedlytranscends time because it never ends but loops –existing in the projected present, edited but unfinished.

——-

‘I am here like the fabric. That may or may not causeproblems with people.’1

‘Here like the fabric’ is an apt way to sum up Tait’scorpus of film poetry, a director who elevated thecommonplace to a cinematic art of power and dignity.Place and time served as theme and medium.

——-

Tait took her interest in the material, transient andtranscendent nature of film much further – in Calypso,carefully restored by Scottish Screen, she paintsdirectly onto the film (surpassing even Ruttman), amore tactile and direct relationship than is usual withfilm.

Tait frequently compared her practice as a filmmakerto painting – of shots and close-ups as the dabs withwhich she renderedlandscapes orcreated portraits,each of these ofcourse, an analogueof time in itself. Thepower of her early APortrait of Ga lies inthe role of timereplayed as much asthe photography – ofthe aged femalebody existing andmoving in time andits physical adjunct,space before us. Fora moment at least,Ga in her doddery

grandeur, becomes the proportion by which the worldis understood.

——-

Cocozza’s taste was for weird fantasy and his attitudeto time is best summed up in Porphyria where, as withBrowning’s poem, a crazed lover strangles hisgirlfriend to freeze a moment of happiness.

But Tait lets time flow – forwards and backwards.

——-

And around and back again – Tait and MacDiarmid,her famous subject attempted to enfold this snakethrough achieving something that rather than captiveof time, transcended it. Lallans was the old poet’sgreat timeless synthesis of Scotland’s many dialects(heavily prejudiced to Langholm brogues, onesuspects). Tait’s revisitations of the landscapes ofOrkney and Edinburgh sought something similar – theuniversal and the local attempting variously, to swalloweach other.

Cencrastus of course, was never satisfyingly‘circumjacked’ nor perhaps, should it be. But weshould perhaps thank Tait for reminding us thathowever we ‘pan’ across the landscape in front of us, itshould be through adapting our own language – orschema – to the task. Where the extremes ofsubjective of objective meet, the note is trulyreverberant.

Which makes my own, somewhat pretentious adoptingof Tait’s trick in On the Mountain to here, an attempt tosee some of my critical beginnings and ends as acritic, simply cheeky rather than clever. But as anexercise in the dramatic allure of rediscovery – selfishor altruistic – and the often bizarre turns thatrevisitation can lead us down, it may have its uses.General readers encountering Cousins and his Storyof Film will be interested – and probably somewhatshocked – to learn that Edison as well as realisingOtt’s snottery expulsions also precipitated theestablishment of Hollywood through his tyrannicalpatenting of sprockets, the small holes that allowedfilm to be clawed through the camera. The greatinventor attempted to lay a path for cinema, and the

filmmakers wentwest out of hisclutches into thebright light ofCalifornia.Contrast thisperhaps, to Tait’sown, generousoffering of herVideo Poems forthe 90s, an openinvitation torediscover, re-invent andrecognise thelocal. In adoptingthe snake, she


might perhaps reduce seeing – whether critical orartistic – to the sequence of chomping, swallowing andregurgitating, but this visceral understanding of theprocess has an enduring vitality about it that extendsback to the Lumieres and Gaumont in France, whomade their first films for local audiences. One rovingcameraman, Abraham Dulaar, was sued by a Frenchchurch-goer following a ‘sortie de l’eglise’ to theChurch of Saint Just. The irate devotee claimed theviolation of his ownership of his image had beenviolated – but all Dulaar had intended was to allowlocal people to recognise themselves, suddenly andshockingly, projected onto a screen. Since then the‘fourth wall’ has been built thick and strong indeedaround this comparatively innocent pursuit, but thesnake will coil, and uncoil, as it pleases – sprocketswill rust and film stock crumble, yet seeing continues,and the local shall make its own claim on the universe.


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