Margaret Tait

International touring exhibition of the film work of Scottish artist, filmmaker and poet, Margaret Tait (1918-1999) with an accompanying publication of essays, artwork and poetry.

TOURING VENUES AND DATES

16 November 2004, launch, Cecil Sharp House, London.
17 November 2004, Nottingham Broadway www.broadway.org.uk
10/11 December 2004, Watershed, Bristol www.watershed.co.uk
12/19 December 2004, Brighton Cinematheque. www.cinematheque.org
6 January 2005, The Phoenix, Leicester. www.phoenix.org.uk
11/26 January 2005, Glasgow Film Theatre. www.gft.org.uk
16/23 January 2005, Riverside Studios, London. www.riversidestudios.co.uk
23/30 January 2005, Edinburgh Filmhouse. www.filmhousecinema.com
27 January 2005, Dundee Contemporary Arts www.dca.org.uk
1/2 February 2005, Scratch Projections, Paris, France www.lightcone.org
14/15 March 2005, Side Cinema, Newcastle www.sidecinema.com
20/27 March 2005, Lumen, Leeds www.lumen.net
21 April 2005, Dartington Arts www.dartingtonarts.org.uk
23 April 2005, ‘Here Like the Fabric' - Rediscovering Margaret Tait, Glasgow Film Theatre. An event dedicated to the screening, discussion and debate of the late Margaret Tait's pioneering work, organised by The Drouth magazine in collaboration with University of Glasgow and University of Paisley. www.gft.org.uk
27/28 April 2005, Falmouth Arts www.falmoutharts.org
30 April - 1 June 2005, Taigh Chearsabhagh Museum & Arts Centre, Lochmaddy, North Uist - exhibition www.taigh-chearsabhagh.org
10/24 May 2005, Chapter Cardiff www.chapter.org
19/20/21/22 June, St Magnus Festival, Orkney www.stmagnusfestival.com
20/23 June, Multisala Grotta, Sesto Fiorentino, Italy as part of the Intercity Festival www.grotta.it
6/13 September, Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley USA www.bampfa.berkeley.edu
6 September, Robert Burns Centre, Dumfries www.web-link.co.uk/rbc/
14-18 September 2005, Cinematexas, Austin TX, USA www.cinematexas.org
10 October 2005, University of Buffalo, USA www.buffalo.edu
10 October 2005, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA www.uwm.edu
20 October 2005, Permanences de la littérature, Centre Jean Vigo, Bordeaux, France www.jeanvigo.com
29 October 2005, University of Iowa, USA www.uiowa.edu
31 October 2005, Ragtag Cinema, Columbia USA www.ragtagfilm.com
8/9 November 2005, Cinematheque Ontario, Toronto, Canada www.bell.ca/cinematheque
12-17 November 2005, Greenwich Picturehouse, London www.picturehouses.co.uk/site/cinemas/Greenwich/local.html
18/19 November 2005, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA www.moma.org
30 November - 1 December 2005, Sala Bergamas, Gradisca d'Isonzo, Italy as part of the VIII Dissolvenze Festival
www.dissolvenze.iconauti.it
3-9 February 2006, Mumbai International Film Festival, India www.filmsdivision.org
13-14 February 2006, Film and TV Institute of India, Pune. www.ftiindia.com
26 April 2006, Deutsches Filmmuseum, Frankfurt, Germany www.deutsches-filmmuseum.de
27 April 2006, Kino Arsenal, Berlin, Germany www.fdk-berlin.de
3 May 2006, Künstlerhaus, Stuttgart, Germany www.kuenstlerhaus.de
4 May 2006, Kinemathek Karlsruhe, Germany www.kinemathek.inka.de
25 May 2006, Kulczyk Foundation, Poznan, Poland www.kulczykfoundation.pl
2 June 2006, Centre for Contemporary Art Ujazdowski Castle, Poland http://csw.art.pl
11 June 2006, Film Club 813, Cologne, Germany
20 September 2006, National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales http://screenandsound.llgc.org.uk
23 September 2006, Harvard Film Archive, Cambridge, USA www.harvardfilmarchive.org
28/30 September 2006, Lantaren-Venster, Rotterdam, Netherlands http://www.lantaren-venster.nl
10 December 2006, The Belmont, Aberdeen http://www.picturehouses.co.uk/site/cinemas/Aberdeen/local.htm
23 March 2007, Film des Femmes, Créteil, France (programme one) www.filmsdefemmes.com
17 - 24 May 2007, Greek Film Archive, 39 Solonos Street (2nd Floor), Athens, 10672, Greece www.tainiothiki.gr

TOURING EXHIBITION - INFORMATION FOR VENUES
Subjects and Sequences is a new 16mm film touring package curated by Peter Todd for LUX featuring newly restored prints of the key works of Scottish film-poet, Margaret Tait. It consists of two programmes of films, running to approximately 70 minutes each backed up with publicity material in the form of a poster / flier / programme notes and a new book on her work published in November 2004. Preview tapes of both programmes and press cuttings are available on request from LUX.

The price of the package (2 programmes) is £100 for UK venues, and £120 for international venues (excluding VAT and shipping). The package is available to book from LUX email info@lux.org.uk from mid-November 2004 onwards. Peter Todd the curator of the package may be available to introduce the programmes – please contact LUX for more information. Publicity material and programme notes will be supplied free to venues. The accompanying book, Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader is available to venues wholesale. For trade enquiries please see www.wallflowerpress.co.uk

PROGRAMME DETAILS

Programme 1: Film Poems
Film explored as a portrait medium with an early work made while studying in Rome, two affectionate portraits, and two ground breaking film poems.

Three Portrait Sketches
1951. 5.6 mins. 16mm. Black and White. Silent.
Three portrait sketches. Made in Italy. Portraits of 1: Claudia Donzelli; 2: Fernando Birri, 3: Saulat Rahman.

Portrait of Ga
1952. 4.16 mins. 16mm. Colour. Sound.
Portrait of the film maker’s mother. Filmed back on Orkney.

Aerial
1974. 4 mins. 16mm. Sound. Colour.
“Touches on elemental images; air, water, (and snow), earth and fire (and smoke) all come into it.” MT.

Hugh MacDiarmid A Portrait.
1964. 8.05 mins. 16mm. Black and White.
Music by Francis George Scott. Singer: Duncan Robertson. Piano: Olive Ogdon. Poems by Hugh MacDiarmid spoken by C. M. Grieve (Hugh MacDiarmid). The poems heard are “You Know Not Who I Am”, “Somersault”, “Krang”, and some lines out of “The Kind of Poetry I Want”. The music is Francis George Scott’s setting of MacDiarmid’s “The Eemis Stane”. An affectionate study of the poet who was seventy-one at the time seen at home and in Edinburgh.

Colour Poems.
1974. 11.20 mins. 16mm. Sound. Colour.
Music by Monia Liter.
“Nine linked short films. The titles within the film are: Numen of the Boughs, Old Boots, Speed Bonny Boat, Lapping Water, Incense, Aha, Brave New World, Things Found, Terra Firma. Memories which effect chance observation. A poem started in words and continued in images - Part of another poem read as an addition to the picture - Some images formed by direct-on-film animation - Others “found” by the camera.” MT.

Where I Am Is Here.
1964. 32.48 mins. 16mm. Sound. Black and White.
Music, the song “Hilltop Pibroch” (words by Margaret Tait) composed by Hector MacAndrew, played by Hector MacAndrew (fiddle) and Lilane (accordian), and sung by Lilane.

A film poem in seven parts: Complex, Here and Now, Interlude, Crocodile, Come and See, Out of this World, The Bravest Boat. “Starting with a six-line script which just noted down a kind of event to occur, and recur, my aim was to construct a film with its own logic, its own correspondences within itself, and its own echoes and rhymes and comparisons, all through close exploration of the everyday, the commonplace, in the city of Edinburgh.” MT.

Programme 2: Islands
People and the places they live, from childhood to a last film.

The Drift Back.
1957. 10.56 mins. 16mm. Black and White. Sound.
Music, The Orkney Reel and Strathspey Society. Signature tune , “The Turn of the Tide” composed by Ronald Aim. Commentary written by Margaret Tait, spoken by Harald Leslie. Produced for Orkney Education Committee and Rural Cinema. Records the return to the island of Wyre by Neil Flaws, a farmer, and his family.

Happy Bees.
1955. 16.07 mins. 16mm. Colour. Sound.
Music, The Orkney Reel and Strathspey Society.
“Happy Bees was intended to be an evocation of what it was like to be a small child on Orkney; when, one (wrongly) remembers, it was sunny all the time, and everything is bursting with life. A film about what surrounds a child, so quite a lot of it is watched at the child level.”MT.

Place of Work.
1976. 29.56 mins. 16mm. Colour. Sound.
Music by Trevor Duncan.
“An exploration of the ambience of a house (Buttquoy House, Kirkwall, Orkney) in the 4/5 months before it had to be vacated...allows Margaret Tait to present not only aspects of the present but something of the nature and intensity of her experiencing and re-experiencing a place that was, for half a century, the family home, and, for the past seven years the centre of her film-making.” Alex Pirie.

Tailpiece.
1976. 9 mins. Black and White. Sound.
“Tailpiece, a coda to Place of Work, is more personalised, more allusive and less naturalistic. The house is being vacated, it is now clear. Children’s voices repeating handed-down rhymes and rigmarole's suggest past time as well as now, and there are other reverberations into past and future coming from the handling of objects, revealing of marks of walls, mirroring of myself in a room and shadows in rooms.”
MT.

Garden Pieces
1998. 11.30 mins. Colour. Sound.
Music, John Gray.
“A set of three pieces “Round the Garden” is literally a look right round a back garden, from a central point, “Garden Flyers” is an animation piece, scratched-on, with added dyes, and “Grove” studies and contemplates a group of trees planted maybe sixty years ago in a disused quarry.” MT.

BOOK DETAILS

Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader
Edited by Peter Todd and Benjamin Cook with contributions by Ali Smith, Gareth Evans, Lucy Reynolds, David Curtis, Ute Aurand, Janet McBain and Alan Russell. Published by LUX, November 2004. ISBN 0-9548569-0-2
Subjects and Sequences gathers together new essays on Margaret Tait's work, interviews, reprints of key poems, a story and texts as well as detailed filmography, chronology, bibliography and resources.

A5, paperback, 184 pages, fully illustrated in colour with over 100 illustrations. retail price £15. Available from LUX SHOP for £15 including p&p (For trade enquiries please see www.wallflowerpress.co.uk for details)

Margaret Tait: Subjects and Sequences is a LUX project with Scottish Screen www.scottishscreen.com and is supported by Arts Council England, Esmée Fairburn Foundation and Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney.

Margaret Tait bibliography

Download the Margaret Tait bibliography compiled by Alice Fraser, and chronology compiled by Peter Todd. Also see Margaret Tait pages on LUXONLINE and read Ali Smith's Margaret Tait LUXONLINE tour. See Scottish Screen Archive Live pages on Margaret Tait.

Margaret Tait chronology (72k)
Margaret Tait bibliography (48k)

Added February 2003:
Three Poems by Margaret Tait (with photographs) (2.7Mb)

Place of Work (1976)

Some of the short films are available individually through LUX and the South London Poem Film Society and Tait's one feature, Blue Black Permanent (1992) remains in distribution with the British Film Institute.

1951 One is One
1951 Three Portrait Sketches
1952 Lion, the Griffin and the Kangaroo, The
1955 Happy Bees
1955 Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo, The
1955 Orquil Burn
1955 Portrait of Ga, A (South London Poem Film Society)
1956 Calypso
1956 Drift Back, The
1956 Rose Street

1964 Hugh MacDiarmid - A Portrait (LUX)
1964 Palindrome
1964 Where I am is Here (LUX)
1966 Big Sheep, The
1966 Splashing
1969 Pleasant Place, A

1970 He's Back (The Return)
1970 John MacFadyen (The Stripes in the Tartan)
1970 Painted Eightsome
1974 Aerial (LUX)
1974 Colour Poems (LUX, South London Poem Film Society)
1974 On the Mountain (LUX)
1974 These Walls
1976 Place of Work (LUX)
1976 Tailpiece (LUX)
1977 Aspects of Kirkwall: Shape of a Town
1977 Aspects of Kirkwall: Occasions

1981 Aspects of Kirkwall: The Ba, Over the Years
1981 Aspects of Kirkwall: The Look of the Place
1981 Aspects of Kirkwall: Some Changes
1981 Landmakar (LUX)

1992 Blue Black Permanent (BFI)
1998 Garden Pieces (South London Poem Film Society)