Sometimes it’s the Wordiness of Words That Gets in the Way

Lesley Harrison on Margaret Tait and film-poems

I first came across the work of Margaret Tait in the Pier Arts Centre, Stromness, Orkney. Calypso (1955), a glorious dance of shape and colour, was on continuous loop, and the wild and joyous music that went with it snaked through the whole building, bouncing off walls and windows like a wedding in full swing. This was the digitally restored version, fresh from its premiere at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. To create it, Tait recycled a spool of blank 35mm which already had an embedded soundtrack (of Jamaican music, from an England vs Jamaica cricket match), adding images frame-by-frame with a brush and colour dyes. Over her career she made six hand-painted films, and later in life she was approached by the Scottish Screen Archive who were anxious to obtain her originals in order to preserve them. But she had refused. Margaret worked in the present, her husband said. Her films were artefacts which belonged to the time and place of their making, and she seems to have accepted their ‘shelf life’ as part of the natural order of things.

A couple of years later I was working in Helmsdale, Sutherland, where Tait lived for a few years before moving back to Orkney. The Big Sheep (1966) was made while she lived at Slow Bend, a cottage on a tight loop of the old single-track A9 (the upgraded road zooms right past a few yards away). I saw the film at the local arts centre. It is a study of absence, of things in suspension. Tait shot things that engrossed her, for minutes at a time – water burbling in a burn, indecisive flocks of sheep, the occasional vehicle slowing to take the bend at walking pace. The film was over-exposed in places, as if the sun came and went. The audience, it is fair to say, were bemused.

Tait was Orcadian; though once she qualified as a doctor she travelled widely. In her mid-thirties, after serving through WWII in the Royal Army Medical Corps, she turned to filmmaking. “I think I gradually came over to feeling that it was necessary to do something more than just simply bringing people back to bodily health”. Between 1951 and 1998 she made over 30 films of various lengths, all of which have this sustained focus and attention to detail which I imagine she gave to her patients. Tait also published her own poems in three slight, beautiful hardbacks, the shape and size of a Ladybird book, in 1959 and 1960. Her logo is a cardiograph line, the double beat of the heart.

In her films and her poetry Tait was, says Ali Smith, instinctively Modernist (Smith links her to the Beats and Whitman, and to Hugh MacDiarmid, a friend and the subject of one of her films – check it out on YouTube). Interviewed on Channel 4, Tait quoted Lorca: “an apple is no less intense than the sea, a bee no less astonishing than a forest ... [The artist] enters what may well be called the universe of each thing ... [he/she] takes all materials in the same scale”. The camera was an impartial witness, she believed: it showed all things in great and equal detail, it could present context and perspective as well as great intimacy. Using collage and disjunction, following associations of ideas and sounds and her own train of thought to move from one shot to the next, without hierarchy. This allowed her to create what she felt was “a pure form of poetry”. “In poetry something else happens ... Presence, let’s say, soul or spirit, an empathy with whatever it is that’s dwelt upon, feeling for it – to the point of identification”. In The Big Sheep, for example, this dwelling is in accumulated, over-familiar layers. Images ‘rhyme’, and are nested together through repetition and cross-linking; she revisits and revises places, shapes, textures and faces constantly, in subtly interconnected moments. But these are not private exercises. She is constantly aware of us, the audience, peering over her shoulder. Look at this, she says. And this. Now look here.

“Poems, like all human fabrications from straw huts to theology, are made to our measure and by our measure, and are not above or beyond us,” said Charles Simic in ‘Notes on Poetry and Philosophy’. “Language and paint are not metaphysical and forms are not spectral. Patterning is a universal human act”. It is in this that I understand her move from “simply bringing people back to bodily health” to looking more deeply at how we live, at how we knit our experience together. In her film poetry, she looks to present simply this, “in a way that only the motion picture camera has a language for”. Documentary filmmaking was, in her view, ultimately unsuccessful because of the way it isolates its subject from its surroundings in order to study it. “I think that film is essentially a poetic medium,” Tait said, “and although it can be put to all sorts of other – creditable and discreditable – uses, these are secondary”. Her film-poems have been described as anti-narrative. They end by simply ending.

Here is her poem ‘Now’, from her first collection, origins and elements (1959). She considers her film of a flower opening with the experience of actually watching it open – cinematographic versus lived time:

But, at the time,

Although I stared

And felt time not so much moving as being moved in

And felt

A unity of time and place with other times and places

Yet

I didn’t see the petals moving

...

I didn’t see them moving open.

My timing and my rhythm could not observe the rhythm of their opening.

I love the idea of us having an internal time and rhythm, of time as something that moves in us.

My favourite of her film-poems is A Portrait of Ga (1952). Only four minutes long, it follows her mother (‘Ga’ is the family’s name for ‘grandmother’) while this elderly lady sits on a grainy, windy hillside letting the sun pass over her, or walks and twirls up a single-track road, or painstakingly unpeels the wrapper from a melted sticky sweety. Close-up, we study her shoulder, her fingers, the back of her head. But then a moment later we are back at a respectful distance, the way we instinctively would position ourselves in her living room. Ga laughs at this game as she lights another cigarette. The tone, overall, is delight. I can’t think how all that could be captured in words.

Recently in Orkney, while out for a walk with the dog, following a track round a lochan, purely by accident I came across her house – or one of them. It was quite dilapidated then, and is even more so now. I peered through the dusty windows into the empty rooms, and there, balanced on an old green chair, was the plaque. Light was slanting in through a skylight or a hole in the roof, landing directly on the chair and making its green glow an extraordinary emerald colour, far more vivid than anything else in the room. It was exactly as if someone was sitting there, watching me looking in at them through the murky pane.

It is a matter of perspective, it seems, whether her film-poems are poems, poem-films, or a particular subset of avant-garde, experimental, Scottish Modernist filmmaking. Tait saw her writing and her filmmaking as continuous, though perhaps one was the necessary precursor for the other. By 1966, Tait realised she had stopped writing poetry, but could never imagine not making films. Her poems are strongly visual, and strongly grounded (to use an overused word) in the real. In ‘Ay, Ay, Ay, Dolores’, the last poem in origins and elements, Tait puts this succinctly:

...

Sometimes a fiction

Is more precise and less strange

Than the bleating truth, the facts;

And in a story is perceived

The thing beyond the story.

But sometimes

It is the time to simply say.

Just say.

But there’s so much to say that by the time

I fine it down there’s only one word left

And then that word has to go too, being inadequate,

And only eyes are left

For saying it all.

“It is in using the camera that Tait appears to open up,” says poet So Mayer. Ay/aye, the ‘I’, the eye.

Yes, sometimes it’s the wordiness of words that gets in the way.

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