Drawing on a wealth of unseen archival material, including sound recordings, film rushes, offcuts and unpublished notebooks, Luke Fowler’s new feature film focuses on Margaret Tait, one of Scotland’s most enigmatic filmmakers. The film takes one of Tait’s unrealised scripts for Channel 4, entitled Heartlandscape: Visions of Ephemerality and Permanence, as its starting point and considers Tait’s life and work grounded within the landscape of Orkney.

Tait was not interested in filming the scenery but instead looked at the precise details that constitute a place, the small things that are often overlooked.  Exploring the process of filmmaking itself from the perspective of a fellow artist sensitive to Tait’s understanding of film as a poetic medium, Being in a Place  pays tribute to the strengths in her method, the importance of fragmented bodies of work, and the intrinsic value in failure.

Margaret Tait (b.1918, Orkney), filmmaker and poet, first trained as a medical doctor and served in the Royal Army Medical Corps before studying filmmaking in Rome in 1950 at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.  Returning to Scotland in 1952, Tait established a film studio, Ancona Films, on Edinburgh’s Rose Street. There she became friends with the ‘Rose Street Poets’, including Hugh McDiarmid, who she would eventually make a film of.  During this time, she was also a prolific writer and self-published three volumes of poetry, a volume of short stories and a book for children. Eventually Tait returned to Orkney – which became the landscape and subject of the majority of her films. During her lifetime, Tait made one feature film in her life (Blue Black Permanent, 1992), but was best known for her short, 16mm films (or ‘film poems’).  All but three of her thirty two films were self financed.

‘The contradictory or paradoxical thing is that in documentary the real things depicted are liable to lose their reality by being photographed and presented in that “documentary” way, and there’s no poetry in that. In poetry, something else happens. Hard to say what it is. 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.’ – Margaret Tait

Courtesy of the artist and The Modern Institute, Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow.

Peter Todd is an artist who works predominantly with film both as a maker and curator. His most recent film pillow bowl rose tree premiered at the Open City Documentary Festival in 2023. He curated the major retrospective of Margaret Tait at the Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2004, the season Rhythm and Poetry : The Films of Margaret Tait at BFI Southbank in 2018 and an international touring programme of her work for LUX, and has presented screenings of her work in New York, Mumbai, and Buenos Aires. With Benjamin Cook he edited Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader (2004) the first book dedicated to Tait. He has contributed to The Temenos restoration workshops organised by Robert Beavers in Berlin.

Sarah Neely (co-producer of Being in a Place) is a Professor in Film and Visual Culture at the University of Glasgow and has carried out many years of research on Tait’s life in work. In 2018-19, she led on a year-long project celebrating the centenary of the filmmaker and poet, Margaret Tait. Book publications include Between Categories: The Films of Margaret Tait – Portraits, Poetry, Sound and Place (Peter Lang, 2016), Margaret Tait: Personae (as editor) (LUX, 2020), Margaret Tait: Poems, Stories and Writings (as editor) (Carcanet, 2012).

Doors open at 18.30, for a 19.30 start. Digital presentation.

Refreshments will be available in our licensed cafe/bar.

TICKETS & PRICING

Tickets £8.

Advance tickets may be purchased from Ticketlab, or direct from the Museum by calling 020 7840 2200 in office hours.