Margaret Tait

A PORTRAIT OF GA is another early experiment in portraiture from Tait. In filming her mother she asks the wider question of how much the camera can reveal of the person. (MUBI)

Barbara Thorburn wiles away the hours with memories of Greta, her mother, the poet. (imdb)

Touches on elemental images; air, water (and snow), earth, fire (and smoke), all come into it. The track consists of a drawn out musical sound, single piano notes and some neutral sounds. The picture is a colour print from an original which is partly in colour and partly in black and white. (MUBI)

An original kind of tribute' is what George Mackay Brown called Tait's 1964 documentary about one of Scotland's greatest poets; Hugh MacDiarmid. (MUBI)

Seven linked film 'poems', described by Margaret Tait herself as follows: A poem started in words, and referring to distant memories to do with people going or not going to the Spanish Civil war, goes on in the picture (in "Numen of the Boughs") ; memory gets somewhat lost in the present observation, although it never disappears, and there are reverberations back, even in the brief life of the poppies in "Terra Firma"... (MUBI)

"Starting with a six-line script (in 1963) 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, its own echoes and rhymes and comparisons, through close exploration of the everyday, the commonplace, in the city, Edinburgh, where I stayed at the time." (MUBI)

"A close study of one garden and house and what could be seen there and heard there within the space of time from June 1975 to November 1975. An evocation of a place (in Orkney) with lifelong associations and latterly used as a work place. A family home, from which at the time of filming, the family had long gone. My own home in childhood and off and on through the years, eventually returned to and worked in (and on). Filmed in the months beforeleaving it..." (MUBI)

The film was conceived as a coda to a longer (colour) film, Place of Work, made in the same year. It covers the time of finally emptying a long-time family home, with its personal memories and connection with some of my own work. Fragments of verse (from Lorca's 'Poet in New York'), along with young children's voices released into the emptying rooms and staircases, and an ersatz "pop" music track, clarify the familiar and the alien in the situation. (MUBI)

"Made over the same period of time and similar methods to Painted Eightsome, the music being entitled, John Macfadyen, a march tune." (MUBI)

A film interpretation of the poem 'The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo' by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Margaret Tait speaks the poem throughout the film. (TMDB)

A series of interiors exploring the work of various businesses - presumably in Kirkwall. Margaret Tait has filmed them at different speeds and added humorous intertitles to hint at their content. 'Workshop Whizz Kids' features auto mechanics, 'Hangar Languor' a farm supplies business, 'Backlings Store' the work of a storeman, 'Hesitation Waltz' the car garage, and 'Centre of Power' general office work. (National Library of Scotland)

A glimpse at the University for Foreigners Perugia, a university oriented towards offering people the chance to learn Italian culture and language.