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 ……..

Read my essay at the North Sea Poets substack .