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Margaret Caroline Tait (11 November 1918 – 16 April 1999) was a Scottish medical doctor, filmmaker and poet.

Margaret Tait
Born	(1918-11-11)11 November 1918 Kirkwall, Orkney, Scotland
Died	16 April 1999(1999-04-16) (aged 80) Firth, Orkney, Scotland
Alma mater	University of Edinburgh Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia
Occupation	filmmaker, poet, author

Early life and education

Margaret Caroline Tait was born and raised in Kirkwall, in the Orkney Islands in the north of Scotland, before being sent to school in Edinburgh.[1]

Tait attended the University of Edinburgh, gaining qualifications in Medicine (1941). Between 1943 and 1946 she served in the Royal Army Medical Corps, stationed in India, Sri Lanka and Malaya.[1] She subsequently moved to Rome to study film making at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia (1950–1952).[2]

Career

After studying in Italy, Tait returned to Scotland, living on Rose Street, Edinburgh[3] and founded Ancona Films, named after the street where she had lodged while studying in Rome.[4]

She would live near Helmsdale in Sutherland in the mid 1960s’.[5] On her move back to Orkney in the late 1960s, Tait continued to make films and took inspiration from the landscape and culture of Orkney.

In 1950s and 1960s, she was close to, though not a member of, the Edinburgh-based Rose Street Poets, which included poets Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley Maclean and Norman MacCaig.[6]

From 1955 to 1961 she was a member of the ruling council of the influential Edinburgh conservationist body the Cockburn Association.[7]

Tait made 32 short films and one full-length film, Blue Black Permanent. In addition, Tait wrote prose and poetry, and published three poetry books – origins and elements, The Hen and the Bees, and Subjects and Sequences.

‘In the documentary Margaret Tait: Film Maker for Channel Four Television in 1983 Tait would describe her life’s work as making ‘film poems’.[8]

Her interest in poetry can also be seen through the specific choices of making a film The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo from the poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins in which she herself reads the poem, Hugh MacDiarmid, A Portrait which features the poet who reads from several of his own poems, and in the work and title of her film Colour Poems of which she wrote ‘A poem started in words is continued in images.’ [Subjects and Squences: a Margaret Tait Reader, LUX, London, 2004. p 164]. Writer Ali Smith wrote of the film Aerial ‘Here's a tiny poem of the relentlessness and beauty of the natural, all around us.’.[9] Fellow Orcadian, writer George MacKay Brown, of the film Place of Work writes ‘calls to mind T. S. Eliot's "Burnt Norton": Garden and house, a small enclave in time where gracious and lovely and stirring things have happened – love and birth and death.’[10]

Death and legacy

She died 16 April 1999 at the home she shared with her husband Alex Pirie on Orkney.[11][12] An annual Margaret Tait Award was established in 2010 in conjunction with Glasgow Film Festival.[13]

Retrospectives of Tait's work took place at the National Film Theatre London in 2000 curated by Benjamin Cook and Peter Todd, at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2004, and at BFI Southbank (NFT) London in 2018 both curated by film maker and curator Peter Todd,[14] amongst others.[15][16][17] 2018 also saw a year long celebration of her life and work Margaret Tait 100 with screenings, exhibitions, talks and other events with Sarah Neely as the director and supported by Creative Scotland.

Centenary exhibitions devoted to her work were held at GoMA Glasgow and The Pier Arts Centre Orkney. In February 2020 Historic Environment Scotland announced Tait would be included in the Commemorative Plaque scheme.The plaque was unveiled on 14 July 2022 at 25 Broad Street, Kirkwall.[18][19]

Her work was introduced to many new audiences with the international film tour of her work Subjects and Sequences (named after her book of poems). Made up of two programmes of films, newly struck on 16mm film from the original 16mm negatives, the first titled Film Poems, and the second Islands, and curated by Peter Todd for LUX it was launched on 16 November 2004 with a screening at Cecil Sharp House, London. Subjects and Sequences A LUX Project was made possible by funding from Arts Council England, Scottish Screen, Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, & Pier Arts Centre. Over the next three years it would be presented at over thirty screenings including Watershed Bristol, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Scratch Projections Paris, Dartington Arts, Chapter Cardiff, Cinematexas Austin, Museum of Modern Art New York,[20] Mumbai International Film Festival, Kino Arsenal Berlin,[21] National Screen and Sound Archive of Wales, Harvard Film Archive,[22] Greek Film Archive Athens.

Her films remain in distribution in the UK.[23]

Filmography

• One Is One (1951)
• Three Portrait Sketches (1951)
• The Lion, The Griffin and the Kangaroo (1952)
• Happy Bees (1955)
• Orquil Burn (1955)
• A Portrait of Ga (1955)
• The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo (1955)
• Calypso (1956)
• The Drift Back (1956)
• Rose Street (1956)
• Where I Am Is Here (1964)
• Palindrome (1964)
• Hugh Macdiarmid: A Portrait (1964)
• The Big Sheep (1966)
• Splashing (1966)
• A Pleasant Place (1969)
• He's Back (The Return) (1970)
• John MacFadyen (The Stripes in the Tartan) (1970)
• Painted Eightsome (1970)
• On The Mountain (1974)
• Colour Poems (1974)
• Aerial (1974)
• These Walls (1974)
• Tailpiece (1976)
• Place of Work (1976)
• Aspects of Kirkwall : Shape of a Town (1977)
• Aspects of Kirkwall : Occasions (1977)
• Aspects of Kirkwall : The Ba, Over the Years (1981)
• Aspects of Kirkwall : The Look of the Place (1981)[24]
• Aspects of Kirkwall : Some Changes (1981)
• Landmakar (1981)
• Blue Black Permanent (1992) (Feature)
• Garden Pieces (1998)

Selected works

• The Grassy Stories: Short Stories from Children (Edinburgh: M.C. Tait, 1959)
• Lane Furniture: A Book of Stories (Edinburgh: M.C. Tait, 1959)
• origins and elements (Edinburgh: M.C. Tait, 1959)
• The Hen and the Bees: Legends and Lyrics (Edinburgh: M.C. Tait, 1960)
• Subjects and Sequences (Edinburgh: M.C. Tait, 1960)
• Poems, Stories and Writings, edited by Sarah Neely (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2012)
• Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader, edited by Peter Todd and Benjamin Cook (London: LUX, 2004)

References

External links

• National Library of Scotland, Moving Image Archive Biography of Margaret Tait with links to film details and clips)
• Scottish Poetry Library (Biography of Margaret Tait, recordings of her reading her poetry, and links to poem texts)
• Preserving the Hand-Painted Films of Margaret Tait, (MA Dissertation), Joss Winn, 2002

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