BEING IN A PLACE: A PORTRAIT OF MARGARET TAIT

Drawing on a wealth of unseen archival material, the film weaves together a complex and personal portrait of one of Scotland’s most enigmatic independent filmmakers, from the perspective of a fellow artist sensitive to the potential Margaret envisaged for film as a poetic medium.

Thanks to an archive of never-released material consisting of notes, rushes, letters and audio recordings of interviews, Luke Fowler traces the life and work of filmmaker and poet Margaret Tait, simultaneously painting a picture of the Orcades, the archipelago north of Scotland where she was born. In order to paint Tait’s portrait, Fowler travels the area. He ascribes equal value and gives the same caring attention to the accounts he collects from neighbours, from Tait’s loved ones and from connoisseurs of her work. Bound by an obvious kinship, Fowler’s approach coincides with Tait’s: both filmmakers consider everything they film with the same attention, taking the time to consider minute details and humble transformations. To capture a landscape, everything counts: the shape of the roofs, the green of the Orcades, the changing light. The film is contained in the most modest of movements. In all this, both sensibilities are so in tune that it is hard to tell whose images are who’s. Their perspectives blend and resonate together. Combining fragments from Tait’s films and footage by Fowler, the film calls attention to fugitive memories, to the beauty of bits and pieces and scrapped attempts, and unfinished works as a trove of infinite depth. It hence makes sense that one of Tait’s unfinished films, Heartlandscape: Visions of Ephemerality and Permanence, runs through Being in a Place. “Heartlandscape” is the word Tait used to describe the landscape she travelled through between her home and her studio, a place she loved and which always fascinated her because of its varied features and ancient history. It could also describe the journey her life has been, and perhaps the road that has led Luke Fowler to Margaret Tait.

Clémence Arrivé