On the All-at-Once Margaret Tait

If you're not familiar with the work of Scottish poet and filmmaker Margaret Tait (1918–1999), an article by Jesse Cumming in this month's Brooklyn Rail will change that. "Like her films, the published written work is defined by an unadorned style that manages to be all at once quaint, playful, and clever," writes Cumming. To continue:

...Following a steady burst of work in film upon her return to Scotland, a period in which she produced Portrait of Ga and the Edinburgh-shot documentary Rose Street (1956), Tait temporarily turned to her writing in earnest for six years, during which she published several collections, before returning to filmmaking with the multipart Where I Am is Here (1964).

While presumably in reference to the tenement construction site and workers that Tait shows, the film's opening chapter's title, "Complex," also serves to define the larger film and a number of her subsequent projects, including Aerial (1974) and Hugh MacDiarmid: A Portrait (1964), a portrait film marked by flourishes inspired by MacDiarmid's poetry. Where I Am is Here is more expansive in its scale and scope—as if after a break from movie-making she seemed eager to capture as much life as possible in 30-some minutes. Tait's sound design also evolves dramatically with the film; where she utilizes music in a relatively straightforward manner, as she'd done in earlier films, she also introduced structured and more abstract plays with soundscape as well as contrapuntal sound/image relationships, including distorted birdsong over an image of a dead sparrow. 

Read on at the Brooklyn Rail.