Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader (review)

The films of Margaret Tait have been undergoing critical rehabilitation in Scotland since they were the focus of a retrospective at the 2004 Edinburgh International Film Festival. Not so much forgotten as never discovered by Scottish critics, these short animations and documentaries impressed those who knew of her only as a poet, or as the director of the feature film Blue Black Permanent (1992). It was known that Tait had written other feature film scripts, but it was the short films that she left behind after she passed away in 1999 that took many by surprise. Ironically for an artist who spent most of her days on the island of Orkney (north of the Scottish mainland), she had a loyal following not in Glasgow or Edinburgh but in London. There she was embraced by figures from the avant-garde film community, who saw in her a kindred spirit.

The efforts of these London filmmakers, programmers, and critics led to the 2004 retrospective and subsequent touring program around Britain and beyond that the films eventually came to light. These individuals raised the money to enable a full restoration of the films by the Scottish Screen archive that has resulted in impressive new viewing prints. In parallel to these restoration and exhibition activities came a beautifully designed book, Subjects and Sequences: A Margaret Tait Reader, published by the London film collective LUX.

Edited by Peter Todd and Benjamin Cook, this collection aims to demonstrate the close ties between Tait's poetry and her film practice, as well as to encourage future research into these highly distinctive films. In this regard the book is an important contribution to critical and scholarly debates. There is an informative account by Janet McBain and Alan Russell (of the Scottish Screen archive) on the technical challenges in restoring films that were constantly being altered and changed right up until Tait's death. The archivists also encountered problems in discerning Tait's artistic intentions, which were sometimes not entirely clear due to the existence of multiple and varying copies of the same film.

This problem of the artist's approach to her work also dominates the most entertaining section of the reader, in which excerpts from Margaret Tait's press and television interviews, selected by David Curtis, are published in a chapter entitled "In Her Own Words." Tait's insight, modesty, and humor are in full evidence when discussing her resistance to being labeled an avant-garde filmmaker:

I don't see that it's a term one can use of oneself anyway. How can anyone say such a thing of themself (sic)? Besides that, there's something too limiting about the idea of the avant-garde—as if at all costs you must be making innovation. Cinema itself is an innovation of this century, and within the mainstream of it, the most astonishing things have been achieved. It bowls me over. It really does.

But do you mind your films being called avant-garde by others?

Oh, well, no! How could I mind that? It's not the only thing they've been called, though.

(95)

This is a constant theme in Tait's interviews—her desire to escape easy categorization at all costs. She is similarly critical of the documentary film movement, a tradition that is particularly strong in Scottish film culture (93). Her films, from reputation alone, seem to exist outside of all established canons and, moreover, are seen too rarely to correct such claims. While this collection aims to remedy this critical neglect, Tait's attitude (understandable for an artist constantly trying to challenge and outdo herself) is adopted by some of the essayists in the collection, with mixed results. Margaret Tait is sometimes depicted as a completely unique artist, outside of history and specific film movements, and this is where I have some reservations about the collection.

It is that Margaret Tait's work is clearly valued greatly by editor Peter Todd, a filmmaker and programmer who knew her...