Margaret Tait (1992)
In a 1983 interview about her work, the Scottish film-maker Margaret Tait (1918-99) described herself as a creator of ‘film poems’ that offer ‘felt rather than logical connections’. A DVD produced by BFI in 2018 includes three of her short films, as well as this interview (with the video artist Tamara Krikorian) and a BFI Southbank panel discussion of Tait’s work. The main item on the DVD is Blue Black Permanent, her only dramatic feature in a filmography comprising more than thirty pieces and spanning nearly fifty years. Tait was in her mid-seventies when she made the feature, which proved to be her penultimate film. I’m not sure why she decided at this late stage to attempt a full-length drama (though it’s still not long: 86 minutes) but the result didn’t leave me regretting she didn’t do more.
Blue Black Permanent moves between Orkney and Edinburgh. (Tait was born and raised in the former, went to university and worked for some years in the latter, and shot films in both locations.) Barbara Thorburn (Celia Imrie), now in her late thirties, remembers her 1950s childhood. The central figure in it was her mother Greta (Gerda Stevenson), whose death Barbara still struggles to come to terms with – as she tells her partner, Philip Lomax (Jack Shepherd). He and Barbara share a home in Edinburgh, where Barbara’s parents also lived. Greta hailed from Orkney, however, and, at the time of her death, was staying there with her three children, of whom ten-year-old Barbara (Katie Groat) is the eldest, in a coastal cottage belonging to a relative. Greta’s body was found one morning on the seashore, near the water’s edge. Greta wrote poetry: her husband Jim (James Fleet) discovers in the cottage a poem that his wife had started but not finished. Greta may or may not have ended her own life – Barbara speculates that she might have ‘sleepwalked’ into the sea. It later emerges that Mary Kelday (Liz Robertson), Greta’s own mother, also drowned in the sea off Orkney.
In the opening scene, Greta, Jim and their children are a happy family group on the beach at Orkney. As Jim plays football with the Thorburns’ two little boys (James Holmes and Sean Holmes), the child Barbara swims in the sea. She briefly disappears from her mother’s view; Greta is anxious and much relieved when Barbara reappears and runs back to her. The sequence is visually striking throughout; Greta’s alarm resonates at later stages of the story, when we learn of her own fate and that of her mother. For as long as Tait is working predominantly in images – of sea, sky and flotsam at Orkney, of buildings in Edinburgh – Blue Black Permanent is expressive. This is often true of the characters’ faces too – in single shots. At one point, the older Barbara looks out to sea and says wistfully that she wishes she could paint. When Philip asks if she hasn’t photographed the scene, she replies dismissively that photography wouldn’t do it justice – an inadvertently ironic remark. Tait’s camera delivers strong close-ups of people, almost as a series of photographs, but problems start up when her cast are speaking and interacting. One of the most impressive presences in the film is Liz Robertson’s Mary Kelday, who says not a word.
Gerda Stevenson’s dominant performance is self-consciously lyrical. There’s a surfeit of rapt gazes, nervous laughter, catching the breath, halting delivery of lines. Stevenson’s Greta is so fey that it’s hard to understand how she and her kindly but conventional husband got together, and have stayed together to raise a young family. Perhaps Tait didn’t intend Greta to be interpreted realistically but Stevenson’s acting conflicts with the more naturalistic style of Celia Imrie, Jack Shepherd and James Fleet, none of whom seems comfortable. Sean Scanlan is, more like Stevenson, very deliberate in his playing of Andrew Cunningham, an Edinburgh artist whose model is Wendy (Hilary Maclean) but whose muse seems to be Greta.
There are effective rhyming sequences, for example on the Playfair Steps at the Mound in Edinburgh: Greta stands there ecstatically during a cloudburst; decades later, Barbara gives money to a beggar at the foot of the steps. (That too rhymes with a bit where a penny-for-the-guy gaggle of kids approach her and Philip, and startle Barbara with the masks they’re wearing.) The film’s fine title refers to certain shots of the sea, as well as to the bottle of Quink left on the table with Greta’s incomplete poem, and the psychic legacy of her death. But Margaret Tait’s gifts as a writer-director, on the evidence of Blue Black Permanent, didn’t include orchestration of actors or plausible dramatic construction.
An episode in which Greta returns from Edinburgh to visit her elderly, ailing father Sam (Walter Leask) in Orkney includes a sequence where she and a few of his neighbours recall a local wedding they all attended. They can’t stop laughing, much to the frustration of Sam, who didn’t go to the wedding: the effect is awkwardly unnatural. Barbara’s work as a photographer, barely mentioned for much of the film, belatedly becomes a main focus of attention, when she does a shoot for an Andrew Cunningham retrospective. A more persistent difficulty is in what she tells Philip about herself. It’s made repeatedly clear they’ve known each other for some time: he’s startled when she describes him as a friend, replying that ‘I thought I was your lover’. Either way, it’s unconvincing that Barbara, given her evident preoccupation with her past, has never mentioned it to Philip before.
I’m glad I watched the feature before the short films (and the interview) on the DVD. It would have been more disappointing to have seen the main course after these hors d’oeuvres. The other way round, I ended up getting more from Tait’s earlier work than I did from Blue Black Permanent. Each of the three shorts, all made in the 1950s, merits the ‘film poem’ label. Her Orcadian mother is the subject of A Portrait of Ga (1953). Rose Street (1956), at fifteen minutes the longest piece, is a day-in-the-life picture of the central Edinburgh street (it runs parallel to Princes Street), where Tait lived and worked at the time – the film closes on the door plate for her Ancona Films outfit on the second floor of one of the buildings. Rose Street mostly comprises fascinating footage of workers, shoppers and kids playing in the street outside: the contributions of both the last two groups seem performed yet revelatory too. A published poet herself, Tait also created film poems of a more explicit kind. The remaining piece, The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo (1955), is a series of images accompanying her voice reading the Gerard Manley Hopkins poem. (Another of her films, featured and discussed in the interview with Tamara Krikorian, is a portrait of Hugh MacDiarmid.) These shorts, in their different ways, bear out what Margaret Tait describes as an abiding essential of her work – her conviction that there’s deep interest, even wonder, to be discovered in every particular place, in the things and the people it contains.
31 July 2020
