Film Screenings / Programs / Series
MARGARET TAIT / LUKE FOWLER
April 14 – April 27
BEING IN A PLACE – A PORTRAIT OF MARGARET TAIT finds one of Scotland’s preeminent contemporary experimental filmmakers, Luke Fowler (whose extensive body of work includes the film cycle A GRAMMAR FOR LISTENING, ALL DIVIDED SELVES, and ELECTRO-PYTHAGORAS, among many others) paying tribute to one of the most illustrious of his Scottish forebears, the great Margaret Tait, whose work is still not sufficiently celebrated here in the U.S.
Tait’s path to the cinema was an unusual one: her initial training was in medicine, and she practiced both abroad with the Royal Army Medical Corps during WWII and back in the UK in the late 1940s. But she had also, in the immediate postwar period, studied at the Centro Sperimentale film school in Rome. And eventually, in the early 1950s, she began making her own films, which span or combine short-form documentary, family portraiture, impressionistic experimental filmmaking, and animation. Her unconventional path – as well as her parallel identity as a writer of poetry and short stories – is reflected in her cinema, which is distinctly noncommercial, personal, and lyrical. Her body of work is also proudly local: making more than thirty films during her lifetime, Tait focused intently on the landscapes, people, and stories of Scotland, and in particular of the Orkney islands, where she was born.
On the occasion of a visit to NYC from Luke Fowler in April, we’ll be screening his invaluable portrait film, BEING IN A PLACE, as well as a program of his own recent short films. Later in the month, we’ll host the filmmaker Ute Aurand, who introduced Tait’s work to audiences in Germany in the mid-1990s, and visited the artist herself in Orkney before her death. Following on from her presentations at the Harvard Film Archive in mid-April, Aurand will present two programs of Tait’s work here at Anthology.
Very special thanks to Ute Aurand and Luke Fowler; and to Haden Guest & Alexandra Vasile (Harvard Film Archive); Hanan Coumal (LUX); Angelika Ramlow (Arsenal – Institut für Film und Videokunst); and Calum Sutherland (The Modern Institute).
