Film Screenings / Programs / Series
MARGARET TAIT / LUKE FOWLER
April 14 – April 27
April 15 & 27, 2024
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).
RECENT SHORT FILMS BY LUKE FOWLER
Courtesy of the Artist and The Modern Institute / Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow.
MUM’S CARDS 2018, 9 min, 16mm-to-DCP
“In his intimate portrait, Fowler’s mother reflects on her life’s work as a sociologist in Glasgow and, through a collection of hand-written notes, illuminates the personal and political nuances that make up a life devoted to intellectual inquiry.” –NEW YORK FILM FESTIVAL
ENCEINDRE 2018, 20.5 min, 16mm-to-DCP
The first collaboration between Fowler and acclaimed sound recordist Chris Watson, ENCEINDRE is a study in film and sound of two 16th century fortified cities: Berwick in the northeast of England and Pamplona in the Navarre region of the north of Spain.
HOUSES (FOR MARGARET) 2019, 5 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Fowler’s first tribute to Margaret Tait was created on the occasion of her centenary. Setting off to Tait’s native Orkney, Fowler creates a record of her life and work through images of her past dwellings and filming locations, excerpts from her production diaries, and the reciting of her poem “Houses” in which she reflects on the meaning of home.
CÉZANNE 2019, 6.5 min, 16mm-to-DCP
Shot in and around the studio and garden of the painter Paul Cézanne in Aix-en-Provence and also on the mountain Saint Victoire, the focus of a long running series of paintings made between 1882-1906.
PATRICK 2020, 21 min, 16mm-to-DCP
“Fowler’s work has long asked how we come to know someone in their absence. He has explored this question by creating posthumous portraits of individuals through precise compositions of the things they have left behind: recorded images and sounds, papers and notes, artwork, the spaces through which they moved, and the testimonies of friends who remain among the living. PATRICK evokes the life of its eponymous music producer [Patrick Cowley] by all these means, taking in the postindustrial charms of San Francisco’s now-gentrified South of Market district, once famous for its dance clubs and leather bars, as if searching for Cowley’s still-lingering energy.” –Ed Halter
FOR DAN 2021, 12.5 min, 16mm-to-DCP
A companion piece to MUM’S CARDS, FOR DAN explores an intense period of correspondence between the artist’s late father and his closest friend, radical university lecturer Dan O’Neill.
Total running time: ca. 80 min.
Sun, April 14 at 7:30.
Luke Fowler
BEING IN A PLACE – A PORTRAIT OF MARGARET TAIT
2022, 60 min, 35mm. Courtesy of the Artist and The Modern Institute / Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow.
Drawing on a wealth of unseen archival material, including sound recordings, film rushes, offcuts and unpublished notebooks, Luke Fowler’s new feature film focuses on Margaret Tait, one of Scotland’s most enigmatic filmmakers. The film takes one of Tait’s unrealized scripts for Channel 4, entitled “Heartlandscape: Visions of Ephemerality and Permanence”, as its starting point and considers Tait’s life and work grounded within the landscape of Orkney. Tait was not interested in filming the scenery but instead looked at the precise details that constitute a place, the small things that are often overlooked. Exploring the process of filmmaking itself from the perspective of a fellow artist sensitive to Tait’s understanding of film as a poetic medium, BEING IN A PLACE pays tribute to the strengths in her method, the importance of fragmented bodies of work, and the intrinsic value in failure.
“Fowler translates his own experience of entering Tait’s world on the Orkney Islands and elsewhere into a restlessly ecstatic and haptic collage of images, sounds, words and memories. Without losing his own sense of looking at the world, he manages to convey a similar appreciation of the abrupt nature of beauty as Tait did; you might call it kinship or the evocation of a particular perception, a portrait not of a person but of her being.” –Patrick Holzapfel, VIENNALE
Preceded by:
Margaret Tait A PORTRAIT OF GA 1952, 5 min, 16mm
Portrait of the filmmaker’s mother. Filmed back on Orkney.
Margaret Tait HAPPY BEES 1954, 17 min, 16mm
“HAPPY BEES was intended to be an evocation of what it was like to be a small child in Orkney; when, one (wrongly) remembers, it was sunny all the time, and everything is bursting with life. A film about what surrounds a child, so quite a lot of it is watched at child level.” –Margaret Tait
Total running time: ca. 85 min.
Mon, April 15 at 7:00.
MARGARET TAIT
“It was in summer 1993 when I first saw films by Margaret Tait. Not in a cinema, but at a 16mm editing table in the Filmmakers Co-op office in London. The room was not dark enough, the image small, but I was inspired and deeply touched by something that is difficult to put into words. Till today I ask myself, what is it that I admire so much in Margaret Tait’s films? They are timeless and speak directly to our inner self, plain and clear and complex at the same time. Her images are simple, nothing special, her camera movements motivated by an inner impulse, often surprising, like her editing. If we see her films, something remains secret, inexplicable but not hidden. Tait said: ‘The cinema I care about is at the level of poetry.’ Perhaps this best explains what defies explanation.I have selected seven short films for the program to show a range, starting with one of her earliest films, A PORTRAIT OF GA, from 1952 and ending with her last film, GARDEN PIECES, from 1998. The program concludes with one of my own short films, which I filmed during my visit to Orkney in 1995.” –Ute Aurand
PROGRAM 1:
A PORTRAIT OF GA 1952, 5 min, 16mm
AERIAL 1974, 4 min, 16mm
THE LEADEN ECHO AND THE GOLDEN ECHO 1955, 7 min, 16mm
COLOUR POEMS 1974, 12 min, 16mm
CALYPSO 1955, 4 min, DCP
HAPPY BEES 1954, 17 min, 16mm
GARDEN PIECES 1998, 12 min, 16mm
Ute Aurand GLIMPSES FROM A VISIT TO ORKNEY IN SUMMER 1995 2020, 5 min, 16mm, color, silent
Total running time: ca. 70 min.
Sat, April 27 at 5:30.
PROGRAM 2:
WHERE I AM IS HERE 1963, 35 min, 16mm
“Starting with a six-line script which just noted down a kind of event to occur, and recur, my aim was to construct a film with its own logic, its own correspondences within itself, and its own echoes and rhymes and comparisons, all through close exploration of the everyday, the commonplace, in the city of Edinburgh.” –Margaret Tait
A PLACE OF WORK 1976, 31 min, 16mm
“A close study of one garden and house and what could be seen there and heard there within the space of time from June 1975 to November 1975. An evocation of a place (in Orkney) with lifelong associations and latterly used as a work place. A family home, from which at the time of filming, the family had long gone. My own home in childhood and off and on through the years, eventually returned to and worked in (and on). Filmed in the months before leaving it.” –Margaret Tait
Total running time: ca. 70 min.
Sat, April 27 at 7:30.
