I saw these three films as a triple bill at the NFT in London. Margaret Tait was an experimental film-maker who spent most of her life in the Scottish highlands and the Orkneys, where she was born, and as a result shot her idiosyncratic films largely in isolation. She died in 1999 and the NFT has recently shown a retrospective of her short films, documentaries and feature.
"Aerial" is a 4 minute silent film, telling the seasons over in a variety of colour washes. Pretty, but not as potentially absorbing as "Land Makar". In this film, Tait followed the daily farming routine of her neighbour (Mary Sinclair, from memory) from spring to autumn. The camera reproduces very accurately the infinite shift of variations on a theme of the farming life, never going beyond the fields around the house, the pond, and the house itself. It is beautiful, in the sense that the known object, painfully laboured over, is beautiful, and Tait's achievement is in putting this across. But I couldn't understand a word of the accompanying monologue by the farmer (in her native Orcadian accent). I was so frustrated by what I was missing on the soundtrack that I found it hard to concentrate on the screen alone.
"The Big Sheep" was the most accessible of the three. Part historical curiosity (for me, antipodean child of the late 20th century) and part elegy, it's a wordless account of the drifting away of the rural population of Sunderland in the late 60's. Tait's technique is to linger on a place or an activity - a stretch of road solely populated by tourist coaches on their way to John o' Groats; a succession of cabers tossed; sheep wandering through roofless stone bothies - until the desired impression has settled into the layers of the subject's brain, at which point she moves on to the next set of images. Timing is all. Tait's timing here suggests the gentle swaying of seaweed in the current, or the careful self-contained stream splashing down its bed from the highlands to the sea, the image which closes the film: film-making that is so richly endowed with a sense of the particular that it asks the big questions.
