Being in a Place: an allusive, pleasingly fluid portrait of Margaret Tait

• Reviewed from the 2023 Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival

Towards the end of Being in a Place, artist Luke Fowler’s experimental portrait of the veteran film-poet (and fellow Scot) Margaret Tait, we enter a Neolithic passage grave jutting out from the Orcadian landscape. Illuminated by a torch, the tomb walls appear covered in Victorian graffiti, over which Fowler’s camera briefly hovers. Perhaps echoing cinema’s prehistoric origins in the animated flickers of early cave art, the carvings certainly testify to the very human urge to leave our mark on the land.

For over 40 years, Margaret Tait imprinted herself on the wilds of Orkney through her poetic, impressionistic films. A poet and medical doctor, Tait started making films in the 1950s, first in Rome as a film student, then later in Scotland. Born in Orkney, where she also died in 1999, Tait moved there permanently in the 1960s, and documented in fragmentary snapshots its hardy people and windswept landscape. A recently discovered brief for one of Tait’s unrealised films, Heartlandscape: Visions of Ephemerality and Permanence (1983), is the driving force behind Being in a Place. Fowler’s resurrection of a failed film project from the cutting-room floor acts as the springboard for this tactile and sometimes frustratingly enigmatic look at a filmmaker’s approach to place.

Fowler’s focus rests on the Orcadian people and local industry, and his observations alternate between the ephemeral and the relatively fixed. Fowler shares with Tait an interest in surveying details in the landscape for what they might tell us about those who live there, merging seemingly inconsequential features of everyday life – street signs, stained-glass windows, sea trawlers, children playing – to create vibrant tapestries of subjects in space. Merging archival material, including Tait’s notepads, sound recordings, unrealised briefs and film rushes, with Fowler’s own 16mm footage, the seams between timeframes can be pleasingly hard to identify, and sound and image obstinately fall out of sync. Although she is its central subject, Tait remains an enigma in the film; drawing on the archive is a way for Fowler to try to fill the gaps in his allusive portraiture.

Searching for “a film equivalent of portrait painting”, Tait was widely celebrated for the warmth and intimacy she brought to her subjects, like her 1964 short about the modernist Scottish poet Hugh McDiarmid, or the lived-in beauty of her maternal study, Portrait of Ga (1952). Constructed with meticulous rigour, Fowler’s posthumous portraits of avant-garde artists and renegades (including radical psychiatrist R.D. Laing, Marxist labour historian E.P. Thompson, and avant-garde musicians Cornelius Cardew and Martin Bartlett) lack some of that intimacy. But taken together, Fowler and Tate’s film revelatory cine-portraits feel like a project of alternative world-building, a utopian constellation of nonconformists whose ideas and practices could light the way to future possibilities.