Stalking the image: Margaret Tait and Intimate Filmmaking Practices

First paragraph: Margaret Tait's artistic concern with the detail of the everyday shares much with general conceptions of feminist filmmaking practices, in which self-expression is identified as an antidote to the oversimplified representations of women in mainstream cinema. As Pam Cook explains, the ‘emphasis on the personal, the intimate and the domestic, has always been important to the Women's Movement and the personal diary form, for instance, has always been a means of self-expression for women to whom other avenues were closed’.2 While Tait maintained she was filming what was around her rather than attempting any kind of autobiographical work, the body of her work, including film poems, portraits and hand-painted films, is frequently praised for its ability to capture the ‘authenticity’ of experience

'Reel to Rattling Reel': Telling stories about rural cinema-going in Scotland

As Annette Kuhn explains in relation to her pioneering research on cinema culture in 1930s Britain, ‘how people remember is as much a text to be deciphered as what they remember’ (2002: 6). This article, drawing from research conducted as part of a three-year AHRC-funded project looking at the history of the Highlands and Islands Film Guild (The Major Minor Cinema Project: Highlands and Islands Film Guild 1946-71, University of Glasgow and University of Stirling), 1 will examine the ways in which cinema memories are narrativised. The article will focus in particular on the creative writing strand of the project, which was inspired by the surprising discovery of the project’s pilot study that some cinema-goers from the period of research had been inspired to write poems or stories in response to their experience of going to the Film Guild screenings. Through a consideration of the project’s oral history interviews, alongside correspondence with respondents and other written accounts, including poems, short stories and other forms of creative writing, the article will consider the ways in which cinema memory (as a very particular form of cultural memory) may offer its own unique inflection to the ways in which stories are told

Discoveries in the biscuit tin: The role of archives and collections in the history of artists’ moving image in Scotland

This article examines the situation of artists’ moving image works within existing archives and collections. With a specifc focus on the archiving of experimental flm in Scotland, the article makes use of existing research in the feld, while drawing from recent interviews with artists, curators and archivists in Scotland, Ireland and Norway

Contemporary Scottish Cinema

First paragraph: In an article in the Scottish cultural magazine, The Drouth, Mark Cousins provocatively bemoaned the lack of a vibrant film culture in Scotland. Putting Iran’s cinematic achievements forward as a – perhaps surprising – example, Cousins identifies several reasons for Scotland’s underdevelopment, most of which revolve around a lack of experimentation and a general absence of interest in exploring the capabilities of the film form. This he puts down to the dominance of an accomplished literary tradition and the consequent development of oral culture rather than a visual alternative. Blame is also laid on various training schemes and funding initiatives espousing the rigid frameworks of mainstream film-making practices without allowing much room for new forms and practices to emerge (Cousins 2006: 12–13)

"Ploughing a lonely furrow": Margaret Tait and professional filmmaking practices in 1950s Scotland

Margaret Tait - filmmaker, poet, painter, and short story writer - has frequently been cited as a truly independent filmmaker. Her first and only feature film, Blue Black Permanent was released in 1992, but she is primarily remembered as a prolific creator of shorter films, ranging from vivid portraits, to cinematic poems and mobile graphic works painted directly onto film stock. When her films were screened at Calton studios in 1979, she was billed as a “one woman film-industry”.1 Hugh McDiarmid, the subject of one of Tait’s film portraits, had much earlier described her as “ploughing a lonely furrow”, and the majority of her work, although sometimes aided by family and friends, was produced largely on her own and with limited budgets.2 She received very little financial support for her productions. Although her film Colour Poems was financed by the Scottish Arts Council’s “filmmaker as artist” competition in 1974, the majority of her attempts at securing funding, including a number of approaches made to the Scottish Film Council, were thwarted. To some extent, this was because her work, crossing a range of disciplines, was unable to be placed within familiar traditions. Her experimental methods were frequently misread as “unprofessional” by a variety of funding bodies, more focused on the strengths of Scotland’s documentary revival.3 Despite this lack of backing, Tait managed to achieve a degree of success, distributing her films internationally through diverse mechanisms. Yet it is hardly surprising that the oversight of her work on a funding level in Scotland, is reflected in the filmmaker’s absence from critical histories of Scottish cinema

The story of the reel that went for a swim’: cinema memory and the history of the Highlands and Islands Film Guild as narrated through oral history interviews and its surrounding metadata

No abstract available

Demons in the Machine: Experimental Film, Poetry and Modernism in Twentieth-Century Scotland

First paragraph: Avant-garde practices in Scotland have often been overshadowed by the dominance of a strong documentary tradition, and discussions of Scottish filmmaking are generally concerned with debates around national identity. These tendencies work to obscure the achievements of a number of important local filmmakers linked to the international avant-garde. This chapter will explore the work of two such figures: Orcadian poet, painter and filmmaker, Margaret Tait (1918-1999) and Scots-Italian writer, academic and amateur filmmaker Enrico Cocozza (1921-1997). Both attended Centro Sperimentale di Cinematographia in Rome in the early 1950s, Tait after serving in the Royal Army Medical Corps, Cocozza after serving as an interpreter for Italian prisoners in the Army. Their poetic approach to filmmaking was admired by artists, other filmmakers, writers and, unsurprisingly, poets. Hugh MacDiarmid, who served as a subject for one of Tait’s film portraits, published some of her written poetry and wrote about her in his article, ‘Intimate Filmmaking in Scotland’ (1960). Edwin Morgan favourably reviewed Tait’s poems and later wrote a poem in tribute to Cocozza. Both Tait and Cocozza, to varying extents, were influenced by poetry, occasionally adapting and referencing the work of well-known poets in their own films

Adapting to change in contemporary Irish and Scottish culture: fiction to film

Abstract available: p. [ii]-[iii]

Tantalising Fragments: Scotland’s Voice in the Early Talkies in Britain and Jenny Gilbertson’s The Rugged Island: A Shetland Lyric (1934)

This article will consider the tantalising fragments of the Scottish voice in the early talkies, exploring the response of Scottish audiences to various accents and voices, and offering a survey of the films set or produced in Scotland during the period of transition from silent cinema to sound. Particular focus will be given to Jenny Gilbertson’s The Rugged Island: A Shetland Lyric (1934), one of the early Scottish indigenous sound productions that have been largely overlooked in critical accounts of early sound cinema in Britain. As this article will illustrate, the film offers unique insight into the disjuncture between the ambitions of filmmakers in relation to how Scotland might feature on the soundtracks of the early talkies and the reality of what could be achieved given the limitations of the available technologies