Being in a Place - A Portrait of Margaret Tait

The magnificent work of Scottish poet and filmmaker Margaret Tait is imbued with an irrevocable sense of presence that gives attention to the smallest details of the world surrounding us. Luke 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. After making a short film called HOUSES (FOR MARGARET), this is his second work to engage with Tait’s legacy and he has an embarrassment of riches to choose from. The film combines archive materials such as notes, letters, rushes, audio recordings of people and places and Fowler’s own sketch of an unrealized Tait film project called HEARTLANDSCAPE. This densely edited material enables Fowler to ask how landscapes can evoke the ghosts of those that lived in them and further ofers a playful concept of filmic heritage along the way, one where the footsteps you follow lead to not just a way of seeing but also a way of being. (Patrick Holzapfel)

With THIS IS HOW A CHILD BECOMES A POET.

Luke Fowler: WHAT YOU SEE IS WHERE YOU’RE AT (K, 2001), THE WAY OUT (K, 2003), PILGRIMAGE FROM SCATTERED POINTS (2006), BOGMAN PALMJAGUAR (K, 2008), AN ABBEYVIEW FILM (K, 2008), TENEMENT FILMS (K, 2009); ALL DIVIDED SELVES (2011), THE POOR STOCKINGER, THE LUDDITE CROPPER AND THE DELUDED FOLLOWERS OF JOANNA SOUTHCOTT (2012), TO THE EDITOR OF AMATEUR PHOTOGRAPHER (2014), DEPOSITIONS (K, 2014), COUNTRY GRAMMAR (WITH SUE TOMPKINS) (K, 2017), ELECTROPYTHAGORAS (A PORTRAIT OF MARTIN BARTLETT) (2017), MUM’S CARDS (K, 2018), CÉZANNE (K, 2019), HOUSES (FOR MARGARET) (K, 2019), PATRICK (K, 2020), FOR DAN (K, 2021)