The Cinematheque

“I think that film is essentially a poetic medium, and although it can be put to all sorts of other—creditable and discreditable—uses, these are secondary.”

Margaret Tait

In 2018, Sarah Neely initiated a year-long celebration of the birth of Margaret Tait (1918–1999) presenting screenings, exhibitions, workshops, readings, publications, and 10 short film commissions that viewed her life and work through a variety of lenses. Ute Aurand recovered old footage, including a glimpse of Tait, from a visit to Orkney. Like Tait, Auraud records life’s small, ephemeral details on a handheld Bolex camera, reworking them into a form that is at once energetic, rhythmic, playful and tender. Luke Fowler’s contribution used Tait’s approach to filmmaking, considering everything within the frame with equal intensity: her homes, filming locations, notebooks, the work’s theme encapsulated by a recording of her reciting of the poem ​“House.” Being in a Place expands on Fowler’s short, allowing him to delve deeper into her archives, and to discover new material: a ​“fugitive archive” in the shed of her former house.

A Portrait of Ga
United Kingdom 1952
Margaret Tait
5 min. DCP

Glimpses from a Visit to Orkney in Summer 1995
Germany/​United Kingdom 2020
Ute Aurand
5 min. DCP

Being in a Place – A Portrait of Margaret Tait
United Kingdom 2022
Luke Fowler
61 min. DCP

“Again a proof of Tait’s genius for portraiture, and a film about the notion of portraiture itself and the investiture of love in the seen portrait … That miraculous Tait way, so placed, so unquaint and so natural, as to leave its viewer renewed and knowing again what it is, simply to be alive.”

Ali Smith, novelist, on Portrait of Ga

“One of my favourite features of the year … Fowler’s materialist bricolage works not to bring Tait closer but rather to accentuate the absolute distance from which she often literally speaks to us, in a voice thin and haunting, rich and specific.”

Edo Choi, Reverse Shot, on Being in a Place

“As much as it is a film about Tait, it is a film about Fowler, too: an intimate yet oblique reflection on the filmmaker and the idea of cinema to which he is committed.”

Erika Balsom, Film Comment, on Being in a Place