Margaret Tait


Margaret Caroline Tait was a Scottish medical doctor, filmmaker and poet.

Early life and education

Margaret Caroline Tait was born and raised in Kirkwall, in the Orkney Islands in the north of Scotland, before being sent to school in Edinburgh.
Tait attended the University of Edinburgh, gaining qualifications in Medicine. Between 1943 and 1946 she served in the Royal Army Medical Corps, stationed in India, Sri Lanka and Malaya. She subsequently moved to Rome to study film making at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia.

Career

After studying in Italy, Tait returned to Scotland, living on Rose Street, Edinburgh and founded Ancona Films, named after the street where she had lodged while studying in Rome.
She would live near Helmsdale in Sutherland in the mid 1960s’. On her move back to Orkney in the late 1960s, Tait continued to make films and took inspiration from the landscape and culture of Orkney.
In 1950s and 1960s, she was close to, though not a member of, the Edinburgh-based Rose Street Poets, which included poets Hugh MacDiarmid, Sorley Maclean and Norman MacCaig.
Tait made 32 short films and one full-length film, Blue Black Permanent. In addition, Tait wrote prose and poetry, and published three poetry books - origins and elements, The Hen and the Bees, and Subjects and Sequences.
‘In the documentary Margaret Tait: Film Maker for Channel Four Television in 1983 Tait would describe her life’s work as making ‘film poems’.

Death and legacy

She died 16 April 1999 at the home she shared with her husband Alex Pirie on Orkney . An annual Margaret Tait Award was established in 2010 in conjunction with Glasgow Film Festival.
Retrospectives of Tait’s work took place at the National Film Theatre London in 2000 curated by Benjamin Cook and Peter Todd, at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 2004, and at BFI Southbank London in 2018 both curated by film maker and curator Peter Todd, amongst others. 2018 also saw a year long celebration of her life and work Margaret Tait 100 with screenings, exhibitions, talks and other events with Sarah Neely as the director and supported by Creative Scotland.
Centenary exhibitions devoted to her work were held at GoMA Glasgow and The Pier Arts Centre Orkney. In February 2020 Historic Environment Scotland announced Tait would be included in the Commemorative Plaque scheme.
Her films remain in distribution in the UK.

Filmography