Being in a Place: A Portrait of Margaret Tait

Margaret Tait once proposed a project to Channel 4 called Heartlandscape, an unrealised landscape portrait of her home region of Orkney. Fowler’s portrait of the Scottish filmmaker and poet takes its bearings from the proposal, although it’s not clear just how closely his ideas cleave to hers. Titles from her project punctuate the film, and a few pages from the proposal flash up on the screen, but they’re one element among many, more jumping off point than framework. Fowler collects, connects and accumulates the nodes through which Tait’s life flowed almost in passing, his restless curiosity and mental agility creating a structure so supple and organic one barely even notices it taking form. There are Tait’s studies in Rome, the vast skies, shimmering waters and shifting shades of green of her homeland, the people she touched, the marks she made on countless pages, her own ravishing footage, her experience of making films as a woman. But there is always also a surplus, like the frost-tinged poppies in a field or the light on the altar of an abandoned church, that could be Fowler or Tait or both; it doesn’t matter. The best portraits of an artist make two sensibilities into one. (Berlinale)