Movies: Ancona Films

A set of three 'film poems' composed around the theme of the garden - the central one featuring hand scratched animated drawings. Margaret Tait described them as follows: 'Round the Garden' - right round and round again, 'Garden Fliers' - flighty car...

Another early experiment in portraiture from Tait. In filming her mother she asks the wider question of how much the camera can reveal of the person....

'Titles within the film are: Numen of the Boughs, Old Boots, Speed Bonny Boat, Lapping Water, Incense, Aha, Brave New World, Things, Terra Firma. A poem started in words is continued in images - Part of another poem as an addition to the picture - So...

"Starting with a six-line script which just noted down a kind of event to occur, and recur, my aim was to construct a film with its own logic, its own correspondences within itself, and its own echoes and rhymes and comparisons, all through close exp...

A film interpretation of the poem 'The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo' by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Margaret Tait speaks the poem throughout the film....

Margaret Tait documents her house, studio and garden in Buttquoy, Orkney as the seasons pass. She had lived there from the age of seven and often returned. At the time of filming, the house was about to be taken back by the council - this film is an ...

"This is a landscape study of an Orkney croft, with the figure of the crofter, Mary Graham Sinclair, very much in the picture. The croft is West Aith, on the edge of a small loch, which almost every passing visitor stops to photograph or draw or pain...

A palindrome created on film. Features interaction between a couple with the recurring line 'Madam I'm Adam'....

A portrait of poet Hugh MacDiarmid....

The minutiae of daily life on Edinburgh's Rose Street in the fifties is presented in this impressionistic documentary piece....

An experimental piece of film-making by Margaret Tait, featuring three children at play in a burn and garden, splashing and having fun playing with water....

Affectionate observational shots of toddlers, school age girl and very new baby....

"The film was conceived as a coda to a longer (colour) film, Place of Work, made in the same year. It covers the time of finally emptying a long-time family home, with its personal memories and connection with some of my own work. Fragments of verse,...

Margaret Tait described this title as 'An eightsome reel played by Orkney Strathspey and Reel Society, recorded in about 1955 - 1956, later transferred to 35mm optical stock with clear picture and gradually painted over the years. Eights of different...

Unedited slates from a film called 'Survivor' filmed by Margaret Tait. Footage includes outdoor landscape and garden scenes, a fire burning in field and a man drinking tea in his study. [There appears to be no coherence to the footage] See also Addi...

A picture of East Sutherland in 1966....