“there and then and never again”: Margaret Tait in Venice

Following on from Interim Edition: The Margaret Tait Poetry Archive, the Demarco Archive and Margaret Tait 100 present a selection of Margaret Tait’s films in Venice.

The programme of films will be screened on the final day of the Demarco Archive’s week-long exhibition and symposium, Art and Healing (watch the video), and will include three films: two of Tait’s first films – My Room, 21 Via Ancona (1951), a brief portrait of the room Tait lived in while she was studying film in Rome; One is One (1951), a film made in collaboration with fellow students at Centro Sperimentale di Cinematographia, following the movements of a couple on a day out in Rome; and Tait’s last film, Garden Pieces (1998), a portrait of Tait’s garden in Orkney, structured as three ‘film poems’.

Grove

Is a holy place
Calmly looked at for what it is.
It is as it should stay.
Although of course
Nothing and nowhere stays as it is
……so that the particular time
of the grove being seen –
our view of it, the feeling about it,
and the sounds heard there
all have a
there and then and never again quality.

— Margaret Tait, February 1998