Thoughts on a film by Margaret Tait
"I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the
waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea
water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will
shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me."
- The Waves (1931) by Virginia Woolf
At one point in the film, a character talks about a flower
that can only grow in one specific location, a heath on the Orkney archipelago.
Any attempt to remove the flower and replant it somewhere else results in the
flower's slow demise; its sense of being so firmly rooted to that one singular
place that it's unable to flourish anywhere else. It becomes an obvious
metaphor for the central character, the 1950s poet, mother and housewife Greta
Thorburn, whose early death and the mystery surrounding it still haunts the
life of her adult daughter, and provides for the audience the emotional center
to this strange and personal film.
The only feature-length work directed by the Scottish
poet and filmmaker Margaret Tait, Blue Black Permanent (1992)
unfortunately wasn't the hidden masterwork I was hoping it would be. There's a certain
inertness to much of the film, an odd disparity between the various timelines,
which are necessary to the conception of Tait's story and her reflection on
three generations of women, but it often feels like separate films competing
for attention. Perhaps this is the point?
Blue Black Permanent [Margaret Tait, 1992]:
The present-day sequences, which act as a kind of
framing device, casting Celia Imrie as Greta's grown-up daughter Barbara, a photographer, with Jack Shepherd as her understanding
partner Philip, don't really work, and weigh down the better, more affecting
sequences of Gerda Stevenson as the sensitive poet, struggling to find a sense
of place. Imrie and Shepard do well in their respective roles, but their
sequences are stilted and expositional. They feel more like scenes of actors
rehearsing for a play than moments that fit comfortably alongside the more
visual and purely cinematic sequences set in the 1950s and earlier.
It's a shame, as these "period" sequences
are often incredible and reach for the kind of filmed poetry that Tait achieved
in her short films, such as A Portrait of Ga (1952), The Leaden Echo and the
Golden Echo (1955) and Aerial (1974). Like Blue Black Permanent, these were films
preoccupied with the same themes of womanhood, home, nature and the elements.
However, they were unburdened by the more conventional necessity for a
narrative with a clear beginning, middle and end, and as such were free to
engage in the kind of extraordinary image-making that Blue
Black Permanent achieves only in moments.
Blue Black Permanent [Margaret Tait, 1992]:
Tait apparently took the title, Blue Black Permanent,
from a type of ink. This makes sense given the personal connection between
Greta, as protagonist, and Tait herself as the filmmaker, as both are writers
and poets, and their work is central to what is being expressed. However, I
think there are further connotations to the title, which might be obvious but
are worth repeating.
Firstly, it could be taken as a reference to the sea; to
the inky blue and black textures that define it, or at least the perception of
it as it moves against the landscape. It could even be taken as an
acknowledgement of the dividing line of the horizon, where the night sky as it
appears in one particular sequence, reaches out to meet the ocean, itself a kind
of black mirror. It also has a psychological connotation; blue like sadness,
black like depression; reflecting the heightened emotional state of Greta
during the run-up to her final moments.
Joni Mitchell's landmark 1971 album "Blue"
features a similar exploration of the colour. The "blues" as at once
an expression, the musical sub-genre and as a state of emotion, and of the
elemental themes that are woven into a song like 'The River', itself a personal
reflection on womanhood and the image of a corporeal escape or transcendence
through a body of water. What Mitchell hints at, Tait's film makes clear.
Blue [Joni Mitchell, 1971]:
Cover photography Tim Considine, art-direction by Gary
Burden
Blue Black Permanent [Margaret Tait, 1992]:
That Blue Black Permanent doesn't quite work as a
complete film shouldn't necessarily detract from its positive attributes, of
which there are many. In certain sequences, particularly those focusing on
Greta, both the brief scenes of her childhood and in the more fully realized scenes
of her later adult life, the film achieves something extraordinary. The
impressionist moments that contrast and connect the existential dilemmas of
characters to the elemental mysteries of the natural world overwhelm the more conventional
or generic notions of character and plot and become an expression. Not something
that is understood or needs to be understood, but something that is felt.
"Felt" in the sense of the emotions, the
sadness, the longing, the regret, the failure to understand and the acceptance
that life is finite and forever running out, but also felt in the way memories
are felt as they're triggered by the various senses, the sound of the ocean,
the smell of the fields, the cold air against exposed skin or the ground
beneath our feet. This aspect of the film is less tangible, but it's the feeling
that the film imparts upon the viewer, the emotions of its characters, rather
than appeals to storytelling or narrative engagement.
There are even moments in the "present day"
segments, flawed as they apparently are, which give a greater potency to those
scenes that depict the inner life of Greta and her inability to share her
feelings with her husband, friends and children. The hard cut from disco lights
throwing blocks of electric colour across the bopping patrons of an Edinburgh
nightclub circa the early 1990s, to a window scene reflection looking out
across a beach in Orknay in the 1950s, illustrates the emotional connection
between Greta and Barbara; mother and daughter each struggling to make sense of
their place in the world. In a single moment, as remarkable as the cut from a
row of suburban houses to lines of gravestones in a cemetery seen in Tait's aforementioned
The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo, this moment connects the film's themes of
disconnection, absence, womanhood, family, home and death, in a way that is both
modest and hugely intelligent.
Blue Black Permanent [Margaret Tait, 1992]:
The scenes shot around Kirkwall in the Orkney islands,
where Tait was raised, have a real affection for the rural lifestyle and for
the practical, unpretentious socializing of the villagers that descent upon the
house of Greta's father. These moments seem to belong to a different film, but
nonetheless provide an incredible and deliberate contrast to the more bourgeois,
middle-class affections presented by characters elsewhere in the film. Here, we
get a sense of Tait's real love for the region and its people as she lets
conversations play out, savoring every word delivered in that remarkable
accent, enjoying the jokes and the banter as a respite from the interior voices
that express something altogether more alienated.
While it's a film where the imperfections stand out,
where the misjudged moments, the wooden dialog, the kitsch dream sequences,
threaten to break the spell of the more enchanting passages, the experience of Blue
Black Permanent is no less affecting. Despite its flaws, it remains a still
relevant film about depression and the effect that mental health related issues
and suicide can have on generations of the same family. It's also a film about relationships
between mothers and daughters, the connection that women have to nature and the
elements, the need for freedom, for independence. Rich themes that are
brilliantly evoked and explored by the filmmaker throughout.
In certain moments, certain images, the film succeeds
in expressing these different themes and emotions that must have compelled it
into being. The poetic sequences – the way the camera lingers on the surface of
the sea, transformed by the iridescent sun; its rays of light refracted off the
dappled surface into a kind of mirror ball; a cosmic interplay of light and
shadow reminiscent of stars in the blue night sky – are beautiful and
transportive. Ultimately the experience of Greta and the character of the film
itself, recalls the final words of a poem by Stevie Smith: "I was much too
far out all my life, and not waving, but drowning."
