Soluble Fish :: digital poetics

“By using images and sounds from the environment in which she lived she was closer in approach to an artist, poet, or composer, than the jobbing life so often associated with more mainstream film-making. Her work explored and revisited landscapes, sounds, and people familiar to her since childhood.” – Peter Todd on Margaret Tait

“Starting with a six-line script (in 1963) 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, its own echoes and rhymes and comparisons, through close exploration of the everyday, the commonplace, in the city, Edinburgh, where I stayed at the time.

‘Documentary’ or ‘record’ of the city was not intended; I was using it rather as a vase of flowers or bowl of apples might be used for painting a still life. That that very apple or bloom or street or swan remains is of course a sort of record in a way, for those who see it like that.

“The music, Hilltop Pibroch, by Hector MacAndrew, is a setting of my poem of that name, and is performed by Hector himself, on the fiddle, and by music-hall singer Lilane (Lilian Gunn) who accompanies herself on the piano accordion.”