“My mother lives in the windy Orkney Islands.  It’s certainly a wonderful place to be brought up in.”

In making a short film about her mother, Scottish experimental filmmaker Margaret Tait also explored the interesting relationship between place and youth. In A Portrait of Ga (1952), a 4 minute short film shot on 16mm with a voice-over by the filmmaker, a fragment of biography becomes a joyous portrait of both a sense of place and the filmmaker’s mother.

Known as Ga, a name that the film suggests was gifted to her by her grandchildren, Tait’s mother is shown throughout the film to engage in the everyday rituals of walking along paths, up scraggy, grassy knolls, eating sweets, smoking cigarettes and dancing. Yet, the effectiveness of the film is the placement of all of these actions within a wider landscape, of both a topographical and emotional character. In emphasising the ordinary with a quiet detail, Tait imbues the film’s collection of moments with a higher sense of purpose. A Portrait is, at the very least, a monument to small, everyday moments.

The calm simplicity of Tait’s work makes deeper readings needless but there is certainly an impression of wider ineffability surrounding these rituals. As Tait herself suggested when discussing why she made the film, it was more to do with a personal interest in creating a maternal portrait. ‘My mother seemed a good subject for a portrait,’ she admitted, ‘she was there, and I thought it offered a chance to do a sort of “abstract film”, in the sense that it didn’t have what you might call “the grammar of film”.’

Tait suggests that the editing of the film is mostly ungrammatical with what appears to be little actual post-editing, and only in camera cuts connecting the occasional moment of shared colour (a reoccurring theme for the artist).

There is logic to its place-memory; the original film reel collating bits and bobs of Ga’s life and her home on the Orkney Islands with the same randomness of recollection. In other words, the shooting seems momentary, instinctive and personal rather than academic or tied to narrative concerns.

Perhaps because of the inherent Scottishness of the film and its subject, A Portrait, and Ga herself for that matter, brings to mind the writing of Nan Shepherd. Shepherd writes of a fluency of walking pace that is gained from regularly exploring more mountainous paths (or at least paths less travelled) that chimes with Tait’s film.

Shepherd writes in her book The Living Mountain (1977) of this fluency of foot. ‘Eye and foot acquire in rough walking a co-ordination that makes one distinctly aware of where the next step is to fall,’ she suggests, ‘even while watching sky and land.’ In a similar fashion, A Portrait‘s opening shot shows Ga walking and ascending a road-side hill towards the camera with total dexterity; earnestly walking beyond the ease of the tarmac path in order to pick a flower, to sit in the grass and to have a smoke.

The film continues in a similar fashion with virtually every shot of Ga outside showcasing her hopping and jumping around grassy patches and fields with youthful exuberance. Part of the film’s charm is its sense of total abandon. She embodies with ease Shepherd’s most famous phrase: ‘It is a grand thing, to get to live.’

Place plays its role in this abandon, just as much as the unwrapping of a boiled sweet does in another segment of the film. Perhaps there is even a hint of childish rebellion through such a playful relationship with the landscape. Ga, when on obviously easier terrain such as the road, starts to skip and break into little runs as a fading rainbow hangs over the hills. She even breaks into a dance when back in the confines of her own garden; that is when not digging and tending her plants.

The sense that the place has imbued her with a defiantly young bearing is perhaps less to do with Tait’s editing (or lack of) and more to do with her subject. But her capture of it is still warming and masterfully subtle.

Author Ali Smith has written of A Portrait‘s wonder, and her thoughts tie well with Shepherd’s vivacious sense of aliveness in the landscape in particular. ‘A long-shot of her mother,’ Smith describes, ‘from behind, almost running almost dancing along a rural road beneath a greyed-out rainbow is, in that miraculous Tait way, so placed, so unquaint and so natural, as to leave its viewer renewed and knowing again what it is, simply to be alive.’  How appropriate then to finish the film with Ga yet again climbing another grassy hill, this time in windier weather; leaving the viewer as youthfully renewed as a Scottish grandmother finding childlike exuberance in facing down the breeze on an Orkney hillside.