LEADEN ECHO AND THE GOLDEN ECHO, the
Full length video
Please read Understanding catalogue records for help interpreting this information and Using footage for more information about accessing this film.
Title: LEADEN ECHO AND THE GOLDEN ECHO, the
Reference number: 6217
Date: 1955
Director: [filmed by Margaret Tait]
Sound: sound
Original format: 16mm
Colour: col
Fiction: fiction
Running time: 6.27 mins
Description:
An film interpretation of the poem 'The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo' by Gerard Manley Hopkins. Margaret Tait speaks the poem throughout the film.
An entrancing 'translation' into film of a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo". The theme is a common one in this most difficult and yet most transparently simple of all poets: all things lovely and young are doomed inevitably to decay and death - nothing can keep them away. Yet (comes back the golden echo from the grayness of the lamentation) having once existed they can never pass away: beauty is gathered and stored in granaries beyond corruption. Every film artist who attempts to interpret such a poem will do it in her own different way. I found Margaret Tait's choice of individual images extraordinarily moving and evocative: the flowers, the children, the wrinkles in the mirror...'
[Source: George Mackay Brown The Orcadian 13 Dec. 1979]
See also Additional Information file at 11/1/455. Paper Archives 4/5/119, 4/11/651, 4/5/92.
The Tait papers are deposited in Orkney Archives. Currently being catalogued. For any enquiries please contact Principal Archivist.
The British Artist's Film and Video Study Collection at http://www.bftv.ac.uk/avantgarde based at Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design holds an artist's file on Margaret Tait.
The British Film Institute National Library http://www.bfi.org.uk holds many of the published articles on her and her work.
In 1979 Margaret Tait was the subject of a BBC Scotland 'Spectrum' arts programme.
Credits: [comm.s. Margaret Tait]
Shotlist:
[Margaret Tait narrates poem throughout film, beginning "The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo made in song from St. Winifred's Well by Gerard Manley Hopkins"...]
This film is a montage of shots translating the written word into a 'film poem'. Shots include woman and man drinking from outdoor tap, women gazing into mirror, children walking in field, teacher at desk, houses in a row, gravestones, church and stained glass, farmer sowing seed, scything, dandelions going to seed, cherubic young children, lambs running along field, c/u hair, choirboys singing outdoors, bird flying in sky, c/u rose, field of wildflowers, man carrying driftwood, child and mother, padlocking a farm gate, church spire, young children running along (6.27)