Blue Black Permanent is the only full-length feature
made by Margaret Tait, when she was already in her 70’s – it’s a work of consistent
beautifully idiosyncratic wisdom, of someone deeply immersed in her environment
and mode of engaging with the world, while in no way resisting the
inevitability of moving on. In some ways, one might see some strenuousness in
its periodic insistence on modernity, a visit to a night club for instance;
certainly it feels like Tait was rather beguiled by recording the present in a
way that would guarantee it becoming dated. This chimes with the film’s unusual
structuring absences – it emphasizes its characters’ identities as poets or
artists or photographers, but is reticent on actually allowing us into their
work, especially to the extent it’s escaped from them to be exhibited or
posthumously consumed. Tait spends as much time on moments that may seem
inconsequential in themselves – a day at the beach, a visit to the shoe store – but only to assert the arbitrariness of memory, how it privileges strange
shards of experience even as it erases major chunks of biographical data. In
this sense, things that are painfully unknowable – preeminently here, even
after decades of self-interrogation, the reasons why one’s mother would suddenly
have drowned – may ultimately find rest, in the contemplation that even
apparently objective truths become reshaped and eroded by the flow of time and
memory (the sea is a major thematic force here, both as glory and threat). But
this isn’t to deny the pleasure of looking back: some of the film’s loveliest
sequences are flashbacks to the mother’s life, not least a trip to the island where
her ailing father now lives alone, temporarily immersing us in the rituals of
making tea and laughing with friends over old stories, and the delight of
receiving a modest but personal gift (homemade honey, its impact as
transcendent here as that of the more traditional arts).
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