My research focuses on Scottish cinema and artists' moving image. My publications include an edited collection of Tait's writings, Margaret Tait: Poems, Stories and Writings (Carcanet, 2012), and a monograph examining Tait's life and work, Between Categories: The Films of Margaret Tait (Peter Lang, 2016). Other recent publications include chapters and articles on Scottish women filmmakers, including Isobel Wylie Hutchison and Jenny Gilbertson (Films on Ice, ed. Scott MacKenzie and Anna Westerstahl Stenport, 2015), and Ruby and Marion Grierson (Media Education Journal, 2014).
Margaret Tait – filmmaker, photographer, poet, painter, essayist and short story writer – is one ... more Margaret Tait – filmmaker, photographer, poet, painter, essayist and short story writer – is one of the UK’s most unique and remarkable filmmakers. She was the first female filmmaker to create a feature-length film in Scotland (Blue Black Permanent, 1992). Although for most of her career Tait remained focused on the goal of making a feature-length film, her most notable and groundbreaking work was arguably as a producer of short films. The originality of her work, and its refusal to accept perceived barriers of genre, media and form, continues to inspire new generations of filmmakers. This book aims to address the lack of sustained attention given to Tait’s large body of work, offering a contextualisation of Tait’s films within a general consideration of Scottish cinema and artists’ moving image. Furthermore, the book’s grounding in detailed archival research offers new insights into Scotland (and Britain) in the twentieth century, relating to a diverse range of subjects and key fig...
Margaret Tait (1918-1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words and images made the world rea... more Margaret Tait (1918-1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words and images made the world real. In 'documentary', she wrote, real things 'lose their reality ... and there's no poetry in that. In poetry, something else happens.' If film, for Tait, was a poetic medium, her poems are works of craft and observation that are generous and independent in their vision of the world, poems that make seeing happen. Sarah Neely, Lecturer in Film at the University of Stirling, draws on Tait's three poetry collections, her book of short stories, her magazine articles and unpublished notebooks to make available for the first time a collection of the full range of Tait's writing. Her introduction discusses Tait as filmmaker and writer in the context of mid-twentieth-century Scottish culture, and a comprehensive list of bibliographic and film resources provides an indispensible guide for further exploration.
This anthology of new writing on cinema is part of a three-year collaborative research project be... more This anthology of new writing on cinema is part of a three-year collaborative research project between the University of Glasgow and the University of Stirling, on the history of the Highlands and Islands Film Guild (1946-71), a mobile film initiative which brought film to rural communities throughout the Highlands and Islands.
Tell England (1931), Anthony Asquith and Geoffrey Barkas’ film depicting the Battle of Gallipoli,... more Tell England (1931), Anthony Asquith and Geoffrey Barkas’ film depicting the Battle of Gallipoli, unsurprisingly incited emotional responses from its audiences. In Turkey, at a time when memories of the war were still fresh, the feeling was that Tell England would benefit from the insertion of a few ‘local scenes’. Additional scenes were written by author, Ziya Şakir, who also appeared in the film alongside other Turkish actors. In January 1932, this new version of the film was screened under the new title, Çanakkale/Gallipoli. In order to meet the demand for the indigenous production of the talkies in Turkey at a time when the necessary resources and infrastructure were not readily available, Tell England served as a way of offering a film which could meet these demands, without having to produce an entire film. Although the arrival of the talkies has often been described as having posed a challenge to the transnational exhibition of cinema, in this article, we will consider the ways in which local exhibitors of the period employed a number of tactics in relation to Tell England and its adaptation for Turkish audiences. In addition to subtitling, dubbing and foreign language remakes, creative strategies like those used in the Turkish production of Tell England, demonstrate the ways in which film continued to be productively exchanged internationally, even in cases where ideological reframing was required to suit local and national contexts.
Using a mixture of green screen and recycled audio texts from a range of recognisable sources - i... more Using a mixture of green screen and recycled audio texts from a range of recognisable sources - including films, television advertisements, chat shows and TV dramas such as Sex and the City and Downton Abbey – Rachel Maclean’s video works share an aesthetic with a variety of online texts, from virtual worlds to mash-ups. Often, the weird and wonderful array of characters played by MacLean serve as ventriloquists for contemporary culture, enabling her to excavate the saccharine surfaces of the popular culture that she presents in order to reveal the more grotesque and disturbing seam running beneath. This chapter focuses on MacLean’s work as a feminist critique, positioning her within a history of women performance artists and considers how the intensive labour of her own performances foregrounds a wider consideration of the ‘work’ of performances of femininity in contemporary culture. Furthermore, it will examine how MacLean’s explorations of marginalised gendered online spaces, and...
Meditations on the Present: Ute Aurand, Helga Fanderl, Jeannette Muñoz and Renate Sami , 2020
Short text on Ute Aurand's feature-length film Rushing Green with Horses. For the festival publi... more Short text on Ute Aurand's feature-length film Rushing Green with Horses. For the festival publication for the 14th edition of Punto de Vista in 2020, focusing on the filmmakers Ute Aurand, Helga Fanderl, Jeannette Muñoz and Renate Sami and edited by Garbiñe Ortega and María Palacios Cruz .
In this chapter Sarah Neely explores the works of three Scottish women filmmakers who made films ... more In this chapter Sarah Neely explores the works of three Scottish women filmmakers who made films in the Arctic. These women are part of a largely unwritten history of the cinema: it was rare enough in the 1930s to be directing documentary films; to have them go to the Arctic on expeditions is mostly unheard of. Neely examines the works of ‘amateur’ filmmakers Margaret Tait, Jenny Gilbertson and Isobel Wylie Hutchison, considering the ways in which their works could be understood as those of ‘women explorers’, and the ways in which ‘women explorers’ have been left outside canonical accounts of Polar exploration and the cinema. Neely positions their works, both those produced in the UK, and in Canada, as a different mode of documentary filmmaking from the tradition formulated by Scottish filmmaker, producer and theorist John Grierson, who nonetheless played a central part of some of their training.
Margaret Tait – filmmaker, photographer, poet, painter, essayist and short story writer – is one ... more Margaret Tait – filmmaker, photographer, poet, painter, essayist and short story writer – is one of the UK’s most unique and remarkable filmmakers. She was the first female filmmaker to create a feature-length film in Scotland (Blue Black Permanent, 1992). Although for most of her career Tait remained focused on the goal of making a feature-length film, her most notable and groundbreaking work was arguably as a producer of short films. The originality of her work, and its refusal to accept perceived barriers of genre, media and form, continues to inspire new generations of filmmakers. This book aims to address the lack of sustained attention given to Tait’s large body of work, offering a contextualisation of Tait’s films within a general consideration of Scottish cinema and artists’ moving image. Furthermore, the book’s grounding in detailed archival research offers new insights into Scotland (and Britain) in the twentieth century, relating to a diverse range of subjects and key fig...
Margaret Tait (1918-1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words and images made the world rea... more Margaret Tait (1918-1999) was a pioneering filmmaker for whom words and images made the world real. In 'documentary', she wrote, real things 'lose their reality ... and there's no poetry in that. In poetry, something else happens.' If film, for Tait, was a poetic medium, her poems are works of craft and observation that are generous and independent in their vision of the world, poems that make seeing happen. Sarah Neely, Lecturer in Film at the University of Stirling, draws on Tait's three poetry collections, her book of short stories, her magazine articles and unpublished notebooks to make available for the first time a collection of the full range of Tait's writing. Her introduction discusses Tait as filmmaker and writer in the context of mid-twentieth-century Scottish culture, and a comprehensive list of bibliographic and film resources provides an indispensible guide for further exploration.
This anthology of new writing on cinema is part of a three-year collaborative research project be... more This anthology of new writing on cinema is part of a three-year collaborative research project between the University of Glasgow and the University of Stirling, on the history of the Highlands and Islands Film Guild (1946-71), a mobile film initiative which brought film to rural communities throughout the Highlands and Islands.
Tell England (1931), Anthony Asquith and Geoffrey Barkas’ film depicting the Battle of Gallipoli,... more Tell England (1931), Anthony Asquith and Geoffrey Barkas’ film depicting the Battle of Gallipoli, unsurprisingly incited emotional responses from its audiences. In Turkey, at a time when memories of the war were still fresh, the feeling was that Tell England would benefit from the insertion of a few ‘local scenes’. Additional scenes were written by author, Ziya Şakir, who also appeared in the film alongside other Turkish actors. In January 1932, this new version of the film was screened under the new title, Çanakkale/Gallipoli. In order to meet the demand for the indigenous production of the talkies in Turkey at a time when the necessary resources and infrastructure were not readily available, Tell England served as a way of offering a film which could meet these demands, without having to produce an entire film. Although the arrival of the talkies has often been described as having posed a challenge to the transnational exhibition of cinema, in this article, we will consider the ways in which local exhibitors of the period employed a number of tactics in relation to Tell England and its adaptation for Turkish audiences. In addition to subtitling, dubbing and foreign language remakes, creative strategies like those used in the Turkish production of Tell England, demonstrate the ways in which film continued to be productively exchanged internationally, even in cases where ideological reframing was required to suit local and national contexts.
Using a mixture of green screen and recycled audio texts from a range of recognisable sources - i... more Using a mixture of green screen and recycled audio texts from a range of recognisable sources - including films, television advertisements, chat shows and TV dramas such as Sex and the City and Downton Abbey – Rachel Maclean’s video works share an aesthetic with a variety of online texts, from virtual worlds to mash-ups. Often, the weird and wonderful array of characters played by MacLean serve as ventriloquists for contemporary culture, enabling her to excavate the saccharine surfaces of the popular culture that she presents in order to reveal the more grotesque and disturbing seam running beneath. This chapter focuses on MacLean’s work as a feminist critique, positioning her within a history of women performance artists and considers how the intensive labour of her own performances foregrounds a wider consideration of the ‘work’ of performances of femininity in contemporary culture. Furthermore, it will examine how MacLean’s explorations of marginalised gendered online spaces, and...
Meditations on the Present: Ute Aurand, Helga Fanderl, Jeannette Muñoz and Renate Sami , 2020
Short text on Ute Aurand's feature-length film Rushing Green with Horses. For the festival publi... more Short text on Ute Aurand's feature-length film Rushing Green with Horses. For the festival publication for the 14th edition of Punto de Vista in 2020, focusing on the filmmakers Ute Aurand, Helga Fanderl, Jeannette Muñoz and Renate Sami and edited by Garbiñe Ortega and María Palacios Cruz .
In this chapter Sarah Neely explores the works of three Scottish women filmmakers who made films ... more In this chapter Sarah Neely explores the works of three Scottish women filmmakers who made films in the Arctic. These women are part of a largely unwritten history of the cinema: it was rare enough in the 1930s to be directing documentary films; to have them go to the Arctic on expeditions is mostly unheard of. Neely examines the works of ‘amateur’ filmmakers Margaret Tait, Jenny Gilbertson and Isobel Wylie Hutchison, considering the ways in which their works could be understood as those of ‘women explorers’, and the ways in which ‘women explorers’ have been left outside canonical accounts of Polar exploration and the cinema. Neely positions their works, both those produced in the UK, and in Canada, as a different mode of documentary filmmaking from the tradition formulated by Scottish filmmaker, producer and theorist John Grierson, who nonetheless played a central part of some of their training.
As Annette Kuhn explains in relation to her pioneering research on cinema culture in 1930s Britai... more As Annette Kuhn explains in relation to her pioneering research on cinema culture in 1930s Britain, ‘how people remember is as much a text to be deciphered as what they remember’ (2002: 6). This article, drawing from research conducted as part of a three-year AHRCfunded project looking at the history of the Highlands and Islands Film Guild (The Major Minor Cinema Project: Highlands and Islands Film Guild 1946-71, University of Glasgow and University of Stirling), 1 will examine the ways in which cinema memories are narrativised. The article will focus in particular on the creative writing strand of the project, which was inspired by the surprising discovery of the project’s pilot study that some cinema-goers from the period of research had been inspired to write poems or stories in response to their experience of going to the Film Guild screenings. Through a consideration of the project’s oral history interviews, alongside correspondence with respondents and other written accounts, ...
This article draws from existing work relating to the creative writing strand of the Major Minor ... more This article draws from existing work relating to the creative writing strand of the Major Minor Cinema project, which was inspired by the surprising discovery of project's pilot study that some ci...
Uploads
Books by Sarah Neely
Papers by Sarah Neely