Aerial (1974)

"Aerial" is a 4 minute silent film, telling the seasons over in a variety of colour washes. Pretty, but not as potentially absorbing as "Land Makar". In this film, Tait followed the daily farming routine of her neighbour (Mary Sinclair, from memory) from spring to autumn. The camera reproduces very accurately the infinite shift of variations on a theme of the farming life, never going beyond the fields around the house, the pond, and the house itself. It is beautiful, in the sense that the known object, painfully laboured over, is beautiful, and Tait's achievement is in putting this across. But I couldn't understand a word of the accompanying monologue by the farmer (in her native Orcadian accent). I was so frustrated by what I was missing on the soundtrack that I found it hard to concentrate on the screen alone.