Margaret Tait, filmmaker and poet, was born in Orkney in 1918. She trained first as a medical doctor before studying film in Rome in the 1950s. After returning to Edinburgh, Tait established her film studio, Ancona Films, before eventually returning to Orkney in the 1960s, where she lived and continued to make films until her death in 1999. Personae is Tait’s previously unpublished non-fiction manuscript edited by Sarah Neely with a selection of photographs from Margaret Tait’s personal archive with a foreword by Ali Smith and beautifully designed by Maeve Redmond.

This is the story of two short-lived artist-run spaces that are associated with some of the most innovative developments in the arts in Britain in the late 1960s. The Drury Lane Arts Lab (1967–69) was home to the first UK screenings of Andy Warhol's twin-screen 3 hour film Chelsea Girls, challenging exhibitions (John and Yoko / John Latham / Takis / Roelof Louw), poetry and music (first UK performance of Erik Satie's 24-hour Vexations) and fringe theatre (People Show / Freehold / Jane Arden's Vagina Rex and the Gas Oven / Will Spoor Mime Theatre).

Compelling interviews with notables in avant-garde cinema offer insights into moving image art--its creative processes, formative influences, and hidden psychic effects. Through interviews with George Manupelli, Chick Strand, Tom Gunning, Lynne Sachs, Jay Rosenblatt, Martha Colburn, Evan Meaney, Mike Hoolboom, Robert Nelson, and Nina Menkes, Strange Questions links powerful personal stories with the contemporary media-scape.

Questions addressed in this collection include:

What role does the audience play in the creative process?

Notes For An Aleatory Flame is a personal manifesto of cinematic self expression flipped into speculative entryway for possibilities of communion with fresh & unforeseen personal methodologies. Through inquisitive poetics, this essay functions as a call for the self as image-making-instrument to slice through the media manure by engaging in the necromantic act of reinvigorating cinematic ruin. Martinod’s words beckon us to traverse new realms through the creation of portals and to witness reality through our personal relations with images.