Courtesy of Scottish Screen Archive

Rose Street (1956) offers a lyrically subjective window onto street life in the 1950s. It is a very evocative film, and is considered one of the best films of independent Scottish filmmaker Margaret Tait. It elicits an almost nostalgic mood and has many fine shots of shops, pubs and children at play. The soundtrack has been post-dubbed and sets the tone for the film. Margaret chose the sequence of sounds to manipulate our response to the images seen, and thus communicate her interpretation of reality as she saw it. For this reason it cannot be considered a straightforward documentary: it is more personal than that. She described her own work as 'film poems'.

Rose Street, behind the capital's major thoroughfare Princes Street, had a poor reputation by the 1950s and was not an area frequented by respectable society. It was, and still is, renowned for its many bars, one of which was frequented by Scottish literary figures at the time. It is now a fashionable area for shopping and eating.

Kenneth Broom

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