Subjects and Sequences: a Margaret Tait reader Edited by Peter Todd and Benjamin Cook Lux, 178pp, £10 ISBN 0954856902

To describe the Orkney Islands-born director Margaret Tait, who died at the age of 80 in 1999, as one of the best British avant-garde film-makers ever would be both right and wrong. Right because her 30 films, most of them self-financed and self-distributed, are fiercely personal and lyrical evocations of Scottish landscapes that operate in an idiom a million miles above and beyond the stage-spawned or flat-packed realist modes that usually define British cinema. Wrong because to many people the phrase "avant-garde" suggests difficult, fundament-chasing arcana. Tait's films can be mysterious, but they are not obscure; they tremble and dance with a sense of the endless possibilities of the moving image.

Tait, who also published three under-appreciated volumes of poetry in her lifetime, believed passionately in the need for art to create "endless possibilities". In her poem "To Anybody At All", she wrote:

I didn't want you cosy and neat
and limited.
I didn't want you to be understandable, Understood.
I wanted you to stay mad and
limitless . . .

As a young woman she, too, had exercised her freedom by giving up her job as a GP in order to travel to Rome, where she studied film-making at the Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia. There, she immersed herself in the work of neorealist directors such as Vittorio de Sica and Roberto Rossellini, who were fashioning forms and techniques to describe the everyday struggles of poor and dispossessed peoples in postwar Europe.

Tait was inspired by their idealism, but she wanted to develop a more intimate and poetic voice than their reformist agenda allowed. During the mid-1950s, at a time when the Scottish film industry barely existed, she formed her own company, called Ancona Films, which financed most of her documentaries over the following decades. Neither ethnographic nor in the social-essay mould pioneered by John Grierson, they are precise but tender film-poems that, according to the essay by Lucy Reynolds in this hugely informative and beautifully produced volume, create "a psycho-geographical landscape which maps people and places by her intimate experience of them".

Tait had a special gift for conveying the "deep time" that suffused - and continues to suffuse - many regions within Scotland. The Big Sheep (1966), shot in East Sutherland, resonates with memories of the Highland clearances of the 18th century. Tait liked Lorca's notion of "stalking the image" and believed that "an apple is no less intense than the sea, a bee no less astonishing than a forest", and she went to great lengths to avoid conventional film narratives that might foreclose new ways of seeing or thinking about her subject matters.

Her films swim and burble with life. She liked to build up banks of beautifully coloured images - of ferns, running water, shadows, old bridges. In her essay, the poet Ali Smith writes: "It's like watching a heart burst open, this vibrant display of Tait's love of colour, music, rhythm and, most of all, open connection." Gareth Evans contributes a rich, poetic piece of writing that praises her "etched trajectory, the fecund spill. She was the light-teller of daily tales, hers a borderless philosophy."

Tait mainly shot using a Bolex, a camera about which the American director Jonas Mekas once remarked: "You hold it somewhere, not exactly where your brain is - a little bit lower; and not exactly where your heart is - it's slightly higher." Her films are hand-held, propelled by their own idiosyncratic rhythms and free of visual cliches. Each is shot through with off-key images that are hard to forget, and which make the flesh prickle: a clock without hands in Where I Am Is Here (1964); her mother unpeeling the wrapper off a sticky sweet in the lovely A Portrait of Ga (1952). They are quotidian and timeless, intuitive but carefully edited.

Tait made just one full-length feature, the somewhat neglected Blue Black Permanent (1992), but it is her smaller pictures that are most cherishable: Calypso (1955), which used film stock on to which she had painted directly; Hugh MacDiarmid: a portrait (1964), an affectionate glimpse of the Scottish poet who, like her, believed in the importance of dialect in art; Land Makar (1981), about a close friend who was a crofter. Her use of sound, almost always added after the visual editing had been completed, was exceptional.

Today, Tait is praised as one of Scotland's first female film-makers. She is a maverick balladeer of the enchanted diurnal, a largely self-taught outsider whose visionary landscapes have a special potency now that so many of our city centres are being developed into dull, identikit non-places. Her time has finally arrived. No aspiring film-maker, or filmgoer, could possibly fail to be inspired by her precious work.

Sukhdev Sandhu's London Calling: how black and Asian writers imagined a city is out in paperback from Perennial

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