Distant Voices: The Films of Terence Davies

Cinematheque Ontario Program Guide
Winter 2009

“A gifted cinematic poet… Davies uses film like Proust’s madeleine to recapture the past. that have a mystical Storytelling is wound around a montage of images and songs that have a mystical personal resonance.”—Stephen Holden, The New York Times

“Davies doesn't offer a cinema of plot or a cinema of ideas, but a cinema of raw feelings and incandescent moments that wash over you like waves.”—Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

The autobiographical films Davies made—though they are more and less than that—are one of our treasures.”—David Thomson

Terence Davies is a lonely figure in cinema culture. He bears enough surface similarities to leading contemporary auteurs—the lingering shots, the attention to details of architecture and colour, his use of spare performances, his rich approach to music—to make one feel like he should adhere to a specific “school.” And yet no filmmakers claim him as a kindred spirit, no critics have placed him in a cadre. On the flip side, he is almost never described as a pioneering or even iconoclastic auteur. There are many fascinating reasons why he stands in this awkward zone, all of which make his films enormously interesting even for the casual cinephile.

Davies’s isolation begins with the fact that the films are often uncomfortably autobiographical and personal. Obviously so in his two most celebrated films: Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, in which the central character is a young boy with just about the same personal history as Davies himself. So too is the first part of The Trilogy about Davies’s experiences in school, abused by teachers and students alike. (The rest of the film is a fascinating imagined future history for that boy, a false autobiography that plays out like a gay horror film, moments of shame and then regret colouring even the simplest of actions). The Neon Bible and The House of Mirth, set as they are in the United States, are less related to the same autobiographical concerns. His most recent film, Of Time and the City is a personal essay on his hometown of Liverpool and so, ipso facto, about himself and the emotions his birthplace evokes

With this sense of autobiography comes a very English bashfulness around cinema and its power. Davies is eminently careful that his (majestic) cinematographical flourishes never make the leap to pretension; the films shy away from any grand statements about humanity, even though they are filled with overwhelming, universal emotional truth. Of course, in other regards, Davies is not English at all. He is playing a game of romantic homage within a British cinema routinely devoted to gritty social realism; he is a storyteller of the working class, surrounded by but dismissive of Marxist analysis, a Liverpudlian who hates the Beatles.

Davies is also an unlikely transcendentalist. He is unafraid of his childhood Catholicism, which he claims to have held on to fervently, well into adulthood. The films believe in the possibility of spiritual redemption, in deriving hope from suffering, in the importance of ritual and prayer to appease the darker sides of the human soul. (The boy character of The Long Day Closes seems only to dream of better things when his eyes are closed at church, for example.) Of course, Davies has some serious doubts about faith too. In fact, one could argue that each film ends on a note of transcendental distress; if one were to make a sequel to a Davies film—what an idea!—it would likely begin with the aftermath of a collapsing faith. (Even Lawrence Selden in The House of Mirth, which runs so closely to the original Wharton novel, seems headed in that direction.)

Then there’s the music. Davies’s films are filled with people singing songs. In pubs, at home, walking down the street. Just like in a musical. But these are not musicals. Songs serve as tint to the scene, sometimes as character detail, rarely to further narrative. The given singer’s countenance, her expression of joy or fear while singing, is key for Davies. These moments of song are among the most joyous in Davies’s films; it is as though they represent the only truly happy memories he can conjure up. The overall collection of songs and music in each film also carries great meaning; they delineate time, often with the songs chronologically jumbled up but internally coherent to a given period, and also serve as a frame for the emotional life of the film. (The House of Mirth does not follow this pattern but utilizes opera in a similar way at times.)

The subtle and unique use of music, this treading on the boundary of the downbeat musical, signals for some critics the deepest difference between Davies and his contemporaries. Roughly said, he is a gay man making deeply unfashionable gay films. No “coming out,” no iconographic cowboy sex, no sense of empowerment, no liberation, never a drag queen moment and certainly not one note of disco. His gay gaze is one of crushed longing and intense fear of the men around him, a hyper-awareness of sexualized erotic man monsters ever-present but to be avoided at all costs. (Davies claims that the beatings he took as a schoolboy for being a “sissy” made it impossible for him to fall in love, that he is celibate and that “being a homosexual is easily the worst thing to happen to me in my life.”) Salvation can only come through the undying, blindingly, all-consuming love of one’s mother. She represents everything good and happy in a Davies film, yet is also the object of pathos, teheworst abused in the household, pitiful in her stiff upper lip drudgery and made to age brutally in front of our eyes. Other women (and an occasional older, kindly man) are there to provide comic relief, a version of the banter Davies soaked up on screen from Doris Day ad the other Olympian Gods of Hollywood.

These moments of subtle levity, these gentle gestures to a different time in cinema are finally what sets him apart from the crowd. Davies, like many great artists, is obsessed with how we might repurpose cinematic artifice and Hollywood’s Golden Age. Yet he fails to share the macho delight directors like Godard, Scorsese and the like have for ripping the history of cinema from its original context and remounting it (not a pun) in a mode of their own choosing. Davies is far more reverent than that. Cinema’s history and culture are a source of power and wonder for him, fragile dream bubbles ready to explode from an indelicate touch. Cinema is not to be dallied with, looted for a shot or costume idea, but sanctified as an essential part of a master’s ongoing heartbreaking exploration of the resilience and fragility of the human condition.
—Noah Cowan

Of Time and the City
Director: Terence Davies
UK 2008 77 minutes

“Nothing has given me more pleasure this year: the sweetness of its temper, the unfashionable seriousness of its design and its mixture of worldliness and innocence make for some thing sublime… What a lovely film this is and what a welcome comeback for one of Britain’s greatest filmmakers”—Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian

“Along with Guy Maddin’s equally stunning documentary My Winnipeg, Davies’ film is a milestone in autobiographical cinema, but also a document on Northern Britain in mid-century that will resonate for years to come.”—Anthony Quinn, The Independent

Of Time and the City was commissioned by the city of Liverpool as part of the celebrations surrounding its designation as the European Capital of Culture. Davies was the obvious choice; much of his masterful body of work breathes through Liverpool’s damp lungs. Yet the burghers were surely not expecting such a tribute as this. Davies’s social history eschews the men cast in statues for the enormous, convulsive changes wrought on what were once known as the “working classes.” He recalls a time of great poverty and camaraderie, when the cinemas were the only palaces his family and friends could actually enter. He remembers scandalous priests and corrupt officials who were never punished, while lonely men in the city’s various parks were tossed in jail for a wink and a nod. He surveys the fatter, less desperate citizens of today, and finds them wanting. Churches have become discotheques, the promenades have emptied, the architecture of heavy Victorian industry seems tailor-made for modern loft living, All well and good, but Davies wonders where the spirit of community might have gone—and finds some answers through the prisms of post-industrial rot and Catholicism’s collapse into the River Mersey.

Of Time and the City is also often great fun. Davies’s voice-over, which runs throughout the work, is a delight. An insightful intellectual with a distinctive drawl, he often manages to be incredibly funny in a wry, sometimes cynical and deliriously romantic way. A precise balance between evocative archival footage and newly shot material completes this unique and inspiring work. This is the first film Davies has made in eight years. It would be criminal to make us wait so long for the next one.
—Noah Cowan