A man apart
How to write about the cinema of Terence Davies? Words just don’t stand a chance. I could deploy every superlative going, and reduce every one of the three short films and five feature films he’s directed into their constituent parts — a dash of low-key acting here, some liquid camera movements there — but nothing could convey or explain the unique emotional power they have. Quite simply, his films need to be seen and experienced. And preferably on the silver screen, so the magic can really take hold.
It’s fortunate, then, that the fifth of those feature films — Of Time and the City, a documentary about Liverpool — is about to be released into cinemas. Like the earlier Terence Davies Trilogy (1976–83) and the two remarkable features Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), it is also an autobiography of sorts. After all, Davies was himself born in Liverpool (in 1945), grew up there, and shot the majority of his work on its streets and among its houses.
He has a natural affinity for the city. Or, rather, he has a natural affinity for the city as it was in the 1940s and 1950s — the period of his childhood. He hasn’t lived there since the early 1970s, and the Liverpool that he commits to celluloid is from those bygone times. It no longer exists. As he put it to me, ‘Liverpool is my imagined country now ... ’ Davies pieces together his imagined country from memory. The various photographs and clips of old documentary footage used throughout Of Time and the City were selected because they chimed with how he remembers Liverpool; a city of smiles, slums, tower-blocks, bunting, songs, docks and hard, hard graft. And these strands are weaved together loosely — to approximate the organic flow of memory. It’s an approach that Davies employs, more or less, in all his films, and which has been dubbed ‘memory realism’ by the critics. The director, though, avoids labels. His is not a rigid technique, but a creative instinct: ‘It’s just instinctive — I don’t know where it comes from. I’ve always been interested in what happens next, emotionally, and that’s what memory’s about.’ But why reside in times gone by? Why indulge in a kind of hyper-nostalgia, if that’s what it is? Part of it is strictly personal — Davies admits that he’s ‘mesmerised’ by his past, perhaps as a means of self-knowledge. But part of it is to do with the world then versus the world now. There have been sad losses over the years, Davies suggests, and chief among them are the decline of ‘simple manners’ and ‘good behaviour’. And anyone who’s seen any of Davies’s films could hazard a few more additions to the list, including ‘family’, ‘community’ and ‘innocence’. To some extent, Of Time and the City is a eulogy for these institutions — a eulogy of sadness and anger in equal parts.
Not that Davies is looking on the Britain of his youth through a rose-tinted window. He recognises the advancements that have been made. We are, in his eyes, more discerning about the good things in life, and — crucially — more humane. The slums and mills are less omnipresent features. And he has been free to divorce from his staunch Catholic upbringing — ‘that pernicious religion’, he calls it — which imposed, with cruel effect, on his homosexuality. No, he does not neglect these facts, and his world view is decidedly more multihued than uncomplicated nostalgia permits. I suspect the distinction may not be that Davies prefers the past to the present, but that he finds it more interesting. Or at least more familiar.
This then-and-now thinking emerges more strongly in Davies’s take on the state of cinema today. When it comes to the past — to the great classics of the Hollywood studio system — he is ebullient. Singin’ in the Rain (1952), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) — these are as nectar to him. But when it comes to things as they are today, he is less upbeat. ‘I think the great days of cinema are over,’ he confessed — a passing that he believes was symbolically marked by the death of the incomparable Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, last year.
What’s more, he argues that the British film industry is mired in slavish devotion to today’s American methods, the American market and the American buck. It is being subsumed, and has lost any distinctiveness that it may once have had. He sees this as part of a wider erosion of ‘national respect’, that we should take some sort of stand against: ‘We’ve produced as an island the world’s greatest playwright, we invented the novel, and our poetry is second to none. We have to be able to say — without any jingoism — we’re proud of what we’ve achieved.’ Trying to situate him on this spectrum of national achievement, I asked Davies, ‘Do you see yourself as part of a tradition?’ His response was unequivocal, and telling. ‘No,’ he said. ‘When I go into a room full of directors, I feel apart from it all.’ This isn’t to say that the film scholars can’t have their play with Davies’s films — categorising them as ‘kitchen sink’ for their workingclass settings and characters, or lumping him in with the Peter Greenaway–Derek Jarman–Bill Douglas–Sally Potter axis of filmmakers which operated in and around the British Film Institute in the 1970s and 1980s. But it is to say that Davies himself didn’t and doesn’t feel that he belonged to these groupings — in any artistic sense, at least. He ploughs his own cinematic furrow, and that’s what makes him so impressive.
Unmoved by modern culture; submerged in his and his country’s past; and creating films quite unlike anything else out there — Terence Davies is very much ‘apart from it all’. And that’s how it will remain. As he put it to me, ‘I now retreat to the things that give me pleasure.’ For the record, that means: the poetry of Larkin and Betjeman; the music of Bruckner; and the films of studio-era Hollywood. Who can blame him?
A directive to finish with: go see Of Time and the City. And watch or rewatch Death and Transfiguration; Distant Voices, Still Lives; The Long Day Closes; House of Mirth; and all the others. Are the great days of cinema really over? No. They live on in Terence Davies. And we should celebrate him. ❑
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