Davies is widely regarded as the UK’s foremost auteur. We are using the occasion of the premiere of his latest film (Of Time and the City) at the Times/BFI London Film Festival in October to offer a season of his three most successful films.
Distant Voices, Still Lives - 25 October 2008
House of Mirth - 15 November 2008
The Long Day Closes - 13 December 2008
Ewa Mazierska at Screen Online writes:
The uniqueness of Davies’ representation of the past lies in the way he uses cinema to convey the fragmented nature of memory and the partial knowledge of his young protagonist. Instead of a smooth narrative, we receive a succession of loosely connected episodes, with no dominant story line. A moving image is sometimes replaced by a discoloured photograph to convey the impression of time frozen by memory and to emphasise the gap between the real and a recollected past. Thanks to the subjective camera, objects lose their hard, material existence, becoming only shadows on the wall or floor. Such a technique also suggests that children - his viewpoint characters in all his films except The House of Mirth - tend to over-interpret facts and mix truth with fiction. He also makes extensive use of songs, which play as important a role as dialogue in revealing his characters’ feelings.
Davies’ carefully composed tableaux and highly stylised narratives have led to him being grouped with Peter Greenaway and Derek Jarman. But Davies is no post-modernist: his use of popular songs and constant allusions to Hollywood musicals reflect a sincere affection for popular culture. Davies’ intensely emotional cinema makes him unique among contemporary British film-makers.
BACK TO TOP
Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988)
25 October 2008
Annette Kuhn at Screen Online writes:
Terence Davies’ debut feature is actually two films, made two years apart. With the same cast and setting, and an effective matching of image and mood, Distant Voices and Still Lives work together to make a highly resonant feature which continues to mine the rich biographical seam explored in Davies’s earlier Trilogy.
The experiments in ‘memory-realism’ honed in the earlier works are extended and brought to fruition in a highly distinctive marriage of style and content. Distant Voices, Still Lives combines the social concerns of much British cinema (in this case, life in a working-class Liverpool Catholic family) with formal and existential preoccupations more readily associated with European art cinema: an emphasis on the personal and on sexual or religious themes, for example, as well as narrative ambiguity and a distinctive visual style.
But far from being a gratuitous stylistic flourish, the film’s ‘poetry of the ordinary’ is grounded in, and dictated by, its subject matter. Composed largely of events and situations recalled by different family members, Distant Voices, Still Lives is about memory itself, and through its organisation of sounds and images enacts the very process of remembering. Especially distinctive features of the film include the mixture of standpoints from which events are recalled, the vignettish character of the memory-stories, and references to popular songs, popular culture, religious iconography and religious music. Film critic Derek Malcolm aptly described it as “a musical version of Coronation Street directed by Robert Bresson, with additional dialogue by Sigmund Freud and Tommy Handley.”
The film’s authentic feel derives not from naturalism, nor even from realism in any ordinary sense. Rather, it contrives to convey the emotion, the ‘structure of feeling’, that attaches to memory. The narration, like memory itself, is cyclical, repetitive, ambiguous, suggesting, as Martin Hunt puts it, an “ambivalent, interrogative, contradictory and ultimately unresolved” relation to the past. The film’s refusal of nostalgia is underscored by the brownish, bleached-out, hand-tinted look of its colour palette, and by startling juxtapositions of memories of happiness and brutality.
Distant Voices, Still Lives captures, from the inside, what it feels like to live (or rather to remember living) in a particular kind of family and in a certain class setting - a way of life some might say is now lost. Whether or not this is so, the film effectively conveys a very particular set of experiences in a way that is universally recognisable.
BACK TO TOP
House of Mirth (2000)
15 November 2008
“With Edith Wharton, the gloves are off and there’s blood on the walls.” So says director Terence Davies, who delivers the author’s 1905 novel to the screen in all its full, flinty vigor. The delicate dynamite of Gillian Anderson in a performance that deserves to be widely celebrated brings a grieving heart to this vicious social satire. In looking at greedy old New York at the turn of the last century, Davies finds only a few things changed about the pulse of sex and the city. Who’s in and who’s out among the filthy rich is still a killing game that takes no prisoners.
Anderson, leaving behind her X-Files role as the alien-chasing agent Scully, portrays Lily Bart, a social climber on the verge of a calamitous fall. Davies and camera master Remi Adefarasin give us a stunning first look at Lily, emerging from a flattering cloud of train steam at Grand Central station. Elegantly dressed, gloved and corseted, carrying a parasol and wearing a sweeping hat with a veil, Lily looks like a bird in full plumage. Lawrence Seldon (Eric Stoltz), the lawyer whom Lily loves against her better instincts - he’s not rich and must work for a living - tells her, “You’re such a wonderful spectacle.” And so she is. But Lily hedges her bets with Lawrence to snag a wealthy husband, and, failing that, she finds herself embroiled in a scandal that makes her a social outcast. Stripped of her ornaments, Lily discovers something less chic and harder to live with: moral courage.
Davies is no less ruthless than Wharton in his portrait of careless cruelty. This gifted British director, best known for 1988’s Distant Voices, Still Lives and 1992’s The Long Day Closes - tone poems to his working-class childhood - has never pressed heavily on the plot button. But in adapting Wharton’s novel, without cheating by updating her language to a modern idiom, Davies attains a narrative purity of shocking intimacy and emotional force. It’s a crowning achievement.
Look closely at the shrewd way Davies stages the chance meeting of Lily and Lawrence at Grand Central. Lily has two hours to kill until her train leaves for a husband-hunting weekend at the suburban home of fat cat Gus Trenor (Dan Aykroyd) and his wife, Judy (Penny Downie). “How nice of you to come to my rescue,” she tells Lawrence, who invites her for tea at his flat. “I’ll risk it,” she says, flirtatiously, but Anderson lets us see the strain that the pretense of coy femininity takes on Lily.
At the flat, Lily tries a more direct approach, confessing her dependence on a man for power and position. “A girl must marry,” she says, “but a man only if he chooses.̵ Lawrence offers Lily a cigarette. You’ve got to hand it to Anderson: Not since Bette Davis has an actress better used a cigarette as erotic punctuation. Davies packs more smolder into a simple moment - Lily blowing a gentle puff of smoke into Lawrence’s face - than a lesser director could accomplish with nudity and penetration.
Lily has a genius for doing the wrong thing at the right time. She asks for financial help from Gus - Aykroyd plays him with just the right note of piggish charm - then recoils when he expects to be paid back in sexual favors. She alienates Bertha Dorset (a memorably nasty Laura Linney), the social leader who falsely brands Lily as a home wrecker. She is rebuffed by the once-courtly Sim Rosedale (Anthony LaPaglia), the nouveau riche Jew who also knows the sting of social exclusion. LaPaglia gives the role a brutal honesty that removes the anti-Semitic taint of the caricature that Wharton created. Only Stoltz fails to realize the potential of his role.
No matter. The film belongs to Anderson, who handles Lily’s descent from decoration to dishrag with uncanny skill. Deprived of the material things that she had used to define herself, Lily is forced to face a reality. The truth both strengthens and destroys her. The House of Mirth is not one of those teacup and doily movies; it’s harsh and disturbing. Davies does superlatively right by Wharton. There’s blood on the walls.
By Peter Travers of Rolling Stone.
BACK TO TOP
The Long Day Closes (1992)
13 December 2008
The experience of a Terence Davies film is like walking through an enormous vault, where every volume on the endless shelves opens onto a vivid picture of a moment from the past of someone else’s life. Davies’ images and sounds flow in and out of time constantly, and innovatively, as rainfalls begin in one memory and end in another, or when daydreaming in school brings us visually into his childhood doppelganger’s mind, which is off on the opulent balcony of a movie theater, or envisioning a misty sea tossing a sailboat about and adrift.
Davies illuminates how each of the foremost social institutions, school, church, home, and theatre, shaped and changed his life. At the same time he spins a tale about the redemptive qualities of escaping into the land of the movies, resulting in a powerfully rendered patchwork quilt of the mind. Every scene is arranged like the firing sparks of synapses in a sort of temporal free-fall, cascading from memory to memory, but woven together sonically and visually, by pop music of the day, clips of dialogue from other films, dreamy dissolves and languorous camera movement, with the present. A “Proustian musical” as one critic so adeptly put it, this film, more than any other, illustrates the power of the past as a living breathing entity in our lives that can be recalled to the surface in an instant by a song, a smell, or a picture. The introductory scene is a perfect example of the pattern throughout: a fluid, cohesive arrangement of sound-bytes, song, and imagery to corporealize the emotional connections between past and present. The film opens with the blaring horns of the 20th Century Fox theme, (the fact that this is not a 20th Cent. Fox film should tell you something right away), as we gaze upon a tattered poster for THE ROBE, (a film that has particular significance as the first CinemaScope feature ever released), hanging on a brick wall in the rain. Then ‘Stardust’ by Nat King Cole begins to play, as the camera prowls the rain-soaked, rubble-strewn street, and settles on a broken down row house, a pale shadow of what it once was. As the music peters out on the lyric "the music of the years gone by", a beautiful lap-dissolve takes us back to the house as it exists in Davies’ memory, with his alter-ego, our protagonist ‘Bud’, sitting on the steps counting his change and asking his mother for money to go the movies.
Often his song choices, as well as the films whose dialogue he chooses to sample, do not evenly match the timeframe of the scenes they are attached to, and their semiotic meanings may seem arbitrary at first. But only if you choose to interpret the film as a perfectly remembered series of memories. Davies is not interested in the kind of vapidly literal association of song lyrics to imagery. Even though The Magnificent Ambersons and Meet Me In St Louis may have come out before ‘Bud’ was born, as an admittedly autobiographical film the words “Back then, they had time for everything” spoken by Orson Welles, or Judy Garland tenderly crooning ‘Over the Bannister’, carry an emotional impact that relates to the moment he is recreating visually. Davies understands that the mind does not compartmentalize its stock in perfect chronology but in a more mysteriously intuitive way. He braids all these different strands of memory and emotional triggers together in his filmmaking the way our minds naturally intertwine them.
His realization of the 1950’s setting is so remarkable you would swear that you weren’t watching a film, but someone’s exquisitely shot home movies. Because of this deliberate style, we never doubt the authenticity of Davies’ vision of the past, even when action is choreographed in time to the music. Characters suddenly burst into song, privately and in party settings, to express their emotions, but not in the traditional ‘musical number’ fashion. They sing the way you or I would sing something to ourselves in times of sadness, to others in a happier and more crowded setting. It is music that bridges the temporal spaces the camera moves through as if merely wandering into the next room. The surrealism of the film’s structure reinforces the realism of these people and their lives so that they always ring true in a way that no other filmmaker is capable. In the film’s most stunning set-piece, Debbie Reynolds’ rendition of "Tammy" is played over a series of identically angled, interlocking, overhead tracking shots; starting from Bud swinging on a metal bar outside his house, this microcosmic journey then brings us to the movie theatre (where the people are seen through their curling streams of cigarette smoke caught in the projector’s beam of light that divides the screen in half), people praying in a Catholic church, to students sitting in a classroom, and then back to Bud’s home, all fizzling out with the end of the music. Again, lap-dissolves, music, and dialogue from other films are used to link different places and times together in one scene in order to underscore their interconnectedness within our minds, and the overlapping of their influences on us as maturing individuals.
This is a shortened version of the review posted by Samiracle at
This Movie’s A Miracle.
Distant Voices, Still Lives
House of Mirth
The Long Day Closes
BACK TO TOP
|
