Terence Davies's films are memory machines. They stir up the past like so many gleaming traces, gaining resonance through rich and telling association. Best known for his masterwork Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), Davies grew up amidst the working class of Liverpool, and this informs much of his veiled autobiography. An urban setting of scarce opportunity and, at its center, a stern and brutish father make for stories in which emotional endurance is a form of quiet heroism. His superbly measured compositions-on display also in the award-winning Trilogy (1984), The Neon Bible (1995), and The House of Mirth (2000)-always find beauty amidst the emotional debris. Davies gleans surprising joy from the privations of the working class, in the shared distractions and communal sorrows. Music also plays a particularly poignant part-popular songs punctuate the films, blending buoyant voices with period sentiments. Finally, there are the fictive Davieses, realized in the Trilogy and The Long Day Closes (1992) as adolescents growing up gay in mid-century Liverpool. In the ache of their otherness, these boys are known to us through their disaffection with Catholic repression and the hostility of their bullying peers. Their homosexuality is a coloration in the director's backwards gaze, not an overt cry, but a whisper, bringing subtle complexity to his much-pondered past.

Featured Works:

Children (1976); Death and Transfiguration (1983); Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988, pictured); The House of Mirth (2000); Madonna and Child (1980); The Neon Bible (1995); The Long Day Closes (1992)

Program information:

Closely Watched Films: Terence Davies

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The Persistence of Memory by Michael Koresky posted Jun. 04, 2008