TIFF

The memory keeper

British film legend Terence Davies reflects on his native Liverpool

Last Updated: Tuesday, September 9, 2008 | 2:34 PM ET

By Jason McBride, CBC News

Director Terence Davies, whose new film Of Time and the City is premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival. (Stuart Wilson/Getty Images)

How is that Michael Winterbottom can make a movie a year (sometimes two) and Terence Davies hasn’t made one in eight? Pardon my subjectivity, but Davies is England’s greatest living filmmaker. (No offence, Mr. Winterbottom.) Thankfully, Davies has a new work showing at the Toronto International Film Festival this year: Of Time and the City, a quietly brilliant, symphonic love (and hate) letter to his native Liverpool.

Davies burst on to the scene in 1984 with a trilogy of stark, autobiographical shorts (Children, Madonna and Child, Death and Transfiguration) that were fused into an acclaimed feature called The Terence Davies Trilogy (which is also screening this year at TIFF). His next two features, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) were a further exploration of Davies’s working-class youth; they also represent the perfection of his accessibly experimental, highly original style.

Fragmentary yet full of arresting tableaux, these are among the best films ever made about memory. One notorious Davies shot consists only of sunlight shifting across a carpet; overtop, you hear dense soundtracks of popular period music and snatches of dialogue from other movies.

Of Time and the City is as much about Davies as the city in which he was raised. In the film, he describes his childhood thusly: “My whole world was home, school, the movies and God.” Davies left this world behind with two films, the literary adaptations The Neon Bible (1995) and The House of Mirth (2000). Artistic successes but commercial failures, these pictures did nothing to broaden his fan base.

A scene from Of Time and the City. (TIFF)

“I’m not in the mainstream,” the 63-year-old Davies says over English Breakfast tea in a Toronto hotel. “I’ve got no talent for it and I’m not interested in it.” He says it without malice or bitterness, despite a frustrating near decade of failed projects. The success that Of Time and the City has enjoyed since its premiere this spring at Cannes, and the fact that Davies is close to financing a new film — a romantic comedy of all things — seems to have buoyed his famously miserable spirits. Almost. Asked what his “whole world” is comprised of now, he replies, “Music, poetry and … despair.”

That could be Of Time and the City’s tag line. On its most basic level, the 77-minute film is a collage of archival footage and home movies in which Davies’s once-beloved Liverpool morphs from slum to council estate to high-tech metropolis, a place where churches have transmogrified into swank restaurants.

“I wanted to exalt them,” he says of the many hard-working, long-dead women in the film, “because they deserve exaltation.”

The film features images of movie theatre marquees, mothers on their way to the wash house, horse races, holidays in New Brighton, soldiers leaving for Korea. They are accompanied by Davies’s mordant voice-over, itself a collage of the director’s own writing and quotations from, among others, Eliot, Engels and Shelley. “The problem with being poor,” Davies says in the film, quoting Willem de Kooning, “is it takes up all of your time.” Over images of the coronation of Queen Elizabeth, Davies adds: “The problem with being rich is it takes up everybody else’s.”

Then as always with Davies, there’s the music. Early on, before he had fully committed to the documentary, he struck upon the idea of juxtaposing images of the bleak Liverpudlian council estates with Peggy Lee’s plangent rendition of The Folks that Live on the Hill.

“I thought, now we have a film,” he says, still visibly excited. Always the high-culture esthete, Davies blames rock ’n’ roll for the ruination of popular music; Liverpool’s most famous sons, The Beatles, receive about as much derision as the Queen. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the director intones, upon their first appearance in the film, his voice filled with venom. But just as the movies replaced the church in Davies’s affections, classical music quickly replaced pop; the judicious, stirring soundtrack is dominated by his favourites (Gustav Mahler and Anton Bruckner).

A Liverpool rain barge is seen in the film Time and the City, Davies' love-hate letter to his native city. (TIFF)

What emerges from all this is a lyrical, dreamy and mournful film poem. While it recalls the work of Chris Marker, Derek Jarman or even Guy Maddin’s recent My Winnipeg, it’s not like much else – except perhaps Davies’s own films. Davies has previously said that his work has never provided the exorcism he hoped for, and Of Time and the City likewise serves only “to heighten the loss”: the loss of the Liverpool of his youth, and of course the loss of his youth.

“I can’t believe,” he says to me, “that 50 years have gone by since my happiest four years. Fifty years have gone by and what have I done with them?”

In the film, he puts it another way, quoting Chekhov: “The golden moments pass, and leave no trace.” Davies’s films, however, are traces of a most sublime kind.

Of Time and the City screens Sept. 9 and Sept. 13 at the Toronto International Film Festival.

Jason McBride writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.