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Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 35.1 (2005) 82-83



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Wendy Everett. Terence Davies. Manchester University Press, 2004. 246 pages, $69.95.

Remarkable Balance

How do you solve a problem like Terence Davies? How do you catch a cloud and pin it down? The straightforward answer is, leave the cloud alone; this gifted British film maker is a one-off, a poet of music, time and memory, whose unique quality is emotional more than intellectual. One of the many strengths of this first full-length study of the director is that it never loses sight of this blend of mind and heart. Wendy Everett has achieved a remarkable balance between the two, and the result is an outstanding book.

Davies's haunted yet lyrical world is the direct result of his upbringing, and cannot be separated from it. Born to a working class family in Liverpool in 1945, he was the youngest of ten children, seven of whom survived. His father, a rag-and-bone man, was, in Everett's words, "a brutal and unstable sadist who regularly beat his wife and abused his children mentally and physically". The young Terence was six-and-a-half when this monster died, but, as the cliché goes, the scars have never healed, nor have the painful memories of persistent bullying at school and of being raised in the repressive atmosphere of the Roman Catholic Church (Davies being gay did not help). Yet the world of patriarchs and tyranny existed alongside a contrasting maternal world of love, music, and, most of all, films. As Everett points out, all the director's work is a journey through this personal landscape in which the fact of imprisonment dances with the vision of freedom, and time itself becomes a complex mixture of past, present and future.

Davies's first three (or five) films—Trilogy (1976-83), Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992)—are all concerned in various ways with childhood and home; because of the working class subject matter, some critics at the time tied themselves in knots worrying about whether he was a gritty "social realist" or a European-style "formalist". Everett dispatches these problems with a few clicks of the computer keys. Davies is, she argues, an autobiographical artist; this means that he is concerned less with "society" in the conventional sense, and more with the complexities of memory and the stories that we tell ourselves through memory. Also, his essentially musical approach, where linear narrative is rejected in favour of echo and association, results in the spectator being drawn by the emotions into the process. By engaging us at the deepest level, she implies, he challenges our attitude towards the very language and purpose of films.

-One example of this (it was stunning to see it on the big screen first time round) is an extended sequence in The Long Day Closes, which deals with the brief idyll in Davies' life between the death of his father and the realisation of gayness. Bud (Leigh McCormack), the filmmaker's ten/eleven year old alter ego, is swinging from the railings over the cellar steps of the family's terraced house. In a long, high-angle crane shot, the camera tracks along the street, then magically through a cinema auditorium, then down the aisle of the local church, then it picks out some boys leaving their classroom, before returning to Bud and his railings again.

In this circular shot, Everett notes, the boundaries of past and present merge, "inner and outer spaces blend, barriers and differences dissolve...while the vertical angle of the camera's viewpoint suggests the eye of the remembering adult looking back at the temporal and spatial construct of his childhood world". In other words, Davies both remembers and draws attention to the act of remembering. The sequence is a dramatic construction of the self; by making the film, the director is also creating his own identity.

Anyone who takes such an intense personal approach to film making might be...

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