Last month, British cinema lost one of its greatest and most distinctive screen poets. From an astonishing trilogy of early short films (Children; Madonna and Child; Death and Transfiguration – all available on BFI Player) to his final feature, Benediction (2021), Terence Davies seamlessly blended personal recollections with wider universal truths. His subjects ranged from autobiographically inspired portraits of postwar working-class life in Liverpool (Distant Voices, Still Lives, 1988; The Long Day Closes, 1992) to sweeping literary adaptations (of John Kennedy Toole’s Georgia-set The Neon Bible, 1995, currently streaming on Channel 4; or Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s hardscrabble Scottish masterpiece Sunset Song, 2015) and intimate portraits of real-life authors, most remarkably the American poet Emily Dickinson, brilliantly played by Cynthia Nixon in A Quiet Passion, 2016. Yet each of his films felt deeply, distinctly personal. No wonder Jack Lowden, who played Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction, told me that after immersing himself in his subject’s diaries in preparation for the role, he gradually came to realise that “I was essentially playing Terence.”
Despite critical acclaim (a Time Out magazine poll ranked Distant Voices, Still Lives as the third greatest British film ever made), Davies – like so many of his compatriots – struggled to get his films financed. After the release of his artfully trenchant adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (2000), featuring a career-best performance by Gillian Anderson, there would be an eight-year gap before the arrival of his next film, the sublime documentary Of Time and the City, and three more before his next dramatic feature, an acclaimed version of Terence Rattigan’s stage play The Deep Blue Sea (2011). He may have been a national hero among cineastes, but Davies had to fight to get every film made.
My fondest memories of Davies, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing on several occasions, are from a trip we made together to Liverpool on the eve of the UK release of Of Time and the City. An intensely personal collage of archive footage played out to a soundtrack of music, quotations (Joyce, Shelley, Chekhov, Engels) and his own reflections, it was my favourite film of the year; a love song and a eulogy to the city of his childhood. Davies, whose producer Roy Boulter memorably described Of Time and the City as being about “loss of innocence, and age”, had agreed to be filmed walking me through his younger years – a film fan’s dream!
On Kensington Street where he grew up, he observed that the houses and pavements of his childhood “live inside me with the most incredible intensity”, adding that “I’ll always be trying to get back to the four years that I was happy, from seven till 11.” He pointed me to a garage where, at a formative age, he saw three men, stripped to the waist, building a wall, “and I knew there and then that I was gay – although I didn’t know what it was called. And my paradise and happiness ended.”
Raised a devout Catholic, Davies struggled to reconcile his faith with his sexuality, recalling years spent weeping and praying till his knees bled, “but no peace came, no succour granted”. We walked from his childhood home to the church in which he once worshipped. “It repels me now,” he told me. “All this empty iconography. It did me a great deal of damage.”
From the church, we walked onward to a now deserted movie house where he talked excitedly of growing up within walking distance of no less than eight cinemas. For Davies, cinema became the new place of worship. “And my love was as muscular as my Catholicism,” he opines in Of Time and the City, “but without any of the drawbacks. Musicals, melodramas, westerns – nothing was too rich or too poor for my rapacious appetite. And I gorged myself with a frequency that would shame a sinner!”
That muscular love of cinema, with all its relish and passion, would run throughout Davies’s entire body of work. A signature image from The Long Day Closes (setting the scene for key moments in Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast and Sam Mendes’s Empire of Light) finds a young boy in the balcony of his local picture house, gazing in rapt wonder at the marvels playing out before him.
Years later, sharing a port and lemon in Da Wheel bar in Shetland, where he was guest of honour at the Screenplay film festival, Davies remembered something he’d told me that day in Liverpool; that for him, the “ecstasy” of cinema had always been “like a religious experience. It was completely ecstatic because I really believed what I looked at.”
I can think of no better description of the transportative magic of the movies, or the invigorating wonder of Terence Davies.
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What else I’m enjoying
Every Man For Himself and God Against All: A Memoir
From his bold description of the entire 20th century having been “a mistake” to his declaration that he can only learn from bad films (the great ones remain “an enigma”), Werner Herzog’s latest tome is deliciously forthright fare. Tales of strong women, crazed actors and random on-camera shootings (“a bit of local folklore”) sit alongside grand philosophical provocations (“the culture of complaint disgusts me”) and apocalyptic predictions (“I picture a radical turning away from thought, argument and image”) to page-turning effect.
Cinema Unbound: The Creative Worlds of Powell and Pressburger
The BFI’s celebration of the great film-making duo’s enduring legacy includes restorations, reissues and exhibitions and serves as a jaw-dropping reminder of the extraordinary talents behind Black Narcissus, The Red Shoes, A Matter of Life and Death and more. Runs until 31 December.
