OF TIME AND THE CITY
A VISUAL POEM
From the original voice of the great British auteur, Terence Davies, comes the visual poem Of Time and The City. It is a visual poem which draws on the first 28 years of the director’s life – his life in Liverpool until he left in 1973. “Cut it as if it were fiction” Davies says with “images which speak” and a layered sound track of popular and classical music, voices, radio clips and a powerful, poignant voiceover by the auteur. Of Time and The Cityis a very personal portrait of Liverpool, beyond its Beatles and its football clubs, the home of the writer’s birth, where youth and inspiration weave his own story into the recent history of the City with fascinating found footage and counterpointed sound.
Davies himself and the people in this footage are the core of this visual poem which is set between 1945 and the present day and played out against a backdrop of dark urban images – densely packed urban living and back breaking domestic labour. But Davies never leaves his audience with unremitting gloom, he counterpoints the slums with beautiful, soaring music and as in Distant Voices, Still Liveshe lifts us into the world of fantasy and collective emotion which makes the misery of life bearable – the cinema where it is “always Christmas and always perfect.”
Davies also tells his story of yesterday in the wider city and beyond that in a country – Britain post 1945 after the Second World War, as it struggles to retain its last grasp on Empire in Africa, India, and the Far East. And the story moves beyond that period to Britain’s transition from post-war austerity to a new prosperity which ultimately swept away back-to-back houses with outside toilets and replaced them with barren high rise blocks of concrete.
All this is exquisitely captured in images of demolishing buildings and children walking through urban wastelands, always observed with Davies’ poignant and sensitive eye and sometimes with a forthright anger at how forgotten these voices were. How unheard and often unexpressed. But the auteur is the survivor who lived determined to tell their tale and his own personal tale. And that is a tale told with honesty and courage – the story of an unforgiving Catholic Church where, desperate for grace, he finds himself unable to deny but unable to confess his homosexuality. So he lives through all the subtle and continuing violence of his environment – physical, sexual, spiritual, economic and domestic. This is violence for those around him too, but for him there is also the loneliness of the outsider who will never find the girl however much he wishes he wanted to.
The film is structured as memories, fractured and bubbling up from beneath the surface, visiting and revisiting the places of the narrator’s childhood, his community’s childhood, moving from past to present and back again but always with a gentle forward push to the end of what is now gone and always grasping the fragments which remain locked within. And always in the hands of a masterful voice which guides the audience with his strength, his poetry, his candour and his anger.
For lovers of Davies’ previous work many of his themes from his earlier narrative pieces thread through this film – Catholicism, homosexuality, violence, death, loss, the glory of cinema, outsider- ness and childhood. But Of Time and The Cityalso documents the memories, the City and the country which shaped those themes in the growing artist and weaves beyond them a complete web of the artist’s vision. A vision which is woven with his own characteristic magic. There are beautifully paced rhythms of poetry (some from T.S. Eliot) and prose with silence to make space for the images which need no words and music to counterpoint other footage with additional layers of emotion.
A VISUAL POEM
Davies himself and the people in this footage are the core of this visual poem which is set between 1945 and the present day and played out against a backdrop of dark urban images – densely packed urban living and back breaking domestic labour. But Davies never leaves his audience with unremitting gloom, he counterpoints the slums with beautiful, soaring music and as in Distant Voices, Still Liveshe lifts us into the world of fantasy and collective emotion which makes the misery of life bearable – the cinema where it is “always Christmas and always perfect.”
All this is exquisitely captured in images of demolishing buildings and children walking through urban wastelands, always observed with Davies’ poignant and sensitive eye and sometimes with a forthright anger at how forgotten these voices were. How unheard and often unexpressed. But the auteur is the survivor who lived determined to tell their tale and his own personal tale. And that is a tale told with honesty and courage – the story of an unforgiving Catholic Church where, desperate for grace, he finds himself unable to deny but unable to confess his homosexuality. So he lives through all the subtle and continuing violence of his environment – physical, sexual, spiritual, economic and domestic. This is violence for those around him too, but for him there is also the loneliness of the outsider who will never find the girl however much he wishes he wanted to.
The film is structured as memories, fractured and bubbling up from beneath the surface, visiting and revisiting the places of the narrator’s childhood, his community’s childhood, moving from past to present and back again but always with a gentle forward push to the end of what is now gone and always grasping the fragments which remain locked within. And always in the hands of a masterful voice which guides the audience with his strength, his poetry, his candour and his anger.
For lovers of Davies’ previous work many of his themes from his earlier narrative pieces thread through this film – Catholicism, homosexuality, violence, death, loss, the glory of cinema, outsider- ness and childhood. But Of Time and The Cityalso documents the memories, the City and the country which shaped those themes in the growing artist and weaves beyond them a complete web of the artist’s vision. A vision which is woven with his own characteristic magic. There are beautifully paced rhythms of poetry (some from T.S. Eliot) and prose with silence to make space for the images which need no words and music to counterpoint other footage with additional layers of emotion.