Happy 75th Birthday, Terence Davies! Born today in 1945, this English novelist, actor, screenwriter and film director is one of the most acclaimed British filmmakers of the present.
He is noted for his highly personal and often autobiographical chronicles of British working class and the struggles they face in the post-WWII world.
Born in Kensington, Liverpool, Merseyside, England, United Kingdom, Davies was the youngest of ten children of working-class Catholic parents.
Though he was raised Catholic by his deeply religious mother, he later rejected religion and considers himself an atheist.
After leaving school at sixteen, Davies worked for one decade as a shipping office clerk and as an unqualified accountant before leaving Liverpool to attend Coventry Drama School.
He later went to study at the National Film and Television School (NFTS). The university was featured in the 2018 ranking by The Hollywood Reporter of the top fifteen International film schools.
In the late 1980s, Davies' wrote and directed his first two features. These were the 1988 British/West German drama/musical film 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' and the 1992 British drama/coming-of-age film 'The Long Day Closes'.
These were both autobiographical features set in Liverpool during the 1940s and 1950s. Of these, Davies is best known for 'Distant Voices, Still Lives'.
Siblings Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne) and Tony (Dean Williams), along with their mother (Freda Dowie), gather for their sister Eileen's (Angela Walsh) wedding.
It is a joyous occasion, but through flashbacks it becomes clear that the family was not always happy.
Their domineering father (Pete Postlethwaite) was physically abusive to his wife, and left the children emotionally traumatized.
As a result, the children have grown into unhappy adults, looking for love they didn't receive when they were young.
The film is made up of two separate films, shot two years apart, but with the same cast and crew. The first section, 'Distant Voices', tells of the working-class Catholic family in the 1940s, but living under an abusive father.
The second section, 'Still Lives', sees the children grown up and emerging into a brighter 1950s Britain, only a few years from rock and roll and The Beatles, yet somehow still a lifetime away.
'Distant Voices, Still Lives' went on to win the FIPRESCI Prize at the 41st Cannes Film Festival in May of that same year. However, the film only grossed a total of $690,000 at the box office.
Four months later, the Davies won the International Critics' Award. This occurred at the 13th Toronto International Film Festival in September of that same year.
In reviewing 'Distant Voices, Still Lives', the following year, American film critic and author Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote: "[...] years from now when practically all the other new movies currently playing are long forgotten, it will be remembered and treasured as one of the greatest of all English films".
One year later, Davies won the ALFS Awards for Film of the Year and Director of the Year. This occurred at the 11th London Film Critics Circle Awards.
In 2002, critics polled for Sight & Sound ranked 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' as the ninth best film of the previous twenty-five years.
Jean-Luc Godard, often dismissive of British cinema in general, singled out 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' as a major exception, calling it "magnificent".
In 2007, the British Film Institute (BFI) re-printed and distributed 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' across some of Britain's most high-profile independent cinemas, prompting The Guardian newspaper to describe Distant Voices, Still Lives as "Britain's forgotten cinematic masterpiece".
In a 2011 poll carried out by Time Out of the 100 greatest British films of all time, 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' was ranked third.
Due to funding difficulties and his refusal to compromise, Davies' output has been comparatively sporadic, with only seven feature films released to date.
According to Davies' personal life, he is gay. Throughout his career, he has frequently explored gay themes in and throughout his films.
Davies is a singularly idiosyncratic but independent filmmaker of whom effectively evokes the sounds and textures of post-war working-class life in England's working-class district of Liverpool during the 1940s and 1950s.
His recurring themes include memory and its close relationship to popular culture--particularly music and movies.
Other themes include the disjunction between bleak lives and glittering fantasies, the collision between the brutish masculine behavior of fathers and the terrified homosexual identity of their sons and the power struggles inherent in familial relations.
Davies' carefully composed tableaux and highly stylized narratives have led to him being grouped with Peter Greenaway ('The Draughtsman's Contract', 'Drowning by Numbers', 'The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover', 'The Pillow Book') and Derek Jarman ('Caravaggio').
However, Davies is no post-modernist: his use of popular songs and constant allusions to Hollywood musicals reflect a sincere affection for popular culture. Davies' intensely emotional cinema makes him unique among contemporary British filmmakers.
His alter ego, called Robert Tucker in the later films, is shy and introverted; his teachers and peers treat this as testimony to his mental slowness and an excuse to bully him.
Davies' family life is traumatized by his violent and unpredictable father, who regularly harasses his sisters and his mother, the most important person in his life. Another cause of unhappiness is his homosexuality.
The pain of being different is exacerbated by his Catholic upbringing, which makes him believe that homosexuality is the gravest sin possible. Yet Davies regards the past with nostalgia as well as resentment.
All of his films are imbued with tender memories of the communality of working-class life and the old forms of entertainment, such as listening to the wireless, visiting the cinema, and singing together.
The uniqueness of Davies' representation of the past lies in the way he uses cinematic means to convey the fragmented nature of memory and the partial knowledge of his young protagonist.
Instead of using a smooth narrative, we receive a succession of loosely connected episodes, with no dominant story line.
A moving image is sometimes replaced by a discolored photograph to convey the impression of time frozen by memory and to emphasize the gap between the real and a recollected past.
Thanks to the subjective camera, objects lose their hard, material existence, becoming only shadows on the wall or floor.
Spare and austere, Davies' low-budget yet surprisingly elegant films tend to be contemplative, deliberately paced and melancholy in tone; while certainly not for all tastes, they have been hailed as sublime works of art.
Davies has been active from 1976–present.
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