Terence Davies

1945–2023 · British

British poetic cinema — memory, Catholicism and song

Terence Davies made films the way people remember: out of order, in tableaux, with a popular song running underneath. The youngest of ten in a Catholic Liverpool family, he turned his violent father, his beloved mother and the pub singing of the 1950s into two features that are among the finest British films ever made. He worked slowly and with difficulty, often going years between projects, and ended with a run of literary adaptations. He died in 2023, aged 77.

How to spot them

▸Slow lateral tracking shots and long dissolves, with the camera gliding past rooms rather than entering them
▸Communal singing — pubs, weddings, air-raid shelters — in place of a score
▸Chronology abandoned for the order of memory; the same house revisited in different decades
▸Liverpool, Catholicism, a cruel father and a saintly mother
▸A repressed protagonist, usually queer or a woman, destroyed by respectability

Key films

A Liverpool family remembers a violent father through weddings, funerals and pub songs, out of any order (1988)

Distant Voices, Still Lives — Pete Postlethwaite as the father; the International Critics' Prize at Cannes.

A lonely boy at the cinema and on the stairs of a terraced house, in the happiest two years of a 1950s childhood (1992)

The Long Day Closes — the celebrated carpet dissolve and the boy Bud.

A New York society beauty descends through debt and gossip to a boarding house and chloral (2000)

The House of Mirth — Gillian Anderson, from Edith Wharton's novel.

An essay film of archive footage over one man's sardonic narration of his home city's slums, ferries and lost faith (2008)

Of Time and the City — his return after eight years, made for Liverpool's Capital of Culture year.

A judge's wife leaves him for a damaged RAF pilot and is found by the gas fire in a rented room (2011)

The Deep Blue Sea — Rachel Weisz, from Terence Rattigan's play.

A crofter's daughter in north-east Scotland inherits the land and loses a husband to the trenches (2015)

Sunset Song — from Lewis Grassic Gibbon's novel, with Agyness Deyn.

A shell-shocked officer who threw his medal in the Mersey writes verse, converts, and grows old and bitter (2021)

Benediction — Siegfried Sassoon, played by Jack Lowden and Peter Capaldi; his last film.

Key ideas

Memory has its own grammar — association, not sequence
Song as the emotional engine; the community sings what the characters cannot say
Catholicism as both the wound and the aesthetic — ritual, guilt, transcendence

Quick-fire facts

•Born in Liverpool on 10 November 1945, the youngest of ten children in a Catholic family
•He left school at sixteen and worked as a shipping clerk and a bookkeeper for ten years before drama school
•His first works are the black-and-white Terence Davies Trilogy — Children, Madonna and Child and Death and Transfiguration — made between 1976 and 1983
•Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) won the International Critics' Prize at Cannes and the Golden Leopard at Locarno
•The Long Day Closes (1992) contains a famous minutes-long dissolve across a patterned carpet, scored to Debussy
•He was openly gay and spoke of a lifelong struggle with the Catholicism of his upbringing
•A Quiet Passion (2016) starred Cynthia Nixon as the reclusive poet of Amherst, Massachusetts
•He often waited years between features for financing; there was an eight-year gap before Of Time and the City
•He died at home in Mistley, Essex, on 7 October 2023, aged 77

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Sources

British Film Institute — Terence Davies obituary: farewell to a British master of poetic cinema
British Film Institute — Where to begin with Terence Davies