Democracy in the dark

To: Retort
Via: IB

[The incomparable David Thomson (Biographical Dictionary of Film, The Whole Equation, Fan Tan (with Marlon Brando) will introduce Terence Davies at the Pacific Film Archive on Wednesday Feb 20th at 7:30, kicking off a week-long series of screenings with the director, including a shot-by-shot workshop on Distant Voices, Still Lives. An interview with Terence Davies, at the time of the release of The House of Mirth (October 2000), is appended below. IB]


Closely Watched Films: Terence Davies
February 20, 2008 - February 27, 2008
Pacific Film Archive, Berkeley

Steve Seid, PFA curator, writes:  Terence Davies’s films are memory machines. They stir up the past like so many gleaming traces, gaining resonance through rich and telling association. Best known for his masterwork Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), Davies grew up amidst the working class of Liverpool, and this informs much of his veiled autobiography. An urban setting of scarce opportunity and, at its center, a stern and brutish father make for stories in which emotional endurance is a form of quiet heroism. His superbly measured compositions—on display also in the award-winning Trilogy (1984), The Neon Bible (1995), and The House of Mirth (2000)—always find beauty amidst the emotional debris. Davies gleans surprising joy from the privations of the working class, in the shared distractions and communal sorrows. Music also plays a particularly poignant part—popular songs punctuate the films, blending buoyant voices with period sentiments. Finally, there are the fictive Davieses, realized in the Trilogy and The Long Day Closes (1992) as adolescents growing up gay in mid-century Liverpool. In the ache of their otherness, these boys are known to us through their disaffection with Catholic repression and the hostility of their bullying peers. Their homosexuality is a coloration in the director’s backwards gaze, not an overt cry, but a whisper, bringing subtle complexity to his much-pondered past.

Winner of the Critics’ Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, Terence Davies will be PFA’s guest for the series "Closely Watched Films", in which notable film artists delve deeply into one of their most masterful movies. The series is based on Roger Ebert’s model, what he calls a “shot-by-shot workshop.” The analysis unfolds with the director sharing personal insights and anecdotes while fielding the copious questions of the gathered viewers, leading to what some have dubbed “democracy in the dark.” In Davies’s case, we’ll begin with a screening of Distant Voices, Still Lives, then return for an hours-long examination of this savory film. Join us as well for the retrospective of memory-drenched films that surrounds it.


Wednesday, February 20, 2008
7:30 p.m. The Terence Davies Trilogy
Terence Davies in Person. Introduced by David Thomson. Three short films entwine into a devastating portrayal of the impact of religion, family, and sexual torment on the life of a man much like Davies himself. “Lacerating but ecstatic in tone.”—David Thomson

Thursday, February 21, 2008
7:30 p.m. Distant Voices, Still Lives
Terence Davies in Person. Davies mines family memories, both painful and bittersweet, for an elliptical, luminous, and moving portrait of a working-class life in mid-century Liverpool. “Terence Davies’s mesmerizing memory film becomes its own kind of poetry: taut, referential, inward, brilliant.”—L.A. Times

Friday, February 22, 2008
7:00 p.m. The Long Day Closes
Terence Davies in Person. Depicting a cinephilic childhood in 1950s England, Davies paints a world of music, shadows, and light. “A marriage of individual and collective memory consecrated by the movies.”—Village Voice

Friday, February 22, 2008
9:05 p.m. The Neon Bible
Terence Davies in Person. John Kennedy Toole’s novel, set in a small Southern town, is transformed through Davies’s sensibility into “a cinema of raw feelings and incandescent moments.”—Chicago Reader. With Gena Rowlands.

Saturday, February 23, 2008
2:30 p.m. Distant Voices, Still Lives: Shot-by-Shot
Discussion with Terence Davies. Davies leads us through his film in what promises to be a transfixing trip down memory lane.

Wednesday, February 27, 2008
7:30 p.m. The House of Mirth
Gillian Anderson plays a woman destroyed by social expectations in Davies’s powerful adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel. “Davies’s sense of the material is closer to a Mizoguchi geisha drama than Masterpiece Theatre.”—Village Voice

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Interview with Terence Davies
Simon Hattenstone
The Guardian
October 6, 2000

With a moving series of films about his brutal childhood, Liverpudlian film maker Terence Davies quietly revolutionised British cinema. Now, after a six-year silence, he is breaking into America with a mainstream film and a Hollywood cast. There is even talk of Oscars.

It is three years since I last saw Terence Davies. His mother had just died, and he was in despair, and he'd tell anyone who stopped long enough to ask how he was. He couldn't see the point of going on. Actually, he looked as if he'd already given up.

So it's hard to recognise the man lapping up the limelight on stage at New York's Lincoln Center. Physically he looks the same - the campest accountant you'll ever meet. It's his demeanour that has changed. An American journalist in the post-screening audience says: "Meeting you here, you seem like the life of the party. Why don't you do an Ealing-style movie next time?" Davies, who has made two of the most miserable and beautiful films in cinema history, licks his lips. "I'd love to," he says, "but having a good sense of humour isn't the same as being able to write comedy." This most English of Englishmen is revelling in the cerebral glitz of Manhattan.

It's 12 years since Davies came to prominence with Distant Voices, Still Lives. The film was autobiographical, documenting the love with which his mother and nine siblings survived his father's brutality. As with all Davies's films, the images haunt you for ever, notably the father, played by Pete Postlethwaite, ripping away the tablecloth, and Christmas dinner with it - a silent, terrifying assault.

Distant Voices, Still Lives was the second instalment of Davies's Liverpool life. The first, his rarely shown Trilogy, is made up of three short movies and is equally brilliant, equally unbearable. The Trilogy shows the young man trying, and failing, to come to terms with his homosexuality. Again, the images glue themselves to mind and soul - the solitary woman on the bus who breaks down and cries till there's nothing left; the father, played by Wilfrid "Steptoe" Brambell, coughing himself to death in a wordless scene that seems to last for ever. With these films Davies quietly reinvented cinema. The camera barely moved, the actors barely acted - they were more like living photographs than movies.

After a six-year absence Davies is back with his fifth film, an adaptation of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, and the New York journalists are stunned by what they have just seen. Yes, this period piece is a conventional film - a radical departure for Davies - but it is a savage take on New York society in the early 20th century.

It's a perfect film for a New York audience - after all, it is set in the city, though it was actually shot in Glasgow because it was so much cheaper. But it's still astonishing to find Davies here, feted wherever he goes. It was surprising enough when the abused child grew into a man who managed to hold down a job for so many years; even more surprising when he gave it all up to make his art-house movies. Now here he is, unable to move for Oscar talk, explaining how he turned Gillian Anderson, one of today's biggest television stars, into a formidable film actor. He may resist the idea, but, as he tells the world's press why he adapted Wharton's novel and they hang on his every word, he's on the cusp of the big time.

"What is extraordinary about the book is its modernity," he says. "It's about the destruction of one person by a social class, it's about how much money you've got, what you look like - and what is modern society about if not how much money you've got and what you look like?" When Lily Bart, the heroine played by Anderson, refuses to marry for money and fails to salvage her reputation by ruining that of the man she loves, she is destroyed.

He is asked why he chose Anderson. Davies looks a little sheepish as he embarks on a typical story. "When I cast her I hadn't seen The X Files and still haven't because I don't watch television except for the news and some documentaries. I was looking for faces that looked like the Singer Sargent portraits of the belle époque , and I said, 'That is a John Singer Sargent face, who is she?'" Davies invited her over for a pot of tea, as he does, and it turned out that the American celebrity knew all about the obscure British film-maker. "Apparently, she was a fan. She told me she had seen The Long Day Closes and had cried at the tracking shot over the carpet."

In The Long Day Closes, Davies's father finally dies, he discovers movies, the family discovers peace, and for four years he embraces life ecstatically. Davies's tracking shot is perhaps his most distinctive trait: the camera languorously glides over a carpet, a cinema audience, the Atlantic ocean. The technique is self-indulgent, audacious and gorgeous.

The great worry about Terence Davies - one of the great worries about him - was that once he had exhausted his family life, there would be nothing left. He says he knew he had to escape his own history. Technically, he did this with his last film, The Neon Bible, but even here the boy with his tender misery was little more than an American version of young Terry.

"When you mine your own seam, you also destroy it," he says. "There's a point where you become repetitive - there's nothing else to say. My great love is Eliot's Four Quartets and these were my modest version of the Four Quartets, based on the suffering of myself and my own family."

We're in a yellow cab on the way to a radio interview. Davies and his PR, Mark, are trying to outcamp each other. Mark stares at a huge billboard advert for Tommy Hilfiger - a male model in nothing but his six-pack and underpants. "It's very popular, that advert in New York," Mark says. "I bet it is! I can imagine," Davies answers.

Mark tells him The House of Mirth has just been reviewed in Newsweek - three and a half stars. "Is that good?" Davies asks. "Three and a half out of four. We're doing OK."

Davies disappears into a tiny booth. He's talking about modernity again, the way that the greatest dramas always remain contemporary. "Because they touch on basic human terrors. We could be Medea saying to Jason, 'If you leave me, I'll kill the children.' Horrific though it is, we can understand that possessive love. Believe me, I understand possessive love."

Davies left school when he was 15, qualified for little but victimhood. After the four years of bliss following his father's death, he went on to secondary school where he was bullied constantly. His voice is smoky, seductive, with little trace of Liverpool. For some reason, he says, at school he started to talk like the Queen Mother. When he left, he worked as an unqualified accountant for 12 years. He hates the fact that he had the pedantic, quibbling mind to be a good accountant. He also trained and worked as an actor for many of those years. He knew, though, that he didn't have the physical appeal to become a huge success. Davies complains that he looks like an avocado.

"I'd give anything to be really good-looking and have a wonderful body and be really stupid," he says. "It's an unbeatable combo."

The radio presenter makes the inevitable comparison with Martin Scorsese, who also adapted a Wharton book, The Age of Innocence. Davies protests. "Martin Scorsese is a huge name! I'm not a huge name. I go into a room full of people and I'm the only person I've not heard of. I think his film is a masterpiece. There are shots I would die for." He describes one, and looks as if he's about to explode with enthusiasm.

"God, it's ravishing. I don't feel in the same class as Martin Scorsese. Although I must say I met him when he came to London. He invited me to dinner, which was so charming. So charming . And he's got a very good sense of humour. I said, 'What's your next film?' He said it was about the Dalai Lama, and I said, 'What are you going to call it, Hello Dalai?' And he said, 'No, Raging Lama!' " Davies dissolves into hysterics, as does the presenter.

"First you make me cry, now you're making me laugh," she says. "You're making me forget everything." "It's a gift," Davies says. He's turned into Noël Coward. The pair of them are flirting like crazy inside their tiny booth.

We're walking along Sixth Avenue towards his hotel. Davies is talking about how American musicals and the Ealing comedies influenced him. I ask him whether he's joking about the comedies. No, he says. Of course not.

Earlier in the day he had said how churlish the English could be, and cited the saying "too clever by half" as an example. I wonder what his family makes of the man who finds it hard to open his mouth without quoting Shakespeare or Keats or TS Eliot. Do they call him too clever by half? "No. They're terribly proud of me, as I'm proud of them. But they think this life is glamour, and it's not. Why should I spoil it for them, though?" When his mother was alive they'd speak to each other every day at 6pm. "If I was somewhere like here, I'd phone up and say, 'Guess where I am, Mum? New York.' And she'd say, 'You're not !'" He smiles.

When he made Distant Voices, Still Lives it was tough on the family. Some of his brothers and sisters felt he was wrong to expose his father, that it was private business. "But my mum just said, 'He's told the truth.' Which was pretty fantastic. She was a pretty fantastic woman. She had no bitterness in her."

Davies was only six and a half when his father, a rag and bone man, died, but he says those few years damaged him for life. "I'm still acutely aware of atmosphere in a room. When I was a kid I'd run into a room and if he didn't want anyone around, he'd just kick me from one end of the house to the other. You don't make that mistake very often."

Did he ever think his father would kill him? "No. What was terrifying was the silences, and the cruelty that was in the air. Then it would all start again. I thought he'd kill my mum because on one occasion he just picked up an axe. My eldest sister hit him over the head with a milk bottle. I didn't want her to die. I thought, 'What would I do if she died?'"