When will Terence Davies get the respect he deserves?

Last year, one of Liverpool’s most talented sons passed away with barely a mention. Laurence Thompson sets the record straight

By Laurence Thompson

Every few years, some artful Dublin councillor or Irish diplomat clears his pipes and keens in the general direction of Zurich. The reason? A half-hearted attempt to repatriate the bones of James Joyce on behalf of “the old sow that eats her farrow”, as the deceased author described his native Ireland (via his literary alter ego Stephen Dedalus). Usually, this is met with the same curt response Florentines have received from Ravenna ever since the exiled Dante Alighieri dropped dead there in 1321. 

Somehow, I doubt future Lord Mayors of Liverpool will be sending olive oil down to Essex to burn in the Mistley tomb of Terence Davies, as Florence does every year on Dante’s birthday. The reason for this is not the great filmmaker Davies’s lesser poetic stature but a particular strand of local philistinism. When Davies died last October, his death went unremarked upon in Liverpool, save for a 700-word boilerplate obit in the Echo.

Not that the rest of the UK did much better. How could this happen to a man who was once acknowledged as the country’s greatest living director? Some may chalk this up to unfortunate timing: the announcement of Davies’ death coincided with the Hamas-led 7^th October attacks on Israel. Like Aldous Huxley, who LSD-tripped into the afterlife the same day JFK was shot, was Davies’s demise simply overshadowed by a bigger story? Don’t believe it. Regardless of what else was in the papers that day, had the Kensington-born director been Parisian instead, the boulevards would’ve flooded with admirers and the French president would have been moved to lead the nation in mourning, as Emmanuel Macron did when the experimental filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard died the previous year. “We respect directors in our country,” as the Shoshanna says in Inglourious Basterds. 

Britain, on the other hand, is a nation deeply suspicious of genuine artistic or cerebral achievement. Where else would treat TV presenter and Twining’s teabag salesman Stephen Fry as a public intellectual? It’s not that Davies’s oeuvre needed to be legitimised, of course. Had he received gag-inducing “national treasure” status in his lifetime, or had conniving statesmen tried to bask in his reflected glory in his death, his work would hardly have been elevated any more than Ulysses is improved by Fine Gael politician-landlords hoping to raise a few rents by rattling Joyce’s remains around Glasnevin. But for the hat to remain so untipped, let alone undoffed, is scarcely tolerable.

Terence Davies in Toronto in 2008. Photo by Lucas Oleniuk/Toronto Star via Getty Images.

If you’ve never seen a Terence Davies film and feel adventurous, you could do worse than start with his vaunted “trilogy” of short films: Children, Madonna and Child, and Death and Transfiguration, the grizzled John the Baptist to the Jesus of The Long Day Closes. (Otherwise, the straighter narrative of The House of Mirth would provide an easier way in.) They betray a director arriving fully formed, capable of weaving his working-class childhood, the revelation of his own homosexuality, the wavering of his Catholic faith, and deep and often painful remembrance of his mother, with an elegiac temper and willingness to experiment in form. Like his later anamnestic meditations, the Trilogy only has a loose plot, little structure, and barely any dialogue. Instead, scenes occur like reveries, or streams of poetic consciousness in a Modernist novel. Children even evokes Dedalus, Davies’s fellow lapsed-Catholic young artist, with a depiction of corporal punishment — both Joyce’s self-insert Stephen and Davies’s “Robert Tucker” have their palms unjustly pandied by Pharisaic schoolmasters. 

To refer to Davies as a “lyrical” filmmaker has almost become cliché, and not just because he must be the only person to direct biopics of not one but two poets. This does a disservice to his patient mastery of cinematic image: the Trilogy’s blasphemous juxtaposition of Tridentine communion and leather-bound fellatio is breathtaking, as is the desperate Cheyne-Stoking of Tucker’s final moments intercut with memories of childhood carol-singing, lost loves, the Cross, and his mother’s embrace. Likewise, once you’ve seen a poor boy’s Yuletide gazing at a line of apples in The Long Day Closes, it’s similarly hard to forget this visual consecration of yearning wonder. 

Before that came 1988’s Distant Voices, Still Lives, for a long time considered Davies’s artistic pinnacle (in 2002, Sight & Sound ranked it in the top ten films of the previous 25 years, and in 2011, Time Out named it the third greatest British film of all time). Even Godard, famously reticent to give any credit to cinema north of the English Channel, registered his admiration. Davies would later return the compliment, eulogising that “as Proust and Joyce are to the novel, so Godard is to cinema.” He might well have been describing himself. Davies later cited the phenomenon of Proustian recall as key to his opus, as well as T. S. Eliot’s evocation and treatment of memory in Four Quartets. Indeed, Eliot’s late poetic tetralogy informs Distant Voices, Still Lives’s structure and rhapsodic-melancholic tone. 

Distant Voices, Still Lives. Image: British Film Institute/Channel Four Films/ZDF.

Does it warrant comparison with its literary antecedents? The first half, “Distant Voices”, is a masterwork, thanks in large part to the central performance of Pete Postlethwaite terrorising his working-class family in ‘40s Liverpool. He is the tyrannical father to the Trilogy’s nurturing, lamented matriarch. (And though much different than Stephen Dedalus’s affable father Simon, rendered equally impotent by social and economic fatalism.) The second half, “Still Lives” — filmed two years later — does without Postlethwaite and naturally suffers a loss of intensity, settling into a kind of in-colour, diegetic-musical version of the Trilogy sans the transgressive edge. This remarkable film’s post-halftime dip in passion, redolent of Coleridge’s Cristobel and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, is perhaps indicative of a Romantic flame in Davies dimmed by encroaching Modernism. 

That such an impressive work of art came both from and was about Liverpool seems worthy of commemoration. Yet it’s impossible to imagine the Royal Court commissioning a major contemporary playwright to adapt a stage revival of Distant Voices, Still Lives like they did with James Graham and Boys from the Blackstuff let alone to envision it being anywhere near as successful (it’s currently enjoying a run on the West End after debuting in 2023). We can only speculate as to why, but I suspect the answer lies in the formless gap between politics and aesthetics. 

Unlike original Blackstuff author Alan Bleasdale or his popular contemporary Jimmy McGovern, socioeconomic strife and its consequences are only of secondary importance to Davies next to a quietist interrogation of the soul. Where they are propelled by righteous social fury, he is moved by spiritual endurance; where they shake their fists, he contemplates the fear and the trembling. In defiance of his working-class credentials, this can make his work seem arch and even solipsistic; in contrast with his atheistic, left-republican sympathies, Davies’s visual interests trended away from the radical even while they approached the transcendent. If one were to trust the film and not the filmmaker, we might read Davies not as the gay irreligious gadfly he saw himself as but a conservative Catholic existentialist, a harder type for instinctively socialistic Scousers to embrace. And then there’s the plummy accent: inexplicably sonorous, theatrical, camp, and un-Kenny. 

Refusing to be “imprisoned in a Liverpool of self” (as fellow unrecognised Merseysider and Modernist genius Malcolm Lowry once put it), Davies moved away from the city, both geographically and thematically. From ’95 to 2000, he directed two films, both adaptations of American novels: The Neon Bible by John Kennedy Toole and The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton. The latter was a larger creative risk, considering Martin Scorsese’s lavish, big-budget adaptation of Wharton’s The Age of Innocence starring Daniel Day-Lewis and Michelle Pfeiffer was still fresh in audiences’ minds at the time. 

Gillian Anderson in 2000’s The House of Mirth. Image: Allstar/Filmfour.

To admirers of Wharton’s prose, however, Scorsese’s production seems somehow over egged in its melodramatic sensuality, whereas Davies displays perfect pitch in his treatment of the sardonic, hard-edged, and tragic material. A career-best performance by Gillian Anderson, at that point known almost exclusively for TV’s The X-Files, beguiled critics. Although director and star reportedly did not get along, Davies clearly identifies with The House of Mirth’s protagonist Lily Bart, as he would later Sunset Song’s Chris Guthrie, and their social and spiritual katabases — two visionary artistic sex-changes. Unfortunately for the Tiresias of Tuebrook, audiences did not show up, nor did the awards that were strongly rumoured upon release. The film made back only half of its small ten-million-dollar budget, and Davies’s own descent began. 

Davies’s subsequent struggles to secure finance for his projects are a reminder of the old argument (recorded in Geoff Dyer’s book Zona) that for all Hollywood’s innovation, only the sort of serious state funding derided by the West could have sustained important spiritual film projects like Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky’s metaphysical sci-fi Stalker. Once upon a time, the BFI Production Board seeded Davies’s ventures, as well as those of formally ambitious British filmmakers like Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, and Bill Douglas, but that has since ceased to exist. The cultural Darwinism of profit-and-loss and an invertebrate UK Film Council meant that, at 62 years old, Britain’s “greatest living filmmaker” had only completed four features by 2008, 20 years after Distant Voices, Still Lives. 

That year, the criminal neglect that nearly sent Davies into retirement ended when it was announced that he had “won” a micro-budget of £250,000 cobbled together between the Film Council, Northwest Vision and Media, the Liverpool Culture Company, and the BBC — a string of misers pursing their pocketbooks to barely justify their sole purpose. (When Davies had previously gone to the Beeb to adapt Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s novel Sunset Song, they asked him for a reference, as if he was applying for a bank loan. At Channel 4, he was told they wanted him to adapt something contemporary and British instead, and were unmoved by Davies’s unmet challenge to name a good novel set in contemporary Britain. Again, imagine Godard, etc.) It was left up to Hurricane Films, a comparatively tiny local production company, to pony up the £500,000 awarded to them by the Heritage Lottery Fund as part of Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture celebrations. The condition for receiving this cinematic budgetary pittance was to make another film about Liverpool — a matter Davies felt he’d settled with The Long Day Closes. 

Much like beggars, British filmmakers apparently cannot be choosers. And so, to complete the Lowry line from earlier, Davies once again haunted the gutted arcades of the past to produce Of Time and the City, a visual collage poem cut together from newsreel footage, Davies’s recollections, music hall ditties, classical compositions, and quotations from Tennyson, Chekhov, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, as well as the Daviesian mainstays of James Joyce and Eliot’s Four Quartets. The documentary narrative contains some of the by-now embittered Davies’s best invectives — against the British “fossil monarchy”, the “anything but Elysian” Liverpool cityscape, and pop music, especially The Beatles. Oof — it’s as if he wanted to be forgotten. A welcome antidote, nevertheless, to tiresome Scouse exceptionalism, ironically while telling a tale that could be told about nowhere else. 

The real reason to be grateful for Of Time and the City is that it preceded a late-career resurgence for Davies. Beginning with The Deep Blue Sea, a film version of Terrence Rattigan’s stage play, in the last decade of his life Davies also finally completed the phenomenal and emotionally rich Sunset Song and two literary biopics: of Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion, and Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction. 

Of Time and the City, Davies’ eulogy and love song to Liverpool. Image: British Film Institute.

Incidentally, I met the news that Davies was once again going cap-in-hand to raise dosh for the latter film with mixed emotions. I’d recently finished a screenplay for The Burying Party, about Sassoon’s friend and fellow war poet Wilfred Owen, and hearing that the great director was about to plant his Mark V tanks on our no-man’s-land generated no small anxiety. Rewatching both Benediction and The Burying Party while writing this article, I was pleasantly surprised to find both not only hold up well independently but also seem to be in visual and textual communication with each other. Did Davies see our film before making Benediction? I have no idea, but let me cherish the fantasy of il miglior fabbro stumbling across us on Prime Video anyway, those pellucid, élite tones humming at the especially good bits. 

Other than The Deep Blue Sea, which was commissioned by the Rattigan Trust, funding did not come easily for these late projects. It’s almost tempting to genuflect like a religious supplicate in gratitude that they exist at all. Then you remember his unrealised ventures denied to us by the bean-counters — such as a New York thriller inspired by the 1944 noir classic Laura, a romantic comedy he’d scripted called Mad About the Boy, or a purported adaptation of the Stefan Zweig novel The Post Office Girl — and the anger returns. Ah, well. What might have been is, as the fella says, an abstraction, while footfalls echo in the memory.

Not without precedent, none of Davies’s 2010s works were welcomed with particular chaleur in Liverpool, which doesn’t just return the ambivalent passions of its self-exiled son but seems as determined to forget Davies as nearby Wirral is its connections to Lowry, the science fiction pioneer Olaf Stapledon, or another filmic chronicler of working-class trauma, Alan Clarke. The truth of the matter is that this is just not a very literary or cinematic “city region”. Perhaps that’s for the best. After all, the prospect of Distant Voices fans getting decked up once a year in 1940s-style double-pleated trousers suspended over a rolled-sleeve shirt, singing “Buttons and Bows” and baffling bartenders around the city with orders of rum-and-peps and black-and-tans, as Joyce’s admirers do the equivalent of every “Bloomsday” in Dublin, chills to the very marrow. 

I’m also not advocating Davies’s memory falling into the hands of the usual custodians of Liverpool’s heritage. What’s the point in putting up a blue plaque commemorating the original Eric’s when the current Eric’s is so unbelievably shite? This is a city that’s had its artistic soul scoured harder than Freda Dowie’s hallway floor in Distant Voices before being mounted on a crass commemorative plate. But the choice between amnesia and kitsch must be a false dichotomy. In defiance of English neglect, it’s pleasant to fantasise a collective Liverpudlian consciousness that would, every so often, daydream back to life this great visual poet of remembrance. In a cultural sense, Dublin was still British until Yeats, Joyce, Behan, and Synge made it Irish. Perhaps engaging with difficult but rewarding artists like Davies can likewise develop Scouseness beyond its neglectful and carnivorous mother country.