Terence Davies and the Art of Memory

Born in 1945, Davies grew up in Liverpool, the youngest of ten children of working-class Catholic parents. He feared and detested his abusive father, who died when he was seven, but he adored his mother, who would comfort him when he came home from a day of being bullied at school. “Being gay, and religion, has ruined my life,” he told Roslyn Sulcas in the New York Times in 2016. And yet, as Koresky, the author of the 2014 book Terence Davies, points out, “Davies created one of the great gay filmographies in cinematic history, complexly patterned films in which queerness was detectable in the very contradictions and crosshatches themselves.”

In the Los Angeles Times, Justin Chang observes that “art thrives on contradictions, and the age-old tensions between faith and desire, between dogmatic formalism and wild, unruly feeling, were precisely what made Davies such a magnificently expressive artist. The bitterness that he could pour into his words, rather than festering or calcifying on-screen, instead bloomed into something fully felt, vividly textured, and often indescribably beautiful.”

After his father died, one of Davies’s sisters took him to see Singin’ in the Rain (1952), and it was a transformative experience. “At seven, I discovered the movies, loved them, and swallowed them whole,” he says in his 2008 documentary Of Time and the City. “I gorged myself with a regularity that would shame a sinner.” He fell particularly hard for American musicals—and Doris Day. “What was a real revelation, though,” he told Koresky in an interview last year for the Criterion Channel, “and I didn’t realize it at the time, was cameras moving through space with music.”

At sixteen, Davies left school, and in part to relieve the drudgery of working as a clerk in a shipping office, and later, as an accountant in training, he began acting in the theater and eventually enrolled in the Coventry Drama School. There, he wrote a screenplay for an autobiographical short, sent it around, and found no takers—until Mamoun Hassan at the production office of the British Film Institute gave him a modest budget and insisted he direct it.

Children (1976) focuses on Robert Tucker, an outsider whose full life story is told through Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983) and revisited in Davies’s 1984 novel, Hallelujah Now. “The key word is transfiguration,” writes the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw. “For Davies, the act of memory and cinema transfigured the pain and shame of what he endured of abuse and bigotry in his own life. Without irony or affectation, he brought his early religious belief into parallel with these childhood experiences: these were his stations of the cross. Like Proust, he saw the awful link between art and pain as the agents of truth and the fixity of meaning.”

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), Davies’s first feature, is actually two separate films shot two years apart with the same cast but with different crews. Distant Voices is a portrait of Davies’s family before he was born. As Ryan Gilbey recounts the story in the Guardian, when Pete Postlethwaite, who plays the father, protested that no man would break a broom over the back of his own daughter, Davies gave him his sister’s phone number and said, “Call her.”

Scenes of fury and suffering give way to communal healing when family and friends gather to sing the popular songs of the day. “These scenes evoke a sense of enjoyment in me that I sometimes forget cinema is still capable of,” writes filmmaker Matías Piñeiro in Terence Davies: Textur #3, the book published in conjunction with the Viennale’s 2021 Davies retrospective. “Moments of transcendent beauty nestled alongside instances of lacerating pain,” writes Gilbey. “There was a similar division in Davies himself. Here was a man given to brooding, despair, and self-loathing that could be lightened unexpectedly by outbreaks of exuberance or glimmers of camp, waspish wit.”

The second half of Distant Voices, Still Lives is set in the brighter Britain of the early 1950s, but as Fernando F. Croce pointed out at Slant in 2006, the film is, on the whole, “a far darker work than his subsequent The Long Day Closes [1992], where [Davies] could freely, lyrically recall the burgeoning awareness of his homosexuality, his joy for cinema, or, simply, the stupefying play of light on a carpet. (As film critic Armond White superbly put it, the difference between the two films is the difference between ‘memories Davies can’t get rid of and memories he won’t let go.’)” Revisiting The Long Day Closes in 2012, Croce noted that Davies “addresses the past not with a nostalgist’s doting tidiness, but with a sense of fluid emotions perpetually at play; far from collections of pinned-down poses, his cinematic photograph albums shiver with anger and love, sorrow and hope.”

In 1995, Davies adapted The Neon Bible, the 1954 novel that John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces) wrote when he was sixteen. “I don’t care much for The Neon Bible, a hackneyed mood piece set in a rural backwater of the deep south,” wrote Jonathan Rosenbaum in the Chicago Reader, “but I think the movie, which seems one hundred percent Davies, is wonderful.” Starring Gena Rowlands, The Neon Bible “may not qualify as a masterpiece, as Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes do, but it still contains moments and achievements that are as impressive as anything Davies has ever done,” found Rosenbaum, adding that there are “moments so ecstatic that you may feel yourself rising off your seat.”

Though he’d never seen a single episode of The X-Files, Davies cast Gillian Anderson as the ill-fated socialite Lily Bart in his 2000 adaptation of a 1905 novel by Edith Wharton. “That, ten minutes into The House of Mirth, we find ourselves wondering why Davies didn’t turn his gaze on the social struggles of the wealthy elite sooner proves the extent to which this man’s emotional preoccupations transcend class, nation, or environment,” wrote Max Nelson for Film at Lincoln Center in 2012. When the film opened in New York, J. Hoberman wrote in the Village Voice that it’s “Davies’s unswerving allegiance to the visual that raises The House of Mirth from tasteful literary adaptation to a full-bodied movie to set beside The Magnificent Ambersons and The Life of Oharu.”

The film should have been “an easy sell,” noted Reverse Shot coeditor Jeff Reichert in 2009, “yet by producing a typically Terence Davies film (which is to say, queer), he only ended up with a box-office flop, and further on the margins.” After eight years in the wilderness, Davies returned with Of Time and the City, an essay film on Liverpool in the twentieth century, and for the New York Times’ A. O. Scott, “a deeply personal piece of art that never descends into the confessional or the therapeutic, and a work of social and literary criticism that never lectures or hectors, but rather, with melancholy, tenderness and wit, manages to sing.”

To commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Terence Rattigan in 2011, the Rattigan Trust commissioned an adaptation of the 1952 play, The Deep Blue Sea. Davies cast Rachel Weisz as a woman who leaves her stodgy older husband (Simon Russell Beale) for a dashing young pilot (Tom Hiddleston). “Rattigan may have been a genteel writer,” wrote Bilge Ebiri for Vulture, “but this play about adulterous passion and disillusionment revealed a new emotional nakedness for him. So, too, for Davies, who has somehow found a way into the raw wounds of Rattigan’s work without sacrificing his own glancing, meditative style.” The Deep Blue Sea is “not a showy or pronounced movie. Open yourself up to it, however, and it might destroy you.”

Davies spent nearly two decades trying to get Sunset Song off the ground. Finally completed and released in 2015, the film stars Agyness Deyn as the daughter of a hard-driving Scottish farmer (Peter Mullan). She falls in love with her brother’s friend (Kevin Guthrie), and their marriage is a happy one until he heads off to fight in the First World War. “At once solemn and lusty,” wrote Melissa Anderson in the Voice, “Davies’s page-to-screen transfer of Scottish author Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel beautifully conveys human fragility, our bodies and minds outmatched by the brute indifference of nature or war—or by the cruelties inflicted by those closest to us.”

Before casting Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion (2016), Davies actually did watch a few episodes of Sex and the City, albeit with the sound off. He was impressed by the way she interacted with her fellow cast members. As Filmmaker’s Vadim Rizov noted at the top of his interview with Davies, A Quiet Passion is “a film of many firsts for Terence Davies: his first biopic, his first all-digital-feature, and—unexpectedly—his first work which, for a time, could pass for a comedy.”

Like many, the Guardian’s Andrew Pulver was pleasantly surprised to see another feature appear so soon after Sunset Song. “On the face of it,” he wrote, “the two couldn’t be more different: the former revels in its sweeping landscapes and full-blooded screaming matches, while the latter is a resolutely controlled miniature, barely setting foot outside the Dickinson house in Amherst, Massachusetts. For all that, A Quiet Passion sees Davies returning again to some familiar themes. His Dickinson is, like Sunset Song’s Chris Guthrie, a figure trapped by history and circumstance, desperate to find an outlet for the overwhelming emotions surging inside her.”

In Benediction (2021), Jack Lowden plays poet Siegfried Sassoon, the decorated soldier whose vocal stance against the First World War landed him in a psychiatric hospital. Sassoon spent much of the 1920s living and loving as an openly gay man, but in 1933, he married a woman, Hester (Kate Phillips), and converted to Catholicism. Here, Peter Capaldi takes over the role, playing Sassoon with what Guy Lodge, writing for Variety, describes as “an embittered, permanently set snarl. But this is the rare biopic that makes a virtue of trying to view a life in full, as opposed to zeroing in on a single telling moment in time: Over its roomy, expansive running time, Benediction rather devastatingly shows how we become strangers to ourselves as the years march by.”

Davies’s filmmaking career “always seemed just to be getting started, and, to the end, he kept the exuberant bearing of youth,” writes the New Yorker’s Richard Brody. ”He never made a ‘late’ film; no work of his suggests a detached philosophical overview or a foot in the beyond.” And of course, Benediction was never meant to be his final film. “Nonetheless,” writes Brody, “it’s a spectacular and fitting ending to the career of the greatest of all British filmmakers.”