Obituary | Terence Davies (1945 - 2023)

It would be unthinkable to write about the film director Terence Davies without acknowledging the cinema that introduced me to his films.

Davies died last week, aged 77. London’s Lumiere cinema, on St Martin’s Lane, closed in 1997 after a paltry 16 years. I watched it metamorphose into an Ian Schrager hotel (as I say, it was the 1990s) and the Gymbox fitness club it is today. It was previously an Odeon cinema that screened Walt Disney cartoons, reminiscent of those Terence Davies remembered from the Liverpool of his youth. These venues were his initiation into film, with an elder sister as his escort, when he was 7 years of age. He cried during the iconic dance sequence in ‘Singing In the Rain’ because Gene Kelly was so happy: ‘I remember every single thing about that day. It will be with me for the rest of my life.’

In later years he expressed two main regrets. Firstly, like Siegfried Sassoon, the subject of his last film, he sought redemption, but acknowledged that ultimately it wasn’t in him. He’d turned away from Catholicism and towards atheism at the age of 22. He was devout as a child, immersing himself in prayer until his knees bled. He lost the faith but not the fear, and was left bereft: ’When you're looking for something that will balm your soul, would you ever find it? I've been looking for 76 years.’

Secondly, he hadn’t produced a masterpiece to equal ‘Singing In The Rain’. But some of us believe his first cinema film ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’ to be a work of genius on a par with his favourite musical in the genre he was working in, and the content he was working with. David Robinson, film critic at the Times when his debut was released in 1988, was convinced it assured Davies ‘a secure place in the history of English art, along with Lowry and Lawrence’, even if he didn’t make any further films. He made seven of them, including the documentary ‘Of Time And The City’ (2008) - a love letter to the Liverpool he’d left decades earlier. ‘I’ve recreated a city that is no longer there,’ he said. ‘The city is now a mythical city for me, because memory is myth.’

The dramas were partly adaptations of the works of American authors, the least successful of which, commercially and creatively, was ‘The Neon Bible’, based on the posthumous novel by John Kennedy Toole. ‘House Of Mirth’ (2000), with Gillian Anderson as the doomed Lily Bart, attracted the plaudits. His 2016 film on Emily Dickinson (‘A Quiet Passion’) is notable because nothing before had covered her life with such delicacy.

Of all the capable English directors that could have turned these American subjects into films, Terence Davies is the most unlikely because he was associated with his working class Liverpool childhood of the 1950s. His final film, ’Benediction’ (2022), the life of Siegfried Sassoon, returned him to personal themes and familiar territory; his native England; the Catholicism that he jettisoned in his twenties; the active homosexuality he ditched a decade later, in favour of celibacy. Finally. the poetry that inspired him as a child; that he read throughout his life; that he started to compose during the desperate and isolating eight yours that followed ‘House of Mirth’, when he found it impossible to raise funding to finance a film. ‘Despair is awful because it’s worse than any pain,’ he told one interviewer. ‘I don’t know how I lived, I don’t know how I earned money. But it certainly puts iron in the soul.’

The moments that linger from ‘Benediction’ are those that convey the wartime experience of Sassoon and the impact on him in its aftermath. Those in which he’s in the company of the likes of Ottoline Morrell and Edith Sitwell, pale in comparison. The dialogue is clichéd and modern, the crimes Davies accused other writers of when dramatising history; the performances as caricatured as those in television series that he recoiled from (‘As soon as you hear of another Jane Austen adaptation your heart just sinks’). Sassoon died in 1967. Davies’s depiction of that decade equally sells the film short, as it’s an era beyond his grasp, because it’s outside of his interests. That year introduced an overdue freedom he would benefit from. Namely, the legalisation of homosexuality: ‘(Growing up) with it being a criminal offence, even though you've not done anything, coupled with being Catholic, made it much harder.’

The period in which he was most comfortable was the era of his childhood, and the neighbourhood in Liverpool in which it was played out. He left because he needed to, because he found it stultifying as a native son and a queer outsider. He returned for a while and watched it change and die. He alludes to this in the semi-autobiographical novel ‘Hallelujah Now’ (1984): ‘One by one the street empties as everyone is rehoused on vast estates circling the suburbs, one by one people - who for years have been part of the very fabric of your life - go.’

Davies accepted that the modern world was not for him. 1963 was the date the present halted and the future was kept at bay. This is the annus mirabilis of the celebrated Larkin poem that lists key moments from that season: the end of the Chatterly ban, the birth of sexual intercourse and The Beatles first LP. ‘I don't understand the modern world,’ Davies informed one interrogator. ‘It not only fragments me, it repels me, because a lot of narcissism is in there, too. But those times, if you like, in history, I feel that I can tackle, I feel that I can be safe.’ The past was a safe space because it was over, preserved, unchangeable, but there to be conjured up in fine detail and resurrected on screen. It wasn’t safe at the time, when he left the confines of his family and the street he loved, to endure the bullying from other boys and the beatings they subjected him to during his years at secondary school. Even the family home was a place where his siblings (there were nine at one time) and his mother endured the frequent rages of his ‘psychotic’ father. In ‘Hallelujah Now’, referring to the return home of its protagonist, his fictional stand-in Robert Tucker, he writes: ‘He fell into a constant looking back to a past which had never really existed, he fell into a constant dreaming in nostalgia which dulled the edge of failure.’

Davies felt submerged in his own failure having spent more than a decade employed as a shipping clerk and bookkeeper, after leaving school aged 15. He made his excuses and left, enrolling at drama school in Coventry, for a dalliance with acting. He acquired funds to make the first of what become a trio of short films that settled under the umbrella ‘The Terence Davies Trilogy’. The bullying he was subjected to, the death of his father when he was seven years of age, dominate in ‘Children’. The central character throughout the trilogy is the Robert Tucker who returns in ‘Hallelujah Now’. These black and white films have a crude, bleak feel that mark them out as publicly funded film school fare that document the working class at the time. The low budget imposed limitations on a nascent filmmaker, yet this was perfect for the minimalist style Davies would refine. Throughout the trilogy the technique is evident - the spartan dialogue, the pauses, the silences, the slow tracking shots, the fades to black, the manner in which the figures are framed. A defining moment in ‘Children’ is the reflection of Robert and his mother on the doorstep of the family home being erased by the father’s coffin sliding into the hearse. The final scene of his final film is equally as moving, when the young, anguished Siegfried Sassoon sobs on a park bench, and the camera watches as a silent witness, like a stranger unable to assist or console.

There’s a s similar, less affecting scene in the second sequence in the trilogy (‘Madonna and Child’), when the adult Robert Tucker is crying on the ferry crossing the Mersey, as he makes his way to his office job. Tucker lives with his ailing mother in one of the flats that replaced the terraced houses of his youth. He’s tormented by the mundanity of his days; torn between the Catholic church and his homosexuality. This chapter is reprised more explicitly, and at length, in ‘Hallelujah Now’. Tucker enters into illicit liaisons in public toilets - the last remnants of the ancient streets he lived on as a child - and late-night engagements with S&M activities in which he is invariably the submissive partner, taken to degrading depths that he soon regrets, but quickly returns to so as to satisfy…something : ‘Salvation through pain, seeking pain so that it might purify like purging fire, the passion and the stake.’

The conclusion of the novel and the final film of the trilogy, anticipate Robert’s last days, mute in a hospital ward, a purgatory between the family home and the hearse, long after his mother dies and his siblings too: ‘I can summon them up from the empty house, from the shuttered rooms, from the staircase creaking into silence. From the frail, dead dark they come - my family and me - in a stately, courtly, purple cavalcade. Softly, very, very softly all my ghosts begin to chatter and cough, murmuring in the cold damp dark.’ Robert Tucker dies in his sixties. Terence Davis lived until his seventies. A few years after the author killed off his alter ego on the page, Davies placed himself behind the camera to summon those ghosts, those memories, those rooms for ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’.

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Bruckner is the composer Davies kept close throughout his adulthood, T.S. Eliot the poet, particularly the ‘Four Quartets’, which he first heard in 1962 when Alec Guinness recited it from memory in a television series. Davies carried a copy with him and would quote from it during interviews. Its form inspired the structure of ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’ which combined two films made with a gap of two years between productions. The overall film covers the early territory of the trilogy. Part one is overshadowed by the presence of Davies’ father. Some of the violent acts he committed were overlooked because these were too improbable to be included. Davies mother told him that after too many black eyes from her husband she jumped from a window of the house while holding one of her children, only to fall in the arms of a passing soldier. When the actor cast as the father (Pete Postlethwaite) doubted the veracity of a scene in which he beats his daughter with a broom handle, the director pick up the phone and urged: ‘Call her!’

He later recalled: ‘When my father died, we did begin to live. Our house was like a magnet, especially for my sisters and their friends on a Friday night. So I just wanted to indicate how although this man damaged my entire family, there can be and there must be hope.’ The second part of the film sees the family enjoying the cultural shifts that came with the consumerism and relative ‘affluence’ of the 1950s. The popular songs of the present, and those handed down from the past, emerge from the lips of the cast on nights out, at family functions. The ordinary, natural humour of the British working class is evident throughout. This is Davies bringing his love of musicals to the lives of everyman, along with his brand of technicolour. Except these are not lavish surroundings and epic sets. The imagery is akin to family snapshots; similar colours, similarly framed. We are watching the still lives within those photographs come to life, yet they rarely move beyond the confines of what is captured by the camera. One critic compared this to a Vermeer painting. It’s a personalised view of the British working class shot amid what Davies called ‘English visions’: that certain type of rain on a certain type of a night, splashing against the windows of houses, pubs and hospitals. ‘My point of view comes from instinct and heart,’ he maintained. ‘I try to be as truthful to memory as possible.’

The soundtrack of American songs is punctuated by the English sounds of the shipping forecast, football results and BBC radio’s ‘Round The Horne’. The film, like Davies second feature ‘The Long Day Closes’ (1952) - portraying the happiest years of his childhood, between the death of his father and his hellish years at secondary school - does not at tell a linear story, because memories seldom do. It is without plot; it shifts back and forth in time, from one emotional moment to another. It’s no surprise that Terence Davies would be enamoured with the elliptical, modernist works of Eliot and Virginia Woolf (he dramatised a version of ‘The Waves’ for Radio 4). Although the content of these films is very British, the director’s style leans towards a European model (Jean-Luc Godard described Davies’ debut as ‘magnificent’.) They didn’t reach out and touch the mass audience they should have. Viewers who might recognise themselves, their families, their histories, in the sequences portrayed, and be affected by the melancholy of what one critic praised as ‘two of the greatest works in all of cinema, with no tonal or aesthetic equal’. The films were classified as ‘arthouse’ pictures and screened in venues catering for the genre, such as the Lumiere cinema in Covent Garden.

Davies was in good company there, among foreign filmmakers Tarkovsky, Wenders, Bergman, as well as fellow countryman Peter Greenaway, and Americans such as Jim Jarmusch. The cinema’s setting was no stranger to film. The pub opposite featured in Basil Dearden’s ‘Victim’ (1961), which controversially presented homosexuality in a largely sympathetic light between the Wolfenden Report and legalisation. The street itself was the opening for ‘St Martin’s Lane’ (1938), with a Terence Davies-style tracking shot through crowds queuing outside a theatre as Charles Laughton’s busker entertains them with a theatrical soliloquy. (Davies was familiar with the film, being an admirer of Laughton. Particularly his sole directorial outing ‘ The Night Of The Hunter’ which he saw on it’s release in 1955).

For me, there were wasted cinematic experiences at the Lumiere - superb air conditioning, Chesterfield sofas in the lobby - one of which , ’Jesus Of Montreal’ (1989), springs to mind today. The high points included Bergman’s ‘Fanny and Alexander’ in 1982 and ‘One From The Heart’ that same year - the critical flop that bankrupt Francis Ford Coppola. Yet nothing prepared me for ‘Distance Voices, Still Lives’. It’s impact was similar to Terence Davies experience at ‘Singing In The Rain’. I remember every single thing about that day. I remember the rain, the search for tea and tranquility, and a pub or a cafe in which to settle and process all I’d absorbed in the previous one hour and twenty-five minutes. Days later I returned and watched it again.

This portrayal of the British working class was a refreshing break from the kitchen-sink realism of the past, and the work of directors like Ken Loache and Mike Leigh in the present. It was not a vehicle for characters to be grafted on the adolescent political agenda of wealthy middle class auteurs, and subjected to the worst plights that might befall them. Neither were the characters mocked for showing aspirations that would lead them to affluence and acquisitiveness. One supportive critic summed up Davies debut beautifully: ‘The thing that makes his work extraordinary is that he has taken the techniques and production values of the back lot and the sound stage - and used them to tell stories about people who are normally shown as either comic relief or as social problems. He shoots his mother washing the windows of his terrace house with all the lavish attention of Rouben Mamoulian shooting Greta Garbo. He shoots working class people as if they've got souls.’ Many of us knew these people. They were of our parents generation, and the landscape some of us were acquainted with - the good, the bad and the ugly - before the bulldozers came and brought change.

Recalling his youth, long after it had passed, Davies said: ’I was loved by my family and I never thought that anybody outside my family would love me and what I have found is, over these last few years when I have had financial problems, that people have cared for me.’ For the last thirty years of his life he lived in the Essex village of Mistley. The county is the focus of a three-minute film he directed entitled ‘PassingTime’ (2023), set to a short self-penned poem and scored by Florencia Di Concilio. He spoke proudly of it a fortnight before his death. It’s a tribute to an elder sister who died two years earlier. The sibling credited with introducing him to cinema, and with whom he experienced ‘Singing In The Rain’. The loss had been devastating, he said, and made him profoundly aware of his own mortality.

‘I’m not that good at life,’ he pointed out during one interview. Elsewhere, he suggested he would have found peace as someone else. As a child, he prayed that ‘God would make me like everybody else’. He often mentioned that homosexuality ruined his life, but never explained if this was because of his Catholicism, because it had been a crime, or because, as he admitted, he wasn’t good at relationships. He lived alone and opted for celibacy from 1980: ‘I’ll go to my grave hating it. I did go on to the gay scene for a couple of months. I didn’t like the sexual venality and the narcissism. I would prefer to be lonely than to live a life I couldn’t justify to myself.’

But his sensibility, his vision, owed a debt to him being cast as an odd outsider who may not otherwise have possessed the sensitivity, compassion and desire that drove him to become a unique filmmaker. When he returned to Liverpool to film sequences for the first part of ‘The Terence Davies Trilogy’ a group of men of a similar age approached, keen to know why he was filming there. Davies was a stranger to them, but he recognised one of the men as the main culprit responsible for bullying him throughout his years at secondary school: ‘He didn’t recognise me. He’d inflicted all that suffering. It was nothing to him.’ The bully seldom remembers the bullied, but the one who is bullied remembers everything. Terence Davies did and ultimately turned it into something good….brilliant: ‘One wants to believe, and I do believe that people are intrinsically good. But people are also intrinsically bad. And that’s the difficulty in real life. In a film, you can control life. But you can’t control life when you’re not in a film.’ Someone said the division within his films was similar to that within Davies himself, in his character and his outlook: ‘Moments of transcendent beauty nestled alongside instances of lacerating pain.’ Yet it was through his work, now his legacy, that he came close to bridging that divide: ’I do see that this is my path. It’s a hard path to travel but I’ve got to be truthful to it. And I think I’ve achieved what I set out to do.’