Terence Davies Films | Terence Davies Filmography | Terence Davies Biography | Terence Davies Career | Terence Davies Awards

"I make films to come to terms with my family history.... If there had been no suffering, there would have been no films." Hardly the most unusual of artistic subjects, but for Terence Davies it has been the source of perhaps the most emotionally and technically distinctive films in recent British film history. The Terence Davies Trilogy and Distant Voices, Still Lives chart what some might think unremarkable territory?working class life in northern England after the war?but do so with an artistic seriousness more usually seen as the exclusive preserve of ?European? cinema.

Davies was born in Liverpool in 1945, the youngest of ten children (seven of whom survived infancy); his early life was overshadowed by the mute malevolence and tyrannical violence of his father, for whom he still feels undiminished hatred. In a house where domesticity would cut violently to the most extreme brutality, Davies developed a sensitivity to mood and detail that was to prove intrinsic to his later filmmaking. ?I have a very retentive memory, and can remember things, even atmospheres on particular days. And I think it's these details, particularly about people's behaviour, that reveal the greater truth. As a child, up to the point when my father died, because you had to gauge whether he was in a good mood or not, all my nerve endings were exposed. And when you're a child, you're like an animal, you smell things, so that now that instinct is absolutely there.? When young Davies was eight his father died of a stomach cancer that was perhaps accelerated by drinking disinfectant in an effort to avoid military service.

The next few years of Davies's childhood, until his secondary school, were relatively happy, particularly because of his discovery of American musicals. Davies left school at the age of fifteen and began working as a clerk and an accountant, spending his spare moments writing for the stage and radio. By the age of twenty-six he was shopping a script that was rejected by various television companies. It was after leaving drama school in Coventry that he applied for and received a grant from the British Film Institute Production Board to direct. Children received critical acclaim, including the bronze Hugo at the Chicago Film Festival. He then won a place at the National Film School, where he began his second film.

Children, Madonna and Child, and Death and Transfiguration took ten years for the director to complete, in part because they required three different sources of funding (including the Greater London Arts Association). His critical reputation began to build during this time. His trilogy showing the three stages in the life of Robert Tucker?from being bullied at school through a loveless middle age of masochistic homosexual fantasy to death?constituted an expiation of sexual and religious guilt. ?Not having come to terms with being gay, I had prayed for forgiveness until my knees were literally raw, and I just thought, that's it. I was so angry, it seemed that even if there was a God he was just inhumane.... Although I had rejected Catholicism before I made the films, in the making of the trilogy I worked out my precise reasons for doing so.? The autobiographical basis of the films, however, indicated a startling emotional maturity on the part of the filmmaker, for he explores the bleak potential future of Davies's life?a lonely death (and transfiguration) in a geriatric ward on Christmas Day.

Davies's subject matter was not to everyone's taste. Religious groups in America protested at its sexual content. And according to one critic, ?It makes Ingmar Bergman look like Jerry Lewis.? But its thoughtful handling of non-linear narrative and ?spare and beautiful? black and white photography picked up an array of prizes.

Distant Voices, Still Lives, again made in parts with a variety of funds, confirmed the legitimacy of previous critical accolades. The film, which dealt with his family's history rather than his own, achieved a deepened emotional range and presented considerable technical innovation, winning major prizes at Cannes, Locarno, and Toronto. The desperate groping by critics to find appropriate language to describe the work underscored the originality of his achievement. "If you can readily imagine a musical version of Coronation Street directed by Robert Bresson, with additional dialogue by Sigmund Freud and Tommy Handley, you might know what to expect from Terence Davies;" ?A proletarian Proust;? "A musical, albeit a brutal, Proustian one." Whilst 1950s revivals were not uncommon at this time, this was unmistakably something new. As Davies put it, "I remember the 1950s which have now become very fashionable and unreal, with films like Absolute Beginners and all those television commercials.... It was not romantic, and that's why I chose to shoot the film in that particular shade of brown, because I didn't want it to look like 'The Good Old Days'." This colouring was achieved through a "Bleach By-Pass? operation in the laboratory and careful suppression of primary colours on the set, apart from the red of lipstick and nail-varnish. The effect is stunning. In set pieces that look like tinted photographs it captures the romance and sterility of a culture bound in working-class patriarchy, but glazed with Hollywood escapism. The father's brutality?cutting from him gently filling the children's Christmas stockings to demolishing the dinner table?is contrasted by the love songs tripping off the girls' lips, and a soundtrack featuring such songs as ?Taking A Chance On Love.? Scenes are overlapped through the music, and static holds are animated by sound (the incantationary Home Service Shipping Forecast in the opening shot).

Such qualities have marked Davies as the most promising director in British cinema. He shows a passionate concern with film craft, lamenting what he sees as the British instinct to use film as a medium for recorded theatre; primarily verbal, sentimental, and in the tight bodice of traditional narrative. His films are remarkably effective in disturbing collective memories?and myths?of British cultural life with such cinematic ingenuity.?SAUL FRAMPTON