Terence Davies breaks down the barriers of time and memory in his autobiographical debut.
After beginning his career with a slew of academic and personal shorts, the late 80s and early 90s saw British director Terence Davies release a pair of autobiographical dramas as his first two features. In Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, Davies paints a portrait of his turbulent youth growing up in England as well as the beginnings of his love of cinema. In the former film, Davies focuses more on his family’s impact on his youth. Growing up in Liverpool during the 1940s and early 50s, the film showcases his working-class family commanded with an iron grip by his domineering father (Pete Postlethwaite). Unfolding more like a photo album than a chronological series of events, Davies uses a fractured structure to illustrate the complex and fraught web of relationships he calls a family.
Distant Voices, Still Lives tells its story in two distinct halves. The first section, "Distant Voices," places its focus on Davies’s immediate family, highlighting his father’s overbearing temperament and his mother’s deeply religious teachings. Each of the family members feels overwhelmed in their own way, and each finds their own outlets to express their desired freedoms. In the second half, "Still Lives," the story retains its focus on the family unit, only now they are finding themselves grown-up and thriving more in a brighter 50s Britain. Both halves maintain the fractured structure, but as the film jumps from memory to memory, Davies invites us to join and acquaint ourselves with his family.
Davies takes his time to build out the geography of his memory landscape. His camera holds long on empty stairwells and hallways in his childhood home, expediting the audience’s familiarity with the house’s layout. Almost like partaking in a homestay during a study abroad program, the audience begins eating, celebrating, and arguing alongside the family. As Davies and his siblings are chastised by their parents, our immersion in the scenes allows us to share their frustration. However, like all families, the Davies family has its share of cheerful moments as well, and that proximity to the family also allows the joy to shine through too.
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Since the film is told as a collection of memories, each scene is tinged with a broad range of emotions. Similarly, the significant events of the film are relatable to any family. Whether it’s the birth of a child, a wedding, or the death of a loved one, these are all experiences that many people encounter as they live their lives, and there are generally accepted emotions that correspond to such events. Sure, it’s not impossible for the birth of a child to be something other than happy, but most people treat the event like a celebration.
Davies uses these expectations to his advantage. In his fragmented approach to displaying these common events, emotions begin to bleed between scenes. Frustration begins to emerge there should be happiness and relief makes an appearance in moments that are supposed to be drowned in sorrow. Davies’ family may be complex in their interpersonal relationships with one another, but they still feel the same spectrum of emotion as everyone else, just maybe not at the same times.
While a fractured approach to storytelling can emphasize the stark shifts in emotion between scenes, it can also underscore elements of life that remain consistent. And for the Davies family, if there was one unifying force across every branch of the family tree, it was music. In both halves, Distant Voices, Still Lives, the combined voices of the family echo through every frame. And in each moment, a contagious feeling of pleasure and belonging infects all who participate, including the viewer. The intoxicating invitation occurs several times over the course of the film, and each moment effortlessly brightens the mood of the film.
Whether it's Ella Fitzgerald or Hoagy Carmichael, Davies uses music as a device to fortify the bonds between family members. On a more individual level, expressing themselves through song allows each family member a release from their otherwise tyrannized lives. Even the most down of moods can be uplifted by song. Just as a song crescendoes to a lively chorus, the characters’ faces slowly reveal bigger and bigger grins. Music is the biggest throughline Davies finds to connect each member of the family, and it easily proves to be a strong enough bond to thread its way through his tapestry of a film.
As Davies grows his film beyond the confines of his home, he also puts great care into building out the streets and local landmarks of his hometown. Smooth camera movements and nostalgic tones blanket the streets with a familiar energy. But again, Davies weaponizes these hypnotic approaches. As his fractured scenes unfold, the backgrounds that we have just familiarized ourselves with take on new meaning. Much like telling a story that accompanies places around a town, each time a location is revisited in the film, a new meaning is carried with it. No street corner is a slab of concrete, now it could be a place of first love or final embrace.
For his debut feature film, Davies came directly out of the gate full of ambition. His nonlinear approach to depicting his upbringing onscreen allowed his story to be as singular as he would like. However, by inviting the audience into his family’s most private moments, the approach also encourages the viewer to remember similar moments with their own families. Davies is able to calculate a paradoxical correlation where the film becomes more universal the more specific the events of the scene are.
Davies balances his broad emotions with his intimate recollections, and walking that tightrope on top of his fractured structure is how his complex portrait of family earns its tangibility. Feelings of love, loss, and frustration are in everyone’s lives, and Davies finds a way to use those emotions as a primal source of human connection. If the story were told chronologically, a barrier would remain between the characters and the viewer. But, when the film jumps between scenes like pages in a photo album, the events of the film transcend mere observation. They become shared.
Sean Naughton is a Movie/TV features writer for Collider. He has written at ScreenRant and writes reviews for his blog Naughton But Movies. He loves all types of films and is currently performing the Sisyphean task of finishing his watchlist.
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