London,

Of Time And The City

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Cert: 12A

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Dir: Terence Davies.

 

Description: Celebrated filmmaker Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives) recounts his childhood in Liverpool in this tribute to the current European Capital of Culture and its people. Of Time And The City is his first film in eight years - since The House Of Mirth - and his first documentary, using archive footage to evoke mid post-war England, overlaid with narration and anecdotes about his family life and the internal tug of war between Irish Catholicism and his homosexuality.

Country: UK. 2008. 73mins

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Sepia memories in Of Time and the City

 

Look back in anger: The LOng Walk by Bernard Fallon is one of many images used by Terence Davies in his documentary

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Nothing is ever as glowing in the mind as the remembered past, even when we quail at awkward and cringe-making aspects of it. Terence Davies’s documentary uses his nostalgic memories of the Forties and Fifties as a stick to beat what Liverpool, his home town, and the world itself have become. He doesn’t recognise the city now and, one assumes from the evidence with which he presents us, he doesn’t much like it.

Even The Beatles get it in the neck, mentioned only once to the accompaniment of a wearily cynical “yeah, yeah, yeah” from Davies’s own throatily eloquent, funny and frequently tetchy commentary. Now, he says, he is an alien in his own land.

Nonetheless, Of Time and the City is not a mere catalogue of resentments. Illuminated by skilfully chosen and beautifully matched and edited archive footage, by Davies’s words and by a musical commentary which includes Mahler, Liszt and Handel rubbing shoulders with Benny Goodman, the Spinners and Peggy Lee, it is a cinematic essay about an often riven past. It is Davies’s first film for eight years — a shaming fact considering he is one of our most original film-makers — and it can justly be called poetic. But that shouldn’t put off those who quail at the thought of anything other than film prose.

Some of his references may not be grasped by those, for instance, who have no means of remembering that Fauré’s Dolly Suite — here played over shots of children playing — was the theme tune to the BBC’s Listen With Mother. But no one need fear missing the point.

Davies catalogues the disasters of time, like the back-to-backs of the city replaced by tower blocks and the violence and vandalism which resulted. He also shows us footballers in long shorts who never cuddled after scoring a goal, from an age when Liverpool’s teams were not populated by foreign mercenaries.

Of Time and the City is as much about Davies as Liverpool — his burgeoning homosexuality, his gradual rejection of a strict Catholic upbringing, his despising of royalty (which he calls “The Betty Windsor Show”), his ever-increasing love of the cinema and his introspective feeling of loneliness among his peers. It is about both fond and bitter memories and the way seemingly unimportant incidents from one’s youth are never replaced in the mind, however far away in time.

This is a highly personal work, which serves both as a history of one man’s psyche and memories, and at least a partial record of a time and a city, as its title suggests. It is the kind of documentary which deserves to stand among the very best of its time — precisely because it is so tied to its author’s own experience, both visually and emotionally.

It can also be measured against the work of the great British documentarists of the past, whose films were once the envy of the world.

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