IN “Of Time and the City,” a new documentary by Terence Davies, the city is his hometown, Liverpool, and the time, true to form for this most Proustian of filmmakers, is the past. “The golden moments pass and leave no trace,” Mr. Davies, who narrates the film, says at one point, quoting Chekhov. But his backward-glancing movies are proof to the contrary. They consist almost entirely of traces, constellations of hallowed people and places recalled with an intensity that verges on the religious.
“Of Time and the City,” which had its premiere at the Cannes Film Festival last year, opens at Film Forum in Manhattan on Jan. 21 and will be featured in a short retrospective of Mr. Davies’s work at the Museum of Modern Art this week. The film ends a long period in the wilderness for this less-than-prolific director, who had not made a movie since “The House of Mirth” in 2000, and signals a return to the autobiographical terrain of his early work. Born in 1945, the youngest of 10 children in a working-class Catholic household, Mr. Davies has spent much of his career chronicling his formative joys and traumas, lingering mournfully on a boyhood defined by his love of Hollywood classics and old pop songs, and his struggles with faith and homosexuality.
He began with a series of black-and-white shorts — “Children” (1976), “Madonna and Child” (1980) and “Death and Transfiguration” (1983), which together came to be known as the Terence Davies Trilogy — that sketched out the biography of a tormented gay man, from childhood to the brink of death. In his first feature, “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1988), he evokes the alternately lulling and jarring rhythms of family life in the shadow of an abusive patriarch.
In “The Long Day Closes” (1992), the presiding presence is a doting mother — Mr. Davies’s father died when he was 7 — though terrors remain in the form of teachers, schoolyard bullies and the alarming onset of puberty. (“The Long Day Closes,” “The House of Mirth” and the Trilogy are screening in the MoMA series, which runs from Thursday through Saturday.)
Working with the most basic and most ethereal of cinematic materials — time and memory — Mr. Davies has devised a mosaiclike film language. Childhood recollections are consecrated as moments out of time and assembled into a symphonic collage, guided more by emotional logic than by plot or chronology. The working-class milieu that tends to be associated with the drab naturalism of the British kitchen-sink school, here comes swaddled in sensory delights: stately tracking shots and overhead angles, gusts of Mahler and Nat King Cole. The overall effect is one of muted rapture, a swelling ecstasy held in check by a constant tug of sadness.
“Of Time and the City” is his first documentary, but it is hardly a typical one and has much in common with the themes and even the methods of his fiction films. “My idea was to contrast the city I knew and the city it has become, which is alien to me,” Mr. Davies said in an interview in Cannes the morning after the film’s premiere. (“Of Time and the City” was one of three movies commissioned to commemorate the selection of Liverpool as the 2008 European capital of culture.)
To evoke the Liverpool of his youth, a class-riven city slipping into a postindustrial dotage, Mr. Davies pored over hours of archival footage, which in turn activated his own fertile memory banks.
“It was really a question of allowing these things to bubble out of my subconscious and then act on them,” he said. “I have a very good emotional memory. I don’t know why when I was a child I’d run out into the street and think, ‘Oh, I’ve got to see how the cobblestones look after the rain today.’ I just thought everyone did.”
As with all his films the soundtrack is of paramount importance. He uses music as emotional outlet and sardonic counterpoint, as in a sequence here that matches Peggy Lee singing “The Folks Who Live on the Hill” with shots of row houses being demolished and replaced by Brutalist tower blocks. Mr. Davies’s narration, combining first-person reverie with a patchwork of quotations from T. S. Eliot, A .E. Housman and many others, is itself an aria of sorrow and scorn, giving full theatrical voice to his curmudgeonly side, which has always been wryly evident in interviews but less so in his movies.
In some aspects — what he calls the “fossil monarchy,” for one — he adopts the stance of a class-conscious reformer, expressing disgust at the ostentation of Queen Elizabeth II’s wedding and coronation (“the start of the Betty Windsor show”). But he can also come off as a proud reactionary, stuck in a halcyon past, contemptuous of change. He laments the emergence of his contemporaries the Beatles, who killed “the witty lyric and the well-crafted love song,” and spitefully scores images of dancing throngs at the Cavern Club to Mahler’s Second Symphony.
Behind these poisoned darts are the conflicted impulses of a very British artist who seems to believe that his country is not as great as it should be, and no longer as great as it thinks.
“Liverpool is the country in embryo,” he said recently, speaking on the phone from his home on the Essex coast. “We are just becoming more and more Neanderthal and uncivilized, and perhaps that’s the fate of all post-imperial powers. I see it all getting worse, and I just hope I’m dead before it gets really bad.”
Mr. Davies belongs to the species of miserablist — the English singer Morrissey is another example, though Mr. Davies would abhor the comparison — for whom unhappiness is not just an idée fixe but almost a badge of honor, something to flaunt and wallow in. Mr. Davies has said that the brief idyll reimagined in “The Long Day Closes” — after the death of his father and before adolescence — was the happiest period of his life. He still insists it has been all downhill from there. Even at Cannes, with positive reviews of the new film rolling in, he had a hard time staying upbeat. “It’s nice to have your ego massaged but it’s not the real world,” he said.
A filmmaker who has little room for contemporary culture in his personal pantheon (“My solace is the music of Bruckner, T. S. Eliot’s Quartets, the sonnets of Shakespeare”), he also freely uses the self-loathing vocabulary of the preliberation homosexual. “I detest being gay,” he said, when asked about the notion of a gay sensibility. “It’s ruined my life. It’s something I struggle with on a daily basis. I would rather be ordinary like everybody else.”
Mr. Davies sounded even glummer on the phone than he had in Cannes. He is trying to develop a new film, but the financing has yet to come together. There is more than a trace of anger when he talks about the eight-year break that followed “The House of Mirth,” during which several proposed projects (including an adaptation of “Sunset Song,” a novel by the Scottish writer Lewis Grassic Gibbon) failed to get off the ground.
“I borrowed against the equity of my house in order to keep myself afloat,” he said. “If I can’t repay that money by next year, I lose my home.” At a low point, in a 2006 interview with The Guardian, he attacked the gatekeepers of the British film industry, singling out executives by name (for good measure, he declared the actor Steve Coogan “about as funny as tertiary syphilis”).
Mr. Davies moved away from autobiography and into literary adaptation with “The Neon Bible” (1995) and “The House of Mirth,” only to be lured back to his Liverpool childhood. This time, he said, he is done for good. “It’s a farewell to Liverpool and all that,” he said of the new film. Of the personal work, he added: “It’s not cathartic. Nothing ever is, unless you’re Sophocles.”
His next project, intriguingly out of character, is a romantic comedy called “Mad About the Boy,” which he described as a “bisexual ménage à trois” set in the fashion world. “It’s nice to make people laugh,” he said. “I want to demonstrate that it’s not all Sturm und Drang. I want to make a comedy that’s enjoyable, nothing more, nothing less.”
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