HOUSING BUBBLE Davies borrowed against his home to keep food on the table between films.

Terence Davies

Few movies in the festival ought to stir as much anticipation as Of Time and the City, Davies’s first film since his underseen adaptation of The House of Mirth in 2000. A famously marginalized figure, Davies could be the poet laureate of British cinema. He has no use for conventional narrative, although anyone who’s seen his 1988 masterpiece Distant Voices, Still Lives knows he’s never less than totally accessible. Having already made two fiction films about Liverpool (Distant Voices and its 1992 sequel, The Long Day Closes), he chose to make his third an archival documentary; his model was documentarian Humphrey Jennings’s landmark short “Listen to Britain” (1942).

Of Time employs a highly personal narration, rich with literary quotations (Joyce, Shelley) and Davies’s thoughts on poverty, war and music. “Content dictates form,” he told us at Cannes, in an interview that was sometimes as free-flowing as the film. “It tells you the way it wants to be written. A lot of that poetry is very important, particularly [T.S. Eliot’s] ‘Four Quartets.’ In 1962, I watched on television, over four nights, Alec Guinness reading them from memory. Can you imagine that happening now?” Given that Davies’s interest in art and literature doesn’t accord with the interests of most film producers, we asked him how he’s been feeding himself in the eight years since his last film. “You get into a lot of dirt,” he says. “I had to borrow loans against my home, and if I can’t repay them in three years, I lose my home. That’s what you do.”

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