God Save the queen

Terence Davies recalls pleasure and pain in Of Time and the City.

Can an atheist have the voice of God? In the documentary Of Time and the City, the latest film by the once-fervent Catholic Terence Davies, the director’s impeccably plummy, orotund narration, which shifts back and forth between profound melancholy and stinging disdain, links a series of memories and poignant observations about Liverpool, his hometown and the subject of this fascinating cine-essay. When I met with Davies at the Toronto Film Festival last September to discuss Of Time and the City, his formidable voice was gentler but still emphasized certain words or concluded sentences with intense, dramatic flourishes; this is a man who charmingly recites passages from Virginia Woolf’s The Waves during an interview.

Of Time and the City is Davies’s first film since 2000’s The House of Mirth and his first nonfiction work; the director, 63, has made only four movies since 1988’s Distant Voices, Still Lives, in addition to a trilogy of shorts begun in 1976. Though slim, Davies’s is an exceptional oeuvre in British cinema: Frequently autobiographical, his films are touching—though never sentimental—reminiscences about sexuality, religion, family and class. Of Time and the City, which will screen at MoMA on January 15 as part of a mini retrospective before opening at Film Forum on January 21, represents Davies’s most bittersweet reconciliation of past and present.

Commissioned by the city of Liverpool to celebrate being named the European culture capital for 2008, Davies’s latest consists almost entirely of archival footage. “I wanted to do a documentary about having grown up there, because we’re all affected by where we grow up,” the director says. “I sketched out a sort of architecture of the piece as I thought I wanted to do it. I had all this wonderful material from all over the northwest and from Pathé and British Movietone News. Then, subconsciously, a thread began to emerge about the nature of mortality, about aging and the acceptance of those things.”

As Davies looks back in the film, he is scathingly funny about religion, referring to a pope as “Clitoris the Umpteenth,” and the British monarchy, calling the beginning of Queen Elizabeth II’s reign “the Betty Windsor show.” He is outraged by Liverpool’s history of abject poverty but nearly rhapsodic about the cinephilia that consumed his life from ages 7 through 11:
“I gorged myself with a frequency that would shame a sinner,” as he remembers in the doc.

But youthful pleasures have faded. “The magic’s gone,” Davies says of filmgoing. “I think it started to disappear after I made my first feature. Once you’re aware of screen grammar, you become aware of when it’s used badly. I get very cross and in such a fury. I can’t concentrate on the story. I’ve become terribly schoolmarmish, but I think what’s happened is that people don’t regard it as a craft. Because it is a craft before it is an art form.”

And other desires, it seems, have vanished entirely. As in his earlier features, Davies weaves in his nascent homosexuality, sparked, as he recalls in Of Time and the City, by the wrestling matches he attended as a child. Though his films are essential contributions to the queer-cinema canon, you won’t find Davies, who says he has been celibate for many years, waving any rainbow flags. “I’ve not celebrated being gay, because I don’t like it. It’s ruined my life. Would I be heterosexual? You bet—like that. But the caveat would be, I’d have to have a wonderful body, be very good-looking and really stupid. Because then the world is your oyster. I don’t think I’m at ease with any sexuality. I think it’s—this sounds awfully pompous—but
I think it’s ungodly.”

Yet the role of the outsider, tortured by his own ambivalence, is precisely what provides the depth of observation in his films: “Between loving and hating, the real journey starts,” as Davies says in Of Time and the City. The director, who lives outside of London, goes back to Liverpool only “to see my dwindling family because they’re dying now.” What does he miss the most about his hometown? “I miss the camaraderie of those streets and the wonderful women,” Davies says. “Northern women are wonderful because they’re funny. I was brought up, really, by women. I miss the little things—like Friday nights, when all my sisters and their friends would come round. I can still smell Friday nights. That really does tug on my heart.”

Do you still gorge yourself on the cinema?
No. The magic’s gone.

When did the magic disappear?
I think it started to disappear after I made my first feature, Distant Voices, Still Lives.

So after 1988?
I think it’s because once you’re aware of screen grammar and when it’s used, as one feels, badly—like tracks are used for no good reason. Cranes are used for no good reason—and they are making huge visual statements. You don’t use them simply to get someone across a room. You don’t do that. You can do that in a cut or a pan. And I get very cross and in such a fury. I can’t concentrate on the story. [Laughs] I’ve become terribly schoolmarmish, I have to say, but I think what’s happened is that people don’t regard it as a craft. Because it is a craft before it is an art form. And you have to know that craft and you have to learn it; it is your job to learn it. If you were a poet, you should know about the difference of verse forms; you should know what the difference is between iambic, spondee and trochaic. That’s your job. You should know the difference between the three forms of sonnet—it’s your job. And a lot of the time I see cinema syntax incorrectly used. I just can’t believe what I see. There are certain things I won’t go see on principle: If they’re violent, I won’t go and see them. My father was psychotically violent and it’s not entertaining, it is not fun being on the receiving end of that. It really isn’t. And if they swear all the time, I’m just bored. It takes no talent to write that, as far as I’m concerned. Horror I don’t understand. It’s like jazz—I simply don’t understand it. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel. And if it’s devil possession, I just think, How silly. Stop being silly. The northern woman comes out of me and I want to say, “Grow up.” [Laughs]

Is there anything that you will see? A certain genre or work by a certain director?
It’s very difficult now. The last two films I saw which I loved were Bertrand Tavernier’s Safe Conduct and, before that, The Age of Innocence. In the first two minutes, you know whether you believe or not. And if you don’t believe, then you really might as well leave the cinema. There’s no point in your being there. You have to believe the lie—because it is a lie, it is an illusion—and if it doesn’t make you suspend your disbelief, then it’s just torture. Also, I have real difficulty with the actors, because they want to act all of the time and that’s really not interesting. And gangster movies—especially British gangster movies—where they all [Affects severe cockney accent] talk like that. Well, no one talks like that: not in Britain, not in London, not anywhere. It’s a completely invented accent, and I don’t believe all that. Real nastiness—you look at the Kray brothers. They look respectable, and they’d kill people at the drop of a hat. But if you looked at them, you wouldn’t think that. They looked like, you know, owners of some really nice clubs where they probably do a bit of stripping now and then but not too often, to keep on the right side of the law. Real evil, as someone said, is ordinary.

So from the age of seven, when you saw Singin’ in the Rain, to 1988, was it just a constant gorging on cinema?
No, between 7 and 11. Those were my happy years. I was literally ecstatically happy for those years. I still obviously went to the movies a lot because I was still discovering it; it was still wonderful. In a way, it replaced my religion because I lost my Catholicism when I was 22. And we did have a decent British cinema. We did—one that wasn’t so American. And once a cinema becomes “sub” anything, it is by its nature second-rate. Why imitate something that other people can do better? Why do that? We should be looking toward stories which arise from our islands and nowhere else. Yes, of course, you can write films about other things, but that shouldn’t be the keynote; it should be what stories arise from our country.

How often do you return to Liverpool?
I don’t go very often now, because there’s nothing for me to go up there for apart from my family, whom I still love. In a way I’ve been weaned away from it. And I suppose in a way weaned away from my family. We’re just an ordinary working-class Liverpool family. They’ve all got accents; I haven’t got an accent. I lost my accent when I was about 11, I am told. I wanted to learn—I didn’t go to university—and I’ve always been self-taught. Knowledge changes you and alienates you from your background in a very curious way, and I find that sad. I’ve said to my family, “If you weren’t related to me, you wouldn’t come sit through my films—you’d be bored stiff.” They say, “Oh no, we wouldn’t!” Of course they would! I’m not offended by that, you know. It’s sweet that they always turn up and they’re very, very supportive, but I know it’s not up their street, really.

What are the hazards of looking back?
I think the main hazards are two: one, nostalgia in the sentimental sense. And I do try to avoid that like the plague. I do believe what Joyce said: It’s unearned emotion. And two, something that you can’t avoid: a sense of loss. That’s very, very painful, even now. Having done the film, it’s reignited all the things that I miss that have gone and all the people that I miss who have gone. That’s very, very hard. The sense of loss is the hardest.

This is your third film in 13 years: Is that due primarily to lack of funds or your reluctance to take on a project that you didn’t feel passionate about?
No. The climate changed in England, and it became very formulaic and to a certain extent still is. And [then there are the] 25-year-olds who’ve done the Robert McKee course telling them how to write a script. And no one would fund anything; it was as simple as that. It’s been a very long, hard eight years.

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