The latest addition to the venerable Bfi Modern Classics series is dedicated to ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’, Terence Davies’ elegiac debut feature. Set in ‘a world before Elvis, and in a Liverpool before the Beatles’, this autobiographical meditation on a post-war working-class childhood remains one of the finest British films of the past 20 years, and its maker one of British cinema’s most original voices. Davies has not made a film since ‘The House of Mirth’ (2000) and his treatment at the hands of UK film bodies and financiers is evidence of a shameful neglect.
Poet and broadcaster Paul Farley was an inspired choice to write this excellent monograph. Explaining how the film – in essence the tale of the tension between a brutal domineering father and his household – evolved from the former book-keeper’s shorts ‘Trilogy’ (‘Children’, ‘Madonna and Child’, and ‘Death and Transfiguration’), Farley goes on to offer both an affecting personal response, as a Liverpudlian and as a poet, and a persuasive exploration of Davies’ unique visual style. A blending of spaces (the ‘short halls, stairways, coal cellars and meter cupboards of northern England’), sounds (the BBC shipping forecast, a pub sing-a-long, the strains of Vaughan Williams) and memories, Davies’ sensual aesthetic is beautifully encapsulated here.
Davies recently detailed his struggles with organisations such as the UK Film Council, but things may be about to take a turn for the better. A new film, an adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s ‘Sunset Song’, has been announced, and after its rousing reception at the recent 50th London Film Festival, the restoration of ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’ will go on general release in February 2007. Time has done nothing to dim the film’s beauty and power; Farley’s book is a valuable and erudite companion piece.
