The Long Day Closes (film group essay)

"The radio waves are heard from deep space..."

The last line in the published screenplay of The Long Day Closes

"The film is a radio oratorio."

David Thomson on The Long Day Closes

1.

Financed by the British Film Institute and released in 1992, The Long Day Closes is the third film in a series of autobiographical motion pictures directed by Terence Davies. Davies’ films are intensely personal and poetic, the kind of movie that can not be made today – at least according to some writers. Critics have lamented the demise of the art-house feature, the kind of artistic, ambitious cinema that first arose in the late nineteen-fifties, flourished in the sixties and, perhaps, expired in the mid-nineties. Lyrical, idiosyncratic film-making like Davies’ movies has no commercial outlet – at least, so it is argued.

But, of course, poetic personal film making has never been commercially viable. Hollywood has never produced pictures of that sort intentionally – to the extent that such movies have been made in Los Angeles, it has been with stealth and cunning; no studio mogul wants to be associated with anything that bears the name of art. In Jean-Luc Godard’s great Contempt, Jack Palance playing a Hollywood studio executive says: "When I hear the word ‘culture,’ I reach for my checkbook" – a reference to words apocryphally spoken by Dr. Goebbels or Hermann Goering: "When I hear the world ‘culture’, I reach for my gun." The meaning of Godard’s line is a bit obscure, but, in context, the words certainly mean that no Hollywood executive would ever intentionally subsidize a film whose objectives were primarily artistic – he will reach for his checkbook, it seems, to hide it. From time to time, personal and artistic films originate in Hollywood – in most cases, these films are contraband smuggled into the studio system.

The great art films of the sixties and thereafter made in Europe or on other continents were typically produced by artists working in environments with strong government financing for the arts. Bergman’s pictures were subsidized in part by the Swedish government; similarly, the German new wave was financed largely through endowments administered in Bonn. Kiastorami’s highly personal films made in Iran were financed as prestige products by the Iranian government and largely subject to administrative control by State censors. Art of the sort made by a director like Davies appeals to only a tiny percentage of the film-going public, probably less that one-tenth of one percent. Productions of this sort can not possibly make money and are offered only the most limited release.

And, yet, we must acknowledge that today there are probably more venues for experimental film making of the kind exemplified by Davies than ever before. Most televisions now gather the signals of over 500 stations and movies of every kind are widely available in DVD format and streaming. Furthermore, I don’t think there’s any evidence that the number of screens available for films like Long Day Closes has decreased. During the golden age of the art cinema, so-called, in the mid-seventies, for instance, a person interested in serious European films could see movies in re-release or first-run at the Oak Cinema in Stadium Village at the University and possibly at the Cedar movie theater on the West Bank. Art movies were shown at the University of Minnesota Film Society on a weekly basis, usually two or three films in first-run in the Upper Midwest and, perhaps, two weekends a month at the Walker Art Center. Today Twin Cities theaters showing art pictures, indies, and foreign films account for about ten screens weekly – there are four or five screens devoted to fare of this kind at Lagoon Theater in the Uptown-Lake area; across the street, the Suburban World shows one film of this kind on a big screen with amenities – in the balcony you can buy booze. The Edina Theater at 50^th and France generally devotes four screens to European, Indie, and Art House films. And the University of Minnesota Film Society continues to screen three or four new European or foreign films weekly. (The Walker Art Center also shows new and important films, although that institution seems more in thrall to Hollywood today than previously.) Silent and vintage films are sometimes shown at the Heights Theater in Arden Hills and there are also several venues devoted to showing Bollywood pictures on weekends, usually Hindi melodramas and musicals. So, on balance, by my computation, there are probably three-times more screens available weekly to non-Hollywood, non-commercially viable films then there were in the supposedly great decades of the European art film forty years ago.

Financing difficulties attending the production of The Long Day Closes make this point. After Distant Voices, Still Lives, Davies was world-renowned. He had received a standing ovation on the red carpet at Cannes and was acclaimed as one of the world’s great film makers. But Davies was unable to raise the 2.2 million pound budget required by The Long Day Closes, a more ambitious film and one requiring more complex technology and effects. A budget of 2.2 million pounds was not particularly lavish in the late eighties, but no one was willing to finance the production because the script was thought to be experimental and non-narrative. Davies eliminated some of the more complicated camera movements and was able to reduce his proposed budget to 1.75 million pounds. Ultimately, the film was financed by British Film Institute’s Production Board – the BFI determined that if it couldn’t help the United Kingdom’s most famous and lauded director make a movie, then, it really had no reason to exist. Funding the picture through the BFI limited administrative costs (but, also, limited PR to promote the film). Predictably, the movie lost money. Until reissued on Criterion disk in 2008, the movie was only rarely seen and almost never screened in an actual theater.

In my view, no useful point is served by lamenting the failure by commerce to support worthwhile and exquisite projects such as Davies’ The Long Day Closes. Most people would find this film completely baffling and a waste of time. By reasonably objective aesthetic standards, we can probably agree that The Long Day Closes, although flawed in some respects, is a magnificent work of art. But audiences, by and large, attend films to be entertained and, for most people, a non-narrative essay on the past, even one as rapturously beautiful as The Long Day Closes simply doesn’t deliver the pleasures that most people expect when they pay for a movie ticket and buy a bucket of popcorn to eat during the show. Rather than lament an alleged lack of taste on the part of the movie-going public, I suppose, we should be thankful that challenging films like The Long Day Closes even exist and are available for us to watch on DVD.

2.

Superficially, the career of Terence Davies resembles to some extent that of another Terence, the American director, Terence Malick. Like Malick, Davies has made only a handful of films in a career spanning almost fifty years. Both directors are exacting craftsmen and control all aspects of the films that they produce. (Davies’ scripts are so precise and detailed that the cameraman on The Long Day Closes, upon reading the scenario, confronted the director with these words: "What do you need me for?" – according to the D.P. on the film, the script specifies the length of shots down to the second, the type of lens required, all aspects of lighting, and nature of the composition; notations identifying the length of shots in seconds are required due to the many musical cues and other imported sound cues in the film.) The two directors each seem to favor highly personal, even autobiographical, subject matter. And both directors are primarily visual in their orientation – there is often a disconnect between the dialogue or sound cues and the imagery shown on the screen. In each case, the film maker’s objective seems to be primarily lyrical and poetic. (If one were to edit the bombast from Malick’s recent The Tree of Life, that film would seem similar in form and intent to The Long Day Closes).

Davies was raised in poverty in the slums of Liverpool, a place not known for its support of the fine arts. When designing sets for The Long Day Closes, Davies was at a disadvantage – his family had been so poor that it didn’t own a camera and there were no childhood photographs of any kind at all. His education seems to have consisted primarily of canings and he reports that he was beaten-up every day throughout the entire school year by bullies. At 15, he was glad to leave school, his primary education completed.

Davies worked as a Liverpool shipping clerk and lived with his mother. After several years, he left the shipping clerk job and labored as an assistant in an accounting firm for a decade. Between his 15^th and 25^th year, when he became an atheist, Davies attended Church daily praying on his knees to be freed from the affliction of his homosexuality. When he was 27, Davies moved to London, a place that terrified him, and attended a third-rate acting school. Davies was handicapped in many ways – he had a thick Liverpudlian accent, was physically unprepossessing (he has white hair and a moon-shaped face and wears thick glasses), and was homosexual at a time when sodomy was a felony offense. Some people drift into film and make movies because it is their profession or on the basis of a mild interest in the art. By contrast, Davies’ was driven to make films by a terrible, visceral need and overcame enormous obstacles to become a movie director. Even before, he attended acting school, Davies had written a scenario for a short film, Children, the first of the trilogy. He sent a copy of the script to the BFI Film Production Board and the government agency reluctantly offered money to finance the project – the BFI was hesitant to provide funding because, although the script was brilliant, it "did not present homosexuality in a positive light."

In any event, Davies was able to make his trilogy of short autobiographical films between 1976 and 1983. This group of films, shot in black and white, have been released in compilation called The Terence Davies Trilogy (1983). (Rather proudly, Davies notes that some critics say that the trilogy is so grim that "these films make Ingmar Bergman look like Jerry Lewis.") Complicating the situation is the fact that The Terence Davies Trilogy is, itself, a part of a larger autobiographical trilogy – the second and third films in the series are Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and the final movie in the group, The Long Day Closes (1992). This group of films is renowned. Many critics claim Distant Voices, Still Lives to be the greatest film ever made in the United Kingdom – unfortunately, the picture is not available on DVD and, for reasons inexplicable to me, not readily accessible in the United States. (Jean-Luc Godard proclaimed Distant Voices, Still Lives to be "wholly magnificent." )

Davies was born in Liverpool in 1945, the youngest surviving child of an Irish-Catholic family with ten siblings (only seven children survived childhood.) His trilogy of autobiographical films is a vast Proustian summoning of Davies’ memories of his boyhood. Davies is gay – he calls himself "a repressed homosexual." The first three films collected in The Terence Davies’ Trilogy mostly concern his adolescence and the suffering that he endured coming to terms with his sexuality. Distant Voices, Still Lives depicts his earliest childhood memories and ends with the death of his savagely abusive and alcoholic father – Davies has said that the has never attempted to depict with any accuracy the abuse that he suffered at the hands of his father because "it is unspeakable" and if shown on screen "would not be believed." (When he was an infant, Davies’ mother sought to escape a beating from her husband by hurling herself out of a second-story window with her baby in her arms. A passing sailor caught her and she was not harmed.) The Long Day Closes studies the relationship between Davies and his widowed mother after the death of his father – the film follows the protagonist, called "Bud Davies," through the end of his middle school (or junior high days). Davies’ regards this part of his life as probably his happiest period and parts of the film resemble an idyll. Throughout these three films, Davies is unsparing in his depiction of poverty and brutality – but, curiously, the films, although sad, are not depressing and, indeed, they all end on a somewhat optimistic note. (The trilogy reminds me of Satjayit Ray’s great Apu trilogy about a young boy from a poverty-stricken Indian village who goes to the University and becomes an educated poet and college professor; Davies work is also somewhat similar to the Taviani brothers film Padre Padrone, about a poor Sicilian shepherd boy who survives savage beatings inflicted by his father to become an important philologist in Rome.)

In 2000, Davies directed an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth starring Gillian Anderson, the actress who became famous as Dana Scully in The X-Files. The film is highly regarded, although, of course, it was unsuccessful at the box-office. Anderson’s performance, in particular, is said to be majestic. (In 1995, Davies directed The Neon Bible based on an unfinished autobiographical novel by John Kennedy O’Toole, the author of A Confederacy of Dunces – reviews of this film are mixed and I recall the picture as puzzling; Davies grasp of the rural southern milieu was thought by some to be uncertain.) Of Time and the City is a intensely personal, although paradoxically grandiose, documentary about Liverpool, tracing the changes in the city from the era of its poverty exemplified by Davies’ neighborhood in his youth through the era of the Beatles. This film, released in 2008, is similar to The Long Day Closes in that Davies evokes Liverpool through a series of complex sound-cues – he makes the city sing to him, intercutting imagery of great Victorian buildings with the demolition of the crowded slums where the filmmaker had been raised. The film is exceedingly complex and digressive; it features a rapturous voice-over narrative by Davies himself. Davis, a great admirer of poetry, reads many poems on the soundtrack as a kind of counterpoint to the music surging under his images. (Davies’ notes that the opening scene of the roses decomposing in The Long Day Closes is based on T.S. Eliot and his love of that poet’s work, particularly The Four Quartets.)

In 2013, Davies film of the Terence Ratigan play The Deep Blue Sea was released to wide critical acclaim. I had never seen any films by Davies and was skeptical that I would enjoy that picture, a movie about a love triangle set in the late forties based on a rather conventional London-based West-End play. I had some vague notions about Davies and understood him to be a sort of confessional film maker who directed movies about his abusive, alcoholic father, his difficult childhood, and his burgeoning recognition that he was homosexual. Of course, these subjects seemed unpromising to me and I had, more or less, resolved to avoid his films. But, on the strength of many strong reviews, I decided to take a look a The Deep Blue Sea. I was overwhelmed by the film’s peculiar moldering beauty and its emotional intensity and resolved that I would have to see all of Davies’ work. The Long Day Closes is, at once, his most experimental and most personal film, but, also, perhaps, his most moving work.

Davies is indisputably the greatest British film maker and, despite his limited professional output, highly influential among practitioners of art cinema. Notwithstanding this status, though, Davies has remained a controversial and disputed figure in some respects. Roger Ebert cites Daniel Mendelsohn’s remark on his own homosexuality: "there is no gay man of my generation (Mendelsohn was born in 1960) whose first experience of desire was not a kind of affliction and that did not teach us to associate longing with shame..." Davies is a gay man, raised as a Catholic, and fifteen years older than the Mendelsohn. Accordingly, Davies’ attitude toward his own homosexuality is fraught with complexities and tinctured with a sense of shame. By contrast to the New Queer Cinema, movies made by homosexual film makers like Derek Jarman, Davies’ pictures are repressed, morose, and his view of gay sexuality carries with it the darkness and reclusion of "the closet" – simply stated, Davies and the figures in his films are not good role models for young homosexuals and there has been some discontent about the director’s ostensible "self-loathing." Furthermore, Davies’ speech and his demeanor have something of the archaic aspect of a nineteen-fifties British queen like Quentin Crisp – his style of homosexuality which is ornate and baroque, expressing itself in adoration of the "fabulous" movie musicals of Davies’ youth is, also, perhaps, politically incorrect. (Davies’ extravagant bearing reminds me a bit of Withnail’s Uncle Monty – "I wept in butcher shops." In an interview Davies said: "I just adored Doris Day. I desperately wanted to be Doris Day – I still want to be Doris Day.") It may take another generation for some gay audiences to distance themselves enough from the existential struggles of people like Davies’ to fully appreciate his work.

3.

The Long Day Closes is a Proustian exploration of Davies’ memories of the years 1955 and 1956 – that is, the time when he was 11 and 12. An important distinction must be made at the outset. Davies is not interested in dramatizing events that he recalls from that time, nor does he wish to provide a narrative of what actually happened to him when he was boy on the verge of puberty. Instead, Davies’ interest, his obsessive concern, is with memory itself – that is, he conveys to us the texture of recalling things that happened forty years ago. Thus, the film’s actual subject is memory: how thoughts and recollections decay and what images and sounds are retained in our imagination of things that happened four decades earlier. This thematic concern with the workings of memory is evidenced by the opening title sequence: while we hear the jaunty Boccherini sonata, we are simultaneously watching the imperceptible decomposition of a pot of roses. Contra Dali, memory isn’t persistent – rather, it is always threatened by decay.

Some of Charles Ives’ greatest muscial compositions have this same effect: in a musical piece like The Unanswered Question or The Housatonic at Stockbridge or any of Ives’ later symphonies, we have the sense that the tunes, the melodies, the voices, as it were of the past, are coming to us across a great distance, distorted by time and memory. The Long Day Closes is similar – students of the film have remarked that the picture is essentially a "musical"; Davies recalls songs and snippets of film dialogue, the 20^th Century Fox fanfare, show-tunes, but these fragments embedded in his memory are half-ruined – they are like the poster for a movie starring Richard Burton, The Robe (1953) that we see half-decayed, ripped, and almost illegible in the opening tracking shot. (The reference to that film is significant; the picture was the first movie shot in wide-screen Cinemascope aspect ratio – Davies’ reference is not merely to a film, but to a moment in film history.)

The shots of the black coal bins underlying the tenements are significant in this light. Memory is always poised over oblivion. Most of what we have experienced is forgotten forever. The dark voids in the movie are like the plaque accumulating in the brain of an Alzheimer’s patient – these dark cavities signify forgetfulness. "Erosion," as the film reminds us, is everywhere and inevitable. When we see "Bud" swinging over the blackness of the coal bin, we have a sense for the fragility of memory, how a few things alone – some fragments of dialogue in a movie, a bit of song, the recollection of an injustice or a beating – survive the wreck of time.

Unlike many film makers whose primary influence is other motion pictures, Davies is not a cinephile in the conventional sense. Until his father died when Davies was seven, the future film maker had never seen a moving picture. (His father, who was mentally ill, imprisoned the family in their tenement to isolate them.) When Davies’ father died, "in agony" the director recalls after two years suffering from stomach cancer, the first thing that the family did together was to attend a movie – as it happened, the first film that Davies saw was Singin’ in the Rain. Thereafter, Davies and his siblings attended the movies weekly. The pictures that most influenced the future director were American musicals, pictures that contrasted powerfully with the gloomy, impoverished, and wet Liverpool slums. (The movies that Davies loves includes disreputable specimens such as Pajama Game and Tammy and the Bachelor.) Davies did not attend art films and was not familiar with the French "nouvelle vague" or the Italian neo-realists. Until he was 27 his knowledge of films outside of popular entertainment was limited to movies that he saw on television. Davies was an admirer of Max Ophul’s Letter from an Unknown Woman and Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter, but these were pictures that he knew only from watching them with his mother on TV. (In interviews in 1992, he names Ingmar Bergman’s Cries and Whispers as the first "art film" that he saw in a movie theater.) Davies’ movies, accordingly, don’t cite European and Japanese models and, unlike a director such Martin Scorsese, he is not learned in the history of film. His primary influences are American musicals and many critics regard The Long Day Closes as a kind of musical, albeit one forged under the melancholiac sign of Saturn. (The picture required 47 clearances of music and sound materials – it has more musical episodes than most film musicals; negotiation of the rights to the music and soundtrack required for the picture was one of the most daunting aspects of the production.)

The Long Day Closes plays an important role in Davies’ career and, I think, that there are aspects of the picture that are extra-filmic – that is, elements of the project exist for idiosyncratic reasons other than their narrative or esthetic significance. Rather, the film’s production, and certain of its features, have personal significance to Davies that can not be known in any exact way by the audience watching the film. The effect is similar to elements in Proust that are clearly implanted in his novels for talismanic reasons, that is, on the basis of a purely private, and, even, concealed significance to the writer. This is demonstrated in two ways: the production of the film and the incorporation into the picture of elements whose significance can not be understood by the audience (or, at least, can’t be understood without footnoting).

Davies’ insisted that much of the film’s budget be devoted to building a replica of the street in Liverpool where he lived during the four year idyll after his father’s death. That slum was torn down in the early sixties and, as Davies rather gleefully notes, "not a brick remains." No pictures existed to show the neighborhood and so Davies, with his set designers, had to reconstruct the neighborhood from memory – memories that the set decorators recall as incredibly detailed. The set built for the movie is exceedingly elaborate – it is detailed down to imitation bird-droppings on some of the wrought-iron railings and the dense "furring" of coal soot on the bricks. Davies’ also insisted that the interiors of his family’s flat be built to actual specifications – this resulted in a warren of tiny rooms that made shooting difficult, particularly since the camera was frequently mounted on cranes or dolly tracks. (All of the walls in the interiors were "fly walls" and could be removed to facilitate camera placement.) Davies’ also insisted on shooting many sequences in Liverpool. The church interiors were shot in Davies’ old parish church with the bemused participation of the local parish priest. The school sequences were filmed in an actual Church of England or Anglican middle school in Liverpool. Whenever possible, Davies worked in the authentic locations. Renowned as Britain’s greatest director, and flush with his success at the Cannes Film Festival, Davies had the bittersweet pleasure of returning to places where he had been bullied and beaten as a kind of conquering hero. There seems to be an element of mischief, even revenge, in Davies’ insisting upon shooting the church sequences in the very place where he had spent so many years on bleeding knees pleading with Christ to free him from his homosexuality – "such a waste of time," he cries out in an interview.

The film’s deeply personal significance to Davies is dramatized as well by certain aspects of the movie that are completely hermetic – that is, details that can’t be understood except when explained by Davies. In the frightening scene involving Bud’s nightmare, Davies notes that, after his father died, he was assigned his parent’s death bed. Accordingly, when the nightmare seizes Davies, the little boy is resting on the bed where his terrifying, and tormented, father died. In one shot, a haggard-looking man walks across the screen. The man is isolated and not a character in the movie. Davies notes that there was a man in the neighborhood dying slowly of throat cancer and that everyone was appalled and afraid of him – this shot refers to that man, although the audience has no way of knowing this. A final example: in one puzzling shot, Bud looks up and sees a door incongruously nailed to the ceiling above his head. What in the world does this mean? Davies explains that his father removed every door internal to the house and used them to repair leaks and as the roof to a lean-to on the back of the flat. This explains why there are no doors inside the tenement – but there is no narrative explanation to this effect. (Another footnote: Bud waits outside the movie theater in pouring rain waiting for an adult to take him into the theater. This is because the film that he wants to see Love me or Leave me, a Doris Day picture, was an A-certificate picture – this means that children could not attend the film without being escorted into the theater by an adult.)

When filming The Long Day Closes, Davies met one of the older boys, now grown into a man, who had mercilessly bullied him. The fellow was avuncular and friendly and Davies’ was horrified that the man had no memory whatsoever about bullying the younger boy. Bitterly, Davies remarks that cruelty that changed his life and that made his days and nights miserable had meant nothing at all to the bully – it had merely been a mild, forgettable diversion as far as the bully was concerned. A critic asked Davies’ if he felt that the movie, with its painstaking reconstruction of the past, had been a kind of "reclamation". (That term seems wrong to me, although in the interview the critic insisted upon it – I would have used the word "reparation.") Davies replied: "Maybe, I thought that way at first. But there’s no reclamation. No catharsis. When the movie was complete, it just increased my sense of loss. What was all this terrible suffering for?"

The Long Day Closes, a title drawn from a "glee" by Sir Arthur Sullivan – we hear the chorale at the end of the movie –has another significance to Davies. Davies says that the "long day" refers to the period of his greatest happiness, the four years from the death of his father in 1953 ending in his adolescent torment in High School, beginning when he was twelve. During that period of time, Davies explains that he thought that he would live a normal life, that he would fall in love and have children, and that he might experience the normal pleasures and pains of growing up. The "closing" of the "long day" is Davies’ renunciation of his hope to love and be loved, the sunset of his dreams of being ordinary and the inception of the sense that he will forever be an outsider, shunned and despised by others.