Distant Voices Still Lives

Terence Davies' 1988 Distant Voices Still Lives is an audacious exploration of memory.  Memory is non-narrative, unpredictable, and associative -- and, so, these are the characteristics of Davies' film about his childhood memories of lower middle-class family life in Liverpool in the 1940's and '50's  We construct the past from an unreliable blur of textures, sounds -- often music that recalls memories to us -- a certain cast of light, or the fuzzy edge of familiar shadows, the smell of food or the stink of a particular kind of ordure.  Davies' luxuriates in the palpable, tactile aspects of memory:  his film celebrates water-stained walls, ancient wallpaper,  mildew on walls, masonry crumbling between bricks, dim thresholds and windows with faded, sunbleached curtains, narrow domestic stairways and claustrophobic corridors.  Colors are muted as if seen through layers and layers of unsteady and tremulous thought.  The dysfunctional family that Davies' chronicles in this film poses uneasily in the first ten minutes, obviously missing its central figure, Tommy, the monstrous and psychotic father who we see beating his wife and children in sequences that alternate with his agonizing death by cancer.  It's a relief when the unpredictable and sadistic Tommy is not in the frame -- but his absence is also, in some ways, catastrophic and the film doesn't, necessarily, relish his demise.  The film's audience is coerced into the position of the family members -- they fear and despise their father, but he is fascinating to them:  in one scene, the children climb into a hay-loft to watch their father at peace, curry-combing his pony, and they seem almost as appalled and baffled by his happiness in this brief scene as in they are appalled and terrified by his rage.  When Tommy departs from the picture -- and it is Davies' genius to make him always absent (we see a hearse taking him away about four minutes into the picture), there is something vital missing from the picture and from the lives of the family members: the lethal energy has leached out of their lives and so out of the movie.  Life for these children is either placid boredom or unremitting terror.  Thus, the first 50 minutes of the movie (the so-called "Distant Voices") section focusing on the father's depredations alternates between benumbed terror (the wife and children seem stoic, almost zombies) and rebellion:  the eldest son smashes through a window and threatens to fight the old man; the two older sisters have a network of friends and escape from the domestic nightmare to dances and boyfriends and, ultimately, the other spatial center to the film, the public house which stands as the refuge from home, a convivial, densely crowded space that Davies' usually films as a frieze of people drinking and singing together, lined up on one side of the table like the disciples at the Last Supper, the camera tracking along the men and women smoking and guzzling beer and, almost, always singing pop tunes or old ballads or torch songs.  Davies' compositions are exquisite -- he keeps the camera far enough from the people in his movie to respect their dignity and their suffering, but the images are closely observed:  we seem to be close enough to sense what people are feeling.  Many of the shots read as rigidly posed tableaux or portraits -- these type of images characterize the various ritual sequences that Davies' stages:  weddings, funerals, baptisms.  In these sequences, the characters all face the camera frontally, notwithstanding the actual spatial logic of the events shown (the is particularly evident in the christening scenes in which everyone turns directly to the lens). 

Some critics regard the film as autobiographical and assert that the surrogate for the film maker is the eldest son, Tony.  This is wrong.  Davies' second installment in a chronicle that is essentially about his mother's life is the very great The Long Day Closes, a picture in which the young Terence Davies explicitly appears as the baby of the family, his widowed mother's favorite child, and, like Stephen Daedalus in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, a nascent artist always observing the landscapes and people around him so as to forge the aesthetic sensibility that will let him depict these things years later.  Distant Voices Silent Lives is about Davies's father's savagery and its effect on his long-suffering mother and his three older, and much-beloved sibilings, Tony and his big sisters Eunice and Maisie.  (Davies' father died when he was six and there is no stand-in for the little boy in this picture).  In no particular, order the film shows Christmas and Tommy's sentimentality on that holiday, an air raid, the mother singing was she washes an outside window sitting on the ledge, this precarious position metaphorically delineated when her husband beats her savagely in the next scene -- in profile, we see the battered woman mindlessly dusting the top of a table.  The girls court and each of them are married and, then, at last, the son, Tony, who has been in the army also marries.  None of these marriages seem particularly happy and, indeed, they replicate some of the brutal dynamics of the relationship between Tommy and his wife -- although without the beatings.  People turn to the movies and the pub for solace.  Distant Voices Still Lives is fundamentally a musical -- everyone has a vast repertoire of songs that they can sing to console themselves or to cheer up others (there's a wonderful scene of terrified people during an air raid singing "Roll out the Barrel') or, indeed, to comment either directly, or indirectly, on the events occurring around them.  (Davies' sisters combat their wretched father by pretending to be Hollywood debutantes, sporting American accents, and smoking "ciggies' and singing sarcastic show-tunes within his ear-shot.)  People also hide from the misery in their lives by going to the movies and one magisterial sequence shows a tableaux of umbrellas soaked in a driving rain, the camera panning up to movie posters and the wet cornice of the movie palace while the soundtrack plays the orchestral theme to "Love is a Many-Splendored Thing" - the next shot tracks over the heads of an audience crowding the theater, great halos of smoke decorating the air shot through with the projector's light, and, then, picking out the two sisters, now married, weeping as they smoke and watch the screen.  The following shot, however, symbolically, shows the price of this interlude -- two men catapult in slow motion through glass skylights.  These are the women's husbands who have fallen from scaffolding and been seriously injured.  There are more songs in the pubs and at wedding receptions.  Tony weeps desperately before climbing into the limousine that takes him and his bride away.  No one expects happiness in this world -- they just hope to survive.  In the final scenes, we see Davies's mother with her three children walking away from the pub -- it's dark and they vanish into the squalid darkness on the mean streets of Liverpool.  The film resembles, I think, Joyce's Dubliners in many respects -- it's full of barroom songs and arias from light opera and afflicted with a strange sense of stasis, a feeling of paralysis:  everyone yearns to escape and their songs embody that yearning and, yet, no one escapes at all.   I'm ambivalent about this film -- it's structure and peculiar slow camera movements, the way the lens lingers over rising damp and decay, and the movie's resolutely non-narrative scrambling of time and events is a bit daunting.  The film is never dull but it is certainly bafflingly hermetic -- you need to listen to the commentary by Davies' to understand exactly what he is showing you in some scenes.  It's beautiful, moving, but, also, airless in a way, a private epistle from Davies and directed to Davies alone.  But this is on first viewing of a film that is constructed like no other -- except, perhaps, the later and even more non-narrative The Long Day Closes -- and I believe that further watching will probably bring me to a better appreciation of the movie:  it can not be understood on first viewing and I couldn't tell exactly what was happening until the second time I saw the picture.