Home truths... Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), New restoration on BFI Bluray and DVD

“It’s hard to believe that one man could have caused so much suffering and all these years later I make a film about him, it’s extraordinary…”

When I first saw this back in 1988 I was struck by the unmistakable sense of “face”; these were people I knew, relatives that I’d see at weddings and funerals at family gatherings in Liverpool; right down to “Mickey” being the spit of my Aunty Doreen and Freda Dowie’s resemblance to my Nain. This is one of the most resonant films ever made in Britain.

Terence Davies grew up in Liverpool’s Kensington and the houses there are the same as my Mum’s in Anfield and my father’s in Wavertree, all areas of Liverpool that were built on close communities and extended families. The anger and brutality of Davies’ childhood is encapsulated in the primal rage of Pete Postlethwaite… I never saw my grandads go off like him but nor would I have messed with them or my Dad.

Davies was the youngest of ten and this film is almost told from the physical standpoint of the child as he stands slightly outside of the main action, catching snatches of mysterious adult actions and viewing the house, the stairs, the happy and the sad from the detachment of his age and stature. I found this claustrophobic on first viewing but this is perfectly the perception of a boy trying to remember and to make sense of those real and imagined moments that revealed the adult world to him.

I remember similar people and occasions, being four and a page boy at our Doreen’s wedding, the adults buzzing around my Nan’s house in Wavertree, my Aunty Barbara looking so pretty (we still flirt now) and taking care of the precocious little lad with the blue blazer. I didn’t really understand everything that was happening but I knew enough to say thank you to the vicar after the ceremony; it seemed like the right thing to do. There may not have been that much singing in our houses but there was plenty of music – both sides of the family could play, some exceptionally well – and, at funerals especially, there was drinking.

Davies’ film is almost a silent one but filled with music either as soundtrack or sung by the characters: everyone had their own songs whilst others like, If You Knew Suzy, was always a group sing-along. The narrative is an expertly-edited series of narrative gobbets, moving tableaux of family life showing the snatches of joy between the killing graft, the wars and the weight of responsibility placed on the shoulders of men when they were still boys; no wonder they barely grew beyond that point.

It starts with a great opening shot the front of one of many thousands of Victorian terraced houses and as the camera moves into the hallway and round to the front room where we see the three children and their mother: all in the moments between definite emotions… weddings, funerals; there’s sadness either way. The mother sings one of Davies’ mam’s favourites, setting the tone, and then we have Jessye Norman singing There’s a Man Going Round Taking Names.

On the wall behind them is the only photograph of Davies' father with a horse, one of the few pleasures he ever found in life: “it’s hard to believe that one man could have caused so much suffering and all these years later I make a film about him, it’s extraordinary…”

It’s one of the most genuine films ever made full of rounded characters we know, like and would want to avoid. Chief amongst these is the Father – one of legions of working-class men born into misery and rage: a stranger to happiness he wishes. As Davies says, like all tyrants he’s moved by sentimentality and not by real emotion; he wishes his children a happy Christmas when they’re asleep because he can’t face saying it to them awake. The next day he explodes at the dinner table and rips the Christmas dinner onto the floor.

Postlethwaite does Scouse like a native even if he was from another great Lancashire town, Warrington, up the road. His portrayal of Tommy Davies is one of the great horrors in British film: a man who can favour his eldest daughter Eileen (Angela Walsh) whilst later beating her sister Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne) with a broom for even asking if she can go to the dance: an event that happened to the film-maker’s sister.

He’s similarly aggressive towards eldest son, Tony (Dean Williams), who he casually kicks out of the house for some misdemeanour… the lad can’t be more than 12. This is another real event and after sleeping rough in the park for a few days he went to live with his Gran and never came back. Davies was present when years later, his brother came home - absent without leave - smashing the front windows wanting to fight his father.

At the same time, Tommy has a soft spot for Eileen’s mate Micky (Debi Jones – who is so full of Scouse joy), for whom he’s far more lenient and humane… the dirty old get! Mickey was based on his sister’s best mate Monica Kelly and Davies talks lovingly of the women, their humour, style and ability to keep their heads even when their men, all around them, were losing theirs.

Meanwhile the next generation of men are heading in the same direction, some cut from the same cloth: Eileen marries Dave (Michael Starke, one of many Brooksiders in the cast and good with it too!) – who gets a bit funny about people coming round… whilst her mate Jingles (Marie Jelliman) is hitched to Les (a vicious turn from Andrew Schofield who I once saw playing in the same band as Margi Clarke at Eric’s) with whom you would not want to mess.

Mickey has it easier with the jokey Red (Chris Darwin) and Maisie finds the good fella she deserves in George (Vincent Maguire) … there’s hope that the family will progress and, what we don’t see in this scaled-down version, is the tenth child growing up to make a quite exceptional film about it all.

In the Q&A accompanying the screening of this restored edition, Davies revealed he never watches his films as he always sees the faults and spent enough time with them during editing. He’s very self-depreciating – you can take the boy out of Liverpool… The film is not autobiographical per se but it mixes in real events with fictional representations such as when Tony and his brother-in-law fall off the scaffolding: a mix of Davies’ eldest brother’s injury in the forces and his brother-in-law falling.

His father had black rages and some of the stories were toned down – one time his mother jumped out of their bedroom window to avoid her husband’s fury and was caught by a passing soldier; Davies felt this wouldn’t have been believable and yet, it happened.

This was his first film, made with BFI backing on a shoe-string but out of necessity came an extraordinary flow of images – the shot of the umbrellas outside the Futurist and the camera floating over the sisters as they cry watching a film inside as a lush, orchestral version of Love is a Many Splendoured Thing plays, followed by the men crashing down through glass in slow motion. A “magical lie” as Davies says but an incredibly powerful sequence.

Davies’ love for his siblings, friends and family imbues the film and it’s instantly recognisable by all: even with so much rage in their lives they continued to love and snatch those precious shards of happiness whenever they could.

This 4K digital restoration from the original 35mm camera negative, approved by director Terence Davies, is simply stunning and every home should have one. It’s available on Blu-ray and DVD from the BFI Shop and online. Every home should have one!

There’s a welter of extras including a post-screening Q&A and Davies’ commentary on the film – essential listening – along with interviews with the director from 2007. A chunky and fully illustrated booklet has new writing on the film by critic Derek Malcolm and art director Miki van Zwanenberg, essays by Geoff Andrew and Adrian Danks, and full film credits.

There’s also Images of Liverpool in Archive Film (1939-42, 62 mins) which features three archive shorts depicting the city of Liverpool and its community when the city had a million people and my parents were kids…

Distant voices… Of Time and the City (2008)

Terence Davies’ memorial montage of Liverpool was commissioned as part of the city’s 2008 Capital of Culture celebration. The organisers were looking to get a take on the “new” from someone who had left the city and in Davies’ case this had been in 1973 when he was 28. The director felt that he’d already had his say on his home town with his stunning Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes and had to be persuaded into making a documentary.

He was finally convinced by a vision of Everton Valley high-rise flats accompanied in his head by Peggy Lee singing The Folks Who Live on the Hill. The Lord sings in mysterious ways…  

Of Time and the City emerged as an unique description of growing up amidst post war decline with Davies as the sardonically poetic narrator of his own emergence from this wreckage. Institutions, architects, pop music and, above all, the Catholic Church all let him down but he came through.

Filming St George's Hall

It’s a totally honest film and one without artifice or sorrow – he may not sound it now but Davies is a Scouser alright. One of ten children crammed into a terraced house in Kensington (not the same as London’s version…), he is one of that glorious generation who made something of themselves as the city’s education system contributed to an accelerated social mobility of a kind we’re unlikely to see again.

My parents’ were similarly enabled and moved out from Anfield and Wavertree to the leafy commuter town of Lydiate, damning me forever to be an out-of-town “woollyback” but we move on… Liverpool and transience go hand in hand, but it’s my family’s city and some live there still.

They say that the only people who love Liverpool are the ones that have left…  Davies is not necessarily amongst them and leaving his rose-tinted camera at home, remembers to bring his poison pen. That said, he clearly retains affection for his family and the community he grew up in.

St George's Hall - scale and splendour...

The film opens with lingering shots of the massive classicism of St George’s Hall – the largest contained space in any municipal building of its era and a statement of civic architectural arrogance unrivalled anywhere else in Yorkshire or Lancashire - a fair reflection of the city’s economic importance at a time when it was pretty much second only to London.

Liverpool's Pier Head

There are frequent shots of the overhead railway which ran along the river front giving a south Manhattan appearance to this most American of British cities. As a silent film aside...this was the scene of the World’s first tracking shot with the Lumière brothers placing their camera on the train in 1896 to record the dock side past the old Customs House and long disappeared warehouses signifying Liverpool’s true nature as a port of empire.

The Lumière's 1896 train ride - Princes and Albert Docks

The footage isn't in this film but you can see it here. Sadly, like many Liverpool landmarks, the railway fell victim to short-term planning decisions and was demolished in the mid-50’s disappointing Davies and many other schoolboys.

Davies post-Catholic confessions are emphatically rendered as he describes his “thousands of hours of wasted prayers” and a futile wait for forgiveness from a God that had no time for deviations from the norm. There’s a painful counterpointing showing a deconsecrated church being used as a bar… graven images still in place looking down incongruously on the revellers.

Then he shows the opening of the city’s Catholic Cathedral, an impressively ambitious construction in cold concrete, locally termed Paddy’s Wigwam, bishops in their flowing red dresses struggling against the Irish Sea wind on an unwelcoming mid-60s day.

Not "Betty and Phil"

Davies is also impressively dismissive of the “Betty and Phil show” with his voice over to Elizabeth II’s 1947 wedding detailing the royal couple’s extensive and mind-numbingly prosaic list of gifts… Barely a pause and he details the even greater “waste” at her coronation in 1954. And so it goes… with a quick cut to less well-fed working people eking out their living on rations in austerity Britain… and so it goes.

Davies’ was sustained by creative appreciation with movies his particular passion alongside arousing trips to oggle the wrestlers tight shorts at the Liverpool Stadium. We’re shown a premier at Birkenhead’s Ritzi cinema, as Gregory Peck helps make this "the Hollywood of the North".

Davies’ fondness for popular music did not extend to rock and roll and his sneering  “yeah, yeah, yeah…” tells you all you need to know of his opinion of The Beatles: “…more a firm of North-western accountants than a pop group”. Liking the Mop Tops isn't a legal requirement for Liverpudlians and,as elsewhere, Davies is totally honest - beat music's rough visceral charm evaded him and he much preferred the well-honed popular classics.

But Davies real passion is with classical music and he reels off a string of exotic European names with relish as Hippy Hippy Shake plays over manic scenes from The Cavern. The film begins with the screen being elevated in the Liverpool Philharmonic and you can hear a section from Mahler’s 2nd later in the film (sadly not performed on this occasion by my uncle's former band, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra - the most recorded orchestra in Britain).

Davies with producers Solon Papadopoulos and Roy Boulter at the Phil

On a strictly limited budget, Of Time and the City is a masterpiece of cost-controlled collage with film acquired on a miniscule budget and seamlessly strung together in support of the director’s commentary. Davies shows the demolition of the old Victorian terraces and their replacement by high-rise homogeneity. For families like the Davies’ it meant the enforced exchange of one unsatisfactory way of life with another, more isolated but with arguably better views...

There is disappointment at Bold Street booze-culture but Davies doesn’t appear overtly judgmental of today's city. His ire is reserved for those who forged his difficult years and for the myopic planners who blighted the area for decades. Possibly in spite of himself, the film is dominated by the 40's and 50's of his childhood, until everything comes crashing down in the 60's to be replaced by concrete isolation.

Davies’ culture worked in part because of his family and not circumstance.  He is rightfully proud of the man he has made and his journey beyond. Returning now he feels estranged: it’s not the place that he knew and – presumably – his people have also moved on too. And it’s people that make the place.

He’s not alone and Liverpool has almost halved in population over the last half century as it has evolved into something new. It’s still a place with extremes and beauty... and it endures.

Davies concludes by saying “goodnight ladies” to the “Three Graces” that dominate the Pier Head – these are at least unchanged in spite of all behind them…

I watched the BFI DVD which comes with a wealth of extras including Humphrey Jenning's documentary Listen to Britain which inspired Davies’ approach to the film. I don’t think you have to come from Merseyside to connect – this is a universal take on the nature of change and identity – and whilst Davies knows where he came from he is also a man who truly knows himself best of all.