Of Time and the City DVD

Michael Brooke finds Terence Davies' evocative love song to Liverpool a profoundly poetic work.

It was commissioned as part of Liverpool’s City of Culture celebrations last year, made on a tiny budget, and most of its images were shot by anonymous cameramen many decades earlier. Yet Terence Davies’ latest film (scandalously, his first in nearly a decade, and certainly not for want of trying) is as profoundly personal and poetic as any of his others, with his instantly recognisable signature stamped on every frame. Not just in the narration by his own wonderfully rich, fruity and utterly inimitable voice, but also the musical interludes, ranging from The Hollies and Peggy Lee to John Tavener and ‘Hooray for Hollywood’. No Beatles, though, except briefly and overdubbed by others: Davies is nothing if not candid about his prejudices. He also offers some choice put-downs of ‘the Betty and Phil show’ (the Windsors, that is), and especially the Catholic Church, for which he feels he has had nothing in return for ‘years wasted in useless prayer’.

Inexpressibly haunting images of the Liverpool of his childhood and adolescence are fused with his verbal memories, especially his ecstatic discovery of the cinema (‘I gorged on the movies and swallowed them whole’) and the challenges of growing up gay in a decidedly unsympathetic environment, when homosexual activity was still criminalised and a trip to the wrestling ring offered the safest clandestine thrills.

But for all the autobiography, Davies also has much to say about the city itself, the way the working classes (from which he hails) were, for all their renowned resourcefulness and character, ghettoised literally and metaphorically. However, they preserved a strong cultural identity that is being eroded by today’s greater social fluidity – one of many paradoxes of which Davies is fully aware, and which makes his film such a tantalisingly ambiguous, endlessly multifaceted experience.

As he puts it in a credo that could sum up his whole career: ‘We love the place we hate; then hate the place we love. We leave the place we love; then spend a lifetime trying to regain it. Between loving and hating, the real journey starts. Do you remember? Will you ever forget?’.

Michael Brooke on 2nd March 2009
Author of 135 reviews