Of Time and the City

Shown to unprecedented acclaim at Cannes, where it was presented in a special sold-out screening, Of Time and the City marks the welcome return to the screen of Terence Davies. Arguably the UK’s most distinctive living filmmaker, the early feature Distant Voices, Still Lives cemented his auteur status before The Neon Bible, an unjustly maligned adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s novel, and The House of Mirth saw the director working on a broader scale with international financing. In the eight years since The House of Mirth, however, Davies has seen various projects fail to materialise and, as has been widely reported, was cut adrift from the UK film industry while other lesser talents found funding easier to secure. For Davies, a deeply sensitive man, the sense of vindication following the reception of this impassioned documentary about his Liverpool birthplace must have been pronounced.

Created as part of the Digital Departures scheme, set up by North West Vision and Media to tie in with Liverpool’s City of Culture status, this idiosyncratic and hugely personal paean to Davies’ hometown brilliantly blends a poetic verbal account of his early life in Liverpool with contemporary and archive footage of the city. A eulogy to his birthplace that also weaves together the themes that define his early narrative works (homosexuality, Catholicism, death, loss and the power of cinema), Of Time and the City also expresses great anger and regret.

This is particularly evident in the heartbreaking black-and-white images (many of which are reproduced from Nick Broomfield’s Who Cares and Behind the Rent Strike) of the post-1945 slum clearance programme, which saw the working-class communities relocated to purpose built flats on the outskirts of the city. It is also present in the contemporary footage showing the Liverpool of today as a place of relative loneliness and desolation, where alcohol is pedalled to young teenagers and where the costly makeover and regeneration initiatives have come at the expense of a distillation of personality and identity.

Narrated in Davies’ own distinctive voice with quiet grace, dignity and a frequently playful sense of humour (the audio clips of Around the Horn are especially ripe and pregnant with innuendo), the film has been deliberately structured as a work of fiction so as to act as a fascinating, if largely memory-driven and non-linear portrait of a place to which there was always so much more than Liverpool and Everton football clubs and the popular chart sounds of the Beatles.

Of equal note to the images we see are in fact the sounds that we hear, with Davies and his attentive producers drawing together a rhapsodic collection of music including Handel, John Tavener, Liszt and Mahler. For Davies, music, film and culture in general always provided a refuge from the realities of the world, and Of Time and the City ably performs a similar function. Arriving hot-on-the-heels of Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, it also reminds us of the redemptive power of the documentary.

Jason Wood

Anticipation:

Praised to the rafters in Cannes.

Enjoyment:

Amost as emotional to watch as it must have been to make, this is a brilliantly constructed portrait of Davies’ birthplace.

In Retrospect:

A film that feels as if it could not have been made by any other filmmaker.