Terence Davies, 1945-2023

Some filmmakers imagine space odysseys, star wars, or invaders from Mars, but British writer-director Terence Davies had scant interest in the shape of things to come.

Davies, who died on Oct. 7 at the age of 77, may be the only major filmmaker whose entire mature career consisted of reassembling the past — both his own boyhood in Liverpool as well as the histories of other figures, real and fictitious. Among his nine feature films, he never made a work on a contemporary subject, but his cinematic reminiscences nevertheless remained vivid and vital.

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Like many great artists, Davies had a memorably troubled, impoverished childhood and the sensibility to recognize the artistic potential of that childhood. It all must have seemed so bleak at the time: The last-born of 10 children, Davies described his father, who died when he was 6, as a brute. By his account, the Catholic faith in which the family was raised did not persist long beyond his teenage years, but during this period, he found a different sort of chapel in which to worship: the movie theater.

“When I was 7, my oldest sister took me to my first picture,” Davies told interviewer Michael Koresky in 2016. “And it was the Odeon, and it was to see Singin’ in the Rain. I mean, what a way to introduce yourself to film! It’s still my favorite film.”

The movies provided succor in Davies’s life. Properly regarding stints as an accountant and a shipping office clerk as detours, Davies entered Coventry Drama School, where he began making short films in which he attempted to make sense of his upbringing, including his early realization that he was gay, and his early adulthood; these were later gathered together in The Terence Davies Trilogy (1983). It was the last Davies project to have any allusions to the present.

Then came his 1988 masterpiece Distant Voices, Still Lives, which was built on a paradox. Starring Pete Postlethwaite as a savage incarnation of the filmmaker’s own father, the movie depicts the privations of coming of age without much money in post-World War II Liverpool. At the same time, Davies was singularly aware of the compensations afforded to him thanks to popular culture — not just the movies (one scene memorably depicts a rapt audience’s reaction to watching the Hollywood melodrama Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing), but popular music. This is a film bursting with song — from “Buttons and Bows” to “If You Knew Susie.”

Davies looked inward again for The Long Day Closes (1992), which offered a similar vision for its young protagonist: a bleak, or at least stultifying, everyday life mixed with an aspirational dream life. The film was nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Davies, who had been churning up material from his own background for close to two decades by this point, shifted gears. He began applying his superb feel for image, sound, and music to recreating the pasts of others. His imagination was large enough to inhabit the consciousness of Louisiana writer John Kennedy Toole (A Confederacy of Dunces), whose Southern coming-of-age story The Neon Bible was made into a film by Davies, starring Gena Rowlands, in 1995.

The filmmaker had the ideal tragic temperament to tease out the lost opportunities and ill-placed bets that contribute to the ruination of Lily Bart in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth; Davies’s 2000 film, starring Gillian Anderson as Bart, is perhaps his most richly conceived.

Further films followed, including an adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s play The Deep Blue Sea (2011) and two films on poets: A Quiet Passion (2016), starring Cynthia Nixon as Emily Dickinson, and his final work Benediction (2021), starring Jack Lowden as World War I-era poet Siegfried Sassoon. Unlike historical dramas that attempt to impart contemporary values on times long gone, Davies took each epoch he saw fit to film seriously on its own terms.

Davies never romanticized the past — coursing through Benediction is a rare fury at the whole idea of young men being made to fight in wars — but he couldn’t help but obsessively meditate on it. “I am drawn to the past, maybe more than I ought to be,” he told LA Weekly in 2012.

As Davies once made movies about the past, he is now part of it — a place, one hopes, where he might feel very much at home.

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Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.