Movie Review: Of Time and the City

There is nothing more likely to make me balk with horror than anything fitting the description of "English heritage cinema." I think of all of those horrifying Merchant-Ivory productions which wistfully yearned for a glorious, happy period of imperial dominance which clearly never existed in the real world.

For many, the antidote to that particular cinematic poison has been the work of director Terence Davies who, beginning with his Trilogy (1976-83), and later with the masterful Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), painstakingly portrayed elements of his own personal experiences of growing up in a post-war and post-Empire England with unflinching honesty. Though at times sentimental for the lost days of his childhood, there is also a focus on ever-present forces of repression, whether they be in the form of organized religion, paternal domestic violence, or societal suppression of the director's own homosexuality.

What is continually disappointing is that funding for Davies' films has been hard to come by, and so his output has been rather meagre; just four features in twenty years gives even Terence Malick a run for his money. A new Terence Davies film, in whatever form it takes, is therefore an event which needs to be celebrated in itself. Of Time and the City in appearance looks like a documentary about Liverpool. Book-ended with grand shots of the modern-day city, the majority in between is composed of found footage mostly of the kind of working-class neighbourhood where Davies grew up, as well as images of the city's proud but dwindling industrial past. As the film marches on, time does too, and we move away from the grainy black-and-white images of Austerity Britain, past the Korean War and the Coronation towards the Sixties and the Beatles, from red-brick housing terraces to grim, menacing tower blocks, and from the director's childhood to his adulthood and self-discovery.

However, those expecting a balanced look at the city's history should be warned that they will be disappointed: for example, the footage of the Beatles, surely a key focus of any examination of twentieth century Liverpool, is brief, with the narration dismissing them as looking like "a firm of provincial solicitors". This is a highly subjective, personal piece of work, in many ways much more about the director than the city of the film's title. His similarly fierce opinions on such matters as the Church, the monarchy, Empire, modern architecture and indeed most anything else modern, smack of curmudgeonly belligerence, and there is a danger with this sort of material of slipping into a kind of Philip Larkin-esque misanthropy. Yet there is also something alluring about this rebelliousness, an anti-establishment stance seemingly at odds with nostalgia, which raises some of the contradictions of what true Englishness, or Britishness, constitutes.

Article Author: Bags

Bags is a writer based in Bristol, UK. He likes the idea of being called a 'cultural historian', though 'boring film and music geek' is probably closer to the mark. Ouch.

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