Where to begin with Terence Davies

The sonorously voiced Liverpudlian filmmaker Terence Davies was a soulful, distinctive presence in modern British cinema for over 40 years. Despite long gaps between films at certain phases, and his often being thought of as an outsider of the industry, his inimitable body of work is filled with a compassion and melancholy that stretched across a generation. Over his career, he directed nine feature films. Their recurring themes – memory, music, regret, suppressed desire – were drawn from his own life, his literary sensibilities and his enduring love of cinema.

Davies often cited the four-year period between his abusive father’s death, when Davies was seven, and the start of his adolescence (the latter filled with loneliness and guilt at the realisation of his homosexuality) as “utter bliss”. Born in Liverpool in 1945 to a working-class Catholic family, Davies became a “born again atheist”, replacing religion with the rapturous experience of cinemagoing. 

His post-war upbringing was to become the inspiration of his earliest works, three deeply autobiographical short films – Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983) – which became known as The Terence Davies Trilogy. These led to the impressionistic visualisation of his early family life in his landmark debut feature Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). With its artfully composed tableaux as we glimpse fragments of lost time, the scenes of domestic violence almost unbearable to watch, the film announced Davies as a singular, uncompromising voice in British cinema.

1992’s immensely nostalgic, Palme d’Or-nominated The Long Day Closes once again depicts Davies’s life as a child, but as it’s drawn from the period after his tyrannical father’s death it’s a slightly softer way into his world. Like all his works, it’s filled with music, opening with Nat King Cole’s ‘Stardust’. It’s also rich with excerpts from the films that shaped him from the era he adored: Ealing classics Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949) and The Ladykillers (1955), Meet Me in St Louis (1944), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). The voices of Dennis Price, Alec Guinness, Debbie Reynolds and Judy Garland drift through the film like echoes of remembered dreams. 

At its heart is Bud (Leigh McCormack), a young boy growing up in post-war Liverpool who is engrossed by the cinema while also navigating the bewildering mix of Catholic guilt, school bullies, desire, shame and solitude. In one of Davies’s most revealing sequences, an overhead tracking shot glides from cinema aisles to church pews to school desks – a perfect encapsulation of the world that made him, in all its confusion and rapture.

Davies made four literary adaptations. All of them are sumptuous and rich with meaning, but perhaps the finest is The House of Mirth (2000), dramatised from Edith Wharton’s heartbreaking 1905 novel and starring Gillian Anderson as New York socialite Lily Bart. Her tragic downfall – amid the cruel and gossipy turn-of-the-century high society as she’s forced to try and find a husband with wealth – was more epic in scale than any of Davies’s previous works. With luscious set design and period details, this is a handsome portrait of an ugly world. Anderson’s performance is superbly nuanced, being at turns lustful, playful, betrayed and desperate. Again, Davies brings the themes of isolation and longing to the fore as the camera lingers on windows and frames and Lily is boxed into a world she won’t escape from, ever-yearning for the love she’ll never be allowed to accept.

Although The House of Mirth was critically praised, its lacklustre box-office performance led to Davies struggling for much of the rest of the decade to successfully finance a film. In 2008, he returned with the release of his magnificent documentary Of Time and the City, an evocative montage of archive footage, mostly of Liverpool. Voiced by Davies as he drifts between poetry and his own recollections, it’s a mixture of wry observation, social commentary and personal reminiscence. His words seep into the very fabric of the images of the titular ‘city’, as he contemplates the role of nostalgia and the passing of time in the place that always meant so much to him. It also covers significant historical moments such as the Korean war, Beatlemania, the queen’s coronation and listening to the Grand National “on radios as small and brown as Hovis”. It’s a profoundly immersive experience, funny, reflective and beautifully poignant.

The critical success of Of Time and the City led to a more frequent output from Davies, and he released two more highly acclaimed and extremely personal adaptations, The Deep Blue Sea (2011) and Sunset Song (2015). The meticulously staged adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s melodrama The Deep Blue Sea stars Rachel Weisz and Tom Hiddleston – both at the top of their game – in a tumultuous, ultimately doomed love affair in post-war London. In this gorgeous version of a play first filmed by Anatole Litvak in 1955, Davies’s love of language and fascination with passionate desire and societal repression prove highly resonant.

Davies’s long-gestating adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s great Scottish novel Sunset Song is set in pre-war rural Scotland, as Peter Mullan plays another brutally violent patriarch to Agyness Deyn’s Chris Guthrie, a woman torn between the freedom of the future, the chance to become a teacher, and the love of her land and farm. Once again, Davies returns to the suffocating weight of faith – the fear of God rendered in a simple image: a cross above the door as Chris’s mother, broken by her husband’s sexual violence, takes her own life. Yet amid this anguish, there are moments of transcendence. Sweeping shots of golden fields of corn and soft green hills form a pastoral juxtaposition – a visual hymn that grants the audience a fleeting escape from the relentless sadness. As in his earlier works, the vitality of music and song is present: Chris sings the Scottish song ‘Flowers of the Forest’ on her wedding day, and the storytelling of folk songs, like memory, trauma and love, echo through generations.

A Quiet Passion (2016) would be Davies’s penultimate film and the first of two extraordinary literary biopics. It’s an elegant and empathetic biopic of Emily Dickinson (Cynthia Nixon), wherein the life of an under-recognised artist who wrote of religion and sexual frustration as she battled with her homosexuality and solitude was bound to stir something in Davies. The act of creating art in the written word, so difficult to portray on screen, is deftly conveyed here through Davies’s own love for verse; all his films are poetic even when they are not directly about the medium.

Davies’s final film, Benediction (2021), brings together all that had come before in a masterpiece of cinematic poetry and refinement. The portrait of the First World War poet Siegfreid Sasson, played as a young man by Jack Lowden and in older age by Peter Capaldi, captures the distilled essence of Davies as a filmmaker. From its exploration of homosexuality, longing and lost youth, to its use of nonlinear storytelling and archive footage, it is a fascinating and beguiling swansong.

Although Davies never made anything that failed on an artistic or aesthetic level, The Neon Bible (1995) – a cinematic version of John Kennedy Toole’s 1989 novel – was not particularly well received on release. For the director’s first foray into literary adaptation, there was a general criticism of pacing, plotting and performance (although not of its star Gena Rowlands). The story, told through the memories of a teenage boy on a train, escaping his conservative town in the Depression era Deep South, is familiar to the Davies canon: an abusive father, moral panic, violence, duty, beauty in escapism, joy in music. It’s all there in the exquisitely composed Hopper-like frames, and slow pans evoking time passing. There’s an emotional punch here, and much to love, even if Davies himself, on reflection, said it “doesn’t work”. 

Perhaps we will one day see a version of the adaptation he was working on when he died, Janette Jenkins’s Firefly, which covers the last five days in the life of Noël Coward. Tragically, it seems like it would have been a perfect project for this sardonic, lyrical genius of British cinema.

Love, Sex, Religion, Death: The Complete Films of Terence Davies runs at BFI Southbank in October and November.

Explore the Terence Davies collection on BFI Player.