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AMERICAN CINEMA PAPERS
1988 |
Distant Voices, Still Lives TERENCE
DAVIES – IN INTERVIEW by Harlan Kennedy Movies
are a many-splendored thing. Bombs fall. Babies are born. Lives are lived and lost. The old Place: Time: any and every year between the war's end and the beginning of the Brave New Fifties, in
transition from austerity to You've Never
Had It So Good. British cinema has reportedly
never had it so good either. But even in
a decade studded with Renaissance
gems, Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives looks like
the Koh-I-Noor diamond.
It outshone almost every other movie at Normally sober, and even normally drunk, critics unpacked long-mothballed superlatives. And back in It is. The movie is a mirror held up to a country, a family, and a time – and to the emotions of a joyful and horrifying childhood. It is
Davies' portrait, moving but never misted
by sentimentality, of his own
warring parents and his oldest
brother and two oldest sisters. (Davies was the youngest of ten children
born to a poor What makes it a modern film, and not a tissue of self-mythologizing pretension like Hope and Glory, is its textual and formal complexity. For all the bells it's bound to set ringing among people ready to invoke the D. H. Lawrence (or Bill Douglas) tradition of crucified provincial
childhood, the film's status is as
meta-cinema in the manner of Andrei
Tarkovsky. It's a film about memory – but it's also a film about making a film
about memory. Davies stuffs the movie with
deliberately exposed bits of grammar and homage. You're aware of the artifices of film lighting. (The chiaroscuro in early scenes is out of German Expressionism
via How Green Was My Valley.) You're aware that each crane shot is a
crane shot. You're aware that a camera,
tracking from a wedding reception hall into a gulf of darkness then into a candlelit church then into more darkness and then along a terraced street, is a geography-defying coup de cinema. And you're aware of the recurring door-frame motif, Searchers-style, distancing and contextualizing the memory of family or friends. But none of this awareness of style and technique vitiates the film's emotional impact. One reason is that its material is not dead but overpoweringly alive. For Davies, the past is not a foreign country in the sighing, elegiac sense coined in The Go-Between – and transmitted to the recent spate of Empire reveries. For Davies, if the past is a foreign country, it's guerrilla territory:
not a sedate outpost of our existential
empire but a ● This Sturm and Drang approach
to the cinema of autobiography was
prefigured in Bill Douglas'
trilogy: My Ain Folk (the first two parts) and My
Way Home. But Davies' past is now. And it has a universal resonance because it has a fearless specificity. Ten
minutes into the film you realize how
unnerving its originality is.
Scenes are not there to illustrate
points. There is no "message" in the jagged tableaux of memory Davies is throwing at us like pieces of broken glass. A boy smashes a window and screams and swears into the unanswering interior. Next shot, he is standing dead still and bloody-handed, talking quietly to his dad. One moment we are with the family after Dad's death. The next we are with them years before. There are no syntactical signposts to guide us. The ripple-dissolve is dead, the mute, brute cut is the new grammar. The characters are likewise mosaics pieced together out of rupture and
contradiction. Dad (Pete Postlethwaite) is stoical and long-suffering. Dad is a raging bully who beats his wife and children. Dad is a kindhearted chap who puts
out a stocking on Christmas Eve. Dad is a
maniac who pulls the tablecloth and crockery off the table for no reason and
screams at Mum to come and tidy. Dad
lies gray-faced and white-sheeted
in hospital. Dad is suddenly back at the
front door, black-faced and brooding. Dad
is loved and venerated. Dad is
loathed and feared. Most films – or books or plays – about childhood lay a patina of adult understanding over the incomprehension of the child's mind. Life couldn't be made sense of then, but thank God it can be made sense of now. But Davies' movie isn't like that. It suggests not only that the child can't understand what is happening around him (even the near-grown-up children depicted in the movie), but that the adult looking back cannot understand what happened to him either. That indeed there is no understanding. There is only a sense that the family is by turns an inexhaustibly rich microcosm and an unbearably grim parody of all the ideas and emotions, hopes and quests, by which we live. ● Chief quest is for love. Distant Voices, Part 1 of the diptych movie, lasting 45 minutes, gives us the three children's struggle for love inside and outside the family. Part 2, Still Lives (30 minutes), is set two years later and was filmed two years
later. It has the two sisters married (one unhappily) and the brother about to be. Dad is dead, and individual memories picture the long central scene of a gathering of friends and family in the local pub. Though Davies refuses to make life easy by explaining childhood and its sufferings, the movie is never random in either structure or substance. Progressively in Part 1, we and the characters try to fathom the mystery of love. Love as something that can be bought: early scenes tintinnabulate with the clink of coins thrown or swapped between parents and children. Love as a vertiginous gamble: "Taking a chance on love," croons the soundtrack over a scene of Mum (Freda Dowie) perched on a high windowsill cleaning an outside pane. (And the same song continues smoothly into the next scene, of Dad savagely beating Mum.) And love as blind faith or blind devotion: "I want me dad," sobs dad-battered elder sister Eileen (Angela Walsh) at her wedding, crumpling in her brother's arms. In Part 2, Eileen's search for love, not surprisingly, has developed a split personality: marital disillusion coexists with maudlin, vicarious fantasy. One moment she is leading the pub singalong in a rendering of "I killed nobody but my husband." The next she is sobbing her heart out at Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, awash at the big screen's version of all the lost emotions she's failed to find in her marriage. The movie has its own version of this constant seesaw between hope and hopelessness. It never levels out at a sustained mood, and it shows the volatility of a world in which despair and happiness can each be a springing-off point for the other. Eileen weeps for Dad at her own wedding. And her brother Tony (Dean Williams) stands alone on the family doorstep, sobbing with grief, at his own wedding party. Conversely, Davies' camera
mimics the process by which joy can grow out of darkness. Three crane shots in the film are unforgettable. In
one, the camera rises mysteriously,
magically to the second floor bedroom
window of the family's terraced house at night, and then the shot
changes almost unperceived into a
reverse interior of the window glowing with daylight, as we hear a softly
murmured voice-off ("I loved
the light nights.") Another shot levitates from a rain-huddled dome of umbrellas to the rooftop poster for Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing, followed by a low glide (as smooth and numinous as the packing-cases shot in Kane) over the sniffling, raptured audience. But the movie's finest grace
note is one that wills a deliberately
enigmatic slippage in time. Late in Part 2, the camera turns away from an injured Tony's
hospital bedside, rises to gaze out of the rain-streaming window, then re-descends to discover a new group of sympathizers around the bed and a palpably
changed emotional temperature. We are
aware that hours could have
passed, or days, or weeks, in a few seconds
of camera life. Distant Voices, Still Lives is postmodernist cinema just as
● Acloud of white hair topping a bespectacled moon face, Davies looks like a child from a Nativity play who's suddenly grown up and is still in shock at the transformation. Though he left school at 15 – That may be an understatement. Trilogy's first two parts – Children and Madonna
and Child – are squeezed out like
drops of pain from Davies' psyche: a grim
free-association of hospitals, confessionals,
schoolrooms, and homosexual one-night stands filmed in penitential
monochrome. Only in Part 3, the powerful Death and Transfiguration, interweaving the life of the young hero (Terry O'Sullivan) with scenes from his own deathbed as an older man (played by Wilfred Brambell),
does Davies start to find the blithe conjuring with time and emotion, and with the ironic potency of popular song, developed in Distant Voices, Still Lives. Trilogy, pieced together with grant money over eight years, became Davies' calling card. With these cans of self-mortifying celluloid under his arm, he did today's equivalent of the Grand Tour: i.e., the film festival circuit. Chicago, Locarno, and Oberhausen, inter alia, gave him a welcome and also gave him prizes. He was lucky there was no ● Are you still Catholic? God, no! I gave that up at 22. I suddenly realized then that it
was a con. I was a very devout Catholic, I really did believe. But it gave me no succor.
And when I realized I was gay, and was
getting absolutely guilt-ridden about
it and not doing anything, I knew something
was deeply wrong. I prayed until
my knees were raw and finally went to Mass one Sunday evening, and just before the offertory I thought: It's a
lie, it's actually a lie; they're just men in
frocks. And I got up and walked out. And
I never went back – it was that sudden.
It was like the Emperor's New Clothes. And I was so angry. I'm still very angry about it, because it wasted a lot of my emotional time. Was this just an emotional rejection? Or do you think Catholicism is logically and intellectually flawed as
well? Well, for me it's flawed because it starts from the premise that we're all sinners. I don't accept that. I think original sin is a
monstrous idea. I don't believe most people are evil, though some undoubtedly are. The majority of people
are basically good, they don't go around killing six million people. But it's
all a question of belief or disbelief. If you look at it quite
dispassionately, it's as remote, as
unmeaning, as the Egyptian Book of the Dead. It's that remote to me
now, and it's as exotic, as theatrical.
The Catholic Church, if nothing
else, has a great sense of theater. In a sense it's like watching a film. After two minutes – if you believe, then that's fine. If you don't believe, forget
it. No matter how good it might be. Your Catholic background seems to have left one mark on your movies: they're structured like altarpieces. Why is the new movie in two
separate parts? Well, I feel they complement one another. All the terrible family history is packed into Distant
Voices, which is about the
nature of time and memory. But in
Part 2 – Still Lives –
life has reached an even keel. I wanted to make something interesting out of our lives as stasis. The first part throws the second
part into relief. And in Part 2 we see the
chains that bind this family together
beginning to loosen and the family
drifting apart. Imperceptibly: they
don't realize it. And that's why at the end, one by one, they go into the dark. "Dark, dark, dark, they all go into
the dark." A kind of metaphorical death. ● How much
of the movie is direct autobiography? Well, all the things that
happen actually happened. If not to me,
to my family. They told these
stories when I was very young, so they became part of my memory, almost as though they happened to me because they were so vivid. But some things I remember being part of. The Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing sequence was
based on a visit to the cinema one
hot Saturday; my two sisters took me, and everyone was weeping away in the audience. And
I wanted to have the irony of the two men falling through the glass roof in the scene we cut to. The idea is that life is much harsher than what you've seen on the screen. And it disorients you, which I think is interesting. You don't
know quite where you are. There are
other things in the sequence. The umbrellas
are a direct homage to Singin' in the
Rain. I was determined to have umbrellas with rain on them! And then you go inside and everyone's weeping. And then – suddenly – their brother and Eileen's husband have this huge accident. Out of the blue, you realize
your hold on life is tenuous. How closely do you structure the movie when you write the script? I write down everything as I
hear and see it in my mind – every track,
pan, dissolve, crane, piece of music. So the script becomes an aide-memoire, which is
why I never do a storyboard. But content dictates form, so I'm not
conscious of how or why I structure certain
things in a certain way. Mahler
said, "One does not compose,
one is composed." And that's
what happens with a film: it will tell its story in the way it wants
to be told. And, you know, you want to tell
it in the most succinct way, because that's
always much more powerful. You learn
how long to hold a shot, for instance
– and how long not to hold one. There's
a two-minute take with a static camera
in Trilogy, the boy's bus journey with his mother, which I always call my Angora sweater shot; because by the time it's over you could have knitted one. There's a point
where a shot dies. Did you decide ahead of shooting on a specific style for the film, an aesthetic? If there was an aesthetic, it
was that I wanted to show life the way it
was back then. It was much more
gentle and polite; there was much
more of a sense of community. And so I had a specific idea of how I wanted the cast to act. I didn't want them to act, I wanted them to be. And I said to all of them,
you must see the Trilogy first
and you must not act. You'll
get the script a week before shooting. Just
read it twice, once for sense and once for character, and then don't read it again. Learn the scenes we're going to shoot only the night before.
We'll rehearse for ten minutes before we
start, and then we'll do it in under ten takes. Because after ten they get repetitive. And very often we got it in three. ● What about the colors in the film? You use
a very rich range of browns and earth
colors. I knew I wanted a certain type of color, so we did a test with Kay Laboratories. I wanted tones of
red and brown, but not sepia, because you can't
watch sepia, it's impossible. So we used a coral filter and took out all the
primary colors from the decor and costumes, except the red in the lipstick. Then we used a bleach bypass process
that leaves the silver nitrate in the print
and desaturates the color. Do you look at paintings for inspiration? I know nothing about art. I've never gone and looked at pictures, I have no vocabulary to discuss them. Obviously there are painters I like. I like the Impressionists, I like Modigliani, Seurat. I think Turner's paintings of Did you shape the visual sequences to the music, or vice versa? You never cut the picture to the music. That's the mistake I made with the two-minute shot in Trilogy. If a scene is visually
right, then you can use just a
snatch of a song and it's enough. For instance with Love Is a Many-Splen-dored Thing we did it without the ending
chord. That was the editor's idea. And because the phrase is not
finished, your inner ear is waiting for the resolution. And what I've found – and it's what I did here – is that you
can resolve it visually with
another shot, and then you resolve it aurally in the shot following that. ● Are you part of the British cinema tradition? Well, I don't feel part of a British tradition, because I don't think there is one. I think every once in a while we produce films in spite of our lack of film tradition, like Powell and Pressburger or the Ealing comedies
or Nic Roeg's Bad Timing. But one problem is, we share a common language with the Americans, and they've always made films better than we have. They see film
as film, they see the way it works. Our culture is centered on the spoken word, and the theater has always had more
prestige. We've produced great theater
actors, but we cannot produce good
cinema actors. The same with writers. What you get, when your writers come from theater and television, is a
record of the spoken event. And
that's not cinema. Were you influenced by Dennis Potter – by Pennies from Heaven or The Singing Detective – in your use of popular song as a substitute for dialogue? [Aghast] No. I saw one episode of The Singing Detective and
I found it unwatchable. They're records of people talking, and I just get
bored with that. The music is not
integrated into the plot. The best
example of how to use music in a
film is Meet Me in St. Louis, because
everything arises from that plot. It
is so perfect. You have to use that as a touchstone. I heard you quoted as saying
you wanted to be reborn as Doris Day. Well, I think she's wonderful. Particularly in The Pajama Game. My
great passion is Why is passion
vulgar in Because we're a very odd
nation. There is that innate reserve. I was talking about this to a friend, and she said something I think is true: that the idea of English exoticism has turned in on itself.
The reason we're such a philistine
country now, and a lot of the people
are so horrible and the place is so dirty,
is that we're no longer a colonial power and we've turned our colonialism in on ourselves. We befoul our own nest because we've
got nowhere else to do it. I think, too, that the British think passion is a badge of insincerity, that it's something only "they" do, the dagos abroad. It's the same as the 18th century ideal of the "gifted amateur." To be professional is really rather vulgar. And
it is exacerbated by our caste system,
which is as rigid as anything in ● It sounds
as if Well, you get welcomed in But the thing I don't like about What films have influenced you? I can't say that particular
films have influenced me. There are films
that I've been absolutely knocked
out by. When I was 18, I saw Bicycle
Thief. And then there was Rocco and His Brothers. Of
course they were revelatory at 18, one had never seen anything like them. And
then one discovered Bergman and Kurosawa
and Ozu, Les Quatre Cent Coups and things like that. But I can't really say, "Oh, well I
saw Donald O'Connor in Francis the Talking Mule and it changed my life." [laughter] The reason I love American musicals, though I don't know how much they influence me, is, one,
that I thought The other thing is, they gave me the most enormous pleasure I've ever had. When I play the soundtracks now, I can remember where I saw
them. It re-creates my childhood. Every time I watch Singin' in the
Rain I cry. Because I remember being taken to see it
as a child and seeing this perfect world.
Because that's what the ● Is
Distant Voices, Still Lives the last autobiographical
film? I want to make one more piece of autobiography. It'll be a 90-minute film, in one part, and it'll be about the three years that precede the Trilogy. So the story will come full circle. It'll be about the children who've not been explored, my younger brothers and sisters. It's the three years between the time my father died and when I left primary school, Those three years were just ecstatically happy. Since you're gay and you're not going to have a family of your own, are these films,
in a way, your children? Yes, I think these are my children.
I've got nothing else. Do you think that's sad? Yes, I do, I think it's pathetic. It's far better to actually have a family of your own. Because at the end of the day most people
don't give a toss whether it's a beautifully made piece of cinema. They don't care. So you can pour your soul into something, and yes, some people care, but most people don't. It'd
be very nice just to be doing Rambo 27,
because you'd make a lot of money and
materially you'd have a very nice life. But (a), I haven't got the talent
and (b), I haven't got the inclination. I'm very puritanical; I want the films to be good
films, cinematically. But at the end of
the day does anyone care? I remember
reading an article about the scherzo
in Mahler's Sixth Symphony, which is a miracle of the sonata form. But
think of all the people in the world who've
never heard of Mahler and don't even
want to. When people see Distant Voices, Still Lives, what sort of feeling do you want them to leave with? I've no idea. I was constantly asked at film school, "What is your audience?" I say, "I don't know." I make the films because I need to make them. I
know that what I want from film is what I want from music: to be emotionally
moved and intellectually stimulated. And I think all great art does that. Which is why one constantly returns to the late string quartets
of Shostakovich, the symphonies of Bruckner and
Mahler, to Citizen Kane. You go back and you
rediscover something every time.
And that's a joy. COURTESY T.P.
MOVIE NEWS. THIS ARTICLE APPEARED IN THE OCTOBER 1988 ISSUE OF FILM COMMENT. ©HARLAN KENNEDY. All rights reserved. |
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