National Museum of Singapore

Presented by National Museum of Singapore in collaboration with the British Council

Venue	Gallery Theatre
Date	FRI 27 FEB 2009 - SUN 1 MAR 2009

The Terence Davies Trilogy inaugurated Davies’ emotionally rich tapestry of autobiographical cinema. In his subsequent films – each similar in style, tone and texture – an intricately intertwined narrative binds them. They are stately and penetrating recordings of a past that cannot be forgotten or erased. In some ways, it’s like turning the pages of a picture album. There’s no cheap nostalgia, no sentimentality, no crying out for pity, just images. And music. Music that often replaces dialogue. Especially in Of Time and the City, Davies’ latest work, images, music and dialogue are interwoven succinctly to spin a complete web of the artist’s memories.

This selection of films give testament to Davies’ immaculate treatment of personal histories, and that of society, to create art that has meaning for the present.

Biography of Terence Davies
Terence Davies was born in 1945 into a Catholic working-class family, the youngest of ten children. After working for 12 years as a clerk in a shipping office and a book-keeper in an accountancy firm – a period he refers to as the nadir of his life – Davies was offered a place at Coventry Drama School. There he wrote the script for Children, which he directed four years later in 1976. Davies subsequently took up a place at the National Film School, where he completed Madonna and Child as his graduation film in 1980. Three years later, thanks to funding from the Greater London Arts Association and the BFI, Davies completed the last part of his Trilogy, Death and Transfiguration. These three short films put him on the cinematic map as one of the most original British filmmakers of the late twentieth century.

In the two films that followed, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), Davies further developed and refined the techniques and style that he had tested out in the Trilogy. In these first two feature films, he kept the focus very much on his own story, and that of his family, depicting the highs and lows of working-class family life in 1940s and 1950s Liverpool.

For his next film The Neon Bible (1994), Davies turned to someone else’s autobiography. The novel of the same name, written by John Kennedy Toole when he was just sixteen, is set in Georgia in the American South, but it shares thematic, stylistic and ideological similarities with Davies’ work and is set, like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Days Closes, during and shortly after the Second World War. As in those films, his adaptation of The Neon Bible leaves the viewer with a bittersweet mixture of pain and nostalgia.

The House of Mirth (2000) marks Davies’ furthest departure from his childhood obsessions. Based, like Martin Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence (1993), on a novel by Edith Wharton, the main theme explores the struggle between the individual and society. Davies’ film offers penetrating insights into an emerging American industrial society defined by greed, narcissism and hypocrisy. The film ends with the defeat of the heroine, confirming the director’s view that against the backdrop of history an individual human being is only a particle of dust.

Davies’s most recent film, Of Time and The City (2008) is both a love song and a eulogy to Liverpool which revisits the territory of his earlier narrative films. It is also a response to memory, reflection and the experience of losing a sense of place as the skyline changes and time takes it toll. Davies believes passionately that British stories like Of Time and The City must be told by British film makers. There can only be truth in a story which is truly specific to a time and place. And it is in that truth that universal appeal will be found.

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Image © Bernard Fallon