Of Time and the City
- Posted: 25th Mar 2010
- Category: Reviews
Terence Davies’ long-awaited return to our screens comes with an epic portrait of his home city, Liverpool, told through his own story, from his birth in post-war austerity to the present day as the city celebrates its status as European capital of culture.From its very beginning, beyond the curtains of a cinema screen that places us within the context both of a filmic interpretation of events and the preoccupations of that film’s director, Of Time and the City sets out its dual narrative. Archive images of Liverpool are overlaid with Davies’ drawling, sardonic voiceover telling the viewer of his Catholic childhood and coming to terms with his sexuality; the epic story of Liverpool is told through archive and contemporary footage, and the personal voiceover provides comment, questions and context. These two narratives unfold sometimes together, at other times side by side, and at others as if they are from two completely different films.
Indeed, this is a film of contradictions, most of which are intended but some most probably are not. This is the story of a city and its strong working class history and community told by one of its children, now a well-spoken artist who quotes T S Eliot and speaks of his love for opera: as Davies says, he has felt like an “alien in my own land”. He doesn’t attempt to hide the subjectivity of his portrait of his home city, and this is both the film’s strength and its weakness.
For much of the film the anonymous, ‘historical’ nature of the archive material is subverted by Davies’ highly personal voiceover to create a beautifully authentic portrait of a city. Occasionally, however, the voiceover takes on some of the attributes of the ‘voice of god’ commentary, with all its connotations of superiority. Davies can hardly help his authoritative voice it’s true, but in his disdain for some of the more modern pursuits of pleasure such as rock and roll or restaurants in favour of his beloved Hollywood melodramas, he sounds nothing if not a paid up member of that strain of intellectualism that sees no value in anything that falls outside its own interest.Don’t get me wrong: it’s nice to see a film about Liverpool that doesn’t deify the Beatles, but in creating a critical and unsentimental approach, Davies often seems to fall prey to a nostalgia of his own. One sequence – of the Victorian slums being cleared in 1960’s Liverpool, to the score of Peggy Lee’s ‘The Folks Who Live On The Hill’ – could be viewed as critical, and every wry, were it not for the sneaking suspicion that even this turn of events holds a sense of nostalgia for Davies for a city long gone, replaced by something far inferior.
It’s never more than a sneaking suspicion however, because Of Time and the City deals so deftly with memory: the inherited and projected memory we have from the wealth of archive material accumulated in the first century of film, together with the idiosyncratic memory of history coloured by experience that Davies’ narration so eloquently evokes. He succeeds in making the strange familiar and the familiar strange, and there are moments of profound brilliance. At times sublime, at others baffling, ultimately one is left with the feeling that the film’s individual parts are greater than the whole.
Dir. Terence Davies, UK 2008, 72 mins
Of Time and the City is released in cinemas nationwide on 31st October. For more details see: www.bfi.org.uk/releases