Of Time and the City

The poster for Terence Davies’ documentary - Of Time and the City - is emblazoned with an almost iconic image; a solitary, silhouetted figure walking through an urban wasteland in a post-war Liverpool. It could almost be Davies himself, a self acknowledged ‘outsider’ who has drawn extensively on his own, often unhappy, past to create a number of remarkable British films with a distinct cinematic style.

I interviewed Davies on the eve of the release of his latest film, described as a ‘love song and eulogy’ to his hometown of Liverpool. Comprised of archival film, photography and modern day footage, Of Time and the City is narrated by Davies himself creating a highly personal cinematic poem. The result is a film that has been lauded by critics, receiving top reviews both at its Cannes premiere, and also closer to home at this year’s Edinburgh International Film Festival. Yet Davies initially felt reluctant about working on the project. 

“I was driving along the Embankment and I suddenly got cold feet and thought oh Lord, perhaps I’ve bitten off more than I can chew here," he says. "And I was going to ring the two producers and say look, I’m withdrawing, find someone else, and I stopped by the lights by the Houses of Parliament and I remembered that one of the big things that happened at the end of the war and all over the North were slum clearances and these new estates being built. And I thought, if I use that and I run Peggy Lee's The Folks Who Live on the Hill underneath it, it will work and we’ve got a film. At that moment one of the producers rang me and I said we’ve got a film now.”

Perhaps this hesitation was in part due to the different approach required in assembling footage for the documentary – a contrast to the carefully crafted and scripted approach required by feature films which have been Davies’ staple up until now. 

“It was completely different, the absolute reverse of fiction. What was incredibly liberating was getting all this material and that prompting other memories and prompting the narration as well. Very hard work, but incredibly exciting. It makes you look with a different eye to other shot material and that was fantastic.”

Using other people’s footage hasn’t prevented Davies from exploring familiar autobiographical ideas that his earlier feature films have also dealt with, in particular the concept of outsiderness, something that Davies doesn’t deny. “I always felt as though I was looking in on life rather than being a participant. It seems to be a subtextual meaning to all my films because I think I am an outsider.”

As well as feeling like an outsider growing up he also feels it today, in his own city. “I don’t know that city any more. The city that I know is in my imagination now. It’s gone, absolutely gone”.

Yet the aim of Of Time and the City isn’t to evoke a romantic nostalgia for the past, as Davies says “I hope it’s not nostalgic, because nostalgia always in my mind implies a certain level of sentimentality. And I don’t think I look back with any kind of sentimentality, I try to look back at it as it was, but that still fills you with a bitter sweetness and regret.”

Despite having a series of critically acclaimed films, in particular Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) which won awards in Cannes, London and Toronto, Davies found it almost impossible to get funding following the production of The House of Mirth in 2000. There is little doubt that he blames the British film industry at least in part for this. He despairs at a constant “looking over our shoulder to America for validation. Will it be a big success there and then that circumscribes the way in which they fund and what they will fund.”

He goes so far as to say “the way in which things are funded in this country is just quite chaotic. it’s a miracle that any films in this country get made at all.” I ask him if he feels any hope for the future of the British film industry. “I can’t feel any joy about it. I feel very worried about it. I don’t think it will ever be a really strong national cinema anymore, that died in the fifties or early sixties.”

The love of the cinema that is mentioned in Of Time and the City sadly seems not to have followed Davies into adulthood. “I go very rarely now because I can’t suspend my disbelief anymore, maybe because I’m getting old, maybe because I make films myself and I’m aware when I see cinema grammar used incorrectly – it just makes me angry. For me, where cinema is concerned the great days are over, with the death of Bergman we’ve seen the last of the great filmmakers.”

There’s an air of pessimism surrounding Davies, which he doesn’t refute. He’s always seen the cup as half empty rather than half full he says. And whilst traces of this pessimism tinge his latest film, it is far from being a desolate piece. There is both humour and a sense of hope, the latter represented by numerous shots focusing on the children of Liverpool. For all his pessimism, his frustrations with the British film industry and unease with the idea of contemporary cinema-going, our ‘outsider’ has created a distinctively British, cinematic experience which not only delves into the past but alludes to the future. From the wasteland that our solitary figure passes through, a new Liverpool has grown, and while we feel a loss for a city that no longer exists there is also the sense of it being passed on, handed over, for a new generation to make their own.