Dreaming of Liverpool

Terence Davies on Of Time and the City, his
highly personal ode to his hometown

FUN GUY: Larry Evans

by MARK SLUTSKY

Eighty years after Walter Ruttman’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, the “city symphony” genre has returned in an idiosyncratic and highly personal way. Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg, from last year, was a surrealist docu-fantasy about the filmmaker’s conflicted relationship with his Manitoba hometown. Now, British director Terence Davies returns to Liverpool, his birthplace and the setting of his early films Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes with Of Time and the City, a poetic and bittersweet revisiting.

Save for an opening sequence shot in Liverpool’s Philharmonic Hall, Of Time and the City is composed entirely of archival footage of the city, with Davies’ erudite narration over top, a stream of consciousness and memory recalling both the city’s history and his own. His voice is tinged with both nostalgia and bitterness; it’s a dreamlike and highly intimate film.

Speaking to the Mirror at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival, Davies is warm and effusive as he talks about the film and the art that inspires him.

MINING A PERSONAL ARCHIVE: Davies

Mirror: How does the creative process work with a film like this? Does it start with the footage, or with the writing?

Terence Davies: I wrote a sort of outline with a rough architecture of where it should be. But that was very rough, because I had no idea that there was so much archival footage to begin with and what that would do when I watched it. But this kind of thing happens: we went to the Philharmonic Hall, it’s a ’20s building and it has the only screen in the world which rises out of the floor. And I said, we’ve obviously got to use that. So I went down to see it, because of all the years I lived in Liverpool, I’d never ever seen it. I’d gone there, I’d had my classical education there, but I’d never gone to see a film there. And, as it came out of the floor, I knew exactly what the opening should be. I got it like that! (snaps fingers)

Even then, the shot was in silence. And I thought no, it needs something else. I love the poetry of A.E. Housman, which was set to music by a man called George Butterworth, who was killed during the First World War. When it’s set to music, “The loveliest of trees, the cherry now / Is hung with bloom along the bough”—oh God, wonderful! And so, I thought, we’ve got to have A.E. Housman, because it’s about lost childhood, it’s got to be that.

And then, I remembered—and this is where memory is quite extraordinary—I remembered being taken to see All That Heaven Allows when I was 11 in 1956 and the big tune was apparently by Joseph Gershenson. I found out many years later that it was in fact an orchestral version of the Consolation No. 3 in D Flat by Liszt, which is a piano piece. That had always stuck in my mind, and I thought if we run that underneath, that would be a little remembrance—for me—of All That Heaven Allows. And that’s how that sequence came about.

M: It’s interesting that it’s so full of references that perhaps only you could decode. Had you ever made a film in that way?

TD: Well I suppose all the films are—where you explore something within you. Because I think if you’re going to make films, whatever they are, whether they’re autobiographical or whether they’re fiction, I think you have to be true to what you feel. And if that’s specific, then it can become universal.

M: You just have to trust that it will come out somehow.

TD: Well, look at Chekov. You don’t have to be Russian to respond to Chekov. Because it’s not about the stories, it’s about the human condition. You don’t have to be German to love Schubert. You don’t have to be English to love Elgar. You don’t! Because they say something beyond their confines, but they’re true to it, and that’s the paradox. But it could have fallen flat. People could have thought “Oh, this is just this aging poof, wobbling on about growing up in Liverpool. Oh thanks. Next!” (laughing) It could have been that!

OF TIME AND THE CITY OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, MARCH 27