Terence Davies (1988)
In the summer of 1989, Sally and I, with a good friend, sat down to watch Distant Voices, Still Lives in a cinema on Tottenham Court Road. The three of us left within half an hour of the start. Since then, I’ve seen, and seen through, plenty of Terence Davies films. BFI’s current ‘Love. Sex. Religion. Death’ programme – their first Davies retrospective since his death in 2023 – was a good opportunity to give the work that made his auteurist name, a second go. There were no thoughts of an early exit this time, yet I still understand why we walked out all those years ago.
Prior to Distant Voices, Still Lives, Davies had made only the three short films, Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983), which run forty-seven, thirty and twenty-six minutes respectively. His first feature runs only eighty-five minutes in toto, and, as its title suggests, comprises distinct parts, of approximately equal length. Indeed, the halves of the whole were shot as separate films, with an interval of two years between them and with a different cinematographer for each part – William Diver for Distant Voices, Patrick Duval for Still Lives: to Davies’ and his DPs’ credit, the combined result is visually seamless. (It may have helped that Diver edited the entire work.) The events in the first film take place around a decade before those of the second. Distant Voices is set in the 1940s, mostly during World War II; Still Lives throughout the 1950s. In both cases, the narrative is a mosaic of events within the overall timeframe, rather than a chronological sequence.
Like the shorts that comprise what came to be known as The Terence Davies Trilogy, Distant Voices, Still Lives is strongly autobiographical, never mind that most of Distant Voices happens before November 1945, when Davies was born, the youngest of ten children in a working-class Catholic family in Liverpool. In this version of his family’s life, he sensibly reduces the brood to three children. Nell Davies (Freda Dowie) and her husband Tommy (Pete Postlethwaite) have two daughters, Eileen (Angela Walsh) and Maisie (Lorraine Ashbourne); the couple’s only son, Tony (Dean Williams), gradually emerges as the writer-director’s screen alter ego (although less obviously so than the Trilogy’s protagonist). In Paul Farley’s monograph on Distant Voices, Still Lives in BFI’s Modern Classics series, Davies describes his choice of filming locations, especially the main one:
‘The house where I grew up was demolished in 1961. And it was unique… I was able to rebuild it for The Long Day Closes, but we didn’t have a huge budget for Distant Voices, Still Lives, so we had to find something that looked… working class … we shot in Drayton Park [in North London], but there were no cellars, so it wasn’t like our house… We had to go with what was there, because we didn’t have the money.’
At several points during Distant Voices, Still Lives, Nell and her children stand for a family photograph – on Eileen’s and Maisie’s wedding days, before then on the day of Tommy Davies’ funeral. Each time, the family group is posed against a wall in a room of their house, the wall bare except for another, framed photograph, of a man. Never shown in close-up, this man is Terence Davies’ own father, who died when his youngest son, who loathed and feared him, was seven years old. There’s quite a bit to unpack from those three sentences. Although he couldn’t use the real place he grew up in, his real father’s image on the wall in the stand-in house in Drayton Park serves as an assertion of Davies’ personal film-making doctrine. Yet you know the identity of the man in the photograph not by watching Distant Voices, Still Lives but by reading about it. When violently abusive Tommy exits the film, it’s a relief for the family he leaves behind (and for the audience – more on that below). They’re dressed in black for his funeral, but the occasion is also something of a red-letter day for the wife and kids he used to beat. That, at any rate, is what seems to be implied in the family photograph marking the occasion.
But perhaps the funeral group, unlike the subsequent wedding pictures, isn’t literally a family photograph but one of the film’s numerous tableaux, hinted at in the carefully chosen title. At the start of Distant Voices, the camera moves round the seemingly empty house, to the accompaniment of disembodied voices. Still Lives must refer to the artful visuals: the lives of the Davies family and their friends are anchored in domestic and social routine but not static or uneventful. Davies means, through what he puts on the screen, to give his personal history the mythic status that he feels is its due. He conveys how he sees the past in some effective ways. The lighting of sunny weather sequences somehow suggests retrospection rather than immediate experience. There’s a moment when Tony, parting from his mother one evening and after they’ve said goodbye, holds her in his look, as if consciously committing the parting to memory: here, the young man on camera seems to fuse with the older man recapturing the moment behind it.
Davies aficionados may well see the predominantly deliberate acting as of a piece with the considered recreation of images. I can’t get past the contradiction in giving actors real people to play and vernacular dialogue to speak, then asking them to deliver their lines – and to look and move – in a style that, rather than bringing them to life, underlines their character’s legendary status, according to how Davies sees them. In the Trilogy films, he worked mainly with actors who were little known at the time and stayed that way; it’s not difficult to see wooden acting in those shorts as a natural consequence of having to make a film on a tiny budget. The cast of Distant Voices, Still Lives, though, includes people either already known at the time (to this viewer, at least) as dependably good actors, or who would go on to bigger things – for example, Freda Dowie in the first category, Pete Postlethwaite and Lorraine Ashbourne in the second. Their acting talents aren’t invisible here so much as distorted.
I think we gave up on the film in 1989 because the early stages are dominated by Tommy Davies’ supposedly terrifying violence, which Terence Davies’ approach renders artificial. Pete Postlethwaite’s face certainly magnetises the camera, yet when Tommy belts his wife or Maisie (Eileen, Tommy’s favourite, is luckier), or hurls to the ground food laid out on the table for a Christmas tea, the staging makes it overdone and unreal. Although the style of Distant Voices, Still Lives is consistent throughout, it’s easier to tolerate once ‘psychotic’ Tommy is out of the picture (Davies described his own father as ‘psychotic’, says Wikipedia), and the film gets into describing more moderate, sometimes even affectionate, forms of marital combat.
The first part has the vocal label, but it’s the second part in which voices – particularly singing voices – really take over. In Distant Voices, the occasional sequences of the family and their friends in the pub, singing favourite songs together, come as a relief. In Still Lives, these sequences dominate almost too much. For me, the most enjoyable musical bit in the second half comes from Pauline Quirke’s Doreen, a family friend who arrives to babysit for the evening and, while she’s waiting in the front doorway, sings to herself Alma Cogan’s ‘Dreamboat’. Quirke does what hardly anyone else in the film manages to do: she elevates – you might even say immortalises – the moment yet she seems completely natural. There’s no doubt that Davies can use music more simply as a means of simultaneously recalling and regretting the loss of times past. As well as the pub singing and some church and classical music (mainly Britten), the soundtrack includes a cornucopia of popular songs – ‘Taking a Chance on Love’, ‘The Finger of Suspicion’, ‘O, Mein Papa’ and ‘Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing’, to name just a few.
23 October 2025
