Cinema Travelogue

This month, TIFF Cinematheque is hosting a series of screenings of the works of British auteur Terence Davies, who passed away in 2023. As someone who has long heard of him but has not seen any of his films other than The Long Day Closes, I jumped when I first heard about this programme, as it feels like an ideal opportunity to explore all of his works at once. The programme’s schedule is much more compact than usual to fit within a two-week time frame, as Lightbox is occupied by the New Waves and Hot Docs film festivals in the last two weeks of April. Good news for me, from last Friday to Sunday, I managed to catch eight works from Terence Davies.

The Terence weekend began with a Friday night of The House of Mirth, Davies’s 2000 adaptation of Edith Wharton’s novel of the same name. The most popular adaptation of Wharton is probably Scorsese’s The Age of Innocence, which I have not seen, but watching The House of Mirth has made me more eager to check it out. The film is set in the early 20th century, in the high society of New York. Davies’s films set in America are usually less acclaimed than those set in Britain. He spent time in director jail after making The House of Mirth, which baffled me when I first learned about it after the movie. Davies’s style is hyper-engaged with the sensorial pleasures of cinema; its quality feels so personal that it seems to conjure the subjective power of memory, a theme predominantly featured in his earlier, more acclaimed works. The transitions from his early career proclivities to historical literary adaptation in a foreign land – as I will continue to learn this weekend with A Quiet Passion – never trouble me as much as they do with others. I find the textures of light, shadows, and all the elemental pleasures to be the sources of Davies’s most provocative images; not using them to symbolically represent the meaning of a scene, but to capture how the light might look on a body or a face, or how the fireplace crackles, or how it feels to be in that room and sit on that couch, at that exact moment centuries ago. These fundamentally cinematic gestures are powerful regardless of geographic boundaries. to me.

With Davies, the presence of time is always crucial yet elusive. Cinema has the ability to trap time, as it can literally imprint realities onto a physical form. But the technique of dissolves also grants it the dangerous power to transition between planes with ease. This trampede of time and space introduces an inherently unrealistic contradiction in this realist art, as it offers viewers an alternative path to experience time and space, whereas in real life, the only possible motion is forward, riding the flow of time, millisecond by millisecond. And because that is not true when it comes to experiencing the passage of time in cinema, this art reveals its beauty through its limitation: that it comes so close to representing reality but invariably comes up short. This limitation is what Davies wholeheartedly embraced throughout his career. The inevitability and melancholia of things and people coming up short – moments passing and never returning. In The House of Mirth, the time period is not specified until the very end, where a date is stamped onto the frame just as the credits begin to roll. Same for A Quiet Passion, where the film ends on a real-life picture of Emily Dickinson; below the picture: 1830 – 1886. The reveal of time in numerical form feels like a micdrop, as if the films have become aware of their – and the characters’ – only possible denouement at the end and have no way to circumvent except putting a stamp on it. In House of Mirth, the temporal advancement is quite ambiguous. The weight of time is applied through transitions to very physical, concrete things: scenes beginning and ending on dissolves to images of trees; from ripples of raindrops on a lake to the wavering reflections of dusk on the surface of another body of water.

The House Mirth primarily concerns the illusion of a dignified existence and the realities of the economy that can only be resolved by elemental matters. Narratively, this functions sort of like a ghost movie. Lily’s money troubles read as expositions of what’s already happened, and we only see her haunted by a vice exterior to the film and a phantom ideal that’s gone before the film even starts. As we come to understand through the closed-door conversations full of double talk and innuendos, the illusion of high society can’t be sustained by “a clean hand”. Lily is exiled simultaneously by the unscrupulous force of a society maintaining their abstract ideal of reputation, and an inner force that tries to sustain an impossible image of moral purity. The two forces push her to the margins, which is likely why the conversation scenes have such an immobile heft; people speaking but never coming to terms with anything. In the final few scenes, there are always the sounds of the clock ticking, not calibrated to dominate the scenes, but lurking in the background nonetheless. This feels like what is truly devastating about this film – acknowledging the ticking of time but not being able to do anything about it.

The first of the three screenings on Saturday included Children, Madonna and Child, and Death of Transfiguration. Together they form The Terence Davies Trilogy. The series name is “Love, Sex, Religion, Death: The Complete Films of Terence Davies”. These three early works show that Davies’s thematic interests are consistent throughout his career. The contemplation on death is evident in his first work, but it’s seen through the eye of a child, the death of his own father. The three films have the same protagonist, Robert Tucker, from a young schoolboy to a moribund in bed. An interesting thing I find about the three is that they seem to connect to accumulation. Death of Transfiguration, the last of three, includes footage of him both as a child and as a middle-aged man, whereas Children only shows an imagined version of Tucker as an adult. Again, the precarity of cinema’s power to converge time reveals itself. Images of the young, adult, and old versions of Tucker transition from one to another in almost a structuralist-like manner. It almost feels like we, as the audience, have lost track of Tucker’s actual age by the end. All moments become intangible memories of another, where Tucker’s fantasy feels equally as realistic. It’s astounding how Davies reveals the limitations of cinema – how the realities onscreen so close to life are ultimately not life – in his debut. The trilogy was released in 1983, when Davies was 38; perhaps Davies is not for the youth after all.

Because I went to bed after 2 a.m. the previous night, I fell asleep during Distant Voices, Still Lives, leaving me with a poor understanding of the film. But during the moments when I was awake, I was moved by the singing and movements of bodies. Especially at the end, when a rendition of “The Water Is Wide” plays as we see characters depart into the night.

Distant Voices, Still Lives is the closest to Long Day Closes, both jettison a firm narrative and progress through the ebb and flow of the images and music themselves. I believe that rather than claiming this lack of narrative as Davies’s style, one should recognize that this style is pertinent to representing personal memories: a precise understanding of its abstract form, the flow of emotions it accompanies, and turning them into objective form through the gestures of light specific to cinema. When we recollect memories, moments do not come in concrete individuals, but as a chain of moments where a single object can evoke another that exists within an entirely different plane. The brilliance of Davies in accomplishing this lies in how he manages to film the tactility of a place, so that the images embody an abstract realism only comprehensible to the mind, which is a gift specific to the art of cinema.

Davies’s images of memories are marked by a planar abstraction. In Distant Voices, Still Lives, shots often find the characters looking directly into the camera, addressing the audience with their unreachability. This quality is reused in A Quiet Passion, the biopic about poet Emily Dickinson, more deliberately, through a transitional sequence that depicts the passage of time via the literal aging of the Dickinson family’s portraits.

The film is concerned with the idea of mortality. As Emily Dickinson remarked in the film, “posterity is as comfortless as God”, she is less interested in promises like transcendence after death than the active moments of living; her existence is thus haunted by a finite endpoint since the beginning because mortality always has an endpoint, whereas the unknown after death will always be infinite. Her refusal to kneel during a prayer stems from her refusal to submit to authority. This spontaneous decision, radical and confrontational, becomes a static image in the film, a planar representation insufficient to capture the immediacy of the moment. The tragedy that lies at the centre of Davies’s biopic is not the fact that a brilliant poet was failed to be recognized during her time, nor is it simply that, but how talent, bravery, virtues, all things Dickinson possessed, are confined by time itself; once they are expressed, they become dispossessed memories.

A Quiet Passion is Terence Davies’s first full foray into working with digital photography. In Sunset Song, only the interiors were shot on digital. The switch to digital makes the film’s texture feel very different, especially with the loss of harshness in the interior shadows. But the gentler lights in the daytime scene add more serenity to the frames themselves, Dickinson’s ornate garden looking like a heaven insular from the outside world. I also suspect the full switch to digital is due to the film being in Scope, which would’ve been expensive with film stock. The combination of format and digital photography offers finer modulation in Davies’s filmmaking, with character expressions captured in more detailed registers rather than in a heightened, physical presence. Although the film does not lack his preferred camera moves, the lateral panning of the camera across the room, the more heightened moments are savoured for the ritualistic actions, and simple shot-reverse-shot set-ups are implemented in the rest. Davies’s expressiveness seems to lie in smaller touches within those sequences, like the push-in on Emily’s face when the reverend is reading her poems in the garden, or the axis shifts as a conversation intensifies. Another rare virtue of digital photography, distinct from the industry norm, is that when a shot is in shallow focus, the background does not feel neglected; the colours still feel connected to what’s in focus. The film is rigorously composed, but the rigour never tames the spirits of the people being represented. Spirit is a very abstract word, but when you feel it while watching a film, you just feel it. I felt it here, and it’d need rewatches to further comprehend that.

The Deep Blue Sea concludes the weekend. The film is adapted from the stage play by Terence Rattigan and spans a day. There are two sequences in the film that are amongst the most majestic creations of Davies’s career. They operate as a reverie of memory that is reminiscent of Davies’s early films. What demarcates the film from those films, however, is how those scenes are regarded as bygones – Hester’s grand gesture of suicide is literally interrupted by a slap in the face. All three characters are trying to resurrect the carcasses of their emotions, the ecstasies promised by the oneiric flashbacks, which their present selves are simply inept at fulfilling. Here, the conversational heft from The House of Mirth reemerges. As the three characters argue for their emotions, sometimes in a stage-like fashion dialogue-wise, their situations remain in a cold stasis where no one is able to regain what they think they once had. So much so that it begins to seem as though the sequences of memories are simply memories, despite resembling actual occurrences of reality, and the gulf between them and actuality deepens whenever anyone attempts to reconstruct.

The effect of watching films by the same filmmaker in a short period becomes clear: in the first scene, the sound of a clock ticking appears in the background. Because clock always operate at the same speed, the sounds and their cadence are the exact same as in The House of Mirth, Distant Voices, Still Lives, and in A Quiet Passion. What’s moving here is pertinent to cinephilia, that the clock ticks the same across time and space – Davies’s old family house in Liverpool, the high society of 20th century New York City, a one-room apartment in post-war London, the worlds contained by individual film suddenly opening up to one another through this small, universal detail.

At the end, the film cuts to an exterior shot of the window, and we see Hester opening the curtain drapes – echoing the opening of the film, and a smile magically reappearing on her face. The camera travels from an exterior shot of the room, passing the landlady collecting mail, the milkman and his trolley, as they go about their lives, and ultimately landing on a shot of children cavorting in the ruins of houses, presumably destroyed by bombing during the war. The children soon exit the frame, and we are left with a static shot of the ruin. This shot feels like a Sirkian move, feeling non-realistic because the camera is travelling all this to end on a rather general symbolic gesture. But when we think about it, what is unrealistic about a house being next to the ruins of another in the aftermath of WWII? Nothing at all. The part that feels unrealistic is actually the movement of the camera, bypassing the living and landing on the carcass of a building. The ending gesture is therefore similar to what Davies has consistently shown throughout his career: cinema is not realistic at all. The camera movement is like the recreation of personal memories: the desire to see, construct, and reconstruct reality, an obsession, and the ultimate beauty that lies in the failure of a total achievement. Long live Terence Davies, for all the ephemeral beauties and truths he introduced to the world.