Of Time And The City (Davies)

Liverpool's status as Capital of Culture may have gone to its head. The new Terence Davies film is being presented to the audience at the city's Philharmonic Hall as a World Premiere, never mind that it's already played at Cannes, Edinburgh, Toronto, and other film festivals the world over. Presumably the logic here is that if it hasn't been shown in Liverpool then it hasn't really been shown in the World, right? The film's editor Sol Popadopolous tells us before the film starts that "this is the screening that matters…Cannes was nice, but you're the ones we've made the film for. It's your reaction that counts". This statement seems like a cruel lie. It’s echoed in Terence's introduction where he states that he "made it with his heart", because if there's one thing the film seems to sorely lack it's a heart.

This is something that I thought would be unthinkable to say about a film by Terence Davies, a director whose mindblowing oeuvre is defined by its passion, its beauty, and its singularity. In The Terence Davies Trilogy, Distant Voices Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, Davies uses film to mine his own past, open up his autobiography and interrogate the way memory affects his own recollections. They're experimental films, forgoing plot to develop with their own internal dream logic, progressing as if the camera is filming Davies own mind, drenched in song, dialogue from the past constantly invading the present, forming a mosaic that presents the truest representation of Experience I've seen on film. Davies shows us how we make sense of experience, he shows how it's constructed, how it develops over time, how the past continually haunts the present.

In a scene from The Long Day Closes, a camera looks directly down onto 12-year-old Bud, swinging on a pole back and forth like a metronome. He represents the slow ticking of time, his body swaying back and forth between childhood and adulthood. A Debbie Reynolds weepy starts playing, the camera begins tracking to the left, and various perfect match-cuts take us through his life, the cinema, the school, the church, the house, and back to where we began three minutes before, a perfect circle formed over the course of one song, in what's made to feel like one long shot. We see Bud's world, Terence Davies world, our world, contained in a song, in a shot.

It has been 16 years since The Long Day Closes was released, with only two literary adaptations made in the intervening period. The slow revelation of the director's autobiography over time is one of the reasons his body of work is profound and revered. Extra layers of memory, reflection, and different ways of approaching Davies’ past are developed film to film, and so the release of his first overtly autobiographical film since then is cause for great excitement.

In October 2006 Davies was interviewed by the Guardian and a return to filmmaking seemed unlikely, with two completed scripts but no green light. Funding was provided for Davies to make Of Time and The City, a film about Liverpool to mark its year as Capital of Culture, with a budget of only £250,000. Maybe it was too much to hope that this film would be another masterpiece, but what I couldn't have expected was that the film would undercut so many of the attributes that make his work special.

Davies’ new film is a documentary about Liverpool, his birthplace and his childhood home. Subtitled "a love song and a eulogy", the film is composed of archive footage bookended by about 10 minutes of new footage shot by the director of modern Liverpool. Davies provides a voiceover where he talks about the city and his childhood, describing the social change that’s taken place since he was younger. This is interspersed with quotes read out from various writers and poets such as T.S. Eliot and Friedrich Engels.

Given Davies' past utilisation of immaculate framing and beautiful colour palettes it comes as a shock to see him make modern Liverpool look so ugly. And no, it's not Liverpool itself that's ugly but the way he decided to shoot it. The opening and closing sequences look like a lazy promo shoot for the tourist board, garish colours and awkward framing that jars with Davies over-the-top, arrogant and ironic voiceover. Davies might be playing a joke to express his feelings about his first film in 8 years only being possible as a commission to give Liverpool a leg-up - OK, well I'll show you the city how you think it should be seen - but in the end it's the audience who have to suffer through this footage. It's a sign of what’s to come – Davies spends a large majority of the documentary treating various things with disdain. He wants to find ugliness and does, denouncing religion, the monarchy, what Liverpool has become, the youth of today(!), but offers little insight, rarely speaking intelligently or thoughtfully about the city and his feelings towards it.

The film is a visual essay in the mould of Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg and Chris Marker's Sans Soleil, all concerned with place and how we deal with histories both private and public, although Of Time and The City contains none of the dizzying inventiveness of Maddin's film and much less of the depth and insight that Marker's work offers. Both Maddin and Marker manage to blur the lines between fiction and documentary in a manner that Davies doesn't get close to here. His previous work succeeds so well because it takes place in a dream state, aware that memory creates fictions. Here he asserts too much control over himself and the past, attempting to claim it as an objective fact. This idea is the antithesis to his previous films. In Distant Voices Still Lives and The Long Day Closes we see the workings of the mind on screen, with voices and songs from the past merging with the present, memories overlapping, the camera tracking gracefully in one shot from moments taking place in the present into the past. It's remarkable and it's profound because the audience is shown how slippery and insecure truth is rendered by time, and so subsequently a capital T truth reveals itself from these 'fictional' films. Davies takes the personal and explodes it out onto the screen. In Of Time and The City the opposite occurs. He takes public footage and makes it private, trying to attain control over it.

I wish that Davies' selection of archive footage had been interrogated, that a dialogue had opened up between him and the images he selected, that questions had been asked about what it means to see 'real' footage and how this conflicts with his idea of reality and his past. This doesn't happen. Instead, the image is relegated to following Davies voiceover on a lead. It's telling that the moments of beauty in the film occur when Davies stops talking and allows the images to speak for themselves.

These moments are rare. Davies' laments come across as lectures, the beautiful combination of word, image and song that exist harmoniously in previous films seem laboured here, pressed onto one another instead of just existing together. Davies forgets how to make us feel. For most of this documentary the voiceover is posturing, all irony projected outwards onto others, lacking the self-reflection and analysis that Davies’ audience has come to expect.