OF TIME AND THE CITY (UK,2008)
Wednesday, 22nd April 2009

OF TIME AND THE CITY (UK, 2008) (12A).
Directed by Terence Davies from his own screenplay. Photography (black & white and Colour): Tim Pollard. Goldman. Length: 74 mins. Narrated by Terence Davies.
This is Terence Davies’s greatly acclaimed return to cinema with a highly personal take on his home city, Liverpool, and on his own life during a period of great social change.
“The kind of documentary which deserves to stand among the best of its time ****” – Derek Malcolm, Evening Standard. “An extraordinary, eloquent film” – Philip French, The Observer.
Our penultimate programme marks the return to cinema of one of Britain’s most acclaimed film-makers Terence Davies who has always readily drawn on his own life and experiences and his own birth-place, Liverpool, when making his highly personal films. His new feature first seen at the Cannes Film Festival last year was greeted with a standing ovation and comes after a long gap due to difficulties with funding. Although Davies has previously used fiction to bring to the screen poetic evocations of his own youth, this latest venture, Of Time And The City, is something new. It is not just that it is a documentary combining historic footage with new material but that it is an example of a rare genre in film-making, the film essay. Such recent works as Bruce Weber’s A Letter From True and Guy Maddin’s My Winnipeg similarly offer personal reflections on life by the film-maker and here Davies’s own narration, highly idiosyncratic in delivery as well as in tone, is a crucial part of a work offering a reflection often critical, on the changing face of society and of this particular city, Liverpool. Deeply concerned (it’s about poverty as well as privilege), deeply personal (Davies’s own memories as a youngster recognising his homosexuality are part of the autobiographical element) and sharply critical (he lashes out at the Church, at royalty and at the Beatles), this is a film which no one else could have made and it may not quite what Liverpool was expecting when it commissioned this as one of three films to celebrate the fact that the city had been named as the European Capital of Culture of 2008. No less personal that the rest is Davies’s striking use of music in the film ranging from his beloved Mahler to Peggy Lee singing “The Folks Who Live On The Hill”, the latter crucial to a scene about the modern look of the city. Film critic Mark Kermode recently had a TV programme which, deliberately excluding all films up for Oscars, gave alternative awards: he not only picked out Of Time And The City as best film of the year but also gave Terence Davies the award for Best Director.