The Cinematheque

“I think that the British were never very gifted movie-makers, although I do have a lot of admiration for [one] movie: Distant Voices, Still Lives.”

Jean-Luc Godard

A masterpiece of formal and personal invention, Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives takes as its starting point the impossibility of separating events from one another, no matter how extreme. The central incident, according to Davies: ​“It’s the day of Eileen’s wedding; she remembers her dad.” For Eileen, her mother Nell, and siblings Maisie and Tony, their violent, authoritarian father is a cursed presence while living and an unforgettable spectre once passed. The film contrasts and contains these emotions in relation to all the others that live in their house, which Davies explores in planimetric compositions bridged by popular songs emanating from the radio, the neighbourhood pub, and resonant memory itself. Training his attention on the generation before his own, with knowledge of what would linger in his own lifetime, Davies renders all the moments that were never captured (his family did not have a tradition of photo-taking) into a hand-tinted procession.

One of the Best British Movies of All Time (#3)
Time Out

“Watching this film after experiencing a family loss [was] the most personally healing experience I can remember.”

Lee Kyoungmi, screenwriter (No Other Choice)

“Davies’s strategy is concerned not so much to represent the past as time remembered, either with affection or with displeasure, as to render it almost as a present experience … It looks like, but clearly is not, a still photograph: we are denied the vicarious pleasure of nostalgia.”

David Wilson, Sight and Sound

“When capturing moments of serenity, the perpendicular shots evoke utter honesty; characters face us frankly, hiding nothing. But confronted with a schoolyard beating or a psychopath thrashing his wife, this curiously impassive camera—no wild handheld bursts or jagged cutting—only accentuates the pain. The camera’s unearthly calm takes on a kind of ruthlessness, as if nothing awful that happens in this world can make it flinch, just as nothing rapturous can make it go giddy.”

David Bordwell