Of Time and the City

This film seems to have been 'legendary' since it began as a commission for Liverpool as European Capital Of Culture 2008. Terence Davies has made just nine films: those I've seen are intimate, small-scale, a close focus on scenes of life, his own experience.

The film is about time and about the city, the city being Liverpool, the time being Davies' own growth into consciousness there, from childhood in 'some of the worst slums in Europe', through the movies and, as Liverpool was singing 'Yeah yeah yeah', to his discovery of classical music from Bruckner onwards, and of T S Eliot's The Waste Land, itself very much about time. And also about the effects, 'ravages' of time on the city and on people.

A lot of unforgettable archive footage of Liverpool from the 1940s onwards. Masses of people: an unimaginably overcrowded Mersey ferry, the crowds disembarking into the city, soldiers embarking for the Korean War, the vast sea of faces at a football match. & the streets of crumbling brickwork and rotting windows, the front doors hardly ten feet apart, and the people, the adults struggling through work and cleaning, and the children, who lived in them: the faces of children at play half a century ago. Then the demolitions and, memorably to Peggy Lee singing The folk who live on the hill, the transition to high-rises. Immaculately put together, could be watched over and over: the strange, unexpected quality of the archive footage, the juxtapositions of image and soundtrack, music, song, Davies talking or reading. Here's the trailer.



The DVD also includes Humphrey Jennings' Listen to Britain, a 'seminal' (these overused words) documentary poem of life in Britain in 1942. This short extract gives the feel of it, and includes a wonderful ballroom sequence, a huge crowd of couples strolling and turning in calm happy order round the floor. Floorcraft? Why the problem?

Too bad YouTube doesn't have an extract showing the Myra Hess concert at the National Gallery, an old friend damaged by bombs, patched up, shorn of pictures, outside which people stand relaxed in the sunshine. Who knew what terrors the night would bring?