Affairs aren’t generally nice and straightforward, and if you’re the sort of person that would do anything for a quiet life then maybe you want to settle for something a little less exciting. Scunthorpe say, or Seaton Sluice. An affair with a city can be a turbulent thing, troubled, tormented, and occasionally tawdry. But that’s part of the joy. Attachment to a place has to have depth, complexity, and commitment. It’s got to cost. To wake up beside a lover who commends you on your speed, efficiency and convenience is to know you have been a major disappointment. And it’s the same with a city.
But this is how town planners, developers, and council corporate marketing departments would like our cities to become. They want to make them magnolia. Break, tame and neuter them. Make them behave themselves. Planners snuff out the soul of a city, developers design away its dirt and darkness. and the marketeers sell us back the simulacrum like it was a sweet and bubbly alcopop, to be enjoyed in moderation, responsibly.
Terence Davies doesn’t approve of this homogenising tendency. He castigates the urge to tidy up the messiness and smooth away the rough edges of his home city, Liverpool. His last film, Of Time and the City, which I saw last Thursday at the Howard Assembly Rooms, is full of smoke and smut, belching chimneys and belicose machinery; men getting dirty, men working on the docks, driving trains and cranes, wrestling, playing football and cheering from the Anfield terraces, riding racehorses in the spattering mud and betting on the Grand national; women drawing the morning fire and warming their hands in the flickering flames, women endlessly cleaning the windows and scrubbing the steps, twisting and churning the dolly tubs, slapping wet laundry and squeezing the suds out, walking around with bundles of clothes balanced on their heads, sauntering along quiet high streets swinging empty shopping bags; urchins squatting in doorways, mongrels mingling equally with packs of feral children; small boys playing around bonfires, smashing windows, swinging from streetlamps, swaggering for the camera; girls skipping, playing with balls, singing in smiling circles, looking after their littler brothers and sisters . . . Wage slavery, women’s oppression, and the exploitation of children has never looked so bloody gorgeous.
It’s a perfect picture of the deserving poor. Poor but honest. Davies quotes de Kooning, “The trouble with being poor is that it takes up all your time” . . . but by heck does it makes for some great camera shots. He’s obviously incensed by the genuine dereliction and deprivation endured by the denizens of the post-war Liverpool slums. He tells us, again and again, how terrible, dehumanising, desperate the poverty was. He rants and raves and sputters with rage. The images, however, are ravishing. The poor are decent. They made do, scraped by, never complained or asked for anything more.
Decline came, Davies insists, when the sprawling slums were demolished and replaced with municipal housing complexes. His voiceover cuttingly refers to “the British genius for the dismal as the archive aerial footage sweeps over rows of nondescript high rise blocks laid out as if designed on graph paper, and Peggy Lee starts to sing “The Folks Who Live on the Hill.” The song is an inspired choice, a paean to domestic bliss and the small comforts of a cosy cottage, with a bit of a garden and a decent outlook;
Our verandah will command a view of meadows green,
The sort of view that seems to want to be seen.
For once the irony is sharp and startling in its understatement. This is the sort of thing Davies is good at. He used the same device in Distant Voices, Still Lives, in the beautiful scene where the mother is washing the outside of the windows, sitting on the ledge with her legs dangling inside, slowly cleaning in wide arcs to the rhythm of the soundtrack, Ella Fitzgerald, Taking a chance on Love; the scene abruptly cuts to the father knocking her to the ground, and shouting “Shut up, shut up, shut up” as he beats her senseless. It’s perfect – beautiful and brutal at the same time. There’s no need to bang on about a moral. Commentary is superfluous. I can’t imagine a diatribe about the evils of domestic violence would improve the thing
Davies makes his loathing for popular culture quite plain, even strident. His ear fails him when he plays The Hollies, He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother, over newsreel footage of the Korean War. The crashingly obvious sentimentality of the song cheapened the effect of the montage and made me feel more queasy than angry. He see’s nothing redeeming in the explosion of working class culture in the 60’s. Even the Beatles get a bashing. He sneers over the intro to the Hippy Hippy Shake, “yeah, yeah, yeah,” in that peculiar, plummy, overly-precise accent that makes even David Starkey sound like a pleb (I was fascinated by his account of how he developed the accent in post-war Liverpool, imitating radio announcers and then wondering why he was picked on at school; he must have been insufferable!)
Over generic footage of the Beatles getting mobbed, he plays the much better version of the Hippy Hippy Shake by The Swinging Blue Jeans, though it’s hard to tell if he knew that or just wanted to have another swipe at The Fab Four. He dismisses John, Paul, George, and Ringo peremptorily as “sounding like a bunch of suburban solicitors.” This is unadulterated snobbery. It’s something about the working classes getting uppity that he disdains, footballers punching the air, rock and roll bands importing inferior music and comporting themselves like demi-gods, ordinary kids having money to flash in fancy bars, the working classes forgetting themselves and having fun. Davies makes his disapproval clear. He sees this as moral decline rather than economic development. In fact, economic development is the main culprit. Money is the ruination of the masses.
Davies has a skewed slant on popular culture deriving from entirely autobiographical sources. Same thing about his beef with Catholicism. His anger is justifiable, but it’s indiscriminate. He can’t contain his antipathy and he can’t resist the occasional juvenile comment or snide insult (Pope Clitoris the Umpteenth! Oh lord.) Fortunately, I wasn’t brought up religious so can’t respond the way he wants me to when he lingers on the architecture and focuses in on the iconography. I don’t see years of humiliation, self-loathing and subjection to a crackpot creed; I see beautiful buildings, gory but gripping statuary, and anthropologically fascinating rituals. It repels Davies. It thrills me. But then I remember reading Homage to Catalonia and wanting to stop the International Brigades from smashing up the churches and toppling the statues of Christ (damned philistines! Think about the heritage.) So perhaps it’s just me. I get the grievance, just can’t feel it in the same way. He did the catholic guilt/anger thing much better in Trilogy, Madonna and Child. Btw, that clip does contain scenes of a sensitive nature, so if you’re of a delicate disposition, please desist.
Obviously Davies is cranking up the cattiness and exaggerating his curmudgeon act for comic effect. It’s a personal essay “cut like fiction” so has no pretensions to be balanced and nuanced like a proper documentary. He is unrepentently partial, personal, and impertinent in his opinions, and the film is all the better for it. I could have done without the hammy recital of T S Eliot’s Four Quartets (I wish he’d got the Alec Guinness version, that would have worked better) and did feel I was being laboriously edified by all the poetry (and why aren’t the poems listed like the music is? There were a couple I couldn’t fathom.) I would have liked to hear some other voices too, maybe from people who didn’t agree with the polemic, who had a different angle. But again, I admired the passion and the craftmanship and the unremitting cantankerous tone. Of Time and the City is definitely a eulogy to a Liverpool loved and lost and the absolute opposite of a marketing brochure. Terence Davies couldn’t do dull and worthy if he tried.
Cracking piece Phil, some lovely analogies. I can see a new tv series coming… Sex with the City.
Just ordered the Terence Davies box set your review was THAT good.
Ta.
It’s all on youtube! He’s a fabulous talker, very entertaining.
Liked the review – though I wasn’t as impressed with the film. I was glad you mentioned his dismissal of popular culture as I did find that even more ‘chip on the shoulder working class’ than me! I won’t be buying the box set….
He wasn’t a big fan of the great unwashed. Well worth getting Distant Voices, Still Lives, it’s a brilliant film and I think you’d like it.
Seems to miss the point that the film presents the view of a gay man unless I am mistaken.
Obviously Terence Davies is gay, but I’m not sure that’s the point of the film. It’s a film about a place he loves – and he’s infuriating and bigotted and arrogant and downright obnoxious sometimes … but he’s never dull. I love the film even but I sit through it wanting to shout at him for being such a prat sometimes.
Totally agree Phil
Only suggesting that you might read the content of the film differently by acknowledging his sexuality – so it becomes a tale of rejection, renunciation, resistance and escape.
No doubt the LGBT community would have a number of viewpoints on the film and it will be interesting to see if any of these emerge at the showing.
Yes, I think you are right about that. It’s hard to tell what sort of question people will be asking at the showing – it all depends on how Ronnie from A Sense of Place introduces it too. I’ve given him a very vague brief and he has free rein to take it wherever he wants. I’m looking forward to it.