Terence Davies, C/D. S/D

btw NOT an evelyn waugh adaptation

damn, I just saw the Trilogy for the second time and forgot what unalloyed misery it is....and often not in good ways; glad he got that out of his system. (and heh, the Beatles hater killed McCartney's grandfather)

nice interview:

The problem with film is that it's always in the eternal present. When you cut, you always read it as "this is the next thing that happened." What do you do if you actually dissolve? Or you cut and then dissolve? What does that mean? It begins to change the nature of how we perceive time. But it's closest, I think, to music. You don't have to be a musician to follow a symphonic argument. If you love the music, you'll follow it. My great love is Anton Bruckner. There's a wonderful moment in the 7th Symphony where there's a huge climax to this wonderful tune, and then there's a pause, and then the tune returns on first violins, like a long long echo of what we've just heard. Your inner ear has been waiting for some kind of resolution, but it wasn't waiting for that. It's devastating. It's so moving and so beautiful and I think you can do that with film. You can deny expectation, but you've always got to imply that expectations are going to be satisfied; but, not necessarily in the way that you were expecting it. That's what makes things interesting.

http://mubi.com/notebook/posts/memory-as-mise-en-scene-a-conversation-with-terence-davies

DVSL is my fave British film ever by miles. still amazing to me that just 5 or so years back it had been out of print since the early 1990s on VHS and *never* available on DVD.
i can't recommend the BFI Classics book enough either.

man i've always really wanted a poster of it and there's an amazing one here. £40's not bad either i guess.. http://norwichfilmposters.com/foreign_and_non_quad.htm

more review links in the Mubi post up top

Good interview with a local critic.

he appears to have been swallowed by The Hunger Games. (alas just like at the b.o.)

i interviewed him a few years ago about of time and the city: http://www.montrealmirror.com/2009/032609/film1.html (that first photo caption appears to be a hilarious mistake.)

The actress who plays the big-boned, jokey friend of the older sister in DV,SL is brilliant, yet she seems to have no other film credits.

In that film, the BAM audience laughed in semi-astonishment at the pub singalong of "Stone Cold Dead in the Market," a song w/ which I am very familiar from WFMU airplay over the years. A pointed inclusion in a film w/ wifebeating tho.

yes, she is fantastic in the film. so much of this has entered my consciousness. e.g. the moment where the girls reunite and they sing "they tried to sell us egg foo-yung" to the tune of the old nat king cole song "too young". a beautiful moment that says so much about the shared language of friendship.

also

-"How much do you love me, Mam?"
-"A pound of sugar."

song is usually called "brownskin gal" btw

love the banter between big-boned girl and her short husband. they constantly insult each other, yet clearly love each other as much as anyone in the movie.

sounds to me like they were doing a medley of "Brownskin Gal" and this one?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Cold_Dead_in_the_Market_(He_Had_It_Coming)

The music almost belted me out of the theater, and boy, he loves the chiaroscuro but this was quite moving in places. I'd no problem with Hiddleston and Weisz, although I often wondered what she was supposed to project. I also didn't think Hester's husband was queer; he looked honestly besotted with her, if confused about where to put it in.

The creakiness of Rattigan's theater devices is amusing now: the inconveniently found letter, the husband stumbling into the phone call, the dowager mom getting laughs from scowling.

oh, I breezed through the text recently, you'd love the landlady and neighbors providing the entire backstory in Act I.

But um, the phone call stumble and the mother's two scenes are entirely Davies' invention.

Damn.

Brand new creakiness!

He said at BAM two weeks ago of the mother scenes "I was pressured to cut them" and I thought, at least one, damn right.

xxxxp that big-boned, jokey girl mentioned above who was in DV,SL quit acting to become er.. one of this lot;
http://www.yournextmp.com/candidates/debi_jones

!!!!

i know!

wow. well she's truly amazing in DV,SL. i can even forgive her conservatism.

saw The Long Day Closes for the first time in 20 years last week... funny how he blatantly remakes bits of the trilogy & DVSL, incl Debi Jones and the clowning hubby (w/ diff actors)!

Terence Davies has signed up Sex and the City‘s Cynthia Nixon to play Amherst poet Emily Dickinson in a biopic. Davies has written the script to A Quiet Passion, which, I’m told, bursts with wit and one-liners, like a Noël Coward play…. Davies is preparing for one of the busiest spells of his long, not always busy, career. He begins shooting Scottish drama Sunset Song (with Peter Mullan and Agyness Deyn) this summer and may then go straight into the Dickinson film.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2013/may/19/trailer-trash-cannes-marine-vacth-pele

i have to say i don't think he'll ever make a film nearly as good a distant voices/long day closes again. he seems to be on shakier ground when he's not writing about his own life (or some version thereof). i think deep blue sea was his best since those days (though the sharks looked kind fake IMO), and i was not impressed with the formless documentary about liverpool.

the sunset song thing is something he's been trying to get funding for since (at least) the early 1990s, so I'm glad he's making it. i guess i'll just have to trust him on the dickinson biopic which looks horrible on paper.

anyway this dude still made one of the two or three best british movies ever so he's got a lifetime of good will from me.

house of mirth had a lot of amazing stuff but i would point to it as an example of the dangers of miscasting. anderson was fine, but the rest of the cast was kind of a mess.

i thought eric stotz was good although not exactly sheldon as i see him but anderson is not the lily bart i see either, or that anyone saw other than davis.

Dan Akroyd threw me out of the movie when he talked like his character in My Stepmother is an Alien.

The Long Day Closes is coming out on Criterion

http://www.criterion.com/films/27984-the-long-day-closes

good to see that the 1992 episode of The South Bank Show is included in this. hopefully Distant Voices, Still Lives will be next.

FINALLY

and he very likely has 2 new films coming out in the next 2 years....

excerpt from Michael Koresky's imminent book:

“Being gay has ruined my life. I hate it. I’ll go to my grave hating it.”

http://brooklynrail.org/2014/09/film/queerness-and-melancholia-an-excerpt-from-terence-davies

you can watch TLDC on YouTube for those who can't wait:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_w12UaW6sqI

don't do it!

Its his best film.

The appearance of the book explains why this is being shown at the ICA, with a Q&A too:

https://www.ica.org.uk/whats-on/long-day-closes-qa

signing w/ DV,SL in NY on Sept 28

http://www.movingimage.us/visit/calendar/2014/09/28/detail/distant-voices-still-lives

The actress who plays the big-boned, jokey friend of the older sister in DV,SL is brilliant, yet she seems to have no other film credits.

That's Debi Jones, she's a bit of a local celeb in Liverpool, had a radio show, column for the local paper, does a bit of panto. Oh and stood as a Conservative candidate in a local election. I had a moment of cognitive dissonance when I saw her in the film.

wasn't she in brookie for a good while though?

Honestly don't remember her on It? Wasn't an avid fan tbf, only watched it round my nan's, my dad wouldn't have it on in ours.

well a quick google says i'm wrong. could have sworn...

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/reviews-recommendations/toronto-2015/sunset-song-first-look

cautiously optimistic

Same. He's the director whose star has fallen furthest I think. Actually it's fallen so far that it makes me wonder if the towering greatness of DV,SL (all time top 5, for me) was an accident.

Nah. I watched The Long Day Closes Blu-ray a few months ago and fell in love again.

last one was his best in awhile

So was the documentary, in which that querulous voice craps on pop culture since the Beatles.

Yeah I've seen them both. I've seen everything.

makes me wonder if the towering greatness of DV,SL (all time top 5, for me) was an accident.

Bcz he followed it with The Long Day Closes its no accident, and Deep Blue Sea had its moments.

Following Deyn with Weisz is pretty exciting.

Friend of mine read that book by Lewis Grassic Gibbon earlier this year. She hasn't been doing great and I really hope to take her to this.

Watched this w/her and she says only one of the three Gibbon bks were filmed.

Anyway this was a disappointment. Slow-cinema over-used (especially in the switchover to WWI France sequence, but also the one in the church), Deyn stretched at some points but that face has potential. I think its equally true the film stretched the material and everybody involved.

Looked great but one for ppl who recognise all the themes - working-class life and song, the woman's lot, brutal patriarchs, and I liked Davies' re-use of these themes in a new setting.

I remain apprehensive of Sunset Song, mainly cus of its regional relevance to me, I went to The Other primary school but I have slept with eh Persons from Redmyre school, which is across the main road from me, and is where the Lewis Grassic Gibbon Centre is (no thread on him? For shame...) I think they filmed parts of the 70's TV version in this village, slightly before I was borned, the old dudes still talk of the dirt they laid up the High Street for it. I heard they got the accents all wrong, no Doric? Still, I will no doubt catch this eventually, on DVD or whatever. But really I'm just looking for reassuarance that this isn't a travesty, cus I love Terrence Davies, albeit from a 2 generation remove from Liverpool, which may make all the difference. But (in the absence of a LGG thread) y'all should read A Scot's Quair. That's as close as my people come to A Great Work Of Literature, and objectively I think it may be. It's like Ulysses to us, and while the ILB people (who intimidate me) might find that comparison offensive I'll throw down for that.

Quite lovely:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lS-boGJ8hd0

RIP

fun list

https://www.instagram.com/p/CyGrwkrIsTH/

i still think about my favorite professor showing us distant voices, still lives at byu. did he know the queer, closeted kids in the class needed to see it? was he somewhat queer himself? probably a little bit of yes to both. it was all so unspoken though.

Loved this bit from Michael Koresky:

At the conclusion of that deeply nurturing conversation, as I was nervously pressing stop on my audio recorder, Davies then looked up at me with a warm smile and asked, “So… what is your book about?” Concerned and amazed, I responded: “You! The book is about you.” Davies’ face turned red and lit up like a child, delighted but also humbled beyond belief.

“Me?!” It was an expression of unbelievable modesty coming from a man many agree was England’s greatest filmmaker of the last quarter century, but also evidence that Davies, never a commercially successful director in all the boring ways we measure such things, was always on the edge of being forgotten. It’s impossible to imagine, however, that Davies’ cinema will ever be forgotten by anyone who has seen a frame of it; his monumental films held candles as vigils to the form itself, and now without him, we will – we must – keep that flame burning.

https://www.bfi.org.uk/news/terence-davies-obituary

MK is living the life I wish I was. He’s the perfect person to pay homage to this particular director

I'll watch his last couple of films. Really hope Davies is not forgotten :-(

My obt for him.

Some nice memories here:

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/oct/11/terence-davies-tom-hiddleston-rachel-weisz-jennifer-ehle-peter-capaldi?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=facebook&fbclid=IwAR1bF7DkZskET2ghvSB4za-cE6oQhHuC1GwtlA7_lK1zMJTfmIozv3MRDaQ

So lovely - the Capaldi contribution particularly.

Yes, that was great, thanks!

I'm getting the Koresky book from the library, this aspect of the description sounded really intriguing:

focusing on four paradoxes within the director's oeuvre: films that are autobiographical yet fictional; melancholy yet elating; conservative in tone and theme yet radically constructed; and obsessed with the passing of time yet frozen in time and space.

Koresky's good.

I have a mega critic-crush on him

I don’t know from him, just heard about him now on this thread. His book Films of Endearment has a cheesy title but maybe it’s good?

I loved it, but as I said above ...

Glancing at it. Looks good. Had a shock for a minute when he said his mother went to Newton High and I misread it as Newtown High.