He was born in the right place, at the right time – Liverpool, 1945 – to become a rockstar, but Terence Davies followed a completely different path. Coming from a working, Catholic, gay background, he found salvation in cinema, which he practiced in a unique way, choosing from his late beginnings to turn to the past, his own – through autobiography. This past becomes eternity thanks to literature, through adaptations (Among the happy people of the world in 2000Sunset Song in 2015) and portraits of writers (Emily Dickinson or Siegfried Sassoon).
Compared to the glory of his contemporaries Ken Loach and Stephen Frears, Terence Davies remains little-known. However, he was admired by his peers (including Jean-Luc Godard, who died in 2022) and critics. His delicacy and poetic invention, evident throughout a succinct filmography (he had a tumultuous relationship with the British film industry), made him a filmmaker. He died at his home on October 7, in Mistley, Essex (England), at the age of 77, after a brief illness, his relatives announced.
Born in a poor area of Liverpool on November 10, 1945, Terence Davies was the last of ten children. He was 7 years old when his father died, an independent worker whom the filmmaker described as “psychotic”. Sent to boarding school at age 11, he left five years later to work. For a decade, Terence Davies was an office worker and then an accountant. He finally left Liverpool for Coventry, where he entered drama school.
It was there that he wrote his first short film, Children (1976). He recounts the miserable childhood of his alter ego, Robert Tucker. Two other short films follow, Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983), which will form the “Terence Davies Trilogy”, self-portrait steeped in metaphysical anguish (arrived at adulthood, the author renounced the faith in which he was raised, but not his imagery and his imagination) and sensitivity.
Painful nostalgia
From 1983, the trilogy circulated in festivals around the world and, five years later, Terence Davies was able to complete his first feature film, Distant Voices (1988). He recreates the Liverpool of his childhood, transfigured by lighting that turns its back on realism, dominated by the figure of a tyrannical father magnificently played by Pete Postlethwaite (1946-2011). The film is bathed in music, from Benjamin Britten to 1950s crooners. In 1992, A long day coming to an end completes the autobiographical aspect of Davies’ work by chronicling the years which go from the death of his father to his departure to boarding school. Peaceful, the film is imbued with a painful nostalgia for a vanished world.
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