Distant Voices/Still Lives

Here's a round up of material on next week's film: first a short biography of Terence Davies and a synopsis of the action in the film. Because the film is so layered, both visually and aurally, I think a synopsis will be somewhat helpful for a first viewing, though as you will see, any synopsis falls short because in this film "the plot" is somewhat secondary to the power of image and sound.

The film critic Annette Kuhn has a some insightful commentary on the film on the British Film Institute's website, screenonline. In particular, she describes the relation between form and content in this film:

"...the film's 'poetry of the ordinary' is grounded in, and dictated by, its subject matter. Composed largely of events and situations recalled by different family members, Distant Voices, Still Lives is about memory itself, and through its organisation of sounds and images enacts the very process of remembering. Especially distinctive features of the film include the mixture of standpoints from which events are recalled, the vignettish character of the memory-stories, and references to popular songs, popular culture, religious iconography and religious music...the narration, like memory itself, is cyclical, repetitive, ambiguous, suggesting, as Martin Hunt puts it, an "ambivalent, interrogative, contradictory and ultimately unresolved" relation to the past."

I like her description of the film as not so much a representation of memory but an enactment of it. It is similar to the ways in which Davies himself has spoken about the film's structure and subject matter:

"I knew that the film would be cyclical because memory is not linear and it’s triggered by time which then triggers other things. It’s an emotional journey that you go on. Also a great influence was The Four Quartets by Eliot. When we first got our television in 1960 Alec Guinness read them over four nights. I still read them now. I read them once a month. I think that they’re one of the greatest achievements of poetry in England. They’re about the nature of time, the nature of memory, the nature of mortality and the nature of seeing. How by seeing something very small you can become changed by it or perhaps it changes you. Eliot writes: ‘What we call the beginning is often the end / And to make and end is to make a beginning.’ Did the end precede the beginning or was the beginning always there before the end? That’s such a wonderful description of the nature of time and experience..."

In another essay on the relationship between form and content in the film, "The Art of Memory: Terence Davies' Distant Voices/Still Lives," Adrian Danks writes,

"The basic structure of Distant Voices, Still Lives consists of an ephemeral string of images and events evocatively joined by a sense of place, time, character, class and social milieu. The film comprises a kaleidoscopic, though stylistically precise, collection of tableau vivants. The artificiality of the images, their exquisite framing, occasional gentle panning, and often long-held 'emptiness', facilitate us perceiving these images as isolated fragments that are unlocked and remembered before our eyes and ears. Davies presents these vignettes as shards of memory which conversely contradict and rhyme with one another...the effect is like that of memory stratified, where memory-images trigger other memory-images...

[T]he film presents a complex notion of British culture in the '40s and '50s: a mix of Hollywood movies, transatlantic popular song at times gently inflected by more exotic elements (such as 'calypso'), British radio (the football results and "Round the Horne") and the elegiac strains of Ralph Vaughan Williams and Benjamin Britten. Davies also demonstrates a feel for the transformative and transcendental potential of this cultural material: when characters cry during a screening of Love is a Many Splendored Thing (1955) or a solo female character defiantly sings "I Wanna be Around" we witness a social ritual (attending the cinema, a sing-a-long at the pub) that allows an expression of pain, bitterness, tenderness and even vengeance unable to be experienced or expressed elsewhere. In essence it is the representation of these social, cultural and generational rituals (the violence of men towards women in particular) that is the heart of the film. This sense of a life remembered is delivered more in terms of sensory experiences, a colour, a tint, a smell or a peculiar sound, than exhaustive, concrete or tangible documentation. This is matched by the film's uncanny ability to simulate and reflect the half-remembered, embroidered and 'artificial' recollections of childhood."