Terence Davies

Contemporary Film Directors

by Michael Koresky

Called the most important British filmmaker of his generation, Terence Davies made his reputation with modern classics like Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes , personal works exploring his fractured childhood in Liverpool. His idiosyncratic and unorthodox narrative films defy easy categorization, as their seeming existence within realism and personal memory cinema is undermined by an abstractness that makes the way he lays bare personal pain come across as distant, even alien. Film critic Michael Koresky explores the unique emotional tenor of Davies's work by focusing on four paradoxes within the director's 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. Through these contradictions, the films' intricate designs reveal a cumulative, deeply personal meditation on the self. Koresky also analyzes how Davies's ongoing negotiation of--and struggle with--questions of identity related to his past and his homosexuality imbue the details and jarring juxtapositions in his films with a queer sensibility, which is too often overlooked due to the complexity of Davies's work and his unfashionable ambivalence toward his own sexual orientation.

Genres: Film

184 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2014

Reviews

[Lillian Crawford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Decent analysis.

[Dylan Kiewel · Rating 4 out of 5]

incredible. should be the go to guide for this most slept on of directors. read in conjunction with the newly film desk published hallelujah now which koresky also intro'ed, this guy's really on the ball. dives into all the formal quirks with aplomb, admirably gets into the nitty gritty of terence's background, even pulls in some queer theory some deleuze and some freud in. hat off.