For the fragmentary uncoiling of the memories that he had of his childhood, director Terence Davies found with his creation—his stirring British landmark—Distant Voices, Still Lives a form that brought them to vivid and vivifying life.
This is cinema as a high-order process of recreating what had been destined to make no sense at all, a mishmash of half-remembered things and yesses and noes and fears and images that sink back into the darkness after stalling beneath the speckled surface; the fragments dredged up by the memory are often indefinite, incoherent, at the very least incomplete, but with the movie camera Davies makes his own incoherence into something digestible, all the while retaining the indefinite haziness and that oh-so-delicious shroud of mystery that can make the act of remembering not only alluring, but wonderful. This is art’s transmuting power to bring to an illuminating completion what was destined to remain merely confused, a form of artistic thaumaturgy in the same line as the great Marcel Proust.
That is not to say that Distant Voices, Still Lives achieves that degree of depth and substance, that it makes entire glittering worlds out of the hues of some mutant asparagus, the sidelong glance of a lone girl coquetting in the distance; that is an extreme of the dredging up of memory, and within the confines of its runtime and the limitations of its artistic medium, Terence Davies does wonders.
Its strength is the series of shots—from a photo album vivified, these tableaux vivant in the house that ages with them and here and there at ceremonial gatherings in mid-century Liverpool—that give the film a sober beauty that isn’t hard to recognize even from the first exterior shots of the house in the rain. But a few shots nonetheless stand out: the slow-motion crashing through a glass roof of two bodies in free fall, almost in a sitting position and so creating distinct shapes in the glass that shatters around them; a crane shot lifting away from a flock of umbrellas abandoned in a rain-soaked alley behind a cinema where the audience, smoking cigarettes as though time enough existed for eternity, tearful and close-packed like salty chips in a closed bag, sit and watch their Hollywood entertainment.
These are just two of the many on whose account, and because it has the crispness and brevity of a great short story, Distant Voices, Still Lives should be remembered in these years of the twenty-first century, decades after the disappearance of that era defined by the Second World War. But it should be obvious that in this case, the act of remembering will be far from difficult.
