Set in 'a world before Elvis, in a Liverpool before the Beatles', Terence Davies' film 'Distant Voices, Still Lives' is an elegiac and intensely autobiographical meditation on a post-war working-class childhood. Paul Farley's study of the film is both a personal response, as a Liverpudlian and as a poet, and an exploration of Davies' unique visual style, blending the spaces - the 'short halls, stairways, coal cellars and meter cupboards of northern England' - and sounds - the BBC shipping forecast, a pub sing-a-long, the strains of Vaughan Williams and Britten - of memory.
Fires Were Started is a provocative analysis of the responses of British film to the policies and political ideology of the Conservative governments of Margaret Thatcher and it represents an original and stimulating contribution to our knowledge of British cinema. This second edition includes revised and updated contributions from some of the leading scholars of British cinema, including Thomas Elsaesser, Peter Wollen and Manthia Diawara. The book discuss prominent filmmakers such as Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Ken Russell, Nicolas Roeg and Stephen Frears, it also explores some lesser known but equally important territory such as the work of Black British filmmakers, the Leeds Animation Workshop and Channel 4's Film on Four. Films discussed include Distant Voices, Still Lives, My Beautiful Launderette, Chariots of Fire and Drowning by Numbers.
A fresh, concise but wide-ranging introduction to and overview of British and Irish cinema, this volume contains 24 essays, each on a separate seminal film from the region. Films under discussion include 'Pink String and Sealing Wax', 'Room at the Top', 'The Italian Job', 'Orlando', and 'Sweet Sixteen'.
In Revisioning History thirteen historians from around the world look at the historical film on its own terms, not as it compares to written history but as a unique way of recounting the past. How does film construct a historical world? What are the rules, codes, and strategies by which it brings the past to life? What does that historical construction mean to us? In grappling with these questions, each contributor looks at an example of New History cinema. Different from Hollywood costume dramas or documentary films, these films are serious efforts to come to grips with the past; they have often grown out of nations engaged in an intense quest for historical connections, such as India, Cuba, Japan, and Germany. The volume begins with an introduction by Robert Rosenstone. Part I, "Contesting History," comprises essays by Geoff Eley (on the film Distant Voices, Still Lives), Nicholas B. Dirks (The Home and the World), Thomas Kierstead and Deidre Lynch (Eijanaika), and Pierre Sorlin (Night of the Shooting Stars). Contributing to Part II, "Visioning History," are Michael S. Roth (Hiroshima Mon Amour), John Mraz (Memories of Underdevelopment), Min Soo Kang (The Moderns) and Clayton R. Koppes (Radio Bikini). Part III, "Revisioning History" contains essays by Denise J. Youngblood (Repentance), Rudy Koshar (Hitler: A Film from Germany), Rosenstone (Walker), Sumiko Higashi (Walker and Mississippi Burning), and Daniel Sipe (From the Pole to the Equator).
Terence Davies has made some of the most innovative, harrowing, and hauntingly lyrical films of the contemporary era. This study of his work combines detailed analysis of all his films with an investigation of key filmic issues of time and memory, identity and selfhood, and the nature of literary adaptation.
What is film criticism for? This book aims to answer this question It argues that art cinema's political effect is the result of indeterminacy and not character-centric meaning.
Moving Pictures, Still Lives revisits the cinematic and intellectual atmosphere of the late twentieth century. Against the backdrop of the historical fever of the 1980s and 1990s-the rise of the heritage industry, a global museum-building boom, and a cinematic fascination with costume dramas and literary adaptations-it explores the work of artists and philosophers who complicated the usual association between tradition and the past or modernity and the future. Author James Tweedie retraces the "archaeomodern turn" in films and theory that framed the past as a repository of abandoned but potentially transformative experiments. He examines late twentieth-century filmmakers who were inspired by old media, especially painting, and often viewed those art forms as portals to the modern past. In detailed discussions of Alain Cavalier, Terence Davies, Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman, Agnès Varda, and other key directors, the book concentrates on films that fill the screen with a succession of tableaux vivants, still lifes, illuminated manuscripts, and landscapes. It also considers three key figures-Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, and Serge Daney-who grappled with the late twentieth century's characteristic concerns, including history, memory, and belatedness. It reframes their theoretical work on film as a mourning play for past revolutions and a means of reviving the possibilities of the modern age (and its paradigmatic medium, cinema) during periods of political and cultural retrenchment. Looking at cinema and the century in the rear-view mirror, the book highlights the unrealized potential visible in the history of film, as well as the cinematic phantoms that remain in the digital age.
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 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. 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.
Home in British Working-Class Fiction offers a fresh take on British working-class writing that turns away from a masculinist, work-based understanding of class in favour of home, gender, domestic labour and the family kitchen. As Nicola Wilson shows, the history of the British working classes has often been written from the outside, with observers looking into the world of the inhabitants. Here Wilson engages with the long cultural history of this gaze and asks how ’home’ is represented in the writing of authors who come from a working-class background. Her book explores the depiction of home as a key emotional and material site in working-class writing from the Edwardian period through to the early 1990s. Wilson presents new readings of classic texts, including The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Love on the Dole and Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, analyzing them alongside works by authors including James Hanley, Walter Brierley, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, Buchi Emecheta, Pat Barker, James Kelman and the rediscovered ’ex-mill girl novelist’ Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. Wilson's broad understanding of working-class writing allows her to incorporate figures typically ignored in this context, as she demonstrates the importance of home's role in the making and expression of class feeling and identity.
"Put briefly, this is a superb collection of essays. They are lucidly and eloquently written, and make their points with wit and clarity. They are full of perceptive, highly stimulating, and occasionally provocative illustrations of how practice connects to theory (and vice versa) without getting bogged down in academic language. The contributors include a combination of exceptionally admired film music scholars, and of musicologists renowned for their keen insights into the cultural contexts of music production and reception. This book is an excellent resource and compelling read."—Derek B. Scott, author of From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology
