Mark Kermode on… the revered British director Terence Davies: ‘He had to fight to get every film made’

From Distant Voices, Still Lives to Benediction, the lyrical work of the late director was suffused with the ‘ecstasy’ of cinema – and his fraught Liverpool childhood

Last month, British cinema lost one of its greatest and most distinctive screen poets. From an astonishing trilogy of early short films (Children; Madonna and Child; Death and Transfiguration – all available on BFI Player) to his final feature, Benediction (2021), Terence Davies seamlessly blended personal recollections with wider universal truths. His subjects ranged from autobiographically inspired portraits of postwar working-class life in Liverpool (Distant Voices, Still Lives, 1988; The Long Day Closes, 1992) to sweeping literary adaptations (of John Kennedy Toole’s Georgia-set The Neon Bible, 1995, currently streaming on Channel 4; or Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s hardscrabble Scottish masterpiece Sunset Song, 2015) and intimate portraits of real-life authors, most remarkably the American poet Emily Dickinson, brilliantly played by Cynthia Nixon in A Quiet Passion, 2016. Yet each of his films felt deeply, distinctly personal. No wonder Jack Lowden, who played Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction, told me that after immersing himself in his subject’s diaries in preparation for the role, he gradually came to realise that “I was essentially playing Terence.”

Despite critical acclaim (a Time Out magazine poll ranked Distant Voices, Still Lives as the third greatest British film ever made), Davies – like so many of his compatriots – struggled to get his films financed. After the release of his artfully trenchant adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (2000), featuring a career-best performance by Gillian Anderson, there would be an eight-year gap before the arrival of his next film, the sublime documentary Of Time and the City, and three more before his next dramatic feature, an acclaimed version of Terence Rattigan’s stage play The Deep Blue Sea (2011). He may have been a national hero among cineastes, but Davies had to fight to get every film made.

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