RIP Terence Davies
I was very sad to read the news about the death of Terence Davies.
In 2021, I had the great opportunity to see and hear him in person twice (photos above taken by me) at my first trip to Viennale where he was a special guest because a section of the film festival was dedicated to his films, Monography: CAPTURING TIME IN IMAGES AND WORDS. I still regret missing the first few days of the festival because I missed watching Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The House of Mirth (2000), but was glad to see his other older films that I had never seen before.
During one of his talks he said, “Theatre tells you everything. Cinema reveals.” He was so lovely and passionate during his talk, and it was heartwarming to witness the happiness and gratitude he exuded from seeing so many people at his screening, and being loved and appreciated by them.
During his time in Vienna it was announced Davies was planning to shoot his next film The Post Office Girl in Austria, which sadly never happened because he wasn’t able to raise enough money for it and he moved on to another project.
This is from an interview in The Film Stage with Davies just last month:
How are things proceeding with The Post Office Girl? It was announced in February that you had cast three actors. Are they still involved, and is there a start date?
Funding, or rather the lack of it means that The Post Office Girl is likely to be no more. The producers have been trying for six years now. You do get to the point when you think maybe not this one…. in the meantime, I’m working with EMU Films (who produced Benediction) on a new script that may take us to Jamaica, so fingers firmly crossed for that!Terribly sorry to hear Post Office Girl is done. But great news on this next film––do you mind if I ask what it will be?
I’m sworn to secrecy at the moment. But we’ve finished the second draft of the script and now we’re starting to make approaches to lead cast.
It is shameful that a director like Terence Davies struggled to get his films funded till his last days. He talked about it in more detail in 2006.
The film industry is cruel.
A moving obituary by Michael Koresky, who has written extensively about Terence Davies,
It might seem counterintuitive, but, yes, Davies’s films were musicals, a genre that exists in the space between the public and the private self. These were often deeply interior works, which moved to the external rhythms of songs and melodies that were profoundly meaningful to him. Never was this more apparent than in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), which forewent traditional linear narrative for a series of anecdotal memory shards triggered by popular songs he remembered being shared by family members when he was a child, and The Long Day Closes (1992), which drifted along on the recollections of music and movies to form a twilit portrait of his own adolescence that felt like a direct transmission from its maker’s mind.
These films are melancholy, occasionally harrowing, and are also indescribably beautiful, two of the greatest works in all of cinema, with no tonal or aesthetic equal. Arguably, he doesn’t even have imitators; no one would dare. Because no one made movies like Davies, who precisely sculpted out of a subjective past, creating films that glided on waves of contemplation and observation, inviting viewers to join him in the burnished darkness of a past about which he felt complex, contradictory feelings.
You can read the complete obituary here.
RIP Terence Davies (November 10, 1945 - October 7, 2023)
I leave you with Passing Time, a 3 min short film which by Terence Davies, and his last, commissioned by Film Fest Gent for 25x2 project which was published online last month, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the festival, “25 composers, 25 filmmakers, 25 ultimate symbioses of music and cinematography that fit completely within the DNA of Film Fest Gent and the World Soundtrack Awards. For the unique 2x25 project, the festival asked 25 composers to compose a short piece of music, after which 25 filmmakers made a short film. The result: 25 exceptional films where the music inspired the form, narrative and texture.”
An extract from Passing Time, words written and read by Terence Davies:
For you are gone and not replaced
But echoes of your lovely self
Will bear us through life's cruel stream
And if I am to join you there
Oh what joy your face will bring
RIP Terence Davies (November 10, 1945 - October 7, 2023)