FILM OF THE WEEK: Of Time and the City

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills?
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.

A. E. Houseman's wistful poem, as narrated in the authoritative fireside bass voice of British auteur Terence Davies (Distant Voices, Still Lives; The House of Mirth), are the fitting first words heard in this bitterly, beautifully nostalgic eulogy to the post-WWII Liverpool that Davies has long left behind -- or should it be said that the city of that era left him? Only outwardly reminiscent of Chris Marker's wandering cine-essays or Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, Davies' nakedly personal retreat into his youthful memories isn't meant as an intellectual exploration of contemporary hindsights, even for all its high-falutin' literary quotations.

No, Of Time and the City is pure, poignant tone poetry as it's rarely seen on big screens today, its dedication to meditative lyricism over the detached academia of postmodern annotation allowing viewers to graft their own personal remembrances of home-movie melancholy. As if assembled straight from Davies' head, the film is a seamlessly curated series of archival and newsreel footage from the '40s through the '60s, occasionally scored to various pieces of popular music, but mostly to his hypnotically grandiose voiceover (like Werner Herzog, you'd let this guy read you the phone book if he asked). Sometimes droll, regularly vitriolic, but never sentimental, Davies' stream-of-consciousness chronicle dances through sacred milestones (of the pro-wrestling match that instigated his first homosexual thoughts, of his Catholic guilt and later denunciation of faith, of his ecstasy for those glorious movie palaces!), favorite pages from his library (T. S. Eliot here, Chekhov and Yeats there), and thorough scene-setting recollections of mid-century architecture and working-class miserablism.

You are there, even if there isn't there anymore, and it's to the credit of Davies' artistry that there's little trace of didacticism or ethnographic tedium. An hour-and-a-half tapestry of hazy, half-remembered memories juxtaposed in hazy, half-deteriorated clips shouldn't even resonate to non-Liverpudlians in theory, and yet I often found myself pensively dazing off into my remembered past. That memory is perhaps the most overlapped subject within Davies' filmography is fascinating, considering that when I interviewed him last week, he denounced the idea that his was a cathartic undertaking: "I thought at one time, when I started making my films, particularly the early autobiographical ones, that I would reach some catharsis. But I haven't. All it has done is highlight that which has been lost." On a screen, that's poetry.

Of Time and the City opens today at New York City's Film Forum. For tickets and more info, click here.

Posted by ahillis at January 23, 2009 2:52 PM