To know the films of Terence Davies is to know his life and his city, or at least the versions that persist so strongly in his memory. With the exception of Guy Maddin (who’s not necessarily trustworthy when it comes to matters of autobiography), no other contemporary filmmaker has drawn so often from his or her early experiences to create works that are so haunting, evocative or keenly felt. At 63, Davies is well beyond his Liverpool boyhood, but there’s no doubting the prowess with which he can recall and recreate every detail of that world, from the luminescence of light reflected on a rain-covered street to the domestic rituals of his beloved mother, a central figure in Davies’ extraordinary early shorts and features — presented in a retrospective starting this weekend at Cinematheque Ontario — and in his newest film.

Ending Davies’ eight-year hiatus from filmmaking, Of Time and the City (*****; Jan 23-25 at Cinematheque and Feb 1-4 at the Bloor) made its premiere at Cannes last May. It was a very welcome pleasure to see him return to his home turf and to the preoccupations that formed his aesthetic — or, as he puts it in his marvelously acerbic voice-over narration, “home, school, the movies and God.”

The film is a very personal tribute to his dirty ol’ hometown conceived along the lines of Listen to Britain, Humphrey Jennings’ immortal ode to Englishness. Archival footage of the city from the time of Davies’ youth in the ’40s and ’50s (he worked as a shipping clerk and bookkeeper for 10 years before escaping to London and filmmaking) is juxtaposed with shots of the wealthier city today.



Caustic, rueful and affectionate in equal measure, Davies’ narration is a marvel of erudition, especially when he’s venting his spleen in the direction of the Queen (or Betty, as he calls her). Of Time and the City’s most bilious sequence presents the royals’ national wedding celebrations as a vulgar display of wealth and ostentation, all the more appalling for their being conducted within spitting distance of the “worst slums in Europe.” Over these images, he quotes Willem de Kooning: “The problem with being poor is that it takes up all of your time.” To which he witheringly adds a truism of his own: “The problem with being rich is that it takes up everyone else’s.”

Lines like that point to an interesting development for Davies: he doesn’t seem nearly as miserable as he used to. His earliest works in the Cinematheque retro present that Liverpool boyhood in a much harsher light. A trio of black-and-white shorts made between 1976 and 1983 and then released together in 1984, The Terence Davies Trilogy (****; Feb 7, 7pm) comprises a bleak introduction to Davies’ favourite motifs: schoolyard warfare, mother love, Catholic guilt and the stirrings of ungodly desires. (Davies has always been very vocal about his misgivings over his sexual orientation — he claims to have never been truly happy since realizing he was gay at the age of 11.)

The careful beauty of the framing and canny use of light in the first shorts also herald the exquisite compositional sense that makes Davies’ first two features so arresting. Both clearly autobiographical in nature, 1988’s Distant Voices, Still Lives (*****; Jan 26, 7pm) and 1992’s The Long Day Closes (*****; Jan 29, 7pm) are unusually tactile experiences. With their nostalgic glow and unconventional flow, their narratives are rivers of memory and reverie. The pain of isolation, abuse and poverty is acutely conveyed, as is the joy to be found in a favourite refuge (the top two being his mother’s arms and a movie theatre). That emotional intensity could be described a sort of fearless sentimentality, a quality that very much defines Of Time and the City, too.

In between those films, Davies travelled away from the Mersey to craft two literary adaptations. Beating the Arcade Fire to the title, his film of John Kennedy Toole’s early novel The Neon Bible (***; Jan 23, 8:30pm) boasts the same strong compositional beauty as Davies’ first features — as well as the same emphasis on a mother-son bond, with then-teenaged Montreal actor Jacob Tierney making a strong showing opposite Gena Rowlands — but the elliptical plotting is more detriment than asset. Anchored by a superb performance by Gillian Anderson, Davies’ 2000 take on Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (****; Jan 24, 4pm) should’ve established him as a superior purveyor of period dramas in the Merchant Ivory mould. Instead, he didn’t work for eight years.

Perhaps it’s no surprise that to start again, Davies had to go back to where it all began. Near the film’s close, Davies shares this line from Chekhov: “The golden moments pass and have no trace.” Yet like all his Liverpool films, Of Time and the City is full of those traces, Davies once again proving to be a master at reconstituting the moments that have marked him most deeply. For all of its author’s irascibility, this may be Davies’ warmest work. It’s certainly the funniest. And even though Liverpool’s streets may be perennially clogged with Magical Mystery Tourists in search of Penny Lane, it should be obvious by now who really deserves a commemorative bus tour.