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A man apart

Peter Hoskin

Wednesday, 15th October 2008

The great days of cinema are not over: they live on in Terence Davies, writes Peter Hoskin

But why reside in times gone by? Why indulge in a kind of hyper-nostalgia, if that’s what it is? Part of it is strictly personal — Davies admits that he’s ‘mesmerised’ by his past, perhaps as a means of self-knowledge. But part of it is to do with the world then versus the world now. There have been sad losses over the years, Davies suggests, and chief among them are the decline of ‘simple manners’ and ‘good behaviour’. And anyone who’s seen any of Davies’s films could hazard a few more additions to the list, including ‘family’, ‘community’ and ‘innocence’. To some extent, Of Time and the City is a eulogy for these institutions — a eulogy of sadness and anger in equal parts.

Not that Davies is looking on the Britain of his youth through a rose-tinted window. He recognises the advancements that have been made. We are, in his eyes, more discerning about the good things in life, and — crucially — more humane. The slums and mills are less omnipresent features. And he has been free to divorce from his staunch Catholic upbringing — ‘that pernicious religion’, he calls it — which imposed, with cruel effect, on his homosexuality. No, he does not neglect these facts, and his world view is decidedly more multihued than uncomplicated nostalgia permits. I suspect the distinction may not be that Davies prefers the past to the present, but that he finds it more interesting. Or at least more familiar.

This then-and-now thinking emerges more strongly in Davies’s take on the state of cinema today. When it comes to the past — to the great classics of the Hollywood studio system — he is ebullient. Singin’ in the Rain (1952), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) — these are as nectar to him. But when it comes to things as they are today, he is less upbeat. ‘I think the great days of cinema are over,’ he confessed — a passing that he believes was symbolically marked by the death of the incomparable Swedish director Ingmar Bergman, last year.