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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

What’s more, he argues that the British film industry is mired in slavish devotion to today’s American methods, the American market and the American buck. It is being subsumed, and has lost any distinctiveness that it may once have had. He sees this as part of a wider erosion of ‘national respect’, that we should take some sort of stand against: ‘We’ve produced as an island the world’s greatest playwright, we invented the novel, and our poetry is second to none. We have to be able to say — without any jingoism — we’re proud of what we’ve achieved.’

Trying to situate him on this spectrum of national achievement, I asked Davies, ‘Do you see yourself as part of a tradition?’ His response was unequivocal, and telling. ‘No,’ he said. ‘When I go into a room full of directors, I feel apart from it all.’ This isn’t to say that the film scholars can’t have their play with Davies’s films — categorising them as ‘kitchen sink’ for their working-class settings and characters, or lumping him in with the Peter Greenaway–Derek Jarman–Bill Douglas–Sally Potter axis of filmmakers which operated in and around the British Film Institute in the 1970s and 1980s. But it is to say that Davies himself didn’t and doesn’t feel that he belonged to these groupings — in any artistic sense, at least. He ploughs his own cinematic furrow, and that’s what makes him so impressive.

Unmoved by modern culture; submerged in his and his country’s past; and creating films quite unlike anything else out there — Terence Davies is very much ‘apart from it all’. And that’s how it will remain. As he put it to me, ‘I now retreat to the things that give me pleasure.’ For the record, that means: the poetry of Larkin and Betjeman; the music of Bruckner; and the films of studio-era Hollywood. Who can blame him?