Distant Voices, Still Lives

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Synopsis

Winner of the International Critics' Prize, Cannes 1988 Terence Davies's stunning debut feature film Distant Voices, Still Lives was instantly recognised as a masterpiece on its release in 1988 and the director hailed as one of Britain's most gifted and remarkable filmmakers. Re-released in April 2007 as part of a complete retrospective season of Terence Davies's films at BFI Southbank, it was once again showered with critical acclaim. A fitting showcase for this unforgettable film from one of contemporary cinema's true poets. Drawn from his own family memories, Distant Voices, Still Lives is a strikingly intimate portrait of working class life in 1940s and 1950s Liverpool.

Movie info:

Release:

1988

Running Time:

85 min

Certificate:

Suitable only for 15 years and over

Availability:

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Genre:

Drama

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Edward Hutchings
This is the life...
07 December 2011
Too often it’s assumed that there’s an arthouse cabal in British cinema obsessed solely with telling stories of the working classes from a distant perspective and with a drab realism – or, to borrow the moaners’ own word, ‘miserabilism’. Certainly, there are guilty culprits, but if any filmmaker blows such assumptions out of the water, it’s Terence Davies, whose ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’ is arguably among the very greatest British films of the last 25 years. The doubly good news is that, after a hiatus of a decade, 65-year-old Davies is back behind the camera making feature films and is currently editing an adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s ‘The Deep Blue Sea’, his first film since 2000’s ‘House of Mirth’.

This fiercely literate and independent Liverpudlian spent the first 16 years of his career, with three shorts, and then two feature films, ‘Distant Voices, Still Lives’ and ‘The Long Day Closes’ (1992), finding different, personal and poetic ways of making sense of his recollections of his childhood in a post-war, working-class Liverpool home. ‘Distant Voices…’ is essentially a portrait of his parents and siblings around the time he was born – but with Davies himself removed from the frame. As such, its fractured, truthful evocation of life in 1940s and ’50s Liverpool is as much about memory as truth. We experience the stuff of life – the brutality of a patriarch (Pete Postlethwaite), a daughter’s wedding, sing-songs at the pub – but the flow of the film is more emotional than chronological, and Davies prefers resonant images and moments to straightforward storytelling. Its songs lift us, while its sadnesses bring us down. Mostly, though, it’s Davies’s love for cinema that is apparent in every single frame of this beautiful film.
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Robert Young
Fantastic
30 November 2009
A very ‘English’ film about a working-class Liverpool family, set during the post second world war period. Written and directed by Terence Davies there are some staggeringly miserable moments surrounding the mistreatment of the family by their abusive father expertly played by the great Pete Postlethwaite. In contrast there are some truly poignant and uplifting moments of family unity in the face of adversity.
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