Of Time and the City opens with a cinema screen framed by curtains. The film may be a documentary, we are being told, but it is intended to be an experience as transcendent as any of writer/director Terence Davies\' previous fictional features. The curtains part and the screen comes to life, colour gives way to archival black and white footage, but the themes and obsessions are the same as with Davies’ previous works: memories of childhood, the push and pull of Catholicism and homosexuality, the nature of community and the power of cinema itself.
It is sadly nine years since Davies’ last feature, his sternly observed adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and as if he’s feeling the passing of time, the filmmaker has returned to the city where he grew up and which informed his early features so completely. 'If Liverpool did not exist, it would have to be invented," Davies says in his narration, quoting artist Felicien de Myrbach. It was originally said with admiration, when Liverpool was a 19th century industrial centrepiece of the British Empire, but it has a barbed intent when spoken by Davies – who knew a city could fall so far?
Calm in structure and heated in tone, Of Time and the City is a documentary about urban change. An assemblage of found material, its central character is Davies delivering the narration. His voice is glutinously thick, heated with the passion of the melodramas he watched as a boy in the city’s then grand cinemas. 'I swallowed them whole," he says of the movies he watched in the 1950s and 60s (Davies was born in 1945 and left Liverpool in 1973).
Davies quotes poets, makes withering remarks (The Beatles resemble a firm of provincial solicitors; he preferred Mahler) and charts his childhood allegiances with the fervour of a failing memoirist. He was a fervent Catholic but fell away, then his sexual stirrings introduced a new element of subterfuge. His memories are richest in youth, falling away as the film progresses; Davies never submits his upbringing to framing devices, making him a memorable if unreliable guide through the past.
His vision of Liverpool’s decline is closely held but idiosyncratic: you will see many a ferry cross the Mersey, but you will certainly not hear Gerry and the Pacemakers sing 'Ferry Cross the Mersey". Davies’ disgust is unspoken but obvious as he marks the transition from working class terraces to bleak council estate towers. Never have there been so many lingering shots of rubbish, disrepair and empty communal spaces as he marks the eradication in just a few years of once burgeoning community spirit.
'Now I’m an alien in my own land," he declares, and there’s a whiff of nostalgia to Of Time and the City that weakens it slightly. Affection is one thing, but there was a sharper edge to earlier autobiographical efforts such as 1988’s Distant Voices, Still Lives. Terence Davies may be a defiant atheist, but his film is a last rites for the city of his youth.
