From Distant Voices, Still Lives to Benediction, the lyrical work of the late director was suffused with the ‘ecstasy’ of cinema – and his fraught Liverpool childhood
ast month, British cinema lost one of its greatest and most distinctive screen poets. From an astonishing trilogy of early short films and intimate portraits of real-life authors, most remarkably the American poet Emily Dickinson, brilliantly played by Cynthia Nixon in, told me that after immersing himself in his subject’s diaries in preparation for the role, he gradually came to realise that “I was essentially playing Terence.
My fondest memories of Davies, whom I had the pleasure of interviewing on several occasions, are from a trip we made together to Liverpool on the eve of the UK release of. An intensely personal collage of archive footage played out to a soundtrack of music, quotations and his own reflections, it was my favourite film of the year; a love song and a eulogy to the city of his childhood.
Raised a devout Catholic, Davies struggled to reconcile his faith with his sexuality, recalling years spent weeping and praying till his knees bled, “but no peace came, no succour granted”. We walked from his childhood home to the church in which he once worshipped. “It repels me now,” he told me. “All this empty iconography. It did me a great deal of damage.”
From the church, we walked onward to a now deserted movie house where he talked excitedly of growing up within walking distance of no less thancinemas. For Davies, cinema became the new place of worship. “And my love was as muscular as my Catholicism,” he opines in, “but without any of the drawbacks. Musicals, melodramas, westerns – nothing was too rich or too poor for my rapacious appetite.