Terence Davies and Alternative British Cinema

Terence Davies, who releases The Deep Blue Sea in UK cinemas this week, is one of Britain’s most original and iconic auteurs. Over the course of the last four decades he has produced a body of work that has consistently pushed at the boundaries of genre, from his early semi-autobiographical works The Terence Davies Trilogy and Distant Voices, Still Lives – poetic reconstructions of working class life in Liverpool in the 1940s and 50s – to highly stylized, high-profile adaptations of the novels The Neon Bible and The House of Mirth, as well as 2002’s documentary-as-memoir Of Time and The City.

Davies comes from a tradition of British art cinema that experienced its most fertile period during the 1980s and early 1990s, the heyday of auteur directors such as Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway and Sally Potter. At a time when art cinema in the UK is experiencing resurgent popularity and mainstream interest with the rising profile of artist film-makers such as Andrea Arnold and Steve McQueen, the following article will trace the path of Davies’ career and explore the legacy of Britain’s alternative art cinema.

Terence Davies’ memory-realism
Terence Davies was born in Liverpool in 1945, the youngest child in a large working class family. After working for ten years as a clerk and bookkeeper, he enrolled in Coventry School of Drama in 1971. It was here that he wrote the script for his first film, Children. The film was produced in 1976 with backing from the British Film Institute, in what was to be the beginning of Davies’ long working relationship with the BFI.

Children became the first part of trilogy of semi-autobiographical short-to-medium length films chronicling the life of Robert Tucker, a gay working-class Catholic Liverpudlian – and Davies’ alter ego. Tucker’s relentlessly bleak life would be tracked through middle age in Madonna and Child, Davies’ graduation film from the National Film School in 1980, and terminal illness in Death and Transfiguration, which was made in 1983 with funding from the Greater London Arts Association and the BFI. The themes of the trilogy, such as sexual guilt and the stringency of the Catholic faith, would recur throughout the director’s work.

Davies made his feature debut in 1988 with backing from the BFI’s Production Board. Recalling the life of a working class family in Liverpool, Distant Voices, Still Lives developed a distinctive cinematic language to explore the process of memory itself. Composed of events and situations re-told by different family members, the film is constructed almost as a series of vignettes, juxtaposed with references to pop songs, popular culture and religious iconography. The narration, like memory, is cyclical, repetitive and ambiguous.

Distant Voices, Still Lives was remarkable in that it combined the social concerns of much British cinema with elements normally associated with European art cinema: an emphasis on the personal and on sexual or religious themes, for example, as well as narrative ambiguity and a distinctive visual style. Terence Davies’ adept pairing of style and content in Distant Voices, Still Lives would cement his reputation as one of Britain’s most imaginative and accomplished film-makers.

Experimental cinema and the BFI
Terence Davies, like many of his contemporaries in the 1970s and 80s, was to find support and financial backing from the BFI Production Board. The Board was established in 1965 to take over from the BFI’s early involvement with production through the Experimental Film Fund, a scheme that was intended to support artistic innovation and enable promising new film-makers to make their first short films such as Lorenza Mazzetti (Together, 1956), Michael Grigsby (Enginemen, 1959), and Ridley Scott (Boy and Bicycle, 1965).

The Production Board was intended to offer more comprehensive support to new and un-commercial filmmakers, with the aim of recouping at least some of the cost of the films on the independent ‘art-house’ cinema circuit. In 1971 the Board received an increase in funding to enable the BFI to fund low-budget feature-length films on a regular basis, alongside shorter “featurettes” running up to an hour. Terence Davies’ Children was one such beneficiary of this initiative.

The 1980s and early 1990s were a golden era for the Production Board, in which it nurtured the careers of major British auteurs, including Peter Greenaway, Derek Jarman and Sally Potter, amongst several others. Greenaway made a mini- feature, A Walk Through H, with the Production Board in 1978, a relationship that would continue through his first three features, The Falls (1980), The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982) and A Zed and Two Noughts (1985). A so-called philosopher of cinema, whose work addressed the changing status of the image in the contemporary world, these features saw him make the transition from obscure avant-garde experimentalist to one of British cinema’s best-known arthouse exports.

Derek Jarman was the “maverick radical” of the British cinema during the 1980s and early ‘90s, producing a highly idiosyncratic form of avant-garde art cinema sustained by his personal reputation as an auteur and an enfant terrible. Though already well established as a film-maker, in 1986 the Production Board supported the production of Caravaggio, a long-cherished project of the director and one of his best known works. Elsewhere, Sally Potter’s The Gold Diggers (1983) was produced through the fund with an all-female cast and crew, a radical undertaking at that time in an overwhelmingly male-dominated industry.

The Production Board was not without its critics, who accused the BFI of ‘trying to imitate Wardour Street’, whilst low budgets meant that crews were often paid below agreed minimum rates in exchange for a share in the profits. Indeed, following a change in government in the late 1990s, the Board was abolished and its functions absorbed into the UK Film Council. Nonetheless, it played a key role in nurturing an alternative British art cinema, the legacy of which can be seen in the film-makers it supported who are still practicing today.

A new new wave?
Terence Davies moved on from alternative British cinema in the 1990s, with two high-profile novel adaptations – 1994’s atmospheric account of 1940s life in the Deep South in John Kennedy Toole’s The Neon Bible, as well as an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth (2000) that referenced the visual aesthetic of John Singer Sergeant and Johannes Vermeer. However, he returned to his low budget roots with the documentary-memoir Of Time and the City, a film composed of archive footage of the post-war years in Liverpool.

“I wanted to capture what it was like being Liverpudlian,” said Davies of the film, which was made after Davies entered a competition for film funding organised to coincide with Liverpool’s European Capital of Culture celebrations. “It was made with the most modest of intentions and with a budget of only £250,000. I’ve always made a film for the money I could afford to raise.” The poetic, emotional and highly personal documentary was released to widespread acclaim and remarkable word-of-mouth success in 2008.

The release of The Deep Blue Sea marks the end of the director’s eleven year hiatus from fiction film-making and comes at a time when art cinema in the UK is experiencing a resurgent popularity in the mainstream film industry. The critical and commercial success of film-makers such as Joanna Hogg, Andrea Arnold and Steve McQueen are leading some commentators to suggest that we are in the middle of a British art-cinema “bonanza”, characterized by film-makers united by a radical spirit of adventure, and a refusal to conform to industry norms. What is clear is that these film-makers belong to a long tradition of art cinema in the UK that has regularly proven that there is more to British cinema than period adaptations and urban Brit grit.