Of Time and the City

On many best-ten lists of 2009, Terence Davies' Of Time and the City is unlike any film I've seen before. Technically a documentary, it is a cinematic collage of the memories Davies harbors of his childhood in Liverpool, England, a mixture of archival film footage and a variety of music.

Davies, who narrates, was born in 1945, and thus most of the images are from the period of around 1950 to the present day. He touches on the subjects that were important to him: the Catholic church, then the movies, then urban blight. He touches on the memorable events of the era: the Korean War, the coronation of Elizabeth II (which he found to be an ostentatious waste of money), the Beatles (he was not fan, and the new form of pop music drove him to love classical music).

The juxtaposition of image to sound are at times quite bracing, particularly a sequence which shows the banality of the housing projects, contrasted with the romanticism of the Peggy Lee song "The People Who Live on the Hill." Davies narration is also candidly witty, particularly his quick discussion of his loss of religion, when he mentions that he'd live under Popes named "Pius XII, John XXIII, and Clitoris the Umpteenth. Who wouldn't turn pagan?"

Davies has made fiction films about Liverpool (unseen by me), and is obsessed with memory. In fact, much of this film seems like a dream, perhaps his dream, images left scattered in his unconscious. The subtitle on the poster--"Love Song and Eulogy"--is apt, as though Davies left, he never quite shook the place. As he quotes, "The place where we can't wait to leave we spend the rest of our lives trying to regain."