Distant Voices/Still Lives

The director, Terence Davies and a trio of screenshots from the film.

Here's a round up of material on next week's film: first a short biography of Terence Davies and a synopsis of the action in the film. Because the film is so layered, both visually and aurally, I think a synopsis will be somewhat helpful for a first viewing.

The film critic Annette Kuhn has a some interesting commentary on the film on the British Film Institute's website, screenonline. In particular, she describes the relation between form and content in the film:

"...the film's 'poetry of the ordinary' is grounded in, and dictated by, its subject matter. Composed largely of events and situations recalled by different family members, Distant Voices, Still Lives is about memory itself, and through its organisation of sounds and images enacts the very process of remembering. Especially distinctive features of the film include the mixture of standpoints from which events are recalled, the vignettish character of the memory-stories, and references to popular songs, popular culture, religious iconography and religious music...the narration, like memory itself, is cyclical, repetitive, ambiguous, suggesting, as Martin Hunt puts it, an "ambivalent, interrogative, contradictory and ultimately unresolved" relation to the past."

I like her description of the film as not so much a representation of memory but an enactment of it.

Here is another essay on Davies's evocation of memory in the film, "The Art of Memory: Terence Davies' Distant Voices/Still Lives."

And finally, a discussion in a french film blog, 24 Lies Per Second. There are many lovely screen captures (some with french subtitles) and part two of the tribute has audio of a rare interview with Terence Davies.
Part One.
Part Two.