2023-10-08 16:40:02
Disappearance
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The British filmmaker, whose work is rare and sincere, has enjoyed critical success if not commercial success. He died Saturday at age 77.
Although the Guardian celebrated him as “the greatest living British filmmaker”, Terence Davies remained a reference for informed film buffs, those wanting to broaden their horizons beyond Ken Loach. His meager productivity (nine feature films in a forty-seven-year career) and his refusal to shoot in a contemporary setting (“being in the past reassures me because I understand this world,” he said) give the illusion of a bubble. But we must praise his lyricism, which is both eloquent and modest, his personal way of transcending the usual thematic boxes – religion, working class, alienation, memory and childhood.
Davies’ biography can be read through his films: born in 1945 into a large Catholic family in Liverpool, to a devout mother and a violent father, he began his professional life as an office worker and accountant before branching out to 30 years towards a theater school – with the secret hope of declaiming Shakespeare, whom he venerates. There he wrote the screenplay for Children (1976), the first part of a trilogy of short films – completed by Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983) – where he recounts in beautiful black and white the discovery of his homosexuality, his guilt, his isolation and even his future death. The autobiographical part then persists in his long Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and A Long Life Ends (1991), particularly notable
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