The gay British auteur Terrence Davies who always reached back into the past for the ideas of his films, has just died aged 77 His output was not prolific but it contained some of the very best quintessentially British cinema in the past 50 years.
Davies’s breakthrough in 1973 was ‘The Terrence Davies Trilogy.‘ It was three autobiographical short films made over seven years about a young gay man coming to terms with his Catholic schooling, his homosexuality and guilt, his parents and their deaths, despair, and loneliness. He followed that in 1978 in what would be considered his very best work with Distant Voices, Still Lives. Again it was based on Davies’s own childhood and was about the lives of an English working-class family are told out of order in a free-associative manner. The first part, “Distant Voices”, focuses on the father’s role in the family. The second part, “Still Lives”, focuses on his children.
Davies also looked back at the past of others to inspire movies like Edith’ Wharton’s novel The House of Mirth, probably the least successful of all his films. But Benediction his film of the queer Wartime poet Siegfried Sasson was one of the best. It was the tale of this decorated war leader and his life-long quest for personal salvation through his experiences with family, war, his writing, and destructive relationships that go unresolved. Sassoon’s list of male lovers reads like a venerable ‘who’s who’ Wilfred Owen, Ivor Novello, Glen Byam Shaw, and. Prince Philipp of Hesse,
Davies, a rather solitary figure who looked like a college professor, seemed an unlikely creative genius. He realized he was gay as a young man but it was something he always seemed to regret. He told The Guardian “I have hated being gay, and I’ve been celibate for most of my life. Some people are just good at sex, and others aren’t; I’m one of them who isn’t. I’m just too self-conscious.”
He is probably one of the last of his kind of indie filmmakers having been allowed/encouraged to create new work which very rarely was a commercial success but with a rare exception, they were met by critical acclaim.
Queerguru had the pleasure of interviewing Cynthia Nixon in 2016 who had just finished filming Davies‘s biopic of the gay reclusive poet Emily Dickinson’s ‘A Quiet Passion’. She couldn’t heap enough praise on Davies’ declaring him a real actor’s director. We would add he was also a queer cinephiles’ director, the likes of who we will never see again
Labels: 2023, autuer, brit, Distant Voices Still Live, obituary, queer, Terrence Davies, The Terrence Davies Trilogy
