Durgnat on Davies

The Long Day Closes (Terence Davies, 1992) – source for the photo: here

 

Terence Davies’ best film yet testifies to the vigour and flexibility of cinematic realisms. It’s intensely ‘realist’ in three common senses: in bending, not subject to form, but form to subject; in generating ‘the shock of recognition’ at experiences privately powerful but culturally neglected; and in the exploring the lives of ordinary people without foreshortening their sufferings and constraints. Davies’ especially delicate realism requires a rigorous fidelity to raw experience, carefully protected from conventional discourse, although conveyed by artifice. Davies’ style is so closely geared to one individual child, in a largely unique situation (local-and-family micro-culture), as to constitute a sort of ‘micro-realism’, akin to the micro-history now subverting Marxist stereotypes of class and culture and their “abolition of the subject”. 

Davies’ double focus, on a vanished world and on subjectivity, far from diluting realism, only extends it. As with Proust and Joyce, subjective remembrance and documentation interweave. A sprinkling of self-reflexive touches (a music teacher telling a percussionist “just tap it, you’re not introducing a film”), and the many looks at, or just off-,camera, are not alienation but, on the contrary, complicity effects. Davies’ aesthetic is utterly non-Brechtian, expecting consummate identification with an ever-pathetic protagonist, much wronged by life and unable to hurt a fly.

The visual style might be described as ‘Wenders intensified’ … 

 

• Excerpts of Ray Durgnat’s review on The Long Day Closes, Sight and Sight, 1992 (June),  p. 44