The development of urban self-portraits in Europe has been highly influenced by the essayistic tradition, to the extent that among critics it is often regarded as a specific form of the essay film. This, however, is not exactly a closed genre but an open domain that includes a wide variety of practices: Laura Rascaroli has devoted several chapters of her book The Personal Camera to the diary, the travelogue, the notebook and the self-portrait film (2009: 106–89), while Timothy Corrigan has done the same in The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker, in which he discusses the travelogue, the editorial approach and metafilmic practices, among other topics (2011: 79–204). All these essayistic modes, as Corrigan has called them, share a similar authorial voice that, according to Rascaroli, ‘approaches the subject matter not in order to present an ostensibly factual report … but to offer an overtly personal, in-depth, thought-provoking reflection’ (2009: 33). Consequently, she considers the essay film ‘a cinema in the first person, a cinema of thought, of investigation, of intellectual searching and of self-reflection’ (2009: 189), a description that echoes old definitions of its literary counterpart, by, for instance, philosophers Eduardo Nicol – ‘a theatre of ideas in which the rehearsal and the final performance are combined’ (quoted in Renov 2004: 186) – or Max Bense, who had already drawn attention to the experimental nature of this type of writing:
The person who writes essayistically is the one who composes as he experiments, who turns his object around, questions it, feels it, tests it, reflects on it, who attacks it from different sides and assembles what he sees in his mind’s eye and puts into words what the object allows one to see under the conditions created in the course of writing. (Quoted in Ibid.)
The essay film has therefore become, according to Paul Arthur, ‘the leading nonfiction form for both intellectual and artistic innovation’, as well as ‘a meeting ground for documentary, avant-garde, and art film impulses’ (2003: 58, 62). The filmmakers who have entered this hybrid domain organise all kinds of visual material guided by their subjectivity, speaking from themselves, as Antonio Weinrichter has written (2010: 266), but not necessarily about themselves. This subjectivity has affected both form and content, to the extent that social and political issues currently coexist with an emphasis on self-documentation and the private sphere: hence the recent blend of collective and individual accounts, historical and personal sources or archival footage and home movies, a series of binomials that have lately caused the pairing of representation and reflection (Weinrichter 2010: 266). By shaping real elements through an explicit authorial voice, the essay film extracts ‘the truth and reality of those real elements’, Josep Maria Catalá has said, ‘a truth and reality that are not outside the
dispositif, but inside it, because they are the outcome of the hermeneutic process launched by the
dispositif itself’ (2005: 144; my translation).
The origin of this film form dates back to the French documentary tradition, within which titles such as Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog, Alain Resnais, 1955), Les maîtres fous (The Mad Masters, Jean Rouch, 1955), Lettre de Sibérie (Letter from Siberia, Chris Marker, 1958), Le Joli Mai (Chris Marker & Pierre Lhomme, 1963) or 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle (2 or 3 Things I Know About Her, Jean-Luc Godard, 1967) are usually mentioned as ‘crucial milestones’ in its genealogy (Arthur 2003: 59). Its development was also nurtured by other national film traditions, especially the German, the American and the British ones: Weinrichter has pointed out the role of filmmakers such as Helmut Bitomsky, Harun Farocki, Alexander Kluge or Hans-Jürgen Syberberg within the first; the importance of Ralph Arlyck, Craig Baldwin, Alan Berliner, Su Friedrich, Trinh T. Minh-ha and Mark Rappaport for the second, and the work of Patrick Keiller, Peter Greenaway, Chris Petit and Steve Hewley within the third (2004: 98). Michael Moore is sometimes added to this list, by Arthur and Renov for example, but his documentaries nonetheless lack two key features of the essay film, as Rascaroli has explained: on the one hand, they do not ‘problematize his authorship, which is not subjected to self-searching scrutiny’, and on the other hand, they do not ‘present [either] their subject matter as a subjective reflection on a problem, but as an objective investigation of factual events’ (2009: 41). Accordingly, Roger & Me would be outside the essayistic domain since its main line of argument is not primarily constructed from the filmmaker’s subjectivity but from gathering journalistic information.
Some European urban self-portraits have resorted to the essayistic tradition because its layering of different time frames allows their directors to recall old places of memory from a present in which they no longer exist. These documentaries do not only represent missing cityscapes, but also the way filmmakers attempt to recover them: they are ‘fragmentary, full of gaps, associative, abbreviated, disorderly, and [have] no respect for chronology’, a description that summarises what Michael Chanan considers ‘the general rule of memory’ (2012: 29). These films usually get lost in ‘the chasm between our desire to recapture the past and the impossibility of a pristine return’, a contradiction that Michael Renov has found, for example, in Jonas Mekas’ diary films (2004: 77, 114). Nevertheless, rather than simply record the present or visualise the past, they mainly focus on the act of remembering itself: even when there is a present from which the past is recalled, this second type of urban self-portrait usually goes beyond the dichotomy of ‘then and now’ by revealing the emotional ties that bind people and places together over time.
The endless revision of old footage is a usual way of addressing issues related to memory, especially when images and commentary belong to different times and tenses. In those cases, the lack of agreement between what we see and what we hear allows the superimposition of past and present, also emphasising ‘historical gaps or tonal clashes inherent in the visual-linguistic interface’, as Arthur has said (2003: 60). According to Catherine Russell, the intertextuality of archival footage provides the audience with ‘an allegory of history … by which the filmmaker engages with the past through recall, retrieval, and recycling’ (1999: 238). This means that travelling through time in these essayistic self-portraits is also travelling through images, whether recovered – those that have been preserved – or absent ones – those that only exist as a memory or an emotion. Today, as Àngel Quintana explains, any image may have a great memorial value because the transition from modernity to postmodernity has deleted the distinction between archival footage and waste material:
A few years ago, filmmakers thought that the useful historical archive was kept at film libraries, on 35mm films, and that its value was clearly informative or sociological. This notion, however, has changed since orthodox documents of the past are no longer the only archive-worthy footage, but also old amateur films, home movies, commercials and all types of ignoble materials. (2010: 70; my translation)
This extended archive has become ‘a second reality’, as Catalá has termed it, which ‘defamiliarises the real and reveals those haunting elements that the coetaneous gaze did not know how to detect or was unable to’ (2010: 283–4, my translation). The replacement of reality by its image has been so intensive in recent years that it has also affected our personal memories: we do not always remember our past experiences directly, but rather through sentimental items or cultural productions ranging from postcards and souvenirs to popular songs or archival footage. In order to describe the mental associations between mediascapes and memoryscapes, Alison Landsberg has developed the concept of ‘prosthetic memory’ (2004), suggesting that the continuous encounters with popular forms have conditioned our memory to the point that ‘it becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate personal experience from the mediating technologies that have (re)constructed both personal and collective experience of past times’ (Hallam 2010a: 72). This is to say that media images are currently so intermingled with our direct experiences that cinema itself has become ‘a repository of memory’, as Rascaroli has stated (2009: 64).
The two case studies in this chapter, Les hommes du port (Alain Tanner, 1995) and Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, 2008), use the essayistic approach to explore what happens when port cities are threatened with the loss of their local identity. It is necessary to take into account, as Francesc Muñoz has pointed out, that the film iconography of waterfronts has historically symbolised much of what a city is supposed to be: mobility, exchange, intensity, diversity, chance, danger, conflict, etc. (2010: 204). However, if these areas lost their original purpose, to what extent do they preserve their old social meanings? In these two documentaries, Alain Tanner and Terence Davies return to Genoa and Liverpool respectively after an absence of several decades, during which the two cities’ architectural and social heritage was completely transformed. As they could no longer find their places of memory in the cityscape, they had to look for their traces in oral testimonies and archival footage, contrasting their own memories with old images. Their first-person narratives convey feelings ranging from topophilia to homesickness, although the explicit nostalgia of previous urban self-portraits gradually gives way to a bitter melancholy of loss. Therefore, Les hommes du port and Of Time and the City are not exactly documentaries about the longing of missing cityscapes, but rather about the emotional quest for those significant memories that took place there.
Les hommes du port: Self-Portrait in First-Person Plural
Alain Tanner is arguably the best-known Swiss filmmaker thanks largely to feature films such as
La salamandre (
The Salamander, 1971) or
Jonas qui aura 25 ans en l’an 2000 (
Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, 1975). Nevertheless, his lack of attachment to his country and his position outside the industry has led him to become a travelling filmmaker: his first documentary,
Nice Time (Alain Tanner & Claude Goretta, 1957), was filmed in London within the Free Cinema movement, and since then he has worked in more than half a dozen countries, including France, India, Ireland, Italy, Portugal and Spain, besides Switzerland itself.
1 Contrary to Tony Buba, Tanner preferred exploring the world to staying in his hometown, Geneva, as he has admitted:
Switzerland is too small, too civilised, and not particularly ‘erotic’. Furthermore, cinema is a large consumer of territories: grass grows very slowly when a movie has gone through a small area. In this sense, I do not mind being a foreigner. I feel good and bad at the same time everywhere, so I can move without too many problems. I have partners in different countries where I can easily find funding, but I also face the problems of co-productions and language. (Tanner in Dimitriu 1993: 266; my translation)
In addition to feature films, Tanner also made thirty documentaries in the 1960s, most of which were socio-political reports for SBC, the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation. After the success of
Charles mort ou vif (
Charles, Dead or Alive, 1969), he left this format convinced that ‘the creative period within television [had] already gone’, since its supposed claim at objectivity was ‘the opposite end of any form of personal expression’ (in Dimitriu 1993: 204; my translation). With the only exception of
Temps mort (1978), Tanner did not accept any other proposal from television until the French-German channel ARTE invited him to take part in a documentary series about port cities (Julie Z. 2012).
2 Despite the fact that the project was never completed, Tanner filmed his episode in Genoa about the slow decline of the dockers’ local union, the CULMV, ‘Compagnia Unica fra i Lavoratori di Merce Varie’.
At first sight, Les hommes du port may seem another talking heads documentary, but its interviews are punctuated by a first-person commentary, made by the filmmaker himself, that introduces several autobiographical references and essayistic digressions in the film. In fact, the audience soon realises that Genoa is not an unknown city for Tanner: his own voice tells how he visited it for the first time in 1947, when he was eighteen years old, because he was so impressed by Italian Neorealism that he wanted to verify his impressions on location. Later on, in 1952, he was hired by a shipping company based on Genoa as a clerk, a job that he left the next year in order to work as a purser in a cargo ship. From these experiences, he established an emotional bond with the stevedores in Les hommes du port, many of whom belong to his own generation. Thus, by means of an essayistic voice, he introduces himself as a mediator between past and present who wants to chronicle the story of the CULMV, a fulfilled utopia threatened by the economic and ideological shifts that followed the 1973 crisis and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
This company was founded after World War II, when Genoese dock workers joined forces to reconstruct the port. Without employers or shareholders, the cooperative allowed them to own their means of production and ultimately released them from dependence on ship owners. Guided by the principles of self-management and direct democracy, they organised themselves through meetings in which they elected two representatives, known as ‘consuls’, for a non-renewable term of two years. Thanks to this system, they kept control of their job until the 1990s, when the company was forced to change its internal organisation due to the privatisation of docks undertaken by Silvio Berlusconi’s first government. In this context,
Les hommes du port became, at best, a praise of their way of life, and at worst, a hagiography of the company. This approach is quite different from American documentaries of the time that dealt with similar issues, such as the aforementioned
Roger & Me and
American Dream (Barbara Kopple, Cathy Kaplan, Thomas Haneke & Lawrence Silk, 1990), in which the defeat of GM and Hormel employees was depicted as a dramatic and irreversible process.
Similarly to Barbara Kopple in American Dream, Tanner puts his camera at the workers’ service and remains on the sidelines in the interviews, which are usually conducted by Italian philosopher Giairo Daghini. His casting solved the problem of the language barrier between the filmmaker and the filmed subjects, but also reproduced the television hierarchy that Tanner had previously rejected:
[Television executives] distrusted filmmakers because our framing and editing choices could ignore objectivity. In order to avoid this kind of manipulation, power soon passed from filmmakers to journalists, who were best-trained in the codes of practice since they came from the mainstream media. (Tanner in Dimitriu 1993: 204; my translation)
The formal contradiction between the journalistic gathering of testimonies and the essayistic elements of the commentary reveals that
Les hommes du port is located halfway between the breakdown of the objective paradigm and its replacement by a subjective one. At the beginning of the film, Tanner reserves a few sequences for himself and tells us about his youth in Genoa, but most of the footage is devoted to the interviews with the characters. The narrative split of these two stories, one individual and another collective, echoes the social gap that distanced the filmmaker from dock workers forty years ago: ‘
There was the society and there was the world,’ Tanner says in the commentary, ‘
and at the time, I chose the world.’ This separation had a spatial dimension that reappears in
Les hommes du port: the cargo ships anchored in the harbour and the offices in the Palazzo della Meridiana are the filmmaker’s places of memory, whereas the waterfront and the
chiamata – the area where stevedores go every day in search of a job – are the workers’ territory. The CULMV headquarters are precisely located in the
chiamata, as well as many bars and restaurants in which dock workers used to meet, socialise and, overall, spend most of their lives. For this reason, this place is a key spot in the emotional geography proposed by Tanner: most interviews were shot there or in nearby areas, except for the consul’s, which was made aboard a boat while sailing in the harbour, perhaps as an unintended sign of his position of power within the company.
Tanner’s places of memory, in turn, are usually represented through evocative images that attempt to capture, or at least to convey, the genius loci of Genoa: a few examples are the pan shots taken inside his favourite café, the ubiquitous presence of cargo ships – a fetish image that already appeared in his previous films Les 100 jours d’Ongania (1966), Les trois Belgiques (1968) and In the White City – and, above all, the footage filmed inside the Palazzo della Meridiana, his old workplace. The only inscription of his body in the film is included in this sequence: it is a brief shot in which he is seen from behind while entering the building to visit the exact corner where his desk was located. Thus, like psychogeographical documentaries, Les hommes du port explores the urban surface in search of any trace of the past in the old café or the dockers’ gestures.
This body language symbolises the association between intelligence and work culture: both at the beginning and the end of the film, Tanner shows several close-ups of these gestures accompanied by classical music, implicitly establishing a comparison between the task of directing the movements of port cranes and the work of an orchestra conductor. This communication system, however, was endangered in the 1990s due to the transformations of dock work itself: as the commentary says, the widespread acceptance of containers as standard format in maritime trade speeded up the process of loading/unloading and fragmented work crews, which replaced old gestures with walkie-talkies. This paradigm shift is visually expressed in Les hommes du port through the contrast between the black-and-white footage of dock work recorded by stevedores themselves in the early 1970s and the colour images shot by the filmmaker more than twenty years later, some of them significantly taken from a modern port crane.
This is the first of the two occasions on which Tanner uses archival footage: later on, there is a sequence that dates back to 30 June 1960, when dock workers led a political demonstration against the attempt to held a conference of the Italian neo-fascist party in Genoa. That protest ended in violent clashes with the police and ultimately caused the fall of Fernando Tambroni’s government. In those days, dock workers played a key role in local politics, but their influence gradually faded as their number decreased: in the mid-1990s, the CULMV had lost ninety percent of its workforce, going from 9,000 to 900 employees in thirty years. The archival sequences work therefore as testimony of the company’s heyday and as illustration of old practices, but without going beyond the dialectic between then and now: given that Tanner undertook his search for traces of the past when many were still visible in the cityscape, he usually keeps his essayistic digressions for contemporary images, limiting himself to describing and identifying the content of the archival footage. In reference to the privatisation of the Genoa port and the transformation of the CULMV into a private firm, he states that ‘
it’s the end of an era and the beginning of another’, a commentary that explicitly locates the film within the interregnum between the end of collective utopias and its replacement by the ideal of good management.
Since
Les hommes du port does not adopt all the features of the essay film, it must be interpreted as a transition between the urban self-portraits about endangered cityscapes, such as
Roger & Me and
Lightning Over Braddock, and others about missing cityscapes, such as
Of Time and the City and
My Winnipeg. Indeed, unlike the latter,
Les hommes du port is still a nostalgic film: to dispel any doubt, Tanner includes a song entitled ‘Nostalgia’ at the beginning, followed by an interview with his composer in which he reflects about this feeling. This retired worker argues that the city itself as it was has disappeared along with its old social routines. ‘
There is no more Genoa,’ he says, ‘
it no longer exists.’ Such idea is further developed in the commentary over a series of carscapes filmed from the ‘
Sopraelevata Aldo Moro’, an elevated highway that crosses Genoa from east to southwest through its waterfront (
Image 7.1):
Image 7.1: Les hommes du port, carscape through the elevated highway
The highway is a physical barrier: the first façade of the city over the port can only be seen by those who drive at fifty miles an hour. It is an American solution at the heart of a medieval city. The old town, its houses and arcades faded into the background. They no longer face the coast, forming a whole with the old port, but bump against a viaduct. The barrier is not only physical, but also made of noise and pollution. The historic core of the city steps backwards, disappears into the shadows and becomes a marginalised ghetto; a sad and dark labyrinth for drug addicts and prostitutes. All that thereby enters the shadows is an important part of the historical memory of the city.
The
Sopraelevata was built in 1965 as part of a circulation plan that attempted to improve vehicular traffic within Genoa’s historic city centre. Although a well-intentioned project, this structure nonetheless embodies the usual flaws of Brutalist architecture: it lacks aesthetic dimension, needs constant maintenance and in the long term has had a negative impact on the city since it has broken its historical link with the sea. Consequently, the
Sopraelevata has turned the Genoa waterfront into what Rem Koolhaas termed junk-space:
Junkspace is the residue mankind leaves on the planet. The built … product of modernization is not modern architecture but Junkspace. Junkspace is what remains after modernization has run its course, or, more precisely, what coagulates while modernization is in progress, its fallout. (2002: 175)
After these carscapes, the film enters the historic city in order to show its contemporary appearance: a two-minute tracking shot goes around a section of Via di Prè, a popular street that used to be crowded with sailors and stevedores in the 1950s, but that forty years ago looks half-empty, especially after the stores’ closing time. This tracking shot is repeated a few sequences later by night, when the street is practically deserted: in forty-five seconds, the camera only meets a man and a cat in a scene characteristic of a ghost city. In both cases, Via di Prè is dark and dirty, but it does not look especially decayed, at least not yet. This footage is quite similar to some sequences of In the White City, a film in which Tanner surrendered to the charms of picturesque aesthetics: in most sequences, he depicted the wild beauty of Alfama – a popular neighbourhood located on a hill over the Lisbon waterfront – without realising that he sometimes confused its genius loci with the effects of urban decay. In Genoa, on the contrary, this atmosphere upset him, because he was not a foreigner there. After all, In the White City describes the exploration of an unknown cityscape, but Les hommes du port deals with the return to a beloved place. Accordingly, the mood of the latter depends on the distance between Tanner’s memories of the 1950s and what he actually found in the 1990s: another city, another waterfront and, above all, another emotion.
Les hommes du port was made a few years before the launch of the ‘Operating Plan for Genoa’s Historic City Centre’ (see Galdini 2005). At the time, sailors and stevedores had already been replaced by the first tourists, whose presence announced the imminent gentrification of the area, whereas traditional residents had given way to immigrants who were not always welcomed: in the summer of 1993, a series of attacks against foreign residents ended in a violent clash with police, an incident that warned about the deterioration of living conditions in the neighbourhood. Dock workers were aware of the importance of urban renewal for the future of the city, but Tanner was not as interested in this issue as they were: the only interview that addresses this topic in the film only serves to highlight the stevedores’ involvement in local politics.
Contemporary global trends in urban planning usually seek to recover and increase the property value of depressed or neglected areas, such as historic centres and waterfronts, which are ultimately understood as spaces of consumption (see Muñoz 2010: 203–7). In view of redevelopments like Canary Wharf in London, Tanner probably feared that the Genoa waterfront might also become a banalscape or just remain as a junkspace. In both cases, the past is understood as a commodity, as something that can be marketed as an idea, an image or an experience in order to make a profit from investors and tourists. Since its traces are simply regarded as economic assets for the city, their preservation usually entails some type of forgery: at best, their original appearance is softened by removing any annoying detail or controversial meaning; but at worst, they are not restored or destroyed, but simply preserved ‘just in case’. At the turn of the century, when most Western cities, including Genoa, were undergoing similar processes of urban renewal, Koolhaas drew attention to the deep disorientation of local governments regarding what to do with their architectural heritage, an idea that appears in both his well-known text ‘The Generic City’ (Koolhaas & Mau 1995) and the later article ‘Junkspace’ (2002):
The Generic City had a past, once. In its drive for prominence, large sections of it somehow disappeared, first unlamented – the past apparently was surprisingly unsanitary, even dangerous – then, without warning, relief turned into regret. Certain prophets – long white hair, gray socks, sandals – had always been warning that the past was necessary – a resource. Slowly, the destruction machine grinds to a halt; some random hovels on the laundered Euclidean plane are saved, restored to a splendor they never had… (1995: 125–6)
Junkspace happens spontaneously through natural corporate exuberance – the unfettered play of the market – or is generated through the combined actions of temporary ‘czars’ with long records of three-dimensional philanthropy, bureaucrats (often former leftists) that optimistically sell off vast tracts of waterfront, former hippodromes, military bases and abandoned airfields to developers or real-estate moguls who can accommodate any deficit in futuristic balances, or through Default Preservation™ (the maintenance of historical complexes that nobody wants but that the zeitgeist has declared sacrosanct). (2002: 184)
These urban change agents’ perception of the past has nothing to do with Tanner’s: his deep admiration for dock workers leads him to praise their legacy, which he considers a source of knowledge for younger generations. ‘
I thought that it was important to convey their unique experience and their truth at a time in which the lie abounds’, he concludes before closing the film with a shot of a cargo ship sailing away. Stevedores are thus depicted as agents of social cohesion, people who gave an emotional meaning to those areas that were successively affected by the post-industrial crisis, the subsequent abandonment, the loss of functions and population, and a partial renewal that was not always respectful with their historical identity. The set of their testimonies constructs a collective narrative about the disappearance of their way of life, but also chronicles the transformation of the waterfront into junkspace. Tanner’s autobiographical account apparently remains in the background, but it is more than an anchor for the story. Indeed, it is the same story, but told from a different perspective, a variation that widens the scope of the film by merging micro and macro approaches: from individual to collective, from generational to historical and from social to spatial. In short,
Les hommes du port is an urban self-portrait narrated in the first person plural, because whenever an interviewee speaks, Tanner implicitly endorses his words; and whenever someone recalls a memory, including the filmmaker himself, any Genoese could feel it as his or her own.
Of Time and the City: Memories from the Dirty Old Town
3
‘We love the place we hate / then hate the place we love. / We leave the place we love / then spend a lifetime trying to regain it.’ These lines, recited by Terence Davies at the beginning of Of Time and the City, summarise his contradictory relationship with Liverpool, his hometown. While he lived there, from his birth in 1945 until he left in 1972, he could not stand it; but later, after settling in London in the late 1970s, he has not stopped returning to those years throughout his film career. His autobiographical cycle, composed of the shorts Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983), as well as the feature films Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), explore the traumatic memories of his childhood, to the extent of developing a series of recurrent obsessions: the love of a devoted mother, the death of a violent father, a hypocritical and emasculating Catholicism and a troublesome homosexuality experienced as closer to sin than to pleasure.
The three shorts were later reunited in a feature film entitled
The Terence Davies Trilogy (1983), which tells the life story of Robert Tucker – Davies’s alter ego – in a three-act narrative: the first,
Children, introduces the character as a young man who remembers his traumatic childhood; the second,
Madonna and Child, focuses on his dependency relationship with his mother and shows his frustrations as a gay man; and the third,
Death and Transfiguration, directly imagines his lonely death. A few years later,
Distant Voices, Still Lives re-enacted the filmmaker’s family life from his mother’s and siblings’ memories of the time when his father was still alive; and finally
The Long Day Closes recalled the short and happy period between his father’s death and his discovery of homosexuality in adolescence by means of another alter ego, this time called Bud.
4 All these works describe a mindscape located at a particular time and place – Liverpool in the post-war years – but they are not intended at all to faithfully depict its cityscape (see Everett 2004: 42, 46, 52).
Davies considers that ‘cinema is the only art form that can show the passage of time visually’ (in Yáñez Murillo 2008: 228), to which he has added that ‘cinema recalls memory better than any other art because its effect is instantaneous’ (in Reviriego 2008: 81; my translation). Hence the Liverpool portrayed in his films does not match the real city, but an imaginary place that only exists in the filmmaker’s memories, an intimate geography that unfolds on the screen without a linear narrative, always following an emotional order instead of a chronological one. The best example of this complex storytelling is the temporal structure of Distant Voices, Still Lives, whose logic Davies has explained through the metaphor of a pebble dropped in a pool:
The idea was that because the film is about memory, and memory moves in and out of time all the while, I had to find a way of saying, you’re not going to see ‘what happens next’. And once you’ve set it up, people will know instinctively. They may not say, this is a non-linear narrative, but they’ll just know. It seems to me that 7/10ths of the film is in that first scene: it’s the day of her wedding, she remembers her dad. That’s the pebble dropped in the pool, and then there are those ripples of memory, which is what the film is all about. (Davies in Floyd 1988: 295)
In this film, most sequences are actually located outside the flow of time, that is, they do not come from a specific present but from the act of remembering itself. The evocation of the past, as Antonio Weinrichter says, is usually triggered by insignificant objects that symbolise previous life periods, like Marcel Proust’s famous madeleine (2008: 258). This idea already appeared in a sample study of North Chicago residents made by Eugene Rochberg-Halton in 1977, according to which the most valued objects in the home were those artefacts that embodied ‘ties to loved ones and kin … and memories of significant life events and people’ (1986: 173).
Distant Voices, Still Lives therefore works, according to Weinrichter, as an emotional zapping of temporal leaps in which ‘echoes, associations, embellishments, forgeries and other instances of self-fiction [produce] a montage of
souvenirs’ (2008: 258). Social ceremonies, such as weddings, christenings or burials, as well as everyday routines, mainly represented by the morning awakening, seem to be endlessly repeated in the film, because they are not conventional flashbacks, in the sense that someone remembers something in particular, but interrelated scenes that coexist in a kind of eternal return, as Quim Casas has pointed out (2008: 186).
5Davies’s favourite element to bind them together is music, especially the popular songs from the 1940s and 1950s that ‘gave ordinary people a voice for their feelings’ (in Everett 2004: 206). He chooses these songs for ‘their ability to convey a certain mood along with the images, and as a representation of collective feeling’, as Ricardo Aldarondo has written, ‘but never to create an easy association of ideas between what the song says and what is narrated in the scene’ (2008: 201). This is to say that the resulting contrast between the image track and the musical score allows the filmmaker ‘to de-privatise his own feelings’, an expression borrowed from Gonzalo de Lucas that refers to the way he turns his personal memories into collective experience (2008: 85; my translation). Thus, as argued by Wendy Everett, the use of popular songs fulfils a triple function in Davies’s autobiographical cycle: ‘to recreate a remembered past but also, simultaneously, to interrogate and deconstruct that past’ (2004: 167).
This strategy reappeared again, along with Davies’s recurrent obsessions, in
The Neon Bible (1995), a transitional work between his Liverpool films and subsequent literary adaptations like
The House of Mirth (2000) and
The Deep Blue Sea (2011).
6 In view of this new direction in Davies’s film career, it seemed that he would never make another film about his hometown, but he actually did, under certain circumstances:
Of Time and the City was produced as an essay film about the city where he grew up within the context of Liverpool’s year as the European Capital of Culture in 2008, an event that promoted many works and projects related to the city, its identity and its evolution through time. In this documentary, as Julia Hallam has noticed, Davies finally showed ‘the exterior spaces and places of his childhood and adolescence that were evoked but never seen in [his] earlier films’ (2010a: 69): for the first time, the domestic topography of his autobiographical cycle was extended to the public space beyond ‘
home, school, the movies and God’, the places in which the filmmaker spent most time of his childhood, as he states in the film’s commentary. The reason for this novelty is the temporal structure itself: contrary to
Distant Voices, Still Lives or
The Long Day Closes,
Of Time and the City does have a specific present from which the post-war cityscape is recalled: 2008. Consequently, Davies establishes a dialogue between past and present that suggests an emotional reading of Liverpool’s urban change, as Matthew Gandy outlines in the introductory text to the DVD edition of the film:
At the heart of this meditation on the city lies a tension, between urban change as a process that is brutal and unremitting, and the persistence of memory as something that is delicate and filamentary. We weave our memories into a palimpsest of dreams where time and place melt into each other. Memories become maps through places to which we can never return in a world that is changing all about us. (2009)
The main topic of this documentary is thus ‘the process of aging, whether for the city, the filmmaker or cinema itself’ (Davies in Yáñez Murillo 2008: 222). In order to find the traces of old social rituals that disappeared along with popular neighbourhoods,
Of Time and the City examines archival footage filmed in Liverpool between the 1940s and the early 1970s. This time, instead of re-enacting the past, Davies appropriates real images in which time had been recorded ‘as it was being lived’ (Bruno 2002: 259): according to Hallam, the film is composed of 85 percent archival footage, mostly taken from professional films such as
A Day in Liverpool (Anton Dyer, 1929),
Morning in the Streets (Denis Mitchell, 1959),
Liverpool Sounding (Ken Pople, 1967),
Who Cares? (Nick Broomfield, 1971) or
Behind the Rent Strike (Nick Broomfield, 1974) (2010a: 69–70).
7 Almost all these materials come from public archives, except for a few sequences that also include amateur footage obtained thanks to local collectors, among which Hallam mentions Clive Garner and Angus Tilston (2010b: 284).
8Despite professional films currently being part of the ‘official’ record of the cityscape, Davies uses them as if they belonged to his own collection of home movies, an impression emphasised by his first-person commentary. The combination of these three elements – professional documentaries, amateur films and Davies’s memoryscape – creates an urban self-portrait that ‘[brings] to the foreground contested spaces and [reveals] emotional attachments and attitudes to place’ (Hallam 2010a: 79). In a broader sense, paraphrasing Michael Zyrd’s definition of found-footage filmmaking, this device ultimately serves to comment on the cultural discourses and narrative patterns behind history, giving a metahistorical meaning to pre-existing images (2003: 42). This new reading is constructed through essayistic elements, such as the poetic tone of the commentary, the rhetorical questions addressed to the audience or the juxtaposition of archival footage and a present-tense commentary. The latter echoes Davies’s working method, which has been described by producers Roy Boulter and Sol Papadopoulos as a process of ‘reflection and viewing, contemplation and reviewing, selecting the archive footage for its evocation of very specific emotions and memories’ (Hallam 2010a: 69). Accordingly, the essayistic component of the film is not only a formal choice, but mainly the outcome of its creative process.
Hallam thematically relates Of Time and the City with ‘the celebration of northern working-class identity found in the black and white realism of the films of the British New Wave’ (2010a: 72). Those works established a pattern of representation that has later conditioned most films set in northern cities of Great Britain. In the entry devoted to Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool of the encyclopaedia La ville au cinéma, Stefano Baschiera and Laura Rascaroli pointed out the main features of this approach:
The common historical evolution of Glasgow, Manchester and Liverpool explains their similar representations on the screen within stories focused on working life and the miserable living conditions in urban slums and poor suburbs. The house, the favourite place in these films, opens to a middle ground: the courtyard opened to all eyes. The films deal with working-class communities, their belonging to a neighbourhood and their conflicts with rival communities. The three cities are usually shown as a mosaic of fragmented spaces, collections of disjointed neighbourhoods characterised by their unequal living conditions: beautiful gardens or rubbish dumps, rows of little houses or tower blocks, parks or dirt roads, churches or derelict factories, old monuments or skyscrapers. These spaces perfectly reflect the unemployed characters, the outcast or the petty criminals that inhabit them. Within this cityscape, the recurring theme is the escape from the city in search of a more promising place, a desire that contrasts with the threat and insecurity of the urban environment. (2005: 390; my translation)
Davies’s autobiographical cycle follows this pattern of representation, but Liverpool is no longer the post-industrial wasteland that it used to be: its current identity has more to do with a business, shopping or tourist city than with its old role of industrial and port city, as also happened to Genoa right after the making of
Les hommes du port. Curiously, film production has played a key role in the regeneration of Liverpool, as Julia Hallam and her colleagues in the research project ‘A City in Film: Liverpool’s Urban Landscape and the Moving Image’ have extensively analysed:
9
Liverpool City Council’s determination to attract film production to the city as part of its regeneration strategy in the late 1980s was a defining moment in acknowledging the role that the creative industries (and film production in particular) could play in reversing the economic fortunes of the city during a decade in which public images of civil strife, social unrest and industrial disruption were perceived to be major factors in the decline of inward investment in the city. It was not however the prospect of projecting an image of the city, positive or otherwise, that was a primary concern at this time; basing their strategy on post-industrial cities such as Philadelphia in the USA, the city council sought to attract major film production companies to use derelict industrial sites as film locations to create freelance opportunities for local film and media workers and develop supporting industries such as catering and hospitality, a strategy that has proven to be very successful. (Hallam 2010b: 290)
10
Given that the old pattern of representation is no longer appropriate to depict the contemporary Liverpool, Davies decided to begin his urban self-portrait with a distancing device that marked the temporal gap between the old image of the city and the new one. In the opening sequence, a screen emerges from the floor and opens its curtains in order to show old street scenes, suggesting that this cityscape can only exist as a projection of archival footage. Among these first analogical images, a phantom ride taken from the now demolished overhead railway stands as a film quote to one of the first icons of the cinematic city: the arrival of a train to the city, a usual image among the silent pioneers since L’arrivée d’un train à La Ciotat (Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, Auguste and Louis Lumière, 1896) that was later canonised by both avant-garde and mainstream traditions, from Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (Berlin, Symphony of a Great City, Walter Ruttmann, 1927) to La bête humaine (The Human Beast, Jean Renoir, 1938). This shot includes a glimpse of the Royal Liver Building, one of the ‘Three Graces of the Pier Head’ (the other two are the Port of Liverpool Building and the Cunard Building) that symbolise the waterfront, the city centre and even public space. The presence of these and other recognisable landmarks in the film, such as Saint George’s Hall, the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral or the Albert Dock, emphasises the stark contrast between the representations of the imperial, economic or religious power and the streetscape where people hustle and bustle in their everyday life.
This spatial opposition has been defined by Wendy Everett regarding
The Terence Davies Trilogy as the clash between ‘the wide-open, masculine confidence of the public spaces at [the] centre’ and ‘the close intimacy of the women’s spaces, hidden behind the net curtained windows of the terraced streets on the periphery of the town’ (2004: 45). Davies clearly feels more comfortable in the latter, as his editing choices confirm: he usually shows architectural landmarks from the outside, as symbols or visual surfaces, while focusing his attention on customs and rituals already disappeared: from leisure time (soccer, movies, wrestling, etc.) to domestic routines (lighting the fire, cleaning the house, doing the washing) without forgetting the scenes of industrial and port work. This life was probably as mediocre, boring and lacking in prospects as ‘
a long Sunday afternoon: nothing to do, nowhere to go’, as he says in the commentary, but the experiences of that time, like those of any other, left a deep emotional trace in Liverpudlians. This idea is expressed in the following passage, in which Davies invites the entire audience to remember with him, even those who were too young to have lived that period:
Do you remember, you who are no longer young, and you who still are? Do you remember the months of November and December? Wet shoes and leaking galoshes, and for the first time … chilblains, with Christmas in the air. God was in his heaven, and oh, how l believed! Oh, how fervent l was! And on Christmas Eve, pork roasting in the oven, the parlour cleaned, with fruit along the sideboard. A pound of apples, tangerines in tissue paper, a bowl of nuts and our annual exotic pomegranate. Do you remember? Do you? Will you ever forget?
These words recall a particular time and place, but they can also be interpreted as a general evocation of childhood memories, regardless of the time to which they belong. The temporal distance turns them into ‘happy days’, as a recorded voice suggests right after Davies’s speech, even though they were actually not happy. Thus, although the filmmaker refers once again to his particular memoryscape, his words urge to remember any past that may have a similar mood.
The insistence on the act of remembering implicitly expresses the topics of
tempus fugit and especially
memento mori, which William Raban had already invoked in
Thames Film. In particular, over an image of people walking down the street in the 1970s, Davies recites a quote taken from James Joyce’s
Ulysses (1922): ‘
as you are now, we once were’.
11 These words actually come from the medieval story of ‘The Three Living and Three Dead’, a narrative that tells the meeting of three living men, usually kings or knights, and three corpses or skeletons who warn them
‘as you are now, we once were /
as we are now, you may become’ (see Rotzler 1961; Sandeno 1997; González Zymla 2011). By reproducing the first part of this sentence, Davies assumes the role of the three dead, reminding the audience that any city and any person has a past doomed to disappear and, for this reason, worthy of being remembered. Later on, after a sequence about summer afternoons in New Brighton, he insists on the idea of
tempus fugit by means of another literary quote, this time from Anton Chekhov: ‘
The golden moments pass and leave no trace.’
12 Certainly, the material traces of the past cannot be found in the cityscape, since much of Liverpool’s urban fabric was razed to the ground between the 1940s and the 1970s, but the emotional traces will survive as memories as long as there are people who may recall them.
The aftermath of World War II created the appropriate circumstances for urban renewal in most cities of the United Kingdom. On the one hand, as John R. Gold and Stephen V. Ward have pointed out, urban policies had receded into the background due to the war effort: house-building stopped, the slum clearance programme was suspended and there was practically no investment in transport and services (1997: 60). On the other hand, the war time experience of mass production and planning served to launch a nationwide programme of reconstruction and reorganisation described by David Harvey in these terms:
Britain … adopted quite stringent town and country planning legislation. The effect was to restrict suburbanization and to substitute planned new-town development (on the Ebenezer Howard model) or high-density infilling or renewal (on the Le Corbusier model) in its stead. Under the watchful eye and sometimes strong hand of the state, procedures were devised to eliminate slums, build modular housing, schools, hospitals, factories, etc., through the adoption of the industrialized construction systems and rational planning procedures that modernist architects had long proposed. And all this was framed by a deep concern, expressed again and again in legislation, for the rationalization of spatial patterns and of circulation systems so as to promote equality (at least of opportunity), social welfare, and economic growth. (1989: 69)
In the case of Liverpool, the city council took advantage of war damage to completely reshape the historic centre: the area between the Pier Head and Lime Street Station was practically demolished in full in order to make way for ‘an inner-city motorway network and modernist “concrete and glass” offices with integrated shopping precincts and amenities’ (Hallam 2010a: 76). Such a project took so much time that vast tracts of the city remained derelict and empty for years, creating an alienating ruinscape from which Davies wanted to escape in the 1970s but to which he attempts to return in
Of Time and the City. His mixed feelings towards this avatar of his hometown protect him from nostalgia, because he has not precisely good memories of that time, but even so he cannot help but miss it. The best tool to convey this emotional state is music, as usual in his films, thanks above all to its ability to arouse memory. The unconscious association between a melody and the time at which we heard it for the first time has been perfectly explained by Iain Chambers:
Music serves as a multi-dimensional map, it is simultaneously connected to fashion (repetition of the new) and to memory (moments lost in time). It permits us to maintain a fragile bridge between consciousness and oblivion. It introduces the history of the event into the fluctuating, atemporal regime of memory by permitting us to mark time and recall it, admitting the past to the present, and allowing us to trace in its echo other dreams, further futures. (1997: 234–5)
Davies always relates his works to musical forms, especially the symphony, to the point that this genre has inspired the emotional structure of most of his films, including
Of Time and the City (see Everett 2004: 168–9). In this sense, its main theme is the passage of time in the city, while its variations revolve around the filmmaker’s usual topics: working-class life, homosexuality, Catholicism and cinema. Davies’s primary reference to organise these materials was the musical documentary
Listen to Britain (Humphrey Jennings & Stewart McAllister, 1942), but the tone and meaning of both films is quite different:
13 while Jennings and McAllister’s work celebrated British national unity in wartime,
Of Time and the City is instead ‘a love song and a eulogy’ for the defunct industrial city of the working class, as its subtitle indicates. Again, the soundtrack includes several popular songs, such as ‘Dirty Old Town’, ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’, ‘The Folks Who Live on the Hill’ or ‘The Hippy Hippy Shake’, as well as a long list of classical pieces, among which there are two that work as counterpoint to the images of urban renewal: Salvador Bacarisse’s Concertino for Guitar and Orchestra in A Minor Op. 72 (1957) and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C Minor, ‘Resurrection’ (1895). This soundscape reinforces the haunting nature of archival footage, maximising what Michel Chion calls ‘the added value of music’:
The expressive and informative value with which a sound enriches a given image so as to create the definitive impression, in the immediate or remembered experience one has of it, that this information or expression ‘naturally’ comes from what is seen, and is already contained in the image itself. (1994: 5)
‘The Folks Who Live on the Hill’, for example, provided Davies with the foundational image of the documentary: ‘When I imagined Peggy Lee singing this song over images of Liverpool’s public housing estates in the late 1950s, I knew that this was what we had to do’ (in Reviriego 2008: 81; my translation).
14 This sequence summarises the evolution of the cityscape from terraced houses to concrete tower blocks through a device similar to that used by Michael Moore in
Roger & Me, in which the visual narrative collides with the upbeat lyrics of the song: while Peggy Lee sings about a bright future that never became true for many working-class Liverpudlians, the footage juxtaposes scenes of family life in Arcadian neighbourhoods, images of their subsequent decay and demolition, and finally a series of shots in which people looked trapped in their new habitat – men and women standing isolated on their balconies, a tiny man walking beside a huge building, an old lady removing a used can from the lift, etc. All these images, as well as the deliberate contrast between old and new spaces, come from
Who Cares?, but Davies re-edits them to the rhythm of the song. The outcome extends the meaning of the original footage by expressing the filmmaker’s personal discomfort regarding post-war urban renewal: he explicitly criticises the replacement of ‘a citizenfriendly town planning approach that fostered communication among people’ by ‘another, overcrowded [one] based on concrete tower blocks, graffiti and neglect’ (Aldarondo 2008: 204), that is, a misapplication of Le Corbusier’s modernist principles.
The only image in this sequence that was not filmed by Broomfield is a photograph entitled ‘The Long Walk’ in which a lonely man walks down Everton Brow amid ruins and rubble [
Image 7.2]. This panorama is part of ‘Liverpool: The Long Way Home’, a series of pictures that photographer Bernard Fallon took between 1966 and 1975, when he was living in Crosby, a suburb located six miles north of the city, and almost every day took the bus to the Liverpool College of Art. At the time, according to Fallon, ‘buildings were bulldozed everywhere in an orgy of destruction. It was said, “What the Luftwaffe failed to do, the city corporation finished off”. And it was truly a fascinating place to photograph’ (2009). ‘The Long Walk’, in particular, conveys the depressing atmosphere of the interregnum between demolition and reconstruction: it is an image so powerful and poignant that it is usually considered an icon of urban decay. Being aware of this meaning, Davies uses it to split his remix of
Who Cares? in two halves, the first devoted to old popular neighbourhoods and the second to modernist new spaces, thereby identifying the point of no return of urban renewal.
The traumatic nature of this process is addressed in all its harshness in the musical sequences that resort to classical compositions: in the case of Bacarisse’s Concertino, the guitar solo of its second movement is associated with terraced houses, whereas its immediate repetition by the full orchestra accompanies images of neglected tower blocks where people, especially children, strive to live with dignity. The resulting effect suggests that Brutalist architecture created a hostile environment to community life that Davies politely describes as ‘
the anus mundi’. The most overwhelming images are nonetheless reserved to the penultimate musical sequence, in which a particularly gloomy passage of Mahler’s symphony emphasises the awful experience of living through urban rejuvenation: children, young couples, immigrants and elders look like castaways left to their fate in a post-industrial nightmare, while old buildings are depicted as lifeless bodies rather than useless structures. This ruinscape is vaguely reminiscent of those included in Akerman’s
News from Home because they were all filmed by means of a similar apparatus: the grainy texture and colour temperature of the images correspond to the visual standards of the 1970s, the decade of the post-industrial crisis and also the last years that Davies spent in his hometown. Accordingly, this musical sequence works as a farewell to the dirty old town that he left behind, putting an end to his memoryscape before returning to the present.
Image 7.2: Of Time and the City, Bernard Fallon’s picture ‘The Long Walk’
Unfortunately, the recent reunion between Davies and Liverpool was anything but happy, as he himself has said:
Almost everything had been pulled down in the area where I grew up. It’s really the dregs what’s left of it. Of the sixteen cinemas that were in Liverpool there’s only one remaining. It was upsetting because you suddenly realised that fifty years had gone by and that was what was left of it. At the end of the 1950s we moved house into these new places. It was the new ‘Jerusalem’, but it really wasn’t. It was even worse than our old houses. And, not because I want to be Catholic again – I don’t – but our parish church seated about two thousand people and on occasions it was filled. Six people were there now. They’ll eventually pull it down, but it’s a good example of Gothic Catholic revival built in the 1880s. It’s just sad to see everything tatty and ruined at the edges. I’m a stranger there now. I’m an alien. (Davies in Yáñez Murillo 2008: 245)
Being a foreigner in his own land did not prevent Davies from realising that life went on beyond his frozen memories: as the narrative of the film relies on ‘the friction between the artist anchored in the past, and the World that continues turning’ (Gilbey 2008: 45), it was essential to show to what extent Liverpool had changed. His solution was to appropriate a long-established metaphor in the British documentary tradition: the image of children playing in the open street as a symbol of the city’s future (see Lebas 2007: 46–7; Shand 2010: 66). These children look at the city as something new, with the same curiosity that Davies felt at their age, but they will not miss the old industrial city at all: in fact, if they are lucky, their places of memory should be much more pleasant and beautiful than the filmmaker’s. Their gazes certify that Liverpool had re-emerged from its ashes in the late 2000s, a real ‘resurrection’ confirmed by the epic fragment of Mahler’s symphony that closes the film.
The final image of the fireworks over the city’s waterfront may seem a happy ending, but it is actually as grandiose as ironic. Davies is aware that Liverpool’s resurrection was achieved only after having sacrificed its old cityscape in the process, removing most traces of the past from its urban surface. In the late 1980s, David Harvey had already warned that the fabric of traditional working-class communities was being taken over by a lobby formed from the alliance of real state developers and local politicians who surreptitiously exchanged the concepts of restoration and imitation (1989: 303). Following the usual practices of postmodern urbanism, these urban change agents certainly did their best to rehabilitate many degraded areas, but they were only superficially interested in preserving the historical identity of places. Nowadays, for instance, the Albert Dock looks much better than in the 1970s, but its genius loci has gone along with the human landscape that inhabited it. This case exemplifies the inherent contradiction of many urban renewals, as exposed by Richard Koeck:
While it is perhaps possible to imitate a cultural past in architectural terms, it is an impossible task to bring back the socio-economic tissue that defined the character of those various historical building types, such as dock warehouses and other site-specific buildings. Paradoxically, such urban planning strategies counteract the natural evolution of a place and its identity, which is not a static agent, but a force that is in constant flux and dialogue with the present. (2010: 215)
Cityscapes, understood as a network of social and cultural relations, cannot be created or recovered by urban planning, not unless they have been simplified as images (Muñoz 2010: 50–1). This process usually develops through two strategies, both based on the manipulation of history, that ultimately lead to the production of banalscapes: the first one, termed ‘brandified cosmopolitanism’ by Muñoz, consists of selecting and reproducing elements and typologies of vernacular architecture in order to simulate certain urban atmospheres; while the second, identified as ‘consumer romanticism’ by the same author, borrows local stereotypes, most of them inspired by the idiosyncrasies of the former residents in the area, to recreate a fictional version of disappeared communities (2010: 191; my translation). Much to their regret, Genoa’s and Liverpool’s dock workers are clear examples of the latter: once they were expelled from historic waterfronts, their iconography was recycled by urban change agents to decorate city tableaux, making profit from their symbolic capital and offering them little more than a nostalgic tribute in return.
Liverpool’s waterfront is currently a simulacrum as artificial as South Street Seaport in New York or the Docklands in London, a banalscape in which Davies is so out of place that he had to dive into archival footage to find his way back to the city that shaped his personality. Nevertheless, if there is any hint of nostalgia in
Of Time and the City, it is not for a better past or for a place in particular, but for a way of living that no longer exists. Like Michael Moore and Alain Tanner, Davies identifies the old cityscape with that lifestyle, but contrary to them, he never idealises it since he is convinced that post-war years were not precisely the best time to live in Liverpool. He was basically unhappy then, but even so he enjoys recalling his past pleasures as much as anyone, no matter how mediocre they were. Thus, while Moore’s and Tanner’s approach may sometimes be a bit ingenuous, Davies’s is more ambiguous thanks to his sincerity. By trying to be honest to himself, he rather lines up with Tony Buba, since they both bear a love-hate relationship to their respective hometowns. Consequently,
Of Time and the City simultaneously works at several levels, ranging from the personal to the social: depending on who sees the film, it may be interpreted as a process of self-healing, a repository of scenes of everyday life or a chronicle of Liverpool’s urban change over half a century. Without ever losing the beat, Davies synchronises his personal memories with archival footage, merging history and story, past and present, facts and feelings in an ambitions combination that manages to bring back the old cityscape to the screen.
NOTES
