Distant Voices, Still Lives

DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES   ***

Terence Davies

1988

IDEA:  A mother and her three children grapple with domestic abuse and other daily social realities in postwar England.

BLURB:  Davies’ debut attempt at cinematically distilling the phenomenon of memory, Distant Voices, Still Lives takes its birfucated title descriptors as spectral, organizing aesthetic principles. From its first lingering frame, in which the sounds of children are dissociated from their absent bodies, to the recurring tableau frames that embalm the characters in the frozen sepia of an irretrievable past, the film evokes something of the form and affect of a family album. Plot or linear time are inhibited by the floating, pre-lingual structure of memory, generating sideways, emotionally intuitive connections between communal singalongs and domestic violence, family mirth and marital malaise. Unlike the similar, subsequent The Long Day Closes, Davies’ debut is unmoored from any diegetic point-of-view, making its vignettes and the ideas that underlie them seem almost too diffuse, as if they might only make real sense to their author, who remains always conspicuously outside the vaporous body of the film. Somewhat frustratingly, Distant Voices, Still Lives thus plays as a wholly personal, painfully private film-souvenir: for Davies, its reconstructed memories call up the absent people and things the audience can only meagerly perceive.