The Long Day Closes

The brilliant “Tammy” sequence from Terence Davies’ “The Long Day Closes”

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Thanks to Terence Davies’s distinctive filmmaking style, The Long Day Closes doesn’t quite feel like any other motion picture. This intensely moving, ethereal reverie on a brief happy period of the director’s often sad childhood in Liverpool during the fifties moves in and out of different moods and sensations, rather than laying out a straightforward narrative. His films may come across as stream-of-consciousness, but Davies actually meticulously sets up every shot and music cue in the first draft of his scripts. Often, his plans are ambitious, as is clear from the following magnificently realized scene. Set to Debbie Reynolds’s 1957 hit song ”Tammy,” it is a virtuosic cinematic symphony, composed of incredible high-angle shots of a movie theater, church, and schoolroom, graphically matched to express the importance of those three locations in Davies’s youth.

Source: Criterion Collection

Remembering Terence Davies, the Greatest British Director

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The late filmmaker was the supreme cinematic poet of memory, and thus of loss and regret.

By Richard Brody

There’s a special pain to the news of the death of the British filmmaker Terence Davies on Saturday at the age of seventy-seven: his career, filled with some of the greatest movies of the past forty years, has always seemed just to be getting started, and, to the end, he kept the exuberant bearing of youth. He was past forty when he made his first feature, “Distant Voices, Still Lives” (1988)—one of the most original of all début features—and he only made eight more, not because he worked slowly but because the money was slow in coming. Although Davies was among the most accomplished of filmmakers, he remained a perpetual beginner, always on the verge of breaking out but never quite getting there. He reached old age with too few films made—a grievous loss to the history of cinema—but with the ardor, the urgency, and the curiosity of youth unabated. He never made a “late” film; no work of his suggests a detached philosophical overview or a foot in the beyond. The paradoxes and complexities of his character run through his output and his life—and they were also very much on the surface, on public display.

I had the honor and the pleasure of meeting Davies on several occasions (including onstage, in 2016, at The New Yorker Festival). In person, he was hearty and vigorous, wryly and effervescently humorous, a trait that spilled over into his cinematic taste: he expressed unflagging enthusiasm for classic Hollywood musicals at every chance he got, whether in front of an audience at moma, about a decade ago, or in his ballot for the 2022 Sight and Sound poll. Yet his own films were marked by a keen sense of ambient tragedy and often scarred by the horrors of war. The American experience of the Second World War shapes “The Neon Bible,” and the British experience of it shapes “The Deep Blue Sea.” (A scene of Londoners seeking shelter in an Underground station during a German bombing raid is one of his most spectacular creations.) The Civil War is an important part of his Emily Dickinson bio-pic “A Quiet Passion,” and the First World War is decisive in “Sunset Song.” It is also the very heart of his last film, “Benediction,” a bio-pic about the poet Siegfried Sassoon.

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Hopes For Paradise: Terence Davies and The Long Day Closes

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By Rich Woodall | First Published May 22, 2022

Years ago, my Dad was trying to explain to me how it felt to see Lawrence of Arabia in the cinema back in the 1960s. Remembering those vast horizons, the steepled banks of sand and the sunrise turning the whole sky to rust he told me, “It was the biggest thing I’d ever seen.” What appeared on that screen was something completely out of scale with his own existence – not just a strange landscape, but an entirely alien perspective. Nobody anywhere had ever seen a desert the way David Lean and Freddie Young showed it to them in 1962, infinite in width and depth and yet also somehow captured within a screen on a wall in Hull, Wolverhampton or Liverpool.

This was the early days of the television boom. Most households had one, but it was two channels broadcast in bleary monochrome. The cinema was still where you went to get your images, a radical elsewhere that let you in on an experience utterly removed from the texture of your everyday life. Today, of course, the value of images has been subject to explosive hyperinflation. We all gorge on a constant stream of high-def footage. The cinema can still affect us with its scale and volume, but it takes effort to think of it as anything other than a jumbo-sized smartphone screen. When I think about my Dad’s experience of Lawrence of Arabia, I try to imagine living in a society where moving images were so scarce and precious. The only film I’ve ever seen that gives me a sense of what this might have felt like is Terence Davies’ The Long Day Closes, which turns 30 this year.

Like Davies’ other early films, The Long Day Closes is a quasi-memoir inspired by the director’s growing up in 1950s Liverpool. The story revolves around Bud, a shy and fragile 12-year-old living on an urban terrace with his mother and three older siblings. This home is a space of tenderness and care, embedded in a close-knit community, although Bud is tortured by his inability to fully participate in the spiritual, romantic and social worlds that revolve around him. As Davies has said of himself, Bud is one of life’s spectators, a daydreamer and a voyeur.

No surprise, then, that Bud is most himself at the movies. In one especially lovely shot, the camera tracks along the front row of a cinema balcony, finally reaching Bud, leaning forward with his chin resting on his hands, a look of pure bliss on his face. But this isn’t so much a film about being at the pictures as wanting to be at the pictures. For most of the film, we follow Bud as he goes (reluctantly) to school and church or kicks around at home, and slowly we see how those couple of hours a week he spends at the cinema are rewiring his brain, reshaping his desires and altering the way he sees the world around him.

This is mostly expressed through exquisite shot composition and camerawork – hallmarks of Davies’ body of work. Sometimes we see through Bud’s eyes, and sometimes we watch him while he watches others, but again and again we’re with him as he stares out windows, through open doors and down empty hallways, searching for frames to organise his everyday experience the way he’s seen it on the screen. Early in the film, as he looks out of an upstairs window, Bud’s eye falls on a shirtless bricklayer, and he feels the first stirring of an urge he doesn’t yet have a name for. There’s something about the spatial logic of the shot that doesn’t quite add up. It feels like the brickie should be at ground level, but he’s filmed head on in the centre of the shot, as he’d appear if Bud were looking straight at him. It’s as if in his mind’s eye Bud is framing the man as he would if he were shooting a movie, transforming him momentarily into a matinee idol. Cinema gives Bud the language he needs to explore desires which every other sphere of his life forces him to repress.

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The Terence Davies Trilogy

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The autobiographical films of Terence Davies are not simply nostalgic journeys into the director’s past; they are piercing insights into the filmmaker’s turbulent early life. While Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), The Long Day Closes (1992) and Of Time and the City (2008) are feature-length depictions of the people and places he knew growing up, the three short films that comprise The Terence Davies Trilogy  – Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983) –are the earliest looks at the filmmaker’s life, focusing on the solitary figure of Robert Tucker. Just as François Truffaut showcased the adventures of Antoine Doinel (Jean-Pierre Léaud), his surrogate self, across five films, the character of Tucker (played by a range of actors across the three films) is a stand-in for Davies.

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