Offscreen Notes
Terence Davies: 1945-October 7, 2023
One of England’s most respected directors, Terence Davies, died on October 7, 2023 at age 77. Davies ‘only’ made about 15 feature films but managed to instill a quiet visual intensity and narrative complexity (often concerned with issues of temporality, memory and the relationship between the personal and the historical) to all his films. His final two films were bio-pics, one about 20th Century poet Siegfried Sassoon, Benediction, and the other about write Emily Dickenson, A Quiet Passion (2016) [read review here). Perhaps his greatest works were more autobiographical in nature, dealing with his working class, Catholic upbringing (in the city of Liverpool) as a gay man in a time when homosexuality was not socially accepted. Three shorts that formed The Terence Davies Trilogy (1983), Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), The Long Day Closes (1992), The Neon Bible (1995) and Of Time and the City (2008), a documentary on his hometown of Liverpool.
