Tag: terence davies

Film by Ezekiel Yu
Read More
A stylized shot from Terence Davies's "The Long Day Closes", featuring child and mother looking ahead with the text of the film's title.

And Fate Disposes: On Terence Davies’s “The Long Day Closes” (1992)

When you’re a child, everything is your first. Both joy and trauma have equal power in one’s formation, and although the details of each event might slip away or alter, their impact does not. Following you throughout the years, few things remain as indelible as one’s introduction to shame, or the ecstasy of a winning moment, or, when least expected, the most proper song.

Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes involves itself with that period of life when innocence is at ebb tide, but the days have not yet lost their halcyon glow; when childhood still seems never ending and maturity remains but a shade on the horizon. The director has stated elsewhere that the scenes portrayed in the film represent the happiest years of his life. Indeed, from the opening with its rain-soaked, dilapidated alley (with possibly the most inspired use of the Hoagy Carmichael tune “Stardust” since Woody Allen’s in Stardust Memories) to the final shot of faint clouds against the moon as Arthur Sullivan’s “The Long Day Closes” plays in its sublime entirety—the artist seems to be almost in mourning for that vanished epoch. […]

Film by Jessica Schneider
Read More
A shot of Emily Dickinson from Terence Davies's "A Quiet Passion" (2016)

The Writing Life of Emily Dickinson: Terence Davies’s “A Quiet Passion” (2016)

It is not easy to create a clever biopic on an artist, much less one that spent most her later years confined to her bedroom as a recluse. One of the many reasons that artist biopics fail is because the writer/director chooses to include too much—sort of a crib to coffin approach, wherein we are only given surface events, rushed timelines and bad accents. This, however, does not stop the artistic mind from occasioning these films as comfort. How many films on Van Gogh do we need? Is anything new uncovered? Any insights? Probably not, yet audiences will continue to witness.

So, one can imagine my delight in learning that there was not only a biopic on Emily Dickinson, but also one that is excellent in itself. One way to measure this is to ask if the film could stand alone without the biography. Is the writing enough to carry it? For Terence Davies’s 2016 film A Quiet Passion, it is. We all know the story of The Belle of Amherst—that she did not title any of her poems, that she used random capitalization, random dashes, that she would write on the backs of receipts and napkins, and dutifully organize her poems into collective heaps tied with string. She was known to wear only white amid her later years and up to the very final days of her death, to never leave her room.

Emily Dickinson is the first poet that ever moved me, and quite possibly the only poet that could have gotten me into literature at all. Sure, this is speculation, as perhaps I would have managed another entry into literary lavishness, but for me it was Emily. I even had the Julie Harris readings on cassette, which I would play as I slept. (Given to me on my 16th birthday, I believe.) […]