Of Time and the City

Cecil says: This was billed as a portrayal of Liverpool on film through the ages, with a personal commentary from Terence Davies. I was thoroughly disappointed.

First the film footage: you'd have to know some of the back-streets of Liverpool pretty well (before they were pulled down) to actually recognise this as being a film about Liverpool, rather than any other northern city; OK Liverpool Catholic cathedral is pretty iconic, but for the rest, I didn't really get any feel from the film footage of the city we were supposed to be viewing. Being from the other great port across the Pennines, I kept thinking: this could just as easily be a film about Hull - why couldn't we have had lots more people being interviewed or extracts from people's conversations? Then, we might have got more of a feel of the unique place we all know Liverpool is.

Then there's the Terence Davies monologue. Dear oh deary-me. This felt more like social egotism than social realism. After a while, his suppressed anger just seeps through in every sentence he utters. OK, it must have been tough to be gay and Catholic and cultured in a rough, tough working class town, but I'm sorry Terence, I resented paying my £10 to sit through your ramblings, which said everything about you and very little about Liverpool.

I know it was Terence Davies's film, so he can choose to do with it what he wants, but there are soooooo many more interesting characters from Liverpool who could have provided us with insights and historical anecdotes about the place, which could so easily have matched the footage he had chosen. No, really, a waste of time and money

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Bea says: We saw this after Hunger (see previous post), so in a way I found it soothing to have the images, music and sounds of this - film? documentary? montage? wash over me. I was however, like Cecil, disappointed. It was clearly a personal representation of what Liverpool means to Terence Davies. Unfortunately, if you're not Terence Davies, it's unlikely to speak to you and it didn't really to me. I kind of felt it missed a trick; liberal use was made of the romantic poets and classical music - but when the film really worked the music and the spoken word behind the images were about the city itself - "Dirty Old Town", and the narrative of a 14 year old left to take sole charge of her younger siblings in the 1930s. I appreciate that Davies may have wanted to leave behind the working class image Liverpool has, but isn't that its reality to some degree (and I speak as the granddaughter of Liverpudlians). I did enjoy the images - the glamorous 1950s cinema opening nights, the holidays on the shore, and the footage of the cathedral (for which my grandfather did the electrics), but probably because this is the Liverpool I know from stories told to me when I was young.
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