TERENCE DAVIES

All my films are about outsiders because I’m an outsider,’ said Terence Davies, who died on 7 October aged 77. The Liverpool-raised director was a filmmaker with a voice entirely his own: at once ascetic and warm, austere and fully felt, his eight-film legacy brooks few comparisons.

Any exploration of Davies’ work begins at home. Raised Catholic, the youngest of a working-class family with 10 children, he was subjected to abuse from his ‘psychotic’ father and bullied for his homosexuality at school. Comfort came from his mother and movies: classic Hollywood musicals and melodramas.

In the ‘Terence Davies Trilogy’ of shorts – Children, Madonna and Child, and Death and Transfiguration (1976-83) – he tapped into these formative experiences deeply. His first feature proper, the diptych Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), explores his father’s violence, his death when Terence was seven, and the relief his family felt afterwards. Davies’ non-linear style summons these experiences with lyrical power: never simply ‘realist’, his composed films unfold as stylised evocations of memory, music and feeling.

His next film centred on that liberated period of childhood from seven to 11, before secondary school’s torments. The release that Davies found in art lights up The Long Day Closes (1992), a film aglow with the fleeting pleasures of cinema and song.

He embraced adaptation with The Neon Bible (1995), connecting with themes of family and religion in the ’40s Georgia of John Kennedy Toole’s novel. Branching out further still with Edith Wharton adaptation The House of Mirth (2000), Davies worked on a larger scale with a major star (Gillian Anderson, rarely better) without compromising his emotional imprint.

Still, his singular voice made it tough for him to find funding, and he wondered if Mirth might be his swansong. Unfulfilled films included a rare modern-day project, a romantic comedy titled Mad about the Boy; the budget eluded him. But he returned to film with the lyrical documentary Of Time and the City (2008) and The Deep Blue Sea (2011), a melancholy, 1950-set adaptation of Terence Rattigan’s play about the infidelities of a tormented High Court judge’s wife.

A lush return to form, the result reiterated Davies’ way with actors in Rachel Weisz’s measured lead performance as Hester Collyer. Another period piece followed with the sumptuous Sunset Song (2015), an adaptation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s 1932 novel touching on themes of male violence, religion and music.

Davies’ final films were portraits of poets, outsiders he related to. Cynthia Nixon played Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion (2016), a film exploring the writer’s sorrows and fleeting joys. In Benediction (2021), Davies alighted on Siegfried Sassoon (played by Jack Lowden), the First World War poet who was underappreciated in his lifetime but later revered. Davies rarely received due plaudits in his lifetime, but he accepted his fate gracefully. ‘If a film lives every time it’s seen,’ he said, ‘that’s the real reward.’ For those who discover them, his films live on in every note of poignancy and joy.