Introduction (Terence Davies)

Terence Davies

Scroll to explore the exhibition

Terence Davies

Introduction (Terence Davies)
Time and Memory
The Cinema of Terence Davies

Introduction (Terence Davies)
Time and Memory
The Cinema of Terence Davies

Return

Related exhibitions

Film Music
Color
John Boorman
James Gray
Lynne Ramsay

/ 05

Terence Davies

Introduction (Terence Davies)

Terence Davies

Through shifting points-of-view and a unique approach to movement and space, the lyrical films of Terence Davies (1945-2023) open up new perspectives on perception, memory, and time. With graceful erudition and disarming humor, Davies speaks eloquently in our two-part portrait film about his style, film color, music, the cinema of the 1940s and 1950s, and his enduring poetic loves: Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot’s “Four Quartets” (1943). Like Davies's films, "Four Quartets" evokes universal experience through sharply observed quotidian detail and cyclical rhythms. It serves as a structuring reference for the two rooms that follow. a key reference point for the two rooms that follow. Photograph by Gus Aronson (Essex, April 2022).

Learn more in folio

Terence Davies Portrait Film

Two Chapters (THE TRUTH OF THE FRAME and TIME ODYSSEYS). (East Anglia and Liverpool, April 2022).

Go to the next room

Time and Memory

Four Quartets

As described in Chapter One of our portrait film, this 1972 BBC recording of Alec Guinness reciting T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets (1943) was a transformative influence on Terence Davies. It was his first exposure to the work, which he quoted in Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, 2008, extract).

Liverpool

All of Davies's early autobiographical films (including his debut Children, 1976, extract) are set in a small section of his birth city of Liverpool. These narrow confines are imaginatively transformed by his fictional surrogates, and the city itself became the focus of his documentary epic Of Time and the City (2008).

Learn more in folio

Go to the next room

Go to the previous room