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Saturday November
7 Of Time and the City
Of Time and the City is a wonderful, considered, sometimes caustic and often hilarious portrait of Liverpool, the director’s home city. Using a mixture of film and sound archive, personal recollection and witty narration – juxtaposed so as to be simultaneously melancholy and rapturous - Davies offers us a consideration of change over several decades: a personal reflection on his own life and the things that moved him as a child but also observations on larger scale influences. Housing, class, consumerism, the Catholic faith and the royal family provide material for scathing, often enraged analysis, all told with Davies’ mellifluous voice over, described by one critic as ‘dundee cake mixed with mescaline’. Anyone expecting Brookside, the Fab Four or the glory of the Anfield terraces should look elsewhere – Davies has little time for scouse clichés, offering instead something far more authentic, an ecstatic portrait of a particular place but also a penetrating discussion of British society as a whole. The Guardian writes: “Nothing has given me more pleasure this year: the sweetness of its temper, the unfashionable seriousness of its design and its mixture of worldliness and innocence make for something sublime... What a lovely film this is, and what a welcome comeback for one of Britain's greatest film-makers”.
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Anyone who saw our recent screening
of the Humphrey Jennings classic docudrama Listen
to Britain will recognise its influence on Davies’ long awaited
return to the screen.