If John Donne were around today, he might recognise some of his style and romanticism in Terence Davies's beautiful, elegiac tribute to the city that shaped him: Liverpool.
For Of Time and the City is a love poem, just as surely as Donne's The Sunne Rising. It lays bare Davies's heart and his longing for grimy streets, red brick back-to-back houses, the docks, the Mersey and chimneys belching smoke into unsympathetic sk
ies already cluttered with rain clouds.
But this is far more than just an exercise in wistful nostalgia. Davies is no ordinary observer. His thoughts and views – trenchant, caustic, mocking, loving, poignant – flow through the narrative, providing always coherent and relevant thoughts on a world now lost: the industrial Britain of the 1950s.
This warm and vibrant biography is told through a collection of images culled from newsreel footage and other sources, all of it moulded into a sumptuous tapestry that with wit and humour tells the story of a mighty city in transition.
It is Liverpool but, more than that, it is Liverpool as Davies experienced it all those years ago.
Davies, who narrates in his own unmistakable style, transports us back to a gentler time. Or was it? Life was hard in Liverpool, and Davies had it as tough as his neighbours. Yet he looks back not so much in anger as in pensive thought, meditating on the lessons he learned.
A paean to childhood memories that avoids the rosy hue of corruption, this is a glorious tableau of day-to-day existence.
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