the art of memory: terence davies' distant voices, still lives by adrian danks

Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988 UK 85 minutes) Terence Davies

Davies presents these vignettes as shards of memory which conversely contradict and rhyme with one another. The basic effect of this is to produce a complex emotional, social and familial landscape in which no character (not even the violent and unhinged father) is drawn simplistically or holistically. These memory images contrast and compete with one another to produce a range and ambiguity of character rare in such a fragmented and heartfelt autobiographical cinema. The effect is like that of memory stratified, where memory-images trigger other memory-images, creating a structure which seems to lack predetermination. Rather than an expected randomness a sense of wholeness, and a uniqueness of structure, emerges within which no compositions, expressions, gestures or snatches of music (flooding the soundtrack or defiantly sung by one of the film's many stoic female characters) seem out of place.

Distant Voices, Still Lives delves into the mechanics of memory (which it never conceives of as mechanical at all) and the mechanics and possibility of representing this memory in cinema. In the process it investigates the capacity of fictional cinema to act as memory book or family album. The film illustrates an important tension between evocative, realistic and tellingly detailed portrayal and the inaccessibility of the material portrayed to us (which can only be represented, distanced, voiced, stilled). Essentially what it offers is an emotionally charged self-conscious cinema throughout which we can sense the presence of the camera as it isolates an empty stairwell, cranes up from a sea of umbrellas, lingers over a composition, or perfectly frames and situates character within space. In the end Davies' film shows us duration, emotion, memory, the constructedness of space, and their interconnectedness.

This title is a homage to Frances A. Yates' fascinating book on mediaeval and Renaissance memory theatres. Davies' films can be seen as cinematic equivalents to such theatres (essentially spatialised systems or receptacles for memory and thought) in that they attempt to establish a model of memory as much as evoke a particular set of memories. His films can also be related to such memory theatres in terms of their mixture of the ephemeral (the memories themselves) and the material (the structures they are placed within). See Frances A. Yates, The Art of Memory (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966).

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