At the end of a long day
| Movie | |
|---|---|
| German title | At the end of a long day |
| Original title | The Long Day Closes |
| Country of production | Great Britain |
| original language | English |
| Publishing year | 1992 |
| length | 85 minutes |
| Rod | |
| Director | Terence Davies |
| script | Terence Davies |
| production | Olivia Stewart |
| music | Bob Last , Robert Lockhart |
| camera | Michael Coulter |
| cut | William Diver |
| occupation | |
| |
At the end of a long day (original title The Long Day Closes ) is a British feature film by Terence Davies from 1992.
action
The film is set in England between 1955 and 1957 and, in montages of remembrance, focuses on a slowly ending childhood. In Liverpool, Bud, who was eleven at the beginning of the film, grew up as the youngest child in a working-class family. His father has already passed away, his older siblings are already working and thus financially support the widowed mother. The relationship between Bud and his family is loving, and occasionally they have parties with neighbors and relatives in their dreary-looking house. Bud loses himself more often in daydreams and in his love for the cinema, he regularly goes to evening shows with his mother.
His life is darkened by his move to secondary school , where the teachers pay little attention to the students and lead a strict regime with flogging for disobedience. At the same time, Bud slowly and quietly becomes aware of his burgeoning homosexuality , which seems to set him apart from the other people around him and brings him into conflict with the strict Catholicism of his family. In secondary school he is increasingly the target of sometimes brutal attacks by classmates, even his best friend Albie lets him down. Bud continues to support his loving mother and his love for the cinema. At the end of the film Bud walks through a dark door in the basement of the house, the audience remains behind.
background
Terence Davies linked with the end of a long day at his "Trilogy of Life" (1976-1983) and his film Distant Voices - Still Life (Distant Voices, Still Lives) from 1988, in which he already autobiographical elements had processed his life . In Distant Voices - Still Life , Davies had addressed his early childhood as the youngest of ten children of a strictly Catholic working class family in Liverpool. His dominant, sometimes violent father and his death, played by Pete Postlethwaite in the film, was processed in Distant Voices - Still Life . Davies said of the course of his childhood:
“When my father died, we started to live, we had a real life. Our house was like a magnet, especially for my sisters and their friends on a Friday night. What happy Friday evenings they were - I can still smell them. (...) I was seven and still in elementary school when he died, and I left elementary school when I was eleven. So I lived in utter bliss for about four years. I was happy all along. Then I had to go to secondary school, which was a full boys' school, and I was bullied for four years, and that's how my little paradise ended. "
This is where Davies' film At the End of a Long Day comes in, in which the character of Bud experiences brutality from classmates and teachers while attending secondary school. The film also addresses the close, loving relationship with his widowed mother. Davies also worked here for the most part with unknown amateur actors; for lead actor Leigh McCormick, for example , The Long Day Closes remained his only film and he is said to work as a firefighter today. The film was co-produced by the British Film Institute , Channel Four Films and Film Four International .
The Long Day Closes also references numerous pieces of music, in the 85 minutes of the film there are a total of around 35 songs, from American songs to British folk songs. The title-giving The Long Day Closes was published in 1868 by Henry Chorley and Arthur Sullivan , it can be heard in the credits in a version by the vocal group Pro Cantione Antiqua . But there are sound recordings of film songs such as Over the Bannister from Meet Me in St. Louis (1944, sung by Judy Garland ) and Tammy from the film of the same name (1957, sung by Debbie Reynolds ), in one scene Bud carries the song We're a Couple of Swells from Easter Walk (1948, sung by Garland and Fred Astaire ) at a party.
Other films are also referenced, mostly through audio recordings from the off, and comment on the lives of the characters. These include The Splendor of the House of Amberson (1942), Mysterious Inheritance (1946), Nobility Committed (1949), Ladykillers (1955), The Best Man in the Army (1955) and Carousel (1956). As in Distant Voices - Stilleben, Davies underlines the importance of cinema for himself, his family and perhaps also the British working class of this time in general - at the same time, he contrasts the actually dreary living conditions of Bud with the musical songs. Like the films of the 1940s and 1950s, but unusual for those of the 1990s. At the end of a long day , the members of the cast and staff also appear in the opening credits and not in the closing credits.
Awards
At the 1992 Cannes International Film Festival , The Long Day Closes was shown in competition and received ten-minute applause from the audience, but went away empty-handed. The film later won the Evening Standard British Film Award for Best Screenplay and the Golden Ear at the Semana Internacional de Cine de Valladolid .
criticism
The film service writes that at the end of a long day there is a “subjective picture and sound poem” in which director Davies interweaves memories of his own childhood: “Detached from a concrete social and historical background, he condenses it into a poetic evocation of a phase of the absolute A feeling of happiness whose value he only grasps in the (occasionally nostalgic) retrospective. In addition to the personal inventory, a virtuoso staged dream and memory game that appeals to the fantasy and magic of (cinema) images and music. "
Michael Hastings of the All Movie Guide wrote that The Long Day Closes was a “similar impressionistic memento” following his predecessor Distant Voices, Still Lives . The recorded songs and dialogue sequences are as important for understanding the film as the pictures themselves. Hastings complains that, in his opinion, Davies preferred nostalgia rather than a “more complex, more ironic kind of memory”.
David Thomson recommends watching all of Davies' autobiographical films in order to get an idea of how he grew up. The Long Day Closes is "just Bud and Mam and the cinema" and shows Buds slowly turning from the Catholic Church to the cinema. Michael Koresky described The Long Day Closes as "perhaps the happiest film" by Davies, in which he creates a nostalgia and "exquisite world" in his film, although the 1950s were actually repressive for homosexuals like Bud. Even in the opening credits with the slowly wilting bouquet of flowers, Davies would point out to his viewers to take a closer look at his film and the transience of time.
DVD and Blu-Ray publications
The Long Day Closes has not yet been released as a German DVD or Blu-Ray, but it has since been released internationally by the Criterion Collection .
Web links
- At the end of a long day in the Internet Movie Database (English)
- Essay by Michael Koresky at the Criterion Collection
Individual evidence
- ^ Terence Davies on Distant Voices Still Lives, 30 years later. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
- ^ The Long Day Closes (1992) - IMDb. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
- ^ The Long Day Closes (1992) - IMDb. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
- ↑ At the end of a long day. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
- ↑ The Long Day Closes (1992) - Terence Davies | Review. Retrieved March 7, 2019 (American English).
- ↑ David Thomson: 'Have You Seen ...?': A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films including masterpieces, oddities and guilty pleasures (with just a few disasters) . Penguin Books Limited, 2008, ISBN 978-0-14-192658-2 ( google.de [accessed March 7, 2019]).
- ↑ Michael Koresky: The Long Day Closes: In His Own Good Time. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
- ^ The Long Day Closes. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .