Terence Davies

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Terence Davies (born November 10, 1945 in Liverpool , England ) is a British film director , screenwriter and actor . Although his work has only included 12 films since the 1970s, he is considered one of the greatest British filmmakers today.

Life

Terence Davies was born the youngest of ten children into a working Catholic family in Liverpool. He worked as an office worker for a few years before he began training at the drama school in Coventry . Here he wrote a short screenplay and convinced the BFI Production Board to give him funding for the filming of the screenplay: his first short film Children (1976) made a cinematic memorial to his tragic childhood, which was shaped by his tyrannical father and his untimely death . This theme was also the dominant one in the two other short films Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983), which were combined into a trilogy together with his debut in 1984. Meanwhile, Davies completed a directing course at the National Film School .

In 1988 he released his first feature film remote voices - still life , with which he again created a family portrait taking autobiographical experiences into account. The film received several awards, including one of three FIPRESCI prizes awarded at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival . In 1992, Davies made a kind of continuation of his feature film debut with At the End of a Long Day , which describes the growing up of a youth who was modeled on him and was also shown in Cannes. He then devoted himself to two novel adaptations: The Neon Bible (1995) based on a novel by John Kennedy Toole and Haus Bellomont (2000) based on a novel by Edith Wharton , the latter of which brought him several awards and nominations for both directing and screenplay. Despite the success of Haus Bellomont , Davies found hardly any funding opportunities for his other projects. In 2008 he made a comeback with the documentary Of Time and City , which showed his hometown Liverpool in the mid-20th century in the style of a collage . It was not until the 2010s that he released three feature films, which were also largely well received by critics. As of 2019, he is working on a film adaptation of Stefan Zweig's novel fragment Rausch der Metamorphosis .

Themes and style

Terence Davies became famous above all for his autobiographical films: in these he dealt with his psychopathic father and his domestic violence, the strict Catholicism of his family and his homosexuality, which aroused feelings of shame and fear in him. The difficult youth in Liverpool shaped his life - Davies is now an atheist, but never felt comfortable with his sexuality and is celibate. Nonetheless, despite the criticism, his films are not simply “settlements” for the conservative living conditions of his youth, because his films conjure up a time of “bigger melodies, less noise and better diction ”. It was precisely this ambiguity in the portrayal of Great Britain in the 1950s that made his films worth discussing.

At the same time, these autobiographical films were also reflections on time and human memory in general. These films are not told in strict chronological order; for example, a scene is often linked to an association from a previous scene. Davies also works a lot with noises, folk songs, classical compositions and jazz music as well as excerpts from classical Hollywood films constantly appear in his films from the 1950s - so the films of the poetry lover Davies almost look like sound and picture poems. These pop-culture recordings often comment on the life of the families in his films.

After The Long Day Closes , Terence Davies (with the exception of Of Time and City ) turned away from the autobiographical film material. He turned to literary adaptations and filmed works by John Kennedy Toole ( The Neon Bible ), Edith Wharton ( The House of Mirth ), Terence Rattigan ( The Deep Blue Sea ) and Lewis Grassic Gibbon ( Sunset Song ). His last film so far is A Quiet Passion , a biopic about the life of the writer Emily Dickinson . Since The Neon Bible, his films have often featured strong female characters who stand against the restrictive conventions of their time. The film professor Robert Shail called Davies one of the "most talented British directors of the last 30 years" in his work British Film Directors: A Critical Guide and wrote:

“His approach to filmmaking is the cinematic equivalent of the magical realism of literature, in which a vivid recreation of the everyday world is infused with dreams and memories to produce a form of hyperrealism that reflects both the outside world and the inside of the filmmaker. "

- Robert Shail

Filmography

As a director and screenwriter

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ The Long Day Closes. Retrieved March 7, 2019 .
  2. ^ Telegraph Film: The top 21 British directors of all time . In: The Telegraph . April 25, 2016, ISSN  0307-1235 ( telegraph.co.uk [accessed October 21, 2019]).
  3. ^ 'Being gay has ruined my life'. Retrieved on August 22, 2019 .
  4. ↑ FFW funds Zweig films and Sargnagel documentaries. Retrieved October 15, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Stuart Jeffries: Terence Davies: follow your hormones . In: The Guardian . November 23, 2011, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed August 22, 2019]).
  6. ^ Time and memory: The cinema of Terence Davies. Retrieved August 22, 2019 (UK English).
  7. ↑ Stuart Jeffries: Terence Davies: follow your hormones . In: The Guardian . November 23, 2011, ISSN  0261-3077 ( theguardian.com [accessed August 22, 2019]).
  8. ^ 'Being gay has ruined my life'. Retrieved on August 22, 2019 .
  9. ^ 'Being gay has ruined my life'. Retrieved on August 22, 2019 .
  10. ^ Time and memory: The cinema of Terence Davies. Retrieved August 22, 2019 (UK English).
  11. ↑ Rüdiger Sturm: The present, a foreign country . September 12, 2001 ( welt.de [accessed August 22, 2019]).
  12. ↑ Joanna Di Mattia: Davies, Terence. Retrieved August 22, 2019 (American English).
  13. ↑ TSPDT - Terence Davies. Retrieved October 21, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Davies, Terence
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British film director
DATE OF BIRTH November 10, 1945
PLACE OF BIRTH Liverpool , England