Though the main fixtures of a classic, Hollywood film are conspicuously absent – narrative, sequential time, protagonist – it would be a mistake to describe Terence Davies’ film as experimental. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) does not, after all, revel in its play with filmic form: it does not push the limits of film language for the sake of pushing the limits of film language, or at least that’s not the impression we’re led to get. In place of brazen self-consciousness, we find moderation and modesty, a fealty of form to subject. So if the meditative, ponderous movement of the film does not offer itself up as experimental – its radical temporality is not achieved through a virtuosity of editing (as it is in, say, the battle scenes of The Desert Fox [1951]), nor through well-timed plot tricks designed to relentlessly complicate who knew what when (as in Memento [2000], for instance), – it is because its language is justified by the subject of the film itself, which, in this case, is memory broadly speaking.
The children’s memories of the father structure the film and provide it a logic [above], and it is the father’s recollected brutality and callous love that keeps the memories in abundant supply. Torn, then, between nostalgia and trauma, the film belongs to an an incessant displacement: as soon as a memory is summoned, it must be turned away for another, lest its horror overwhelm. No scene conveys this tortured figuration more succinctly than that of the air raid. Angry out of worry that they’re late in reaching the bunker, the father slaps the eldest of the bunch, then tells her to sing. For Davies, what allows, or makes endurable, the convolution of love and violence is art, or song, so rendered.
Song both binds the film together on a formal level, forcing into succession asynchronous times, and offers the children means for a pleasant, psychological distraction from the conditions of their lives. It would be tactless, however, to call this distraction an escape, if only for the reason that the songs themselves, in their subject matter and oftentimes-melancholic delivery, repeat or return to the trauma they otherwise appear to disavow. Their love of song is perhaps then less a means of escape than of mythology. Interrupted by a song, whole scenes come to a stop, and a welcome lethe descends upon the characters: one must sing about the war to forget it just as they remember their father to forget his brutality.
Though it is true that the disavowal of the father is never complete – in the last scene, the son is shown weeping on his wedding day (although this time, importantly, no memory accompanies the recollection) – the figuration of love and violence he enacts retreats into new, less conspicuous forms: as a cruel oedipal fate, he reappears in the daughter’s husband [below], only with this repetition she finds herself unable to finish singing. We are left, then, with the impression that the whole story will begin again, through a new generation, but that song may not be able to soothe the mind the way it used to.
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