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The post Monday Movie: Distant Voices, Still Lives, by Alexander Miller appeared first on Battleship Pretension.
Every Monday, we’ll highlight a piece of writing from our vaults. This review of Distant Voices, Still Lives originally ran as a Criterion Prediction.
When you ask someone about “British Cinema” they’ll likely imagine Victorian or Medieval Melodramas, Kitchen Sink Realism, Monty Python or Hammer. Is it possible that the dreamily augmented realism of Terence Davies’ work was too hard to sell to the US market? The proceedings of Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives is in some ways easy to summarize, and yet nearly impossible to categorize. So when you hear “British Realism” as a way to describe this movie, you don’t think you’ll experience such deliberately artful compositions and atmosphere. Davies’ stylistic devices fuel his films with such ease that his dense narrative and dark subject matter flow without the downbeat residuals you might get from the likes of Ken Loach, or Mike Leigh. His contrasting techniques (that would otherwise suffer in lesser hands) that might seem at odds fall perfectly into place; mercurial violence is followed with static compositions (evoking silent cinema, or still portraits), staging is presented in slow dissolves, and most strikingly the harsh realism is executed with dreamy resonance. As tragic as the narrative may sound, Distant Voices, Still Lives is an enlightening film whose dual segments (shot two years from each other) may diverge in tone but work in harmony. Recounted from Davies own life (whose experiences were worse than those in the film), Distant Voices, Still Lives is a stirring piece of cinema that transposes the viewer to a time and place distinct and personal to the director’s life.
The post Monday Movie: Distant Voices, Still Lives, by Alexander Miller first appeared on Battleship Pretension.
The post Monday Movie: Distant Voices, Still Lives, by Alexander Miller appeared first on Battleship Pretension.
