The Cinematheque

“A masterpiece powerful enough to blow every other new movie currently playing out of sight and out of mind … Davies merits inclusion within the company of Dreyer, Resnais, and Welles … There are very few filmmakers of this sort at present who show comparable mastery.”

Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Terence Davies’s most beloved film was also, at the time of its release in England, his most divisive. There was no hiding it: Davies was not, and probably never had been, interested in realism. He was a filmmaker from working-class Liverpool who wanted his cameras to ascend and his actors to be lit by hallowed light. He also desired for rain machines and dramatically unmotivated sound collage—from Hollywood fanfares, Ealing comedies, and a Platonic ideal of his mother’s working-day songs—to be as important, and as textured, as any other kind of ​“performance.” The film is autobiographical, covering the years of Davies’s adolescence after his abusive father’s death. His alter ego is Bud, who, like Keaton’s Sherlock Jr., daydreams so that life and cinema instruct each other in a manner both tender and increasingly isolating. As with the Taiwanese New Wave, Davies’s film understands why cinema was the popular medium of the 20th century, and how it changed the means by which inner life itself could be conceived.

The opening-night screening of The Long Day Closes will be preceded by remarks from Programming Associate Michael Scoular.

“The Long Day Closes had a profound effect on me when I saw it … [One] particular close-up, of a rug in the bedroom … The camera just holds [and] his poetry through camerawork, through music, through mood spoke volumes to me.”

Gillian Anderson

“Enough to win over even the most ardent anti-sentimentalists … With Davies’s help, Debbie Reynolds’s ​‘Tammy’ reaches the heights of St Matthew Passion.”

Tyler Maxin, Screen Slate