The Cinematheque

“A rich, resonant tapestry of impressionistic detail … There is plenty to enjoy: a bleak, wry wit and an imaginative use of music undercutting the grim but beautiful imagery; flashes of surrealism; and superb performances throughout.”

Geoff Andrew, Time Out

The three films that open Terence Davies’s career comprise an education, covering his time at the National Film School. They also mark a seriously unique departure from any parochial English style of filmmaking. Davies intuitively, then with growing self-awareness, plunges into the sharply internalized perspective of alter ego Robert Tucker as a twentysomething, in middle age, and at the end of his life. The more experiences Tucker accumulates, whether they be peer, institutional, or self-punishment, the more it gives Davies the opportunity to expand the scale of time and range of tone, making the final chapter, Death and Transfiguration, the clearest signal of the mature director he would become. Yet the whole of his career’s emotional range, as well as his sculpting of time unbound by narrative convention, can be found in Children. Does youth dream of a prescribed future, or an adult recall the experiences that shaped him? Davies makes both simultaneously possible.

Children
United Kingdom 1976
46 min. DCP

Madonna and Child
United Kingdom 1980
28 min. DCP

Death and Transfiguration
United Kingdom 1983
26 min. DCP

“Overwhelmingly powerful: its stark black-and-white images and dramatic use of chiaroscuro, particularly in its close-up shots of faces, along with the raw edginess of its visual compositions, convey the director’s rage and despair with an often unbearable intensity.”

Wendy Everett, British Filmmakers: Terence Davies

“Even [at the time] it was obvious that Children was the work of a mature filmmaker … [And] when I saw Death and Transfiguration I remember being stunned by the opening sequence.”

Jennifer Howarth, Sight and Sound