OF TIME AND THE CITY

Liverpool in the fifties and sixties: streets, children, terraced houses, churches, football grounds, washing days, the demolition and the tower blocks that followed. In “Of Time and the City” (United Kingdom 2008), Terence Davies assembles newsreels and documentary footage into a portrait of the city he grew up in, laying his own voice over it – reminiscing, polemical, funny, wounded. It is about his Catholic upbringing and the loss of faith, about coming of age as a gay boy at a time when that was a crime, about the Beatles, the Queen, and the transience of everything. Classical music and the popular songs of the era carry the images.

An essay film that is both a love letter and an elegy, made for Liverpool’s year as European Capital of Culture. It was Davies’s first film in ten years; it was shown in a special screening in the official selection at Cannes in 2008. “Of Time and the City” was shown at Around the World in 14 Films in Berlin in 2010.

Shown at the 2010 edition of Around the World in 14 Films.

All films 2010 · Film Archive