Distant Voices, Still Lives: BFI Film Classics (Paperback)

Paul Farley's study of Terence Davies's poetic memoir is both a personal response and an exploration of its unique style.

Set in a world before Elvis, in a Liverpool before the Beatles, Terence Davies's film Distant Voices, Still Lives is an elegiac and intensely autobiographical meditation on a post-war working-class childhood. Paul Farley's study of the film is both a personal response, as a Liverpudlian and as a poet, and an exploration of Davies's unique visual style, blending the spaces – the short halls, stairways, coal cellars and meter cupboards of northern England – and sounds – the BBC shipping forecast, a pub sing-a-long, the strains of Vaughan Williams and Britten – of memory.