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If the name rings no bells with most viewers, it is due to the fact that, despite passionate critical acclaim and the relative accessibility of most of his movies on tape, Davies is hardly the kind of director whose work provides what audiences have been taught to expect -- a plot that is neatly solvable within 90 minutes, jazzy MTV cutting, clear- cut morality, and seamless impersonality. Born in Liverpool, England, in 1945, Davies instead sees film as a direct pipeline into the artist's memories, with all the feelings that arouse from them constituting not just the background for a film, but its raison d'être. Memory and its many effects in Davies' films play as integral and audacious a role as in the films of Alain Resnais (Hiroshima Mon Amour, Muriel) or in the writings of Marcel Proust (Remembrance of Things Past). Fine, but where is that connected to the musical? At its very roots, it turns out. The musical, after all, feeds in no small part on repressed, frustrated emotions, the better to explode them with glorious bursts of singing and dancing. What are musical numbers if not lyrically stylized declarations of feelings that could not be expressed any other way? It is this very notion of the musical as expressions of feeling -- the musicality of emotion -- that has eroded away over the years in favor of sledgehammer editing and gaudy Broadway pizzazz. That a smirky, would-be libertine such as Baz (Moulin Rouge!) Luhrmann can cram every single musical in the last century into one madly spinning carrousel and still miss the point is symptomatic of how far the genre is from its origins. Davies' films (Distant Voices, Still Lives, The Long Day Closes, The Neon Bible, The House of Mirth) present us with the musical in its purest form. Music is used as an incantation device, a way of conjuring up images and feelings from the past. Characters often sing in his movies, but the songs are invariably old pieces rather than big production numbers. The effect is one of a moment in life, intrinsically tied to that song, being conjured up and relieved in film. The dreariness of the characters' environments is transformed by these musical epiphanies. For example, in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), images of brutally tyrannical fathers, cramped interiors, dank pups and bomb shelters fill the screen, yet I came away from it elated rather than depressed. That's because his characters, a working-class Liverpool family, are able to engage in bits of almost defiant joy by humming to an Ella Fitzgerald song, or by luxuriating in the pleasure that watching Love Is a Many-Splendored Thing can provide. In the same way, songs and the emotions behind them turn a ray of sun shining in a carpet in The Long Day Closes (1992) or a white sheet blowing in the wind in The Neon Bible (1995) into moment of transcendental ecstasy. Davies is possibly the only filmmaker working today who is able to present us with a thoroughly personal image and view it both as a memory conjured up from the past and as a set of vivid, very much present-tense emotions. The opening shots of the family in Distant Voices, Still Lives are arranged like old portraits, in sparse, frontal compositions, its colors slightly drained by time. Yet they are incandescent, the intensity behind them all but burning through the silver screen. So far I have concentrated solely on Davies' wondrous talent for creating expressive moods, with virtually no word on what his films are "about" -- that is, their plots. Considering "plot" as we have become used to would be a pretty fruitless task when talking about a work such as The Long Day Closes. In the traditional sense, nothing "happens" in it: the 11-year-old protagonist goes to the movies, his mother sings along to the radio, there is a New Year's Eve party. The end.
Far from being the nonmovie this description would indicate, this lack of narrative frees our expectations and, in the
process, enlarges our views of how a story can be told. There is a story in the film, but it is told as memories delicately
evoked rather than as events neatly streamlined. The images flow like waves of feeling, dictated not by plot mechanics
but by the director's sense of emotional truth. It seems reductive to consider Davies' films merely as "musicals," when
their artistic achievement spills over onto so many other areas. In a way, however, this narrow classification may prove
constructive: it is possible that the renewed interest in the genre may lead viewers to discover his work, lending it the
public visibility it has deserved all along.
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