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Winner of the International Critics' Prize, Cannes 1988.
Terence Davies's stunning debut feature film Distant Voices, Still Lives was instantly recognised as a masterpiece on its release in 1988 and the director hailed as one of Britain's most gifted and remarkable filmmakers. Re-released in April 2007 as part of a complete retrospective season of Terence Davies's films at BFI Southbank, it was once again showered with critical acclaim.
The BFI now makes the film available on DVD for the first time, presented in a beautiful new digital restoration - a fitting showcase for this unforgettable film from one of contemporary cinema's true poets.
Drawn from his own family memories, Distant Voices, Still Lives is a strikingly intimate portrait of working class life in 1940s and 1950s Liverpool. Focusing on the real-life experiences of his mother, sisters and brother whose lives are thwarted by their brutal, sadistic father (a chilling performance by Pete Postlethwaite), the film shows us beauty and terror in equal measure. Davies uses the traditional family gatherings of births, marriages and deaths to paint a lyrical portrait of family life - of love, grief, and the highs and lows of being human, a 'poetry of the everyday' that is at once deeply autobiographical and universally resonant.
Extra Features:
- Feature commentary by director Terence Davies
- Filmed interview with Terence Davies
- Filmed introduction with Art Director Miki van Zwanenberg
- Original trailer
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
70 of 71 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
I have waited fifteen years for this masterful film to come out on DVD, and now, finally, thanks to the wonderful work of the British Film Institute, it has.
I first came across "Distant Voices, Still Lives" when it was shown on Channel Four television in the early '90s. I decided not to watch it - I was only in my early teens at the time - but my parents did, and I occasionally found myself glancing at the television screen to see what it was like. It did not look like a "normal" film. There was something strange, and deeply haunting about its tableau-style images, and its use of music. I put it out of my mind until, a few years later, there was a South Bank Show devoted to the work of its director, Terence Davies, on the eve of the release of his new film "The Long Day Closes". Clips from both films were shown, and I was simply amazed by the beauty of their camerawork and cinematography. Even though I did not know what either film was actually about, I knew that their images would stay with me forever.
Eventually, I managed to watch both films, and they quickly became my favourites. "Distant Voices, Still Lives" is the more sombre and brutal of the two. It is a diptych: the first film, "Distant Voices", was made in 1986, and through a series of impressionistic moments puts us right inside the memories of a family, as they recollect their experiences of their terrifyingly violent father. "Still Lives" was made two years later (but you can't see the join), and puts us inside the same family's memories of the period immediately following their father's death. Two central themes stand out. The first is a portrait of a close-knit, somewhat stifling community, which is at once deeply fond and somewhat critical. The second is a quite stunning use of music - perhaps the best in all of cinema - and especially of popular song, to complement, and counterpoint the action.
The film is blessed with an array of sometimes magical, sometimes disturbing moments. I will mention one: the terrifying scene where the Mother (Freda Dowie) is balanced precariously on the window ledge, cleaning the window, as "Taking a Chance on Love" plays in the background, and she reflects that her husband (Pete Postlethwaite) was "a good dancer" - only to cut to him leading her in a horrific dance of almost ritualized domestic violence. But do not listen to those who say this is a depressing film. It *is* powerful, and sometimes distressing; but it is also full of such warmth, humanity, and good humour that watching it is, in the end, a deeply uplifting experience.
Geoff Andrew's review, which appeared in Time Out magazine in 1998, said of this astonishing film: "It thrills with a passion, integrity, and imagination unseen in British cinema since Powell and Pressburger". I could not agree more. Just one request for the BFI: please release "The Long Day Closes" as well!
I first came across "Distant Voices, Still Lives" when it was shown on Channel Four television in the early '90s. I decided not to watch it - I was only in my early teens at the time - but my parents did, and I occasionally found myself glancing at the television screen to see what it was like. It did not look like a "normal" film. There was something strange, and deeply haunting about its tableau-style images, and its use of music. I put it out of my mind until, a few years later, there was a South Bank Show devoted to the work of its director, Terence Davies, on the eve of the release of his new film "The Long Day Closes". Clips from both films were shown, and I was simply amazed by the beauty of their camerawork and cinematography. Even though I did not know what either film was actually about, I knew that their images would stay with me forever.
Eventually, I managed to watch both films, and they quickly became my favourites. "Distant Voices, Still Lives" is the more sombre and brutal of the two. It is a diptych: the first film, "Distant Voices", was made in 1986, and through a series of impressionistic moments puts us right inside the memories of a family, as they recollect their experiences of their terrifyingly violent father. "Still Lives" was made two years later (but you can't see the join), and puts us inside the same family's memories of the period immediately following their father's death. Two central themes stand out. The first is a portrait of a close-knit, somewhat stifling community, which is at once deeply fond and somewhat critical. The second is a quite stunning use of music - perhaps the best in all of cinema - and especially of popular song, to complement, and counterpoint the action.
The film is blessed with an array of sometimes magical, sometimes disturbing moments. I will mention one: the terrifying scene where the Mother (Freda Dowie) is balanced precariously on the window ledge, cleaning the window, as "Taking a Chance on Love" plays in the background, and she reflects that her husband (Pete Postlethwaite) was "a good dancer" - only to cut to him leading her in a horrific dance of almost ritualized domestic violence. But do not listen to those who say this is a depressing film. It *is* powerful, and sometimes distressing; but it is also full of such warmth, humanity, and good humour that watching it is, in the end, a deeply uplifting experience.
Geoff Andrew's review, which appeared in Time Out magazine in 1998, said of this astonishing film: "It thrills with a passion, integrity, and imagination unseen in British cinema since Powell and Pressburger". I could not agree more. Just one request for the BFI: please release "The Long Day Closes" as well!
27 of 27 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD|Amazon Verified Purchase
I grew up in a working-class family in a terraced house in Merseyside in the 1950s and for me this film is a very evocative and poignant reminder of those days. It's the small details that bring a lump to the throat and a tear to the eye - the mother sat on the window ledge to clean the sash windows, the Billy Cotton Band Show on the radio, the cinema thick with cigarette smoke - details of a recent past that is now as confined to history as the Crusaders or Roundheads and Cavaliers. Indeed I think the comparisons with the films of Powell and Pressburger are well judged, Terence Davies also presents a vanished world, albeit a slightly less distant one.
From the opening scene we are given the pace of the film (slow and lingering) and we rightly sense that this isn't going to be a linear narrative. The film is shot with a restricted colour pallet, like the hand-coloured photographs popular at the time, to perfectly represent life faded and worn with the passage of time. In many ways the film looks more authentic than the black-and-white kitchen-sink films made in the 1950/60s.
Peter Postlethwaite is wonderful as the father who terrorises the family and even after his death is still a brooding presence, staring down from his photograph on the front room wall. Postlethwaite's face is straight out of the 1940's, flesh stretched taught over the bones of his skull by hard work and rationing. Indeed the whole cast, including Freda Dowie as the wife, is excellent. (Debi Jones as Eileen's friend Micky looks so period that I find it hard to believe she hasn't been spliced into the film from 1940's film clips, as in 'Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid'.) We are introduced to the family via a series of events - funerals, marriages, christenings - many of which involve a booze-up and a singsong at the pub, this was life before television and the mass media were available to the working-classes. However, the counterpoint to the family's happy public face is the back-story of the father's violence to both his wife and kids. We are offered no explanation for this violence but there are hints that this is not unique - Eileen's friend Jingles also suffers at the hands of her husband.
Other people have commented on the music in the film - I particularly enjoyed the pub singsongs which my wife and I found ourselves joining in with - but I would also like to commend the sparse script, which I thought was wonderfully written with just the right cadences and vocabulary.
This is a great film, unlike any other film of the 1980s (or the 70s or 90s come to think of it!) It skilfully presents an evocation of a time and place but from this also reveals intimate details of one family, one city and a whole social class. Davies was confident enough to do all this without a conventional narrative in which the significance of every event is explained and without the characters needing to spout long speeches.
From the opening scene we are given the pace of the film (slow and lingering) and we rightly sense that this isn't going to be a linear narrative. The film is shot with a restricted colour pallet, like the hand-coloured photographs popular at the time, to perfectly represent life faded and worn with the passage of time. In many ways the film looks more authentic than the black-and-white kitchen-sink films made in the 1950/60s.
Peter Postlethwaite is wonderful as the father who terrorises the family and even after his death is still a brooding presence, staring down from his photograph on the front room wall. Postlethwaite's face is straight out of the 1940's, flesh stretched taught over the bones of his skull by hard work and rationing. Indeed the whole cast, including Freda Dowie as the wife, is excellent. (Debi Jones as Eileen's friend Micky looks so period that I find it hard to believe she hasn't been spliced into the film from 1940's film clips, as in 'Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid'.) We are introduced to the family via a series of events - funerals, marriages, christenings - many of which involve a booze-up and a singsong at the pub, this was life before television and the mass media were available to the working-classes. However, the counterpoint to the family's happy public face is the back-story of the father's violence to both his wife and kids. We are offered no explanation for this violence but there are hints that this is not unique - Eileen's friend Jingles also suffers at the hands of her husband.
Other people have commented on the music in the film - I particularly enjoyed the pub singsongs which my wife and I found ourselves joining in with - but I would also like to commend the sparse script, which I thought was wonderfully written with just the right cadences and vocabulary.
This is a great film, unlike any other film of the 1980s (or the 70s or 90s come to think of it!) It skilfully presents an evocation of a time and place but from this also reveals intimate details of one family, one city and a whole social class. Davies was confident enough to do all this without a conventional narrative in which the significance of every event is explained and without the characters needing to spout long speeches.
14 of 14 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
I haven't seen Terence Davies's other films but this is undoubtedly a great achievement - and one which, seen again after a gap of fifteen years, feels even more poignant. It may seem odd to say it of a piece so rooted in the specifics of a certain time and place but this autobiographical film also feels like it's the story of Everyfamily.
This may be partly down to the device which helps give shape to the non-linear narrative, namely that the film is threaded around major events - weddings, funerals, Christmas - so we often see the family either in the process of having a commemorative photograph taken or frozen as if doing so.
And given that our memories have a tendency to simplify events over time, the complexity of the experience dwindling down into the information contained in the tangible souvenir of a photograph ("smaller and clearer as the years go by", as Philip Larkin put it), it's as though Davies has deliberately reversed this process in order to defy time's usual softening effects: here is that frozen moment we thought familiar from the snapshot; now the half-forgotten, half reinvented events behind it spring up, vivid and painful again.
But while there is pain in this film's account of the tyrannous father who rules the house, there is joy and magic as well, as we see the family, and the downtrodden mother in particular, gradually recover after his death in the second part. It's also worth saying that Distant Voices, Still Lives is an art movie, but an art movie without that term's negative connotations: there is never, when watching, any sense of frustration at the non-linear narrative. As Davies says in an accompanying interview, the tone is established in the first couple of minutes when, accompanied by a shot of an empty staircase we hear the voices of those who once lived in the place going about their normal routines - ie this story is going will unfold itself in the fragmentary way that memory does, so forget your Robert McKees and Syd Fields when it comes to assessing this film. I don't know whether Davies had him in mind but Thomas Hardy, especially in such poems as The Self-Unseeing and Old Furniture, would be a more appropriate figure to cite.
This may be partly down to the device which helps give shape to the non-linear narrative, namely that the film is threaded around major events - weddings, funerals, Christmas - so we often see the family either in the process of having a commemorative photograph taken or frozen as if doing so.
And given that our memories have a tendency to simplify events over time, the complexity of the experience dwindling down into the information contained in the tangible souvenir of a photograph ("smaller and clearer as the years go by", as Philip Larkin put it), it's as though Davies has deliberately reversed this process in order to defy time's usual softening effects: here is that frozen moment we thought familiar from the snapshot; now the half-forgotten, half reinvented events behind it spring up, vivid and painful again.
But while there is pain in this film's account of the tyrannous father who rules the house, there is joy and magic as well, as we see the family, and the downtrodden mother in particular, gradually recover after his death in the second part. It's also worth saying that Distant Voices, Still Lives is an art movie, but an art movie without that term's negative connotations: there is never, when watching, any sense of frustration at the non-linear narrative. As Davies says in an accompanying interview, the tone is established in the first couple of minutes when, accompanied by a shot of an empty staircase we hear the voices of those who once lived in the place going about their normal routines - ie this story is going will unfold itself in the fragmentary way that memory does, so forget your Robert McKees and Syd Fields when it comes to assessing this film. I don't know whether Davies had him in mind but Thomas Hardy, especially in such poems as The Self-Unseeing and Old Furniture, would be a more appropriate figure to cite.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Disappointing!
As a Pete Postlethwaite fan I had great expectations of this film judging by some of the rave reviews. Read more
Published 10 months ago by Del
Lower your expectations
I did not enjoy this film, simple as that. It presents a series of scenes from a working class family, in no particular chronological order, omitting anything to do with work, and... Read more
Published 11 months ago by W. Hamilton
Just Boring.
Looked forward to watching this film but was really dissapointed,too much singing and not much of a story,no way is this a five star film,wasted my money wouldn't watch it again.
Published 11 months ago by Hank.
weird
good as a bit of a history lesson and I could be missing the point but I found it very hard to watch
Published 14 months ago by john kelly
The best of times...
..and the worst of times. Things, places, people, and communities gone forever. Watch it and laugh - and weep too.
Published on 30 Mar 2010 by P. Radcliffe
DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES
This WAS my childhood and life as I remembered it. Meeting the family in the pub on a Saturday night and having a good sing song. Read more
Published on 24 Oct 2008 by J. R. Jones
An awesome achivement
For me this is one of the best British films ever made. The fractured chronology and mesmerising use of song and introspective camera work glorifies the lives of a working class... Read more
Published on 13 April 2008 by Room For A View
Was I Watching Something Else?
5 star reviews for this, I completely disagree.
Too many sing-a-longs! I was fed up listening to them. Didnt see the point in the movie, other than a sing-a-long. Read more
Too many sing-a-longs! I was fed up listening to them. Didnt see the point in the movie, other than a sing-a-long. Read more
Published on 24 Mar 2008 by S. MacGregor
Luminous & thought provoking
If you want a traditional linear cause and effect narrative watch another film. This is a luminous autobiographical pastiche of memory and family framed by doors and windows,... Read more
Published on 11 Jan 2008 by Sad Anorak
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