Critics reviews

Distant Voices contains some of the most beautiful, poetic filmmaking in British cinema. In the way it seamlessly flits between events separated by large stretches of time, Davies seems to have miraculously captured the essence of memory itself in its elliptical, dreamlike quality.

[The] disjunctive stops and starts recur across Davies’s movie, whose look-back form — all elegiacally drifting camera movements and belted-out bar songs — endures as a grand cinematic anomaly.

Davies, not a character in this film, was only six-years-old when his father died, yet his presence as a spectator is felt in the film's formal elements. We are always aware of the camera's presence here. In Distant Voices we see this to powerful effect in the glorious tableau composition of the family posed as if for a photo on Eileen's wedding day. Slowness and stillness make us aware of the father's physical absence and his detached presence in a photo on the wall behind them.

A stunner of a first feature, this episodic chronicle of working-class life in postwar Liverpool was a personal and public exorcism for Davies, marked by his enduring compassion... With devotional simplicity and heartbreaking tenderness, its virtuoso set pieces of family ceremony and quotidian ritual lay bare a generation's worth of compromises and betrayals. A masterpiece of the most exalted plane.

With an unfailing eye for place, décor, costume, and gesture, the director glides his camera through tangles of memories to evoke joys and horrors with a similar sense of wonder. In effect, the movie is an autobiographical musical, with the singing of pop tunes and traditional songs in homes and bars taking the place of ineffable intimacies.

The film evokes intimate memories with its carefully selected music cues and precise formalism, but what it has to say about its tyrannical patriarch, both the product of an equally hellacious upbringing and the producer of a subsequent generation of abusive, insecure men, is tragically universal.

Terence Davies' first feature is one of the most original and accomplished debuts of the 1980s, and a masterpiece of personal filmmaking... By inventing a style that reflects his own memories, Davies touches upon a universal theme: our relationship to the past.

But what really sets his film apart is the stunning power of the images Davies conjures up. Long, stately shots combine with impassioned performances to create a visual tour de force unmatched elsewhere in British cinema.

It’s a heartbreaking work. Its cast are phenomenal; its songs flow through the film like blood; and Davies is unflinching in his hunt for truth and full of nothing but love and understanding for his characters. A masterpiece.

The title may imply the stagnation of oppressed lives, yet the picture's lasting impression is one of concentrated, purified motion, of images poetically triggering images, and, above all, of waves of feeling flowing from screen to audience and back. Never ignoring the characters' pain as the family dissolves in the course of the film, Davies brings to their gatherings a heartfelt sense of emotional community struggling with the inescapable passage of time.

Distant Voices, Still Lives delves into the mechanics of memory (which it never conceives of as mechanical at all) and the mechanics and possibility of representing this memory in cinema. In the process it investigates the capacity of fictional cinema to act as memory book or family album.

A series of emotional and visceral jolts whose brute power and intensity could not be conveyed by a conventional linear story. A seamless block of passionate memories defined by the beauty and terror of the everyday. The problem with all these descriptions is that though each is partially accurate, they only dance around the periphery of what is a primal experience; that they represent the shards of my attempts to describe the essence of a masterpiece that reinvents filmgoing itself.