One Shot is a series that seeks to find an essence of cinema history in one single image of a movie.
On a sunny afternoon in Liverpool a mother sits on the windowsill of a red-brick terraced house, her body perched precariously on the outside of the window as she scrubs the glass. The danger of the moment is felt through the eyes of her children who stare transfixed from the end of the hallway, willing her not to fall with the strength of their gaze. This scene occurs 20 minutes into Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988). By this point we have witnessed the brutal and unpredictable violence of Pete Postlethwaite’s father and we understand the consequences of a household without the love and protection of Freda Dowie’s mother. As the camera takes the perspective of the siblings, moving slowly toward the window, we are met with the sounds of Ella Fitzgerald’s “Taking a Chance On Love.” The song continues to soundtrack the toughest sequence of the film, in which the father viciously beats his wife until she collapses out of shot, a sobbing heap on the floor of their house. Here Davies moves from the worry of what could happen to the reality of what is happening. The concern for a motherless future is at once heightened and made superfluous by the misery of the present. As the film fast-forwards to the children’s adulthood, this contrast between anxiety and reality, between possibility and inevitability continues to echo. The christenings, weddings, and funerals that bookmark the non-linear plot crystalize the film’s relation to past, present, and future. It is here, among ceremonies prescribed with hope, that the family members are continuously confronted with painful memories and unhappy realities. The speckling of memory in the film’s first half (“Distant Voices”) situates the present in the second (“Still Lives”): family relations repeat, women live lives constrained, men behave poorly and die early. For Davies however, who has an autobiographical relation to the film, it’s all an act of recollection: revisiting his early life under the shadow of a terrifying father and the lasting effect this had on his family. This gives the film a double take on the passage of time. From within the narrative, the past refracts through the siblings’ present, leaving its mark on each significant milestone and tugging on their hopes for the future without eradicating it. However, taken in its entirety the whole film is retrospective, a collage of memory that leaps back and forth through time, diluting the separation between what was and what is. This is film as recollection and reconciliation, a memory that moves in circles like the cloth in mother’s bruised hand as Fitzgerald sings on: “things are mending now, I see a rainbow bending now, we’ll have a happy ending now… taking a chance on love.”