Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

CINEMATIC ELEGIES TO CITIES LOST

For viewers unfamiliar with the baroque quality of Terence Davies’ films, a perfectly natural response to the first minutes of his latest is:

Good lord, is the whole thing going to be like this?

That was certainly my reaction.

The first moments of "Of Time and the City"--Davies’ most recent work since adapting "House of Mirth" (2000)--are indeed a good indicator of what's to come, but that turns out to be okay. This “love song and eulogy” to Davies' hometown of Liverpool opens on the city’s Metropolitan Cathedral. A meditative camera gazes solemnly at the church’s central altarpiece while the filmmaker’s narration rolls in slowly and theatrically, like voice of God.

Once you forgive this complete absence of artistic humility, "Of Time and the City" is just as masterful as Davies intends it to be (if slightly funnier than the sombre crowd at New York's Film Forum cinema house was willing to let on). A pastiche of Liverpudlian history mixed with Davies’ own, the documentary chronicles the evolution of the city from the early 1950s (poverty, Catholicism and the Korean War) to Davies’ teenage years in the mid-60s (burgeoning homosexuality, the discovery of film and, naturally, the Beatles). The film eventually culminates in a return to the hometown that Davies no longer considers his own.

Liberally sprinkling T.S. Eliot and Christopher Marlowe quotes over archival footage, Davies’ cinematic bildungsroman aspires to Joycean dimensions, and often reaches them. He casts the tragedy and exaltation of youth within the stoic march of history. In the final scene, Davies films today’s Liverpool: a hub of enlightened capitalism long removed from the memory of its decrepit, mid-century charm.

Near the end of "Of Time and the City", Davies muses that “people often meet their destiny on the road they take to avoid it”. In "My Winnipeg", Guy Maddin’s own contribution to the urban homage/auto-documentary genre, the director seems to have taken this notion to heart. Marketed as a “fugue to origins”, a "docu-fantasia" and, most spectacularly, a “deranged post-Freudian proletarian fantasy”, the film begins with a half-asleep actor--Maddin's on-screen proxy--leaving Winnipeg by train in the midst of a snowstorm. This bizarre, somnambulant moment sets the pace for the rest of the film, a rewriting of personal and public histories, with the city at “the heart of the heart of the continent” as palimpsest.

For Maddin, an experimental filmmaker best known for 2003’s "The Saddest Music in the World"–a Depression-era musical comedy starring Isabella Rossellini–"My Winnipeg" is something between an homage to his hometown and a desperate attempt to bury it through fiction. He turns the city into a canvas for his own feverish visions. Unmarked alleyways create a secret city within a city; homeless Winnipeggers, banished from the streets, create an alternate society on the city’s rooftops; and Maddin’s own childhood memories are starkly re-enacted in black-and-white by a team of actors. “What’s a city without its ghosts?” Maddin asks.

While both films address poignant homecomings to places once happily abandoned, they’re also elegies to cities lost. Both remember the past with such grace and nostalgia that they achieve a sense of intimacy rarely captured in film. Davies and Maddin reveal what happens when we finally do encounter our destinies while trying to avoid them. As paraphrase Davies’ beloved Eliot once said:

We shall not cease from our exploration
And at the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time

~ JESSICA LOUDIS

Picture credit: "Of Time and the City" and "My Winnipeg"