In the absence of an analysis of class relations, British cinema might as well not exist. From Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) to the recent Ray & Liz (Richard Billingham, 2018), passing through Mike Leigh's filmography, the idea of social stratification constitutes the red thread which connects this particular national cinema, perpetually preoccupied with understanding who we are and from where we are speaking. But nobody inscribed the ineffable and ineluctable feeling of belonging to a certain class – in particular, to the working class – with more graciousness than Terence Davies. What separates Davies' early films – Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) – from anything else is not just their capacity to invent a method, a style, but an entire affective territory which surpasses them, encasing them into a whirlpool of the heart. The Long Day Closes is, in this sense, a film that advances slowly, setting the truth of feeling as its sole guiding star: from one and to the other, Davies – this Proustian spirit of working-class England – labors solely towards testing a handful of creative hypotheses through which the cinematic machine, with its machinery and rails and ancestral virility, approaches the silky folds of the soul. It's a telling sign that, in cinema, emotion is a hybrid being with the head of a man and a body made out of metal and polished glass, which sometimes just so happens to hide its own traces and thus reveal to us the purest landscape of existence.

Victor Morozov

+ posts

Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. He studied film theory in Grenoble, Paris, Dublin.

This author does not have any more posts.