Key
Collaborators: Olivia Stewart
(Producer), Michael Coulter (Cinematographer), William Diver (Cinematographer/Editor),
Christopher Hobbs (Production Designer)
Highly Recommended: Distant
Voices, Still Lives (1988), The Long Day Closes (1992), The House of
Mirth (2000)
Recommended: The
Neon Bible (1995), Of Time and the City (2008)
"British
director best known for painful - and painstaking - portraits of
childhood. Davies' own harrowing experiences at the hands of an
abusive father colour and infuse all his portraits of a
working-class Britain. Nonetheless, these are flavoursome, if
slow - sometimes to the point of inertia - nostalgia pieces;
their atmosphere is 100 per cent redolent of Davies' upbringing
in a disease-ridden Liverpool slum area, the youngest of ten
children." - David
Quinlan (Quinlan's Film Directors, 1999)
"He shows a passionate concern with film craft, lamenting
what he sees as the British instinct to use film as a medium for
recorded theatre; primarily verbal, sentimental, and in the
tight bodice of traditional narrative. His films are remarkably
effective in disturbing, collective memories - and myths - of
British cultural life with such cinematic ingenuity." -
Saul Frampton (The St. James Film Directors Encyclopedia, 1998)
"Made
on low budgets provided by institutional resources, the films of
Terence Davies reveal a highly original, audacious film-maker.
Few contemporary figures match his ability or his interest in
charting the dark recesses and haunts of the soul; fewer still
do with such sincerity and compassion. Indeed, he is that
rarity: a British, but never parochial, director who views
cinema seriously and passionately, thus fulfilling the loftiest
demands of art." - Geoff
Andrew (The Film Handbook, 1989)
"I
make films to come to terms with my family history...If there
had been no suffering, there would have been no films."
- Terence Davies
