Of Time and the City was commissioned last year to celebrate the decision to make Liverpool the European Capital of Culture for 2008 (I know, I know). Rather than a portrait of shellsuit wearing scousers nicking hubcaps we’re presented with a very personal documentary from Liverpool born and bred director Terence Davies with a poetic elegance in both its imagery and narration. Davies traces the growth of his city and juxtaposes it with his own adolescence where he grapples with his sexuality, religion and taste in music.
Davies’ own narration is robust both in tone and content, when he speaks he does so with a mix of wit, wonderful use of language and carefully chosen quotations. Fortunately he’s savvy enough to know when to be silent and let the images do the talking, and there is some striking and fascinating footage on display here. Much of it feels like footage from a time when film was still a novel technology and a far more precious commodity than it is now, but they were still fascinated enough to use the technology to capture the everyday realities of their life and their town. It would be nice to think they were also prescient enough to imagine that they would also gather some footage that would prove to be a surprisingly fascinating time capsule, a history of the everyman that is undoubtedly essential to a city as rooted in the strength of the working class as Liverpool. Whatever the case, there is a far more artful quality to the ordinary footage than anyone could capture with a mobile phone video camera these days.
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The nostalgic sentiment that pervades Of Time and the City is inescapable to the point where it becomes overbearing on occasion, especially towards the film’s conclusion which has a ‘things have changed, what’s happened to my city?’ attitude that is somewhat tiresome, and that observation from Davies doesn’t seem especially well reconciled beyond a superficial level. It’s surprising given that he has a fairly profound understanding of the Liverpool he grew up in, but perhaps not so much Liverpool as it exists now.
The film’s positive qualities overwhelm these complaints, though, and the result is an interesting curiosity and a finely crafted documentary.
