Distant Voices Still Lives

Set in 'a world before Elvis in a Liverpool before the Beatles' Terence Davies' film 'Distant Voices Still Lives' is an elegiac and intensely autobiographical meditation on a post-war working-class childhood. Paul Farley's study of the film is both a personal response as a Liverpudlian and as a poet and an exploration of Davies' unique visual style blending the spaces - the 'short halls stairways coal cellars and meter cupboards of northern England' - and sounds - the BBC shipping forecast a pub sing-a-long the strains of Vaughan Williams and Britten - of memory.