| Ben Desbois |
Distant Voices, Still Lives plays at the Trylon Cinema from Friday, September 18th, through Sunday, September 20th. For tickets, showtimes, and other series information, visit trylon.org.
My mom still lives in the house I grew up in. Visitors often refer to it as a museum because of how well it preserves the past. In the dining room, there is still a mural of a dragon burning down a mountain village which I painted when I was eight. It’s hard in today’s pace to stop and listen to what the objects in her house can hold, what history they resuscitate into being. They are repositories of the past, reliquaries of memory, of life lived.
The house itself is a century-old craftsman with a single staircase to a modest carpeted landing. The built-ins are all stained dark acorn and the single window on the landing has a perpetual shade to hide the window AC my mom refuses to take out. This dark flight of stairs is a sanctuary that holds imprints of me from different ages. I sit at the top of the stairs.
At five, I cry because the babysitter won’t let me stay up until my mom comes home.
At eight, after bedtime I listen to the adults downstairs laugh and gossip in the strange way adults seem to want to do.
At seventeen, I’m trying to understand why I’m being dumped, even though I already understand, I just don’t know how else to react.
At twenty-three, I’m on the wireless phone with my Dad in France as he explains to me he’s moving because he’s sick of Paris.
At twenty-nine, I argue with my mom about how to shift the couch so it’ll fit upstairs as I move back in during Covid.
At the top of the stairs, they’re all there with me. Like a bus depot, the stairs are where each version of me returns. They remind me I have been here, and I am still here. My voices of the past remind me I still live. The rolls of time, of my past, stick together with memory. Time and memory combine to make a sort of cinnamon roll of experience. Places and objects hold liminal power and guide us in accessing the sensational past. Sensational not in the sense of fantastic—it’s not fantasy—but in the sense that it is rooted in sensation, in feeling.
This relationship can also be terrifying, even traumatic. The stairs were a convenient haven so the associated memories bring me comfort. Change the setting or context, and the way the past crawls into the present transforms. Some memories, some places, people prefer not to relive. Sitting at the top of the stairs I see myself within the continuum of time, through the layers of the cinnamon roll.
It helps that there’s also a full size mirror.
Objects radiate the distant voices of the past, always haunting us, but if we’re lucky that haunting can bring us to a better place.
This liminal relationship of time and place that swirls around us haunts the work of Terence Davies. He’s figured out a way to capture this intangible experience in film so that we can relive the liminal déjà vu at will, ad nauseam. A physical medium (film) that is spooled around on itself (like a cinnamon roll) that floods us with memory. In the autobiographical Distant Voices, Still Lives, Davies layers memory upon memory to tell an accumulated narrative of the human condition and the true torture we rest upon ourselves and call living. It evokes the very essence of remembering, and watching the film feels like remembering your own life.
The film opens with a shot of Nell (Freda Dowie), the matriarch at the core of the narrative, collecting milk bottles on the rainy front stoop. It’s an unknown house, but it is the reliquary of this story. We—and the characters—will live multiple lives in this home. The camera follows her to the door as she disappears down the hall and into the kitchen. We are left to stare at the empty front hall and dark stairs. The shot lingers, but does not freeze, it connects with the memories and scenes that lived, and live on, in those stairs. Without cutting away, the distant voices of the past creep in. Scenes of the characters, alive, but disembodied are superimposed over the image of the stairs. We live with the past before it’s even happened. We can hear Nell’s three children, Eileen (Angela Walsh), Tony (Dean Williams), and Maise (Lorraine Ashbourne), as if they’re already an echo of memory.
In a world that is moving ever faster and with stimulus coming at us in ever more vibrant colors and with greater intensity, the first images of Davis’s film are halting. The stairs become etched into your brain. Later, after Eileen’s wedding the same shot returns, only the house is overflowing with party goers drinking and reminiscing on the choices of their lives.
And in the words of Jens Lekman, whether you marry or you don’t/you’ll wish you hadn’t because we are haunted by the choices we’ve made just as much as the ones we didn’t.
Davies sneaks this technique in throughout the film, sometimes passively and sometimes overtly. This pulls you into a state of pure presence where you can live in the now with memory. It is a moment of uncanny presence that will pull you away from the ever-spiraling pace of distracted life. This film reaffirms that we are alive, and each of us lives on and navigates memory as it comes. Watching this film is like biting into the cinnamon roll to taste all the layers at once. The nonlinear nature of the film creates a cyclical sensation, spooling the film over and over again, it, like memory, never really ends.
Through singing, the film also becomes a salve for modern film making. The ephemeral humanness of our existence can acutely be felt through song. Most of the music in the film is sung by the actors themselves without accompaniment and is inspired by recordings Davies made of community members from his childhood. Singing is the purest, unassisted, and most immediate way for us to create cultural stamps on the rolls of time. When life is hard, we get together and we sing. When we celebrate, we sing. Together we sing and our voices become imprinted in the past. Churches, music halls, empty offices have a liminal echo of the vacant distant voices that inhabit them. There is no auto-tune in this film. Like the fuzz on an old four-track recording, the realness of the singing makes the film that much more tangible, relatable.
This film is part of the antidote to the way we currently move through the world. Thank you Davies for providing us a moment of presence amidst the complex chaos. Life can be a minefield of love and pain, but there is a relentless insistence in the human spirit for connection. Distant Voices, Still Lives gets at the very heart of living and says: come remember to be alive. Come spend time inside this film, inside this memory.
Edited by Olga Tchepikova-Treon