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This chapter examines the film career of British director Terence Davies. The cinema of Davies is one of contradictions—between beauty and ugliness, the real and the artificial, progression and tradition, motion and stasis. These opposites reflect a certain struggle, for the filmmaker and his characters, to make sense of a confusing and sometimes violent world. For Davies, this struggle constitutes a reckoning with his past, a highly personal account of a fractured childhood; for the viewer it has resulted in one of the richest, most idiosyncratic, and arrestingly experimental bodies of work put out by a narrative filmmaker. The chapter focuses on the distinct emotional quandaries Davies' films evoke in the viewer and proposes that their tonal and political in-betweenness is a form of cinematic queering. Through the exploration of their contradictions, these films function within seemingly recognizable generic parameters only to then explode and thus queer conventional notions of narrative cinema.

In the latter part of the twentieth century, two indigenous visions arguably dominate in terms of vision, not in terms of output: in Scottish cinema that of Bill Douglas, in English cinema that of Terence Davies. Both careers were haunted by failure to realise key projects. Douglas had devoted much of his time to a screen version of James Hogg's classic Scottish novel The Confessions of a Justified Sinner, for which there exists an extant screenplay but little more; Davies has tried for many years to bankroll a version of Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Sunset Song — two great Scottish artworks but neither in the end brought to the big screen. This chapter explores mimetic modernism and family mysteries in the Douglas trilogy: My Childhood, My Ain Folk and My Way Home. It also discusses romanticism and the poetry of memory in Davies' films such as Distant Voices, Still Lives, Children, Death and Transfiguration, Madonna and Child, The Long Day Closes and The House of Mirth. The chapter also looks at Iain Softley's The Wings of the Dove.

If there is a clash between romanticism and modernism in what is called ‘British’ cinema, it is as much internal as external. Most great directors in Britain are romantics to some degree and modernists to another. In film, paradoxically, the great British romantics like Alfred Hitchcock, David Lean, Carol Reed and Ian Powell have often worked though classical ‘invisible’ narration and under tight censorship: the great romantic films invoke war and its aftermath or the end of Empire and frame within them the romantic ironies of personal passion. A film in which the romantic the modern fluidly intersect is Patrick Keiller's documentary fiction London (1994). This book explores the twentieth-century history of the relationship between romanticism and modernism in British cinema starting at the end of the silent era in 1929, stops deliberately in the year 2000 with Terence Davies' The House of Mirth, then starts again with a postscript in the new century.

This chapter presents an interview that took place at Terence Davies's home in Mistley, Essex, on October 16, 2012. Topics discussed include the influence of T. S. Eliot's The Four Quartets; whether Davies has finally found his own language after years of making movies; the reasons why he continues to make movies despite his belief that cinema is a potentially a dying form and the fact that he no longer enjoys watching movies; the reasons why some of films are in black-and-white; his views about his alter ego character Robert Tucker in the Trilogy; his views on realism; and the importance of telling a narrative in a nonstraightforward way.

This chapter uses key ideas from queer theory in order to argue that the queerness of Terence Davies’s The Long Day Closes (1992) lies less in its protagonist’s presumed homosexuality and more in its formal arrangement of quotations from disparate cultural texts. This bricolage exposes the operation of a culture committed to reproducing compulsory heterosexuality. Criticism, however, has concentrated on explaining the density and arbitrariness of cultural quotation through reference to Bud, insisting that the scraps of film and popular music that make up The Long Day Closes reflect the boy’s escape into self-expression, offering relief and release from the humdrummery and cruelties of life. Building on Derrida’s post-structuralist theories, this chapter argues that the mosaic of references does not provide a medium through which characters can speak, but rather speaks over characters and limits what is sayable. Far from nostalgic, this articulation-through-quotation constrains the possibilities of individual identity.

Like the tableau vivant, the cinematic still life experienced a stunning revival and reinvention in the late twentieth century. In contrast to the stereotypically postmodern overload of images, the still life in film initiates a moment of repose and contemplation within a medium more often defined by the forward rush of moving pictures. It also involves a profound meditation on the relationship between images and objects consistent with practices as diverse as the Spanish baroque still life and the Surrealist variation on the genre. With the work of Terence Davies and Alain Cavalier’s Thérèse (1986) as its primary touchstones, this chapter situates this renewed interest in the cinematic still life within the context of both the late twentieth-century cinema of painters and a socially oriented art cinema that focuses on marginal people and overlooked objects rather than the hegemonic historical narratives also undergoing a revival at the time.