"Sing to me, O Muse, of time and the man..."
Among Italo Calvino‘s Invisible Cities may stand the port city of Liverpool. If a city and its name are a record of a constant forgetting and the interminable labor to summon up the remembrance of buildings past, then Liverpool qualifies itself: “Liverpool, the glorious city, has a tormented history. Several times it decayed, then burgeoned again, always keeping the first Liverpool as an unparalleled model of every splendor, compared to which the city’s present state can only cause more sighs at every fading of the stars.”
Though I’ve substituted the nonfiction city of Liverpool for Calvino’s fictional “Clarice” (one of the cities that Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan in Calvino’s novel), Terence Davies‘ new film, Of Time and the City, presents a Liverpool that is equally fictional and nonfictional. A city that had gone through decades of industrial wealth and misery, and is only now trembling on the precipice of rebirth and cultural esteem; a city constructed from the impersonal stock of images documenting its natural growth, decline, and renewal, and a city which has evolved privately in the memory of a single man.
Davies, a native Liverpudlian, and director of Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes, crafts a subjective experience of the city by splicing documentary footage of its facades and citizens throughout its photographed and videotaped history, with his own memories and articulate, often witty, narration. The director confesses that the film essay is to be taken as a “personal” expression of subjective value and not as an impartial documentary of the city’s history.
Yet the essay’s resonance, full of Wordsworthian sincerity and the Eliotic desire to “arrive where we started and know that place for the first time,” achieves through fragmented recollection the power to convince foreigners (and maybe Kublai Khan himself, had he conquered it) of its mnemonic symbol and universality. That Liverpool is personal and limited to Terence Davies makes it personal for those who partake of his peculiar (and catholic) vision.
Davies asserts that if we leave the place we love and hate, as he did Liverpool — finding no other solution than to escape from its parochial integrity — “then we spend a lifetime trying to regain it.” Before watching the film, Liverpool had meant only three things to me: the Beatles, Liverpool F.C., and the unmistakable scouse accent. Now it is also an invisible city turned concrete, a living city of stations and trains, with its names erased and rewritten on brick walls, and a tepid sun shining on its brown mills, white apartment blocks, and silver shipyards. Perhaps a city loses its glamour only to recover it through the tagged-up decrepitude of its buildings, the machine odours of its alleyways, the regenerative faces of its bright children; that a city decays has ultimate emotional value for its denizens and native sons; that it’s capable of reviving itself, brings it closer to those who’ve never passed its gates or known its joys.
this was a great read, man. the last paragraph really captured it for me…