Directed by Terence Davies. Documentary PG cert, Light House Cinema, Dublin, 76 min *****
WHEN COMMISSIONING a film to mark Liverpool's status as European City of Culture 2008, the organisers had the imagination - and courage - to assign the project to a director, Terence Davies, whose autobiographical fiction films presented an uncompromised, less-than-flattering picture of the city where he was born and raised.
They could hardly have expected him to produce an uncritical, flag-waving celebration, or a bland exercise suffused with phoney nostalgia, and true to form, he didn't. What they got instead is a deeply personal essay that reflects the changes in the city through the experiences of its disarmingly honest director since his childhood in the late 1940s.
His inspiration was Humphrey Jennings's justly acclaimed short documentary Listen to Britain(1942), which spanned 24 hours across wartime Britain and which Davies regards as "one of the great visual poems".
As Of Time and the Cityevolved during production, its focus became as firmly fixed on Davies himself as it is on Liverpool. He has a remarkable memory for the tiniest of details, as recalled in the many humorous anecdotes and melancholy observations that accumulate against his documentary's broader canvas. The film is stirring as it dwells on the people who populated his working-class background, and the simple pleasures of life in hard times, from the close spirit of community to, in Davies' case, the joy of movies, particularly musicals.
He clearly invested hundreds of hours poring over archive and newsreel footage to select the wealth of imagery he uses, and he evidently enjoyed the process. This material rolls over an eclectic soundtrack that ranges from Mahler, Handel and Liszt to Benny Goodman, Peggy Lee, the Spinners and the Hollies, along with quotations from TS Eliot, James Joyce and the director's own poetry.
Davies doubles as narrator on this cherishable documentary, and there is a sting in his softly voiced, mellifluous tones as he vents his spleen against the British royal family and the Catholic Church, and comparatively less damningly, against The Beatles and the gentrified modern Liverpool where he no longer feels at home.
He appears to have pondered every word he has chosen for his elegant script, which he delivers with passion and dry wit as he follows himself and his city on an eventful journey from post-war poverty to the present day.
