NOT DRAMATIC, JUST SPELLBINDING

“Of Time and the City” is a 72-minute montage of old newsreel footage, much of it depicting nothing more dramatic than a woman scrubbing her front step or children chasing each other around a playground. Commissioned to celebrate Liverpool’s Capital of Culture status, its autumn release (in Britain) didn't break any box-office records. But viewers of Terence Davies’s unique cinematic poem are haunted by his wry combination of social documentary and personal reminiscence well after this year’s blockbusters are forgotten.

It begins in the 1940s, in the Liverpool Davies evoked in “Distant Voices, Still Lives” and “The Long Day Closes” (now on DVD): a time when being British could feel “like one long Sunday afternoon—nothing to do, nowhere to go”, and when Christmas meant the consumption of “our annual exotic pomegranate”. Over black-and-white clips of daily life among the brick tenements, followed by colour clips of the graffiti-plastered concrete tower blocks which replaced them, Davies’s own urgent, breathy voice delivers anecdotes and observations that are confessional, elegiac, sometimes angrily political and often wickedly funny. If the past is another country, he’s a spellbinding tour guide. ~ NICHOLAS BARBER