Arguably the greatest living British filmmaker, Terence Davies (b. 1945) is renown for the meticulous care that transforms each new release into a highly anticipated cultural event. A member of the distinctive generation of British Film Institute nurtured directors whose ranks notably included Derek Jarman, Sally Potter and Peter Greenaway, Davies first established himself with three celebrated shorts, known collectively as The Terence Davies Trilogy (1984). Like his trilogy, the subsequent features Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) are also set in postwar England, a dreary land of scarcity and sexual repression which inspires the elemental dichotomy at the heart of Davies’ work, a contrast between the somber outside world of gray, brick and rain and the intimate interior world, whose promise of warmth and camaraderie is tempered by poverty and the threat of violence or isolation. In Davies films escape – from both worlds – is provided by the radio, by the cinema and above all by music.

This is terrain that the Liverpool-born and Catholic-raised Davies knows well, and shapes with a strong autobiographical intimacy of his films. Davies’ work is distinguished by the wonderfully cinematographic qualities of his stories which are told most powerfully not through dialogue but rather through framing, camera movement, lighting and editing. Davies’ style has been called “memory realism”: everyday life is rendered in naturalistic detail colored by or overlaid with fantasy or reminiscence.

Davies’ postwar England is, indeed, defined by a kind of heightened reality that swings, with pendulum inevitability, from the best of times to the worst of times. That sense of life-and-death drama also animates Davies’ adaptations of American novels: The Neon Bible (1995) and The House of Mirth (2000), two films that foreground women struggling against patriarchal society to live on their own terms. Davies’ latest film, The Deep Blue Sea, continues in this latter vein, although relocating to the time and place of his semi-autobiographical work.

Seen as a group, Davies’ films set in postwar England reveal him as an artist deeply grounded in a milieu as specific as Faulkner’s Mississippi or John Waters’ Baltimore. Davies has spoken of “the British genius at creating the dismal,” but his films show something else: the ability to make glowing poetry from the dismal. – David Pendleton