Over the last several decades, Terence Davies (b. 1945) has cemented a reputation as one of the great filmmakers in the Anglophone world, with a career that by now encompasses a few distinct periods. In his thirties, he debuted with a trilogy of short films—made between 1976 and 1983—based on his life as a boy in Liverpool, his early adulthood as a shipping office clerk, and anticipating his aging and death. These films announced the themes to which he returned in his first feature films, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), also based on his childhood and adolescence in postwar England.

These two earliest films remain Davies’ most celebrated works, and they have defined much of the form and content of his work since: episodic structures; narratives that often contain an abusive father and the resulting dysfunctional family dynamics that both heal and wound; a commitment to realism interrupted periodically by rhapsodic passages, typically wordless, that involve the camera moving slowly past or into a space or tableau often meant to invoke the mental state of the character or characters onscreen.

He has since returned to Liverpool with the documentary Of Time and the City (2008) and to postwar England with The Deep Blue Sea, adapted from Terence Rattigan’s play. But his other films of the past twenty years have been literary adaptations that have taken him further afield: to the Depression-era American South in The Neon Bible; to Gilded Age New York in the The House of Mirth; and to World War I-era Scotland in Sunset Song. All involve dysfunctional families, episodic swings between realism and rhapsody.

More and more in these films, Davies has turned to the concerns of melodrama—the domestic entrapment of women—but he does so with a bracing, unflinching, almost frightening realism. His female protagonists are loners at heart, willingly or unwillingly, and in his latest film of all, he turns to one of the most famous recluses of all time, Emily Dickinson, in the biopic A Quiet Passion. – David Pendleton

A Quiet Passion screens at the HFA on Monday March 27, with Terence Davies in person, as part of the “Houghton at 75” program.