Stilled voice

Earlier this week I lost a true mentor from my teenage years. He was a coach but he was not my coach. He was the group leader for the high school aged kids at a place I went during the summers, and under his leadership we laughed, we cried, we played games, we participated in trust activities. It was the most growth a 14- through 17-year-old could ever expect to glean from a single week's vacation, repeatedly annually. 

The man was an incredible physical specimen -- he once worked out with Arnold Schwarzenegger -- which just makes his passing at age 74 all the more incomprehensible. Sure, most people aren't a spring chicken at 74, but this guy was. He was still running road races. He was kayaking when he had the shocking heart episode that left him effectively brain dead. He was removed from life support five days later and still, somehow, lived another five days in his bed at home, with his loved ones around him.

I'm not here to give him another complete eulogy that highlights everything he did and everything he was, and how he could see right into your soul and express to you, both wordlessly and with words, that you were loved. I've written a couple of those on social media and I also wrote a handwritten six-page letter to his widow, who was just as important to me.

But I did want to relate how I happened to have watched Terence Davies' Distant Voices, Still Lives the same night I found out. 

Or rather, copy and paste what I wrote about the film in Flickchart Friends' Favorites Fiesta, since it depicts my melancholic state when I watched it in a way I can't convey any better by changing a few words here and there. 

Here's what I wrote:

I went on quite the journey trying to find a film of [Redacted]'s I could watch in February. The hand I was dealt was his #1, Terence Davies' The Long Day Closes, but as anyone who has been following posts on this page learned, I couldn't find it in any form without purchasing it for about $60, which I was not willing to do. Then I shifted to Rosetta, his #12, having first made certain I could see it. But the YouTube copy I'd selected was -- you guessed it -- only in French with no subtitles. French is the language I know best other than English, but after one minute I just knew it would not be possible.

The next two I tried to find were also unavailable, though my searches for them started to feel increasingly cursory. Those were Come and See (#28) and Yi Yi (#32), both of which have been on my list to see -- I've been looking for Yi Yi for 20 years it feels like.

Finally, appropriately, I landed sort of back where I started, with a film by Terence Davies. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) is Mike's #36, and there it was, sitting easily available on Kanopy.

It was a good place to end up for a number of reasons.

It caught me in a very contemplative mood. Earlier that day I had learned that an old mentor of mine from when I was a teenager had unexpectedly died of a heart attack, which is crazy because he was super fit, even though was 74 at the time. The melancholy of learning this blended directly into Distant Voices, Still Lives, which is like a treatise to memory, particularly the most melancholic sorts of it.

I don't know whether to call this a movie or an art installation, and please believe me when I say that's a compliment. These dreamy memories are hung on sort of a loose narrative framework, but the film does not even invite you to try to learn much of substance about its group of disparate characters seen in a working class British neighborhood in the 1940s and 1950s. Their substance is their very anonymity.

The first half of the movie ("Distant Voices") deals largely with the death of the paterfamilias, who was played by the one actor I recognized, Pete Postlethwaite. He's a miserable bastard alright, but his passing is still the occasion for a strange sort of sorrow among the family he so regularly shunned and abused. We see them contemplating him and engaging in activities related to his memorial, interspersed with these horrible things he did, but also these moments where it was clear he was trying the best he knew how, which are incredibly touching. The film seems to suggest that even when people are horrible, their passing is the occasion to consider mortality itself and extend them a sort of forgiveness and attempt at understanding.

I don't recall ever seeing such purposeful technique by Davies, though I should say I've only seen two or three of his other films. The film is so committed to immersing you in the collective memory of this neighborhood that it is quite literally a sepia-toned photograph come to life. There's one device where you're sure it's an actual photo until the people start moving, another photo of the departed father hanging on the wall behind them, and the camera sort of holds them in place and moves to each of them as it shows us some memory associated with that particular person. It was in these moments that I was really reminded of an art installation, and the sense of being in a fugue state of memory is palpable.

Another way this movie delves into a sorrowful kind of melancholy is that it has far less dialogue than it has groups of people singing pub songs, songs that are clearly central to the very fabric of both their larger culture and the immediate culture of this neighborhood. Everyone knows each song by heart, everyone understands the sorts of sentiments and pains bound up in each lyric. There are times when this film just travels from face to face as it captures each of these increasingly familiar faces, singing along with what might be a funeral dirge for an entire generation. An intentionally artificial construct has never felt so truthful and so insightful.

The second half ("Still Lives") moves ahead a few years and was actually shot a few years later. There is some progress as the family has moved past the long shadow of their deceased father, but they are clearly older, and the film makes it clear that you never steer clear of tragedy for long. The songs continue and so does the loss of life, but we also see weddings and births and the lifeblood of this community continuing to pump. It's thrilling in a way that seems to be entirely anathema to the subject matter.

Obviously I was pretty blown away by this, and I think being in the right mood to receive it helped immeasurably. I don't know if it will crack my top 500 but it might. Let's find out:

Distant Voices, Still Lives > Strike a Pose

Distant Voices, Still Lives > The People vs. Larry Flynt

Distant Voices, Still Lives > The Age of Innocence

Distant Voices, Still Lives < Ponyo

Distant Voices, Still Lives > Timecrimes

Distant Voices, Still Lives > Dirty Rotten Scoundrels

Distant Voices, Still Lives < Picnic at Hanging Rock

Distant Voices, Still Lives < Berberian Sound Studio

Distant Voices, Still Lives > Waking Ned Devine

Distant Voices, Still Lives < Apocalypto

Distant Voices, Still Lives < The Past

Distant Voices, Still Lives > Shane

469/6206 (92%)

Wow, pretty strong. In fact it beat three films ranked higher than 500.

Thanks [Redacted]!

Obviously my mentor was a better father than Pete Postlethwaite's, by so many orders of magnitude that you wouldn't talk about them in the same breath, in the same book, even in the same written language. But the fact that it dealt with the loss of a father -- my mentor's daughters were on either side of me in age -- just made the universe's choice of this film for me on this particular night seem even more profound. 

The songs in Davies' film only increase the sentimentality and solemnity of the experience. My mentor used to leave us entranced during campfire sing-a-longs of the song "All My Trials," popularized by Joan Baez. He was a maestro on the acoustic guitar just like he was a maestro in life, with a singing voice that was both gentle and clear.

And now that voice is still.

I saw him only once in the past 30 years but I will miss him terribly.

Rest in peace.