Of Time and the City
Dir: Terrance Davis
2008
*****
A visual poem of love and nostalgia. Terrance Davis uses only archive film in this voyage of memory of Liverpool, the city of his birth. It does feel, as it was intended, like a long newsreel people used to watch at the cinema before home televisions but with Davis own honest, wonderful and sometimes poisonous meditations. This isn't just an exercise in sentimentality though, nor is it an essay on why life was better back then. You can't love something without being fearlessly protective of it and Davis's film shows Liverpool's faults as well as its triumphs and isn't afraid to point out the sources. It's hypnotic, splendid and something to behold. If you don't know Terrance Davis, you don't know real England (or what is great about it anyway).