The Long Day Closes

The light beams from a movie projector the same as it does the stars, or the flicker from a fireplace, or filtered through a rain-streamed windowpane. It diminishes over time, but still in some heightened and bittersweet form it radiates from the past. An era bygone though it may be, its sights and sounds live just the same, captured in hearts and minds, on celluloid, and in the celestial fabric, quite literally as much as poetically.

Whoa. Kieslowski made The Mirror after falling in love with Malick. They say film is photography + music + literature. This is closer to dream. Each shot is a masterpiece. The frame is treated as a canvas, and you feel it. And the softest, most orgasmic lighting, and vivid textures (snow, rain, dust), and silky dream movements of the camera like some ghost who can see the melancholy in the moments, even the happy ones. You are here eavesdropping on this fading youth. Euphoric cinema.

Remember how slowly time moved when you were a child? How every moment was laden with newness? This film will remind you.

Davies successfully creates the logic of the "memory" within the cinematic realm: just like the events from our past, the movie is constituted of seemingly still images with almost no significant dialogues. I think our memories work like that too, it juxtaposes images from the past in a silent but very emphasized way, similarly Davies holds the space constant and lets the time pass, so that the childhood memories occur in a juxtaposed stream, a poetic formalist movie on childhood. Beautiful.

A magnificent and heartbreakingly beautiful visual depiction of the loneliness of the closet. No one makes movies like Terence Davies.

I can't deny that Davies is a great director and I have to give him credit for exposing himself emotionally the way he does. That said I find his elegiac and masochistic nostalgia for suffering alternately tedious and disgusting. It's a lot easier to take here than Distant Voices, Still Lives, and I suppose if I had life experiences that matched up with his I might like it but as things stand the 80 minutes felt unending and the nice small moments were few and far between.

This film has much in common with its predecessor, Distant Voices, Still Lives. A bittersweet collection of brief nostalgic episodes, with heaps of songs... as before, both diegetic and non-diegetic. And once again, Davies plays with chronology. Time seems to flow like a river, eroding gaps between memories as one flows seamlessly into the next. It's a beautiful film, both haunting and warm, one that shows growth in Davies' abilities as filmmaker, especially with so many striking compositions.

I really enjoyed this. It doesn't have so much of a clear, strong plot narrative but its like a big hug of nostalgia in a way - it comes across as perhaps a bit like a play, a bit of an arty type film perhaps, with lots of cheery music and depictions of everyday domestic scenarios, focussing on the young child growing up in a rather rundown area, with emphasis on the working class area their from. There is a really quite touching and heartwarming aspect to this film, which I enjoyed.

Probably as graceful as a Brit can get

Looks beautiful but didn’t leave a big impact on me

The Tree of Life of kitchen sink dramas. Not my usual preference, but this is so beautiful and poetic with so many striking images.

Quite similar to Distant Voices, Still Lives in feel (though more visually inventive), but I didn't like it as much. There's probably no one better at evoking this kind of nostalgic memory for a time and place as Davies. His movies must be UNBELIEVABLY impactful for people who grew up in similar circumstances at that time/place, but their extremely personal nature is also a bit of a weakness in that I didn't relate to much of this. Masterfully done, but It's a film I admire more than I like.

In contrast to the dreary surroundings of Bud's 1950s life, the film exudes a warmth of vision that creates a remarkable tension in the atmosphere. Even the rusty bars in front of the flat are evocative. There are also the delights of groups singing and the punctuated narration from films like Meet Me in St Louis and The Magnificent Ambersons. These moments fully transcend the stilted quiet of Bud's world, elevating the lives not just of Bud but of all these people, from drab to dazzling.

Reminds me of The 400 Blows. The trailer had a nice narrator that perhaps the movie should have used as bookends.

Nostalgia nirvana. Logic, plot, "life", thrown out the damn lit window. Deeply moved by this.

The tapestry of dreams and memories can, so it seems, be remarkably uninteresting. Lasted as long as I could.

As movie audios (Welles, Garland) are put together with oldies (Doris, Nat), Davies crafts a film about growing up in post-WWII Liverpool. A boy lives from film to film, as memories creep into his life while he goes to church, gets beaten at school and stays home singing and listening to people singing. Davies dissolves and pans the camera to chronicle cinema as the only shelter for memories, dreams and fantasies. Cinema as true storytelling. No real conflicts or catharsis. Just breezy images.

watched: 2016, 2021

As pure and warm a love letter to popular art as one could ever hope for, and a lovely treatise on the faulty nature of memory and how beautiful that sometimes can be. Reminds me of sitting in a cafe in the dead of winter at a low point in both of our lives; my misery has faded, and now I miss the comforting amber glow of the cafe lights. Does that make sense? The way that Davies moves his camera is the stuff that dreams are made of.

"There's no MGM musical scored to a gay romance, you know?" http://illusionpodcast.blogspot.com/2014/09/episode-30-first-terence-davies-episode.html

Probably the quintessential Davies film.

(Viewed on 10/05/14): Time, memory, music and cinema; an evocative mix of melancholy and nostalgia; a romantic longing for a bygone era free of trite sentiment; a wistful reflection on childhood and those special moments of discovery. The impressionist, non-narrative approach emphasises feelings over ideas, which perfectly reflects the nature of memory. Davies' painterly images burn slowly into your mind. Think 'Tree Of Life', except without the cosmological bullshit.

Absolutely gorgeous and unique filmmaking. As pure cinema alone it's breathtaking; Davies' shot compositions are very striking and his use of music is excellent. It's not all just mindless nostalgia though, which could wear thin. This film feels to me like a kind of poetic tapestry of impressions from childhood, weaving together idealized memories, snippets of songs, film dialogue, daydreams, fantasies and fears.

A warm and cosy film, tinged all the way with honest nostalgia and plenty of sing-alongs, old songs, and excerpts of old films. Not a huge amount of conflict in this one, but it's a lovely way to spend 80-so minutes.

It really does feel like filmic poetry, a collage of overwhelmingly beautifully filmed scenes of Bud's childhood full of all the wide-eyed wonder with which kids take in the world, of family and love, of religion (often portrayed in a harsh, oppressive manner) and school (and bullying), loneliness and Bud's escape in the form of his local cinema. To emphasise this last point sound clips from various films appear throughout the The Long Day Closes, like a nostalgic soundtrack to Bud's life.

For such a well-made film, this is awfully frustrating at times. The slice-of-life portraiture is very charming - think Woody Allen - but Bud is such a blank slate of a character, defined almost entirely by his timidity, that it can be annoying. Still, it's undeniably charming, and beautifully shot, with some absolutely great use of classical and oldies music. I could see it growing on me.

#875

The Long Day is a beautifully filmed evocative and nostalgic collection of memories. Everything is very precise with symmetrically composed shots, slow tracking and carefully chosen soundtrack. The overall feeling of the film is the sense of Bud's loneliness' and that stops me from really enjoying this.

Remarkable, atmospheric, understated, nostalgic movie, dealing with emotional repression and the release offered by the cinema.

873

# 939

An "art film" in a much more literal sense than usual. A very pretty and leisurely film, one that totally disdains conventional notions of plot to show us beautiful images and evoke emotions of things that we all know