Davies, Terence

   b. 1945, Liverpool

   Film-maker

   Davies is a film-maker whose two themes are the violent foundations of a sense of place captured through a heightened nostalgia, and the relation of homosexuality to working-class culture and institutionalized Catholicism. In his trilogy (Children (1974), Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983)) Davies, charting the central character from life to death, captured physical endurance and spiritual ferment through domestic hardship, sexual guilt and emotional repression. Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992) evoke Davies’s postwar childhood in Liverpool and, while still marked with a troubled haunting nostalgia for place and kinship, demonstrate a shift towards a more mainstream vision. Both films pointedly reflect the popular culture of the period.

   GUY OSBORN

   STEVE GREENFIELD