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| Distant Voices, Still Lives [1988] | ![Distant Voices, Still Lives [1988]](http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51wdW8UhG-L._SL160_.jpg)
 enlarge | Director: Terence Davies
Actors: Freda Dowie, Pete Postlethwaite, Angela Walsh, Dean Williams, Lorraine Ashbourne
Studio: Bfi Video
Category: DVD
List Price: £19.99
Buy New: £13.83
You Save: £6.16 (31%)
Buy New/Used from £11.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  (7 reviews)
Sales Rank: 10864
Format: Pal
Languages: English (Subtitles For The Hearing Impaired), English (Original Language)
Rating: Suitable for 15 years and over
Media: DVD
Running Time: 84 minutes
Number Of Items: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.77:1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.4
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.4 x 0.6
EAN: 5035673007334
ASIN: B000RJEINY
Release Date: July 30, 2007
Theatrical Release Date: 1988
Availability: Usually dispatched within 1-2 business days
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| Customer Reviews: Read 2 more reviews...
 DISTANT VOICES, STILL LIVES October 24, 2008
This WAS my childhood and life as I remembered it. Meeting the family in the pub on a Saturday night and having a good sing song. Pubs closed at l0 o'clock in those days so it was always back to someones house with a crate of ale. Something to get dressed up for on a Saturday night. No juke boxes, no druggies and all the old songs. Still remember lots of the old songs my mother in law used to sing, but if you started singing in the pub these days, they'd only turn to juke box up louder!! No wonder the pubs are losing customers, there's nothing to go out for now, excepted harrassment and druggies. As least in this film they had the wedding breakfast at home - I went to the pictures in the afternoon with my husband because I was only 17 and he 18, and I was not old enough to go in a pub!! then he was sent to Singapore to do his National Service. Married 54 years next week. God I wish those days were still here.br /Terence Davies lived just up the road from where I grew up in Liverpool. Brilliant film.
An awesome achivement April 13, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
For me this is one of the best British films ever made. The fractured chronology and mesmerising use of song and introspective camera work glorifies the lives of a working class family tormented by patriarchal tyranny and post-war austerity. Davies' ability to convey love and loss through 'distant voices' erodes any sense of sentimentality or mawkish pretension - the viewer is presented with imagery that conveys a positivitism that rivals any of the great Italian neo-realist films makers of the past. The acting is first-class and the sepia tinted cinematography excels at painting a colourful view of a sing-a-long Britain untainted by celebrity egos or superficial consumerism. A masterpiece.
 Was I Watching Something Else? March 24, 2008
0 out of 18 found this review helpful
5 star reviews for this, I completely disagree.br /br /Too many sing-a-longs! I was fed up listening to them. Didnt see the point in the movie, other than a sing-a-long. Looked like a play on screen, not one I would recommend. Drab drab drab.
The way we were February 29, 2008
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
I grew up in a working-class family in a terraced house in Merseyside in the 1950s and for me this film is a very evocative and poignant reminder of those days. It's the small details that bring a lump to the throat and a tear to the eye - the mother sat on the window ledge to clean the sash windows, the Billy Cotton Band Show on the radio, the cinema thick with cigarette smoke - details of a recent past that is now as confined to history as the Crusaders or Roundheads and Cavaliers. Indeed I think the comparisons with the films of Powell and Pressburger are well judged, Terence Davies also presents a vanished world, albeit a slightly less distant one. br /br /From the opening scene we are given the pace of the film (slow and lingering) and we rightly sense that this isn't going to be a linear narrative. The film is shot with a restricted colour pallet, like the hand-coloured photographs popular at the time, to perfectly represent life faded and worn with the passage of time. In many ways the film looks more authentic than the black-and-white kitchen-sink films made in the 1950/60s. br /br /Peter Postlethwaite is wonderful as the father who terrorises the family and even after his death is still a brooding presence, staring down from his photograph on the front room wall. Postlethwaite's face is straight out of the 1940's, flesh stretched taught over the bones of his skull by hard work and rationing. Indeed the whole cast, including Freda Dowie as the wife, is excellent. (Debi Jones as Eileen's friend Micky looks so period that I find it hard to believe she hasn't been spliced into the film from 1940's film clips, as in 'Dead Men Don't Wear Plaid'.) We are introduced to the family via a series of events - funerals, marriages, christenings - many of which involve a booze-up and a singsong at the pub, this was life before television and the mass media were available to the working-classes. However, the counterpoint to the family's happy public face is the back-story of the father's violence to both his wife and kids. We are offered no explanation for this violence but there are hints that this is not unique - Eileen's friend Jingles also suffers at the hands of her husband. br /br /Other people have commented on the music in the film - I particularly enjoyed the pub singsongs which my wife and I found ourselves joining in with - but I would also like to commend the sparse script, which I thought was wonderfully written with just the right cadences and vocabulary.br /br /This is a great film, unlike any other film of the 1980s (or the 70s or 90s come to think of it!) It skilfully presents an evocation of a time and place but from this also reveals intimate details of one family, one city and a whole social class. Davies was confident enough to do all this without a conventional narrative in which the significance of every event is explained and without the characters needing to spout long speeches.
Memory given cinematic form - a great achievement January 15, 2008
6 out of 6 found this review helpful
I haven't seen Terence Davies's other films but this is undoubtedly a great achievement - and one which, seen again after a gap of fifteen years, feels even more poignant. It may seem odd to say it of a piece so rooted in the specifics of a certain time and place but this autobiographical film also feels like it's the story of Everyfamily. br /br /This may be partly down to the device which helps give shape to the non-linear narrative, namely that the film is threaded around major events - weddings, funerals, Christmas - so we often see the family either in the process of having a commemorative photograph taken or frozen as if doing so. br /br /And given that our memories have a tendency to simplify events over time, the complexity of the experience dwindling down into the information contained in the tangible souvenir of a photograph ("smaller and clearer as the years go by", as Philip Larkin put it), it's as though Davies has deliberately reversed this process in order to defy time's usual softening effects: here is that frozen moment we thought familiar from the snapshot; now the half-forgotten, half reinvented events behind it spring up, vivid and painful again. br /br /But while there is pain in this film's account of the tyrannous father who rules the house, there is joy and magic as well, as we see the family, and the downtrodden mother in particular, gradually recover after his death in the second part. It's also worth saying that Distant Voices, Still Lives is an art movie, but an art movie without that term's negative connotations: there is never, when watching, any sense of frustration at the non-linear narrative. As Davies says in an accompanying interview, the tone is established in the first couple of minutes when, accompanied by a shot of an empty staircase we hear the voices of those who once lived in the place going about their normal routines - ie this story is going will unfold itself in the fragmentary way that memory does, so forget your Robert McKees and Syd Fields when it comes to assessing this film. I don't know whether Davies had him in mind but Thomas Hardy, especially in such poems as The Self-Unseeing and Old Furniture, would be a more appropriate figure to cite. br /
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