Family album of barely moving snapshots of a working-class Liverpool household modelled on the director's own, in the period from the Blitz to the middle Fifties. But perhaps not so much an album exactly, since that implies a sense of order and chronology; more an old hatbox of photos fetched down from the closet shelf. And not really snapshots either, since that suggests a degree of casualness and spontaneity, whereas these images are as painstakingly lit and rigidly staged as any studio portrait in one's Sunday best, and as discriminatingly selected and framed as something by Walker Evans. Out of the jumble of them, the father of the family emerges as an unreasoning monster of almost mythological proportions (quite properly he never seems to age a day); and the mother emerges as a long-suffering martyr fit for canonization. In addition, a sort of catalogue emerges, a scrupulous and unglamorous catalogue, of the hairstyles, fashions, fabrics, wallpapers, curtains, etc., of a particular period, place, and social class. In reality, however, this is two separate and separable movies: the second part, Still Lives, was shot two years after completion of the first, Distant Voices, to bring the movie up to standard feature-length. Not a lot has been gained in the expansion: the second part, half an hour or so, lacks the strong focus of the first part (specifically, in what would seem a psychological untruth, it lacks the rampaging father), and it has no formalistic ideas to justify the addition of the new annex (well: it has some white-out transitions, hardly worth having). But it does nothing to hurt the ambitiousness of the overall plan, nor the rigor and purity with which it is put in action. Directed by Terence Davies. (1988) — Duncan Shepherd
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