The leaving of Liverpool

I was watching Terence Davies's Of Time and the City on DVD the other night. And once again I was half compelled, half repelled by the director's rich, clotted narcissism. It is in the end a film more about Davies than Davies's home city of Liverpool.
Fair enough, I suppose. It is Davies's Liverpool we are seeing even if most of the imagery is made up of found footage and photographs (in particular Bernard Fallon's black and white photographs of Merseyside during the sixties and seventies).
The director left Liverpool in 1973 so it's the postwar city that he documents here, not so much the city of the eighties and today (although the city of today is in there). Here is Paddy's Wigwam still in a state of partial construction. Here are street games no longer played. Here are faces that have long since wrinkled and maybe even decayed.


And so it is inevitably, for the most part, a ghost story. a depiction of a long-lost world, what Davies calls the stuff of "emotional memory".
What's also missing is perhaps the Liverpool we know best. The Liverpool of the eighties, the one decade when film-makers and TV executives were most interested in the city - the city of riots, Militant,football and Brookside, of Willy Russell and Alan Bleasdale, a city in decline and at odds with the political mainstream, its sense of civic pride holed and battered, with only its football teams dealing in the business of success. A city unrecognisable from the one that appeared in the background in Stephen Frears's debut Gumshoe in 1971.
But what struck me the first time I saw Davies's film last year and again on DVD the other night is how, in general, the city has been absent from the screen apart from that period in the eighties. There's the odd movie (51st State) after that, the odd sitcom (The Liver Birds) before, but these are exceptions. It is the absence of the city that, when you think about it, becomes most visible. What was most interesting about last year's coverage of Liverpool's reign as European capital of culture was the unspoken sense that this was a look at a strange,novel place.
The most explicit dichotmy in British TV and cinema is the distance between town and country. And that's there. But the really deep divide is between London and the provinces. Even now, five decades after free cinema that's still the case. It's not that films don't take advantage of the streets of Sheffield (The Full Monty), Gateshead (Get Carter), Edinburgh (Trainspotting) or Glasgow (Red Road). But that when they do they so often have a clear playing field. They're rarely competing with other visual representations of those streets. Too often we live in a country that views itself only through local news bulletins and the football scores.
Davies's film is - for all that he says he always felt an outsider (distanced by his sexuality, his distaste for the Beatles) - is an insider's view of the city, coloured by a nostalgia for his own past. Compare the footage he uses of holidays in New Brighton which is all primary coloured happiness with Martin Parr's photographs of the resort in 1985, which are full of crying babies and dirty beaches.


Locales change in time of course, but Parr's vision is ultimately not as forgiving, not as willing to see the pleasure available in familiar places.