Bloch on film as utopia

Terence Davies' Distant voices, still lives

Ian Fraser

pp. 62-81

in: Ewa Mazierska, Lars Kristensen (eds), Marx at the movies, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014

Abstract

Distant Voices, Still Lives focuses on a working-class family in Liverpool in the 1940s and 1950s and centres on a tyrannical father and how the mother and three children, Eileen, Maisie and Tony respond to his overbearing presence both when he is alive and when he is dead. The first half of the film, Distant Voices, moves back and forth in time as the characters remember incidents, or memories are portrayed of their family life, both happy and sad. The second half, Still Lives, focuses on the developing lives of the family without the father as they experience births and marriages. The story is told in such a way by Davies that it offers us a picture of a lost world of the working class that has now been aesthetically preserved forever.