Watch Of Time and the City For Free

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

Terence Davies used to be an actor and narrates this film as well as directing it. The film is a mixture of archive footage set with music, songs, poetry, speeches and narration, some of it set with a bombastic tone by Davies.The start is interesting as it reflects his childhood Liverpool, the post war years which also mirrors its industrial decline. You feel the power of the Catholic church and as Davies gets older his burgeoning feelings of homosexuality causes conflict with his religious belief and guilt for having feelings that would not only bring spiritual damnation but which was also illegal at a time he was growing up.Over time mores and laws change and his love of song and pop music gives way to a keen interest in classical music. As with these films where they use archive clips, your interest is not always sustained and the narrative focus is lost. Thankfully Davies does not emit faux nostalgia for The Beatles whose presence in clips is thankfully short but there is little about the rise of Liverpool football club from the 1960s which leads me to presume he does not like football or supports Everton!As an irregular visitor to Liverpool since the early 1970s when I was a kid, this is a city whose changes I have seen with my own eyes whether its been bad or good. As he reaches that time period I began to feel the Liverpool I remember and especially its agitation politics diverts from his vision of the city.Davies has no time for the Royal Family and the Pope but he is also starts distancing from his home city but what did he think about the mess of the 1980s and the rise of the Militant Tendency? Its something I wished that was dwelt on more but of course by that time he switched from acting and became a director and his life went on a different turn.

after watching of time and city i couldn't help but be so proud of the city that my parents and grandparents had made carved a life for themselves in what was extremely hard times compared with today. I felt that the film brought out a sense of togetherness of the people who really had very little to share. There are not many cities in this country where there is heavy industry, docklands, rundown ares yet only a few miles from, what was then a vibrant seaside resort (new brighton)for the people of liverpool to get away from it all. I'm from liverpool but live on the wirral, but liverpool is my home and this masterpiece of film makes me very proud of my roots. It was a joy to watch. The major difference in today society is health and safety, but as you can see the children of the yester year are simply enjoying there self's.

There was a time when the world was black and while. I lived in that time, and so did Terence Davies. His time in the 50s and 60s was spent in Liverpool, and in this film, this poem with images, and songs, and poetry, and and words of remembrance, he takes us to that time that only those who lived it would fully appreciate.We didn't really know we were poor. We made the best of it and found happiness where we could - at the beach, by winning a race at the fair, or in the movies.The crack began in the mid to late 60s, and we started to question why some had and others didn't, why a church held such power over our lives, why love could not be shared by all, black and white, straight and gay.I thank Terence Davies for this trip back. it was a beautiful thing.

When I read the newspapers' reviews of Terence Davies "Of Time and the city" and they mentioned words like tone poem, melancholy recollection, I thought hmmm I'm going to enjoy this. Well let's start from the beginning, this autobiographical documentary of Liverpool , if it was a memoir full of Mahler and nostalgia it would be wonderful and to be fair it starts really well, with a black and white image of industrial Liverpool over which he quotes in his posh northern voice A.E.Housman's Blue Remembered hills, from A Shropshire Lad. And you think oh good, but then he goes on to make some banal statement and tags Karl Marx's name on the end of it to give it some cultural or political significance and for the next couple of minutes banal statement is followed my banal statement each ascribed to some great thinker from the higher cannon of western culture. He constantly has to display how well read he is in the early part of the movie, to an embarrassing degree, a silly statement is a silly statement no matter the eminence of the man who made it. Also the enjoyment of the film was spoiled my his curious pronunciation at times, he would be quoting some line of poetry or making some observation and he would rush to the end of a sentence with a great whooshing sound which completely subverted the intention of the text, bizarre. There are moments which are genuinely moving of which Davis can take no credit ; a winter park covered in snow, old women carrying their washing back from the washhouse on their heads, it's the nostalgia we bring to it as a viewer that gives it such potency, a society now vanished for good or ill. When I saw those black and white images I was transported back to my own lost childhood to my two dead parents to those lost familiar times. I love Terence Davies, I love his films he is a man of the highest sensibilities I want him to find personal and professional happiness, but this film has been over praised. I think everyone is aware that he has not made a movie for a number of years so they are desperate that this is a return to form, which it is not, and that it is a commercial success which I believe it is in art house terms. I just hope that he will find it easier to get financial support with his next film through his higher visibility in this, and in the next we shall all see his real ambition. Now it's my chance to show off, Davies takes his title for his documentary from the American author Thomas Wolfe's novel 'Of Time and the River' {1935}