Happy families... still from Distant Voices, Still Lives
On Saturday, the London film festival screened a restored print of Distant Voices, Still Lives, the 1988 film by Terence Davies that has some claim to being the most significant British film of the last 30 years.
In case you don't know it, it's Davies's highly autobiographical account of a childhood in 1950s Liverpool, dominated by pub sing-songs, grimy working-class terraces, and the arbitrary rages of Davies's tyrannical father (played by Pete Postlethwaite, in the role that put him on the map).
Almost two decades on, Distant Voices has lost none of its deeply-felt imagist power - even though Davies, in a short post-screening speech, explained his father was far worse in reality (a "psychotic" was the exact description).
Davies's troubles in recent years in trying to get more films off the ground have been documented in detail in the Guardian and you can tell straightaway that someone dropping liberal references to TS Eliot and Chekhov - as Davies unabashedly does - is not especially likely to get much change out of most of our film industry development executives.
But in this writer's opinion at least, Davies has always been a special case: someone whose record speaks for itself.
It was a surprise, therefore, to see that British cinema's apathy toward the authentic geniuses in its midst extended also to the audience; I was astonished to see that the Odeon West End wasn't sold out, let alone queues round the block that such a masterwork deserves.
But, as ever, it's their loss.
