Lost in Found Footage

Last year's indie favorite "Momma's Man" comes to DVD.

Much more expressly autobiographical, Terence Davies’ “Of Time and the City” is found-footage itself — a brisk, lyrical, swoony compilation of archival images devised as a “city symphony” in the old style, saluting Davies’ hometown of Liverpool during the postwar decades. Introducing its own screen in an immense theater, quoting liberally from Shelley, Eliot, Wilde, etc., bearing Davies’ jaundiced, plummy-pruney narration like a tweed Sunday jacket reeking of roses and camphor, the movie recounts the middle century of Liverpudlian life as a scourge Davies himself had to endure, with only movie matinees and wrestling shows (hot for the nascent gay boy) to ameliorate the provincialism and, eventually, crushing poverty.

If you’ve seen Davies’ first shorts and features, you already have as concise a memory of his childhood as you probably have of your own, so this assemblage stands as more of an echoing addendum, with Davies in first-person damning the wickedness of modernity — ironically? — while the scenes collect as a lovely Valentine to the beachgoers, dance hall swingers, streetwalkers, slum kids and factory workers of yesteryear. (British critics considered the movie something of an event.) Like Jacobs pere and all found-footage artists, Davis is clearly only comfortable in the past. But that’s movies, isn’t it?

“Momma’s Man” (Kino) and “Of Time and the City” (Strand Releasing) are now available on DVD.

Pages: 1 2