Once we know we are looking at something, the object changes because we are aware of it

-- Terence Davies, Terence Davies (Contemporary Film Directors)

Time and again, Terence Davies pointed out how much his films had been influenced by T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets and how he had first encountered these poems in the form of a television recital by Alec Guinness.1 Eliot’s meditation on the notion of time is most conspicuously echoed in the associative stream of memories and daydreams of Davies’s autobiographical films. But “the still point of the turning world,” to quote from “Burnt Norton,” the first quartet, also lies at the heart of his literary adaptations and biopics.3

While working on a lecture about “memory spaces” in Davies’s oeuvre, I realized how closely the lines “Footfalls echo in the memory / Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened / Into the rose-garden,” matched one of my favorite scenes in Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988): After a mother calls her children, we only hear their steps and their voices in an empty staircase until the camera slowly turns and moves towards a door that remains closed. Such direct references are admittedly rare.

Once I started looking at Davies’ films through the lens of “Burnt Norton,” the familiar audiovisual material started to change in front of my eyes. And so did Eliot’s poetry. At this point, I decided to explore this intertextual dialogue by way of an audiovisual poem.

Intertextual Adaptation

Although Davies recited a few lines from Eliot’s second quartet “East Coker” in his essay film Of Time and the City (2008), he never adapted Four Quartets as openly as the poems of Emily Dickinson in A Quiet Passion (2016) and Siegfried Sassoon in Benediction (2021). My audiovisual poem, however, attempts to adapt the works of both Eliot and Davies in order to open up an interpretive space in which the primary texts reflect on each other.

The method of this adaptation is a videographic remix of pre-existing material that I treat as audiovisual archives. Although I am interested in Eliot’s words, what I actually juxtapose with excerpts from Davies’s films are selections from a recording of Alec Guinness’s voice reciting those words.4 Yet, it was exactly this combination of Guinness’s interpretation and Davies’s unique aesthetics that allowed for a balanced audiovisual interplay. Written text on screen would have resulted in a vastly different experience.

I first assembled a series of supercuts – montages of short film clips based on common parameters – of the many recurring motifs that reminded me of lines or ideas from “Burnt Norton.” Only then did I pick the audio passages from Guinness’s reading to juxtapose with different elements from the supercuts. Since I wanted the films to enter into a dialogue with the poetry rather than illustrating a pre-conceived voice-over narration, this back-and-forth process was mainly guided by what the words revealed about the audiovisual material and vice versa.5

Naturally, the phrases and lines from “Burnt Norton” switched position quite a bit, before a highly condensed remix of the poem emerged. This new version uses the beginning, middle, and end of the first stanza as structural pillars but leaves room for the film clips to unfold. Within that structural framework, I followed the intuitive, musical logic of the director’s early films in order to produce an associative stream-of-consciousness of moving images, in every sense of the cinematic term.

Audiovisual Counterpoint and Autonomous Camera

One of the stylistic cornerstones of Terence Davies’s films is the audiovisual counterpoint. Images are frequently coupled with offscreen sounds that seem to proceed independently but are still tethered to each other by the montage or occasional sync points. I tried to adapt this concept on two levels: On the one hand, I limited the literal matches of words and images to a few specific instances (like the “footfalls”, 01:25) that anchor the more ambiguous juxtapositions. On the other hand, I avoided clips that were too similar in the side-by-side comparisons.6 Rather than visual twins, I opted for visual cousins, i.e., clips that would emphasize the differences within the similarities.

Eliot’s poetic entanglement of stillness and movement finds its counterpart in Davies’s autonomous camera that is instrumental in creating an oneiric flow across space and time. In the very beginning, for example, different time periods are contained within single camera moves. In Benediction, the connection between “time past and time present” is revealed while the camera circles around the protagonist’s head (the clip is played backwards to emphasize the visual analogies), while in Sunset Song (2015), we reach “time future” via a seamlessly edited camera turn, at the end of which, the protagonist appears in a wedding dress. Often, the framing does not follow the protagonists but rather passes them by, as if they were part of the decoration. A relative inversion of the movement, however, reveals that this impression is only a question of perspective (03:00).

Challenging stylistic strategies by defamiliarizing or intensifying them is a major strength of videographic criticism. On its own, the slow rotation of the lovers in The Deep Blue Sea (2011) conveys the simultaneousness of motion and stasis quite well (03:57). Juxtaposed with “the enchainment of past and future / woven in the weakness of the changing bodies,” may trigger different interpretations. But framed between two counteracting pans and travellings, the emerging visual patterns enable yet another, more abstract perspective on the rotation as a dissolution of time. Are the bodies in the center grounded by the divergent movement above and below? Or is the central rotation propelling these travellings instead?

Between Transparency and Opacity

In contrast to these multilayered visuals, I strove for transparency on the soundtrack. Thanks to the lush orchestral music and the communal singing, the sound design of the original films feels very rich at times. On the whole, however, these soundtracks are often quite sparse, foregrounding rarely more than one or two sound events at a time. Although I tried to keep as many audiovisual connections intact as possible, I had to eliminate many sounds that got in the way of the voice-over or interrupted the audiovisual flow I wanted to maintain.

In key moments, offscreen voices from the film clips are in dialogue with the poem. At 01:40, the memory of a mother singing “I get the blues when it rains”7 interacts with Eliot’s evocation of “echoes.” During the passage about “a place of disaffection,” the recital is arranged around a male voice saying “I’ve come home” into an empty room in Sunset Song (06:03). For those who recognize it as the imagined return of a husband who died in the war, the words may add poignancy to “time before and time after.” Without this knowledge, the opacity of this juxtaposition will likely trigger other meaningful interpretations. Moments like this are part of what makes audiovisual poems so intriguing to me: they force us to engage with associations, traces, and irritations.

An Echo of Despair

In his autobiographical films, Davies often revelled in unlikely combinations of pop culture and high art, creating a unique simultaneity of the philosophical and the sentimental. Following that lead, I balanced the Eliot recital with two excerpts from film scores that Davies had often mentioned8 but never used in one of his films: Alfred Newman’s “Marcellus’ Farewell” from The Robe (1953) and Jerome Moross’s “Reprise” from The Big Country (1958).

In order to adjust them to the tempo and key of the classical pieces that came with the film clips, I slowed and pitched the 1950s scores down an octave and a fourth, respectively. This temporal deformation also magnified the inherent imprecision and instability of these recordings, coloring the words of Alec Guinness with a sense of despair that Davies had found in his own life, as well as in Four Quartets9 (Koresky); “Descend lower, descend only / Into the world of perpetual solitude” (06:47), as the many images of unmoving protagonists exemplify.

The ambiguous contradiction between hope and despair that fuels all of the filmmaker’s work also informs the elaborate montage that takes up the final part of the video (starting at 07:00). Triggered by a lasting violin note,10 three visual layers enter into a dialogue with the spoken words and with each other, sometimes via their content, sometimes as abstract visual patterns. Similar as these tracking shots may look one moment, they contradict each other the next, juxtaposing the promise of a new dawn with the despair of self-confinement, a speculation about “what might have been” with a reminder of “what has been.”

It is only fitting that the window as a key motif of Davies’s films marks the beginning and the end of “Always Present.” The many gazes through windows also perfectly encapsulate what audiovisual poems are: a framework for looking at familiar media objects from an unfamiliar perspective, through a glass that hopefully refracts the light in multiple ways.