The CINEMAtech Film Series returns with an exciting Autumn season, beginning with Terence Davies's forgotten masterpiece, Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988).

"Stunning stylized. Fiercely emotional."
--The Boston Globe

"A musical kaleidoscope of memory."
--The New York Post

"Davies is one of the most original stylists in the contemporary cinema."
--The New Yorker

The British director Terence Davies conjures a crucial decade and a half--from the Second World War through the nineteen-fifties--in the life of the fictionalized Davies family, in a working-class neighborhood in Liverpool. A boy and two girls grow up under the wrathful despotism of a violent father (Pete Postlethwaite) and become part of an ever-tightening web of friends and extended family. With an unfailing eye for place, decor, costume, and gesture, the director glides his camera through tangles of memories to evoke joys and horrors with a similar sense of wonder. In effect, the movie is an autobiographical musical, with the singing of pop tunes and traditional songs in homes and bars standing in for unspeakable intimacies. Davies shows that, for all its brutality, constraint, and frustration, the pressurized little society offered him a schooling in sensibility, thanks to a cast of characters whose minor distinctions evoke a world of exquisite differences. The actors' performances have a controlled yet passionate expressivity to match--especially in the case of the sisters (Angela Walsh and Lorraine Ashbourne) and their friends, the floridly sassy Micky (Debi Jones) and the grievously tyrannized Jingles (Marie Jelliman), whose glances and inflections suggest whole chapters of a novel. Released in 1988. [The New Yorker]

September 13, 2016 at 7.00 p.m.
Library Auditorium
Montana Tech
1300 W Park St
Butte, MT 59701

All CINEMAtech screenings are FREE and OPEN TO THE PUBLIC