Death and Transfiguration

It’s Christmas Eve and Robert Tucker, now elderly, is slowly dying in hospital. He remembers his mother’s funeral, recalls himself as a child, arguing with a nun in the school corridor. As an adult, he cares for his sick mother and fantasizes about well-built men. He remembers a school play in which he played an angel, his mother’s death in another hospital bed, and thinks back to Christmases past. As he dies, he sees himself as a child again, opening his arms wide to embrace his mother.
Screening Schedule

No physical screenings scheduled.
Script: Terence Davies
Cinematography: William Diver
Editing: Mick Audsley
Actors: Wilfred Brambell (Tucker as an old man), Terry O’Sullivan (Tucker, middle-aged), Iain Munro (Tucker at 11), Jeanne Doree (mother), Chrissy Roberts (nurse)
Production: A Greater London Arts Production
Producers: Claire Barwell
Co-production: British Film Institute
Format: 35mm B&W
Production Country: UK
Production Year: 1983

Terence Davies

He was born in Liverpool in 1945. He began his career under the auspices of the British Film Institute with a first short already showing autobiographical traits, Children. At the National Film School he made Madonna and Child, continued in his third short, Death and Transfiguration. These three works were brought together in what was to constitute The Terence Davies. Distant Voices, Still Lives, a masterpiece on post-war Britain, was his international revelation, winning among others the FIPRESCI Award at Cannes IFF, the Golden Leopard at the Locarno FF and the Critics’ Awards at both Los Angeles and Toronto. With The Neon Bible, Davies gave his career something of a new direction on adapting a novel by writer John Kennedy Toole and shooting the movie in the USA. His most recent film Of Time and the City, which was premiered in Cannes IFF 2008, reveals amasterly use of archivematerial in constructing an emotional and critical discourse on urban evolution in Liverpool over the last 50 years.

Filmography

1976-1983 The Terence Davies Trilogy:
Children(1976), Madonna and Child(1980), Death and Transfiguration(1983)
1988 Distant Voices, Still Lives
1992 The Long Day Closes
1995 The Neon Bible
2000 The House of Mirth
2008 Of Time and the City