General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20269 min read

Of Time and the City

Of Time and the City is a 2008 British documentary film directed, written, and narrated by Terence Davies, in which he reflects on his childhood and youth in Liverpool through a collage of archival footage, music, poetry, and personal voice-over. It was his first documentary and his first feature in eight years, and it premiered at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Director and writer	Terence Davies, who also narrates and served as director of photography³
Year and premiere	2008; screened at the Cannes Film Festival in an honorary special screening, with no prizes won¹
Running time	74 minutes (73 minutes 39 seconds at 25 fps per the spotting list)⁴^•⁵
Subject	Davies's life in Liverpool from birth until he left in 1973, set between 1945 and the present day⁴
Producers	Roy Boulter and Solon Papadopoulos for Hurricane Films⁴
Awards	New York Film Critics Circle Best Documentary (2009); BAFTA nomination for Best Debut; BIFA nomination for Best Documentary⁶
Critical reception	93% on the Tomatometer from 59 reviews; Metascore 81 based on 9 critic reviews⁷^•⁸

Spoilers

Plot

There is no plot to speak of, and that is the point. The film is a memoir in moving pictures: roughly 85% of it is archive material ²¹, arranged not chronologically but emotionally, mapping Davies's Liverpool from his birth in 1945 until he moved away in 1973 ²¹. The city is introduced with shots of the Overhead Railway that look like a Fritz Lang future city, and a tracking shot filmed from a train gliding into town, an image straight out of the Lumière brothers ²². From there the film wanders the twentieth century: families struggling to keep warm in winter, troops leaving for the Korean War, women washing windows, hooded professional wrestlers, radio snippets from Round the Horne ²³^•¹⁰.

Davies's voiceover carries everything. It moves between rapture and grievance, quoting T.S. Eliot and A.E. Housman, then puncturing its own lyricism with a dry Scouse joke. He remembers the annual exotic pomegranate in his Christmas stocking with the same weight he gives to mocking the royal wedding as "The Betty Windsor Show" ²³. The hooded wrestlers get a sequence of their own: Davies pairs the spookily beautiful footage with his memories of the sexual feelings those men evoked in him ²⁴.

The film's most famous montage comes when Peggy Lee's "The Folks Who Live on the Hill" plays over footage of the squalid Victorian terraces of the poor giving way to the squalid, 1960s-built brutalist tower blocks of the poor. The song sentimentalizes the old streets; the images and the narration refuse to. Davies knows the old houses were cold and rat-ridden, and he misses them anyway, and the sequence holds both truths at once: the slum clearances gave people indoor plumbing and took away the streets that made a community. Later, a camera pans back from a woman sweeping her veranda to reveal the decayed block she has been housed in, the archive footage turned into an argument against the planners ²².

The royal sequences are the film's comic high point. The all-color lavishness of Elizabeth II's coronation is pointedly contrasted with monochrome stills of Liverpool's poor, and Davies notes that the Scottish fireman who marked the occasion with a firehose salute was "taking the piss," a line that drew the first rousing cheer of the evening at a London screening ²⁵.

The darkest stretch comes late, when Davies turns on the Catholic Church that formed him. Footage of processions, of the enormous Catholic cathedral, of children marched through ritual, is paired with narration that grows steadily more furious, culminating in his account of the Church's teachings on homosexuality and the shame they instilled. His sarcastic prayer, "O Jesu, be thou the light...," set against religious pageantry, works because underneath the sarcasm is a child's faith that was never allowed to grow up honestly.

The film closes on the present-day city. Tracking shots glide over Liverpool's regenerated waterfront, gleaming buildings that could be anywhere from Baltimore to Buenos Aires ¹⁰, while Davies recites Eliot's Four Quartets: "Home is where one starts from. As we grow older / The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated." He ends as an alien in his own land ¹⁰^•²². Davies has said there is no "message" in the film about community or urban life; his reckoning is with himself, then and now, not with the city ²².

Characters

There are no characters in the usual sense; the only speaking presence is Terence Davies himself, whose narration is the film. Everyone else on screen is an anonymous face from the archive: the poor of Liverpool, the wrestlers, the troops, the woman on her veranda.

Interpretations and controversies

The film's anti-royal and anti-Church barbs drew attention but little real controversy. The more debated question is what the film is about: critics read it as a hymn to Liverpool and a critique of its development ²⁶, while Davies himself insisted it is not about the city at all but about his own transformation ²². Scholars have described it as a melancholic meditation on absence in which the city can only exist in and as an archive ²¹.

Origin and commission

The film was commissioned as part of Liverpool's celebrations as European Capital of Culture in 2008. Davies, ahead of the Liverpool premiere at the Philharmonic Hall, called it "the most important one, because this is where I come from."⁹ Funding came from a group of public bodies, including Liverpool's Digital Departures project, Northwest Vision and Media, the UK Film Council, the Liverpool Culture Company, and BBC Films.²^•¹⁰ It followed an eight-year period in which Davies, whose previous feature was The House of Mirth, could not get a film made in the United Kingdom.²^•¹¹

Form and content

The film relies almost entirely on archival and newsreel footage of twentieth-century Liverpool, woven together by Davies's narration. He described his method as cutting it "as if it were fiction," with "images which speak" and a layered soundtrack of popular and classical music, voices, and radio clips.⁴ The narration mixes personal recollection with quotations from literature and philosophy, including A.E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad and Shelley's "Ozymandias," both read over the opening footage of the city's now-demolished Overhead Railway.⁵ The music ranges from Handel and Mahler to Peggy Lee.¹²

Themes. Davies confronts the two forces he calls the determinants of his youth, Catholicism and homosexuality, before broadening to attack the monarchy, mock the Beatles, and lament the demolition of terraced neighborhoods and their replacement with high-rise blocks.¹²^•⁴ He describes himself as having moved from a Catholic upbringing to becoming a "born-again atheist," and he explains in the film that he came to classical music, including Bruckner, just as the Beatles rose to prominence, so their impact on the city is deliberately understated.¹³^•¹⁴ Specific reminiscences include the 1955 Grand National, at which his mother backed the winner Quare Times each way, the Lyceum tea-rooms, and newsreel of the King's Liverpool Regiment embarking for Korea in 1952.¹²^•¹⁵

The film's structure is chronological and associative rather than argumentative: it moves from the wartime and postwar city, through the austerity years and the arrival of television and popular music, to slum clearance and the skyline of the present.⁴ Matthew Gandy, Professor of Cultural and Historical Geography at King's College, Cambridge, writing in the BFI DVD booklet, described the film as a response to the failures of postwar Britain and an exploration of the connections between memory and place.¹⁰

Reception

Critical response was strongly positive. The film holds 93% on the Tomatometer from 59 reviews and a Metascore of 81, which Metacritic labels "universal acclaim."⁷^•⁸ Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian called it "miraculous" and compared its spirit to Humphrey Jennings's Listen to Britain and to Noël Coward.² Anthony Quinn in The Independent placed it, alongside Guy Maddin's My Winnipeg, as "a milestone in autobiographical cinema."¹² Time Out gave it five stars, calling it "a poetic, sometimes caustic, always enthralling cocktail of Mahler and Peggy Lee, TS Eliot and James Joyce, archive film and witty narration."¹³ Dissenting voices existed: J. Hoberman in The Village Voice found the return to Davies's youth mixed in effect, scoring it 50 on Metacritic.⁸

Audience measures were lower than critics' scores: the Popcornmeter stood at 68% from more than 1,000 ratings on Rotten Tomatoes, the Metacritic user score was 6.5 from 11 ratings, and IMDb users gave 7.2/10 from about 2,400 votes.⁷^•⁸^•¹⁶

Awards and afterlife

The film won Best Documentary from the New York Film Critics Circle in 2009 and received nominations for the BAFTA for Best Debut (for producers Sol Papadopoulos and Roy Boulter) and the British Independent Film Award for Best Documentary.⁶ It also received two Cinema Eye Honors nominations and a win and a nomination at the Thessaloniki Film Festival.⁸

The film has remained in circulation. The British Film Institute preserved a print in the BFI National Archive, and the BFI re-released it in UK cinemas in 2025, with the British Board of Film Classification certifying a 76-minute version on 21 July 2025.¹¹^•¹⁷ FACT Liverpool scheduled a 35mm screening in December 2025 as part of a monthly series of archive-print presentations.¹⁸ Davies died in 2023 at the age of 77; Of Time and the City remained his only feature documentary.¹⁹^•²⁰

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026