The Long Day Closes

This Thursday, April 8 at 8:00 there will be a free screening of Terence Davies's masterpiece, The Long Day Closes. The event is being sponsored by noted film critic and blogger Kevin Lee, and it's the final film in a project he started several years ago of seeing and writing about each of the 1000 greatest films listed at a site called They Shoot Pictures, Don't They? This list, which is updated each year, was compiled from a number of sources, one of which is the Senses of Cinema Top Ten lists. My own Senses of Cinema list includes The Long Day Closes so I like to think I may have played a small part in nudging this great film onto the list. I first saw the film at the 1993 San Francisco Film Festival, followed by a Q&A with Terence Davies, and I immediately fell under the spell of its slow, hypnotic rhythms, associative music and sound editing, and semi-autobiographical portrayal of an adolescent gay British schoolboy and his family. The film uses powerfully apt audio clips from films such as The Magnificent Ambersons, and in its greatest sequence Davies edits together a series of matching overhead tracking shots which link the boy Bud at home, at school, in church and at the cinema, all set to the song "Tammy's In Love" sung by Debbie Reynolds. Since that first screening I've seen the film perhaps 5 or 6 times thanks to a VHS recording I made from HBO, but this will be the first time since '93 I'm seeing it in a theater, this time with an invited audience of cinephiles, so it should be a very special occasion.