But Why? replaces political deceit with soul-searching.
Terence Davies made a short film But Why? for the 2021 Viennale that serves as the benediction for the filmmaker’s recent passing. It’s a brief but tremendous glimpse into his inner life: A young man goes up a flight of steps in a comfortable-looking middle-class home, stands at the landing before a stained-glass window where he changes — ages. Then the older man turns and retreats down the steps. Over this life cycle, Davies dulcetly speaks his own literary musing: “I ascend the stairs / I descend the stairs. / But why?”
It’s a casual question — a philosophical question — made effective by the domestic space familiar from so many of Davies’s films: Distant Voices, Still Lives; The Long Day Closes; Sunset Song; A Quiet Passion; and Benediction. The last two are biographies of the poets Emily Dickinson and Siegfried Sassoon — perfect subjects since Davies himself is a cinematic poet who endows commonplace images with intriguing, complicated meanings. His artistry derived from personal experience — Anglo-Irish, Catholic, homosexual — yet utterly universal.
Probing his own sensitivity was the source of Davies’s profundity, ranking him with the greatest filmmakers. They all ask, “Why?” That private quest lets viewers confront the meaning of their own lives through relatable stories shown in stately rhythms and with splendid visual, musical details, finding depth in the darkest, starkest moments, such as a poor Liverpool boy’s marveling at a line of hanging apples during Christmas in The Long Day Closes.
Davies redeemed the term “existential,” recently abused — and misused — by politicians and pundits who impute gravitas to their own self-interests. It has become an obfuscating word, implicitly deceptive. But Davies’s artistry always provides emotional clarity — as in the devastating final tableaux of The House of Mirth (a mordant still-life) and The Long Day Closes (a cosmic celestial pageant). But Why? has a similar effect: Its concise setting and action, through the simple passage of time, refresh the concept of existentialism. He adds rich, honest self-examination to what Sartre and Camus knew but that contemporary politicians and intellectuals have forgotten. This explains why Davies’s films are being excluded from the current, juvenile cultural conversation.
A cinematic poem such as But Why? contradicts today’s greed, self-love, and diabolism:
I ascend the stairs
I descend the stairs
But why?
All is still
Still as glass
Was there once a purpose?
Was there once a goal?
Did I love a moment?
Did I love a soul?
Family, yes
Mother always
Fires in the parlor
Reflected in the polished wood
Sighs at midnight
Her apron, her soft warm hands
All the ephemera of love
She stands there ironing my small shirt
Then hankies, too
But all is gone now
Buried under memory’s thick silt
I ascend the stairs
I descend the stairs
But why?
Those verses are only half of it. Davies’s plummy elocution, a voice of proper British aspiration like Neil Tennant’s of the Pet Shop Boys, is also intimate, pacing emotion with diction — soft-spoken intelligence and moral insistence. His autobiographical The Long Day Closes (his boyhood suffused with family totems, church, music, and movies) appeared amid the artistic ferment of the Eighties and Nineties, when pop music’s most ingenious artists, Public Enemy and Morrissey, were similarly sampling from their heritages to convey profound alertness to culture and politics.
Davies’s debut feature, Distant Voices, Still Lives, was reportedly called “Magnificent” by Jean-Luc Godard. I didn’t need Godard to tell me that. I felt it myself, as did Stephen Sondheim, who haunted its U.S. premiere at the New York Film Festival. But the word “magnificent” correctly describes the film’s combination of naturalism, art, life, singing, struggle, torment, family, and complicated love —subjects Godard also addressed without conspicuous confession and never with banality. So Davies saluted Godard’s passing last year:
As Proust and Joyce are to the novel, so Godard is to cinema. They all still cast their power over new writers and directors. Godard’s influence and his fierce passion tower above us, and we who are left behind can only remember and bask in this reflected glory. It is hard to say goodbye when au revoir would be more comforting. We are now impoverished by his going. I didn’t know him personally, but he gave me a compliment once which I will always treasure. So, ladies and gentlemen, hats off and stand for the passing of a genius.
That tribute is fair exchange. Like most artists, Davies displayed unimportant contradictions, as when he once criticized the class distinctions in David Lean’s adaptation of Noel Coward’s This Happy Breed. (He similarly told the Irish Times, “I can still feel guilty for the fact that I told my mother 40 years ago to shut up.”) Go back to that film and find the stylistic and humanistic roots of Davies’s own cinema — especially in But Why? That numinous staircase scene, featuring actors Richard Goulding and Peter Capaldi from Benediction, makes it a companion piece while also retracing Emily Dickinson’s staircase agon in A Quiet Passion. Both films reprove today’s lack of soul-searching — that’s our real existential crisis.
But Why? is only one minute long. But one minute of Terence Davies is more powerful than entire movies by any still-living filmmaker.
