"Of Time and the City" (2008)

Among Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities may stand the port city of Liverpool. If a city and its name are a record of a constant forgetting and the interminable labor to summon up the remembrance of buildings past, then Liverpool qualifies itself: "Liverpool, the glorious city, has a tormented history. Several times it decayed, then burgeoned again, always keeping the first Liverpool as an unparalleled model of every splendor, compared to which the city's present state can only cause more sighs at every fading of the stars."

Though I've substituted the nonfiction city of Liverpool for Calvino's fictional "Clarice" (one of the cities that Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan in Calvino's novel), Terence Davies' new film, Of Time and the City, presents a Liverpool that is equally fictional and nonfictional. A city that had gone through decades of industrial wealth and misery, and is only now trembling on the precipice of rebirth and cultural esteem; a city constructed from the impersonal stock of images documenting its natural growth, decline, and renewal, and a city which has evolved privately in the memory of a single man.


Read the rest of the article at Hydra Magazine.