Distant Voices, Still Lives is built on tableaux vivants, and moves cautiously through houses emptied into three-dimensional models. Disembodied voices haunt the house, and chatter around the living scenes as well, unmoored from the bodies present. These voices indicate a life outside the frame, while Davies' images attempt to contain all that there is within the frozen image. This is the film's central tension, between tableau and song, the still life and the distant voice. It is the latter that wins out by the film's end, but it is the early tableaux that I find most disquieting and moving, and which have preoccupied me the last few weeks.

The tableaux I refer to all take place in the first ten minutes of Distant Voices, Still Lives, setting the relationship of the family to the father, and of the photographic image to the passage of time. The first, the funeral tableau, has the family dressed in black, trying not to blink, before leaving us, the camera tracking forward to a photograph of the father on the wall. This arrangement is replicated a minute and a half later with the family dressed for a wedding, only here the camera breaks the rule of the tableau and moves not only forward but sideways, showing the side of Tony's face and torso, and fixing on Maisie to the right. The tableau was already uncanny, revealing on one hand a deficit (cinema's basis in mummified images of life, the lineage of painting and sculpture informing photographic reality) and a surplus (the blinking, the tremors of the live performers only acting as though they are still). Now the gentlest pan of the camera introduces a three-dimensionality that, owing to the otherwise classical stillness of Davies' compositions, is shocking. The depth increases as Eileen speaks "I wish me dad was here," and an off-screen voice responds "I don't. He was a bastard, and I bleedin' hated him." Sounds from another time enter the tableau, before we are taken to a new one, a cleaning scene lit like a Vermeer, the father beating the shit out of Maisie with a broom. (Godard called Vermeer "The first film-maker in the world" because he painted with light, 'pinning' the world down). We cut back to Tony and Eileen, and then to another classical tableau, Tony, bloodied in a military uniform, the father hunched over. "Will you have a drink with me, dad?" "Nope."

Davies proceeds to stage tableaux of ordinary life through Distant Voices, but this early near-identical series, set before the photograph of the father, are the richest demonstration of the tableau as a formal and dramatic device. They are eerie and confronting, at least in part because Davies is invoking the techniques of the pre-cinematic past in a medium that tends toward the impression of movement. We can compare the family tableau here to its appearance in Denis Diderot's bourgeois melodrama Le Pere de famille (1758), where it opens and closes the drama. Literary critic Peter Szondi writes that in the tableau "What is depicted - in pantomime, dialogue, and monologue-is an emotional state" that halts narrative time when narrative time is understood to be the flow of events: "No action occurs, nor does the exposition serve to prepare for any." This is of course intentional - Diderot contrasts the tableau with the coup de theatre (or "dramatic turn of events" brought about by some action, altering character circumstances), insisting the latter is invariably "untrue," "merely theatrical," "created exclusively in response to the needs of the theater." In other words the tableau carves from the flow of time an ateleological, affective space, that works against the demands of the medium that houses it to communicate a truth that can't be expressed through dramatic artifice. This works with Davies' own reflections on the film, that "When you're the youngest of 10, you don't see events fully, you just feel intense moments." A reenacted event would hold a fraction of the truth of the memory, by its nature fragmentary, and by its fragmentation intense. The family tableaux then relegate significant events to screen memories, suffering without catharsis, distant voices that ceaselessly arrive at a picture that cannot rationalise or put them to rest.

Jean-Louis Baudry once asked of the cinematic apparatus "What desire was aroused, more than two thousand years before the actual invention of cinema, what urge in need of fulfillment would be satisifed by a montage, rationalized into an idealist perspective precisely in order to show that it rests primarily on an impression of reality?" With Distant Voices, Still Lives we are tasked with asking what desire is met by rejecting cinema's impression of reality and replacing it with the impression of photography in the form of living tableau. And so we here extend the question of the tableau's function for Davies to the question of the function of the photographic image in general. The reason everyone is together for the family tableaux is that a photo is being taken, the father is dead, and so the father is present in the photograph on the wall. And so we are made to bear witness to the profilmic reality of the event being flattened into the same order as the documented past of the photograph. The reason that the gentle pan is so uncanny is because it reveals the irreconcilability of these orders — two- and three-dimensional, photographic and cinematic, dead and still living.

The much celebrated musical dimension of the film is most realised in its second half, titled Still Lives. The relationship between the tableau and still life painting is accounted for by Brigitte Peucker, who writes of an "uncanny contradiction":

No matter that their subject is organic, was once living: still lifes are natures mortes (dead nature), their flowers and fruits killed off into and fixed within the space of representation. Nevertheless, like other paintings in this regard, still lifes also function to preserve their subject in the atemporal present of art

Davies' tableaux are uncanny because they resist transforming the family into natures mortes — there is an uncanny surplus of life, a painful inability to stay still. It should be acknowledged at this point that the plural of 'still life' is 'still lifes' and not 'still lives'. This is because 'still life' does not refer to a state of life, but to an object (specifically an artwork). This goes some way to explaining why the Still Lives portion of Davies' film is less still than the previous one, and pointedly synchronises voice and body in the live performance of song: after the event of death, something still lives.

This is an incredible film for its unbearable warmth, and for its precise staging of contemporary cinema's being haunted by the past (filmic and otherwise). I would like to write more about how public spaces and songs allow for interpersonal synchrony, and how through deft camera movements Davies transforms building interiors into empty miniatures. But that's enough for now.

Written 17 Jan 2024