I would rate Terence Davies as a more important Son of Liverpool than John Lennon, so how about Davies Airport, then? This film goes against the canon of behaviour for the cinema in countless ways, but Davies is one of those masters who knows how the break the rules and achieve results. It is only to be expected that a film so radical in its contempt for conventional film-making as this should arouse a great deal of exasperation and fury amongst viewers who do not know what they are seeing, or cannot understand. The film has an austerity and formality about its construction which reminds me of a Japanese Noh play, and another Oriental touch is the enlarged moon at which the characters are so often staring, and towards which the boy is constantly reaching his hand, as if straining towards some perfection which he knows is forever beyond his reach. But what is so remarkable is that Davies has captured an elusive essence of the American Deep South of the 1940s, as if he were a perfume-manufacturer who had found the recipe for an exotic scent, using materials wholly unfamiliar to him, for after all, Davies is an alien in that world. However, as he shot a lot of the film in Crawfordville, Georgia, which has a population of 572, everybody who visits it could be said to be an alien. He seems to me to have drawn inspiration from the photographs of the Alabamba sharecroppers taken in the late 1930s by Walker Evans for James Agee's book LET US NOW PRAISE FAMOUS MEN, which was published in 1941, the same year which is so important early in this film, in which we hear Roosevelt's broadcast announcing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, which leads to the boy's father going to war and coming back in a box. I am proud to say that I saved the manuscript of Agee's book. I used to stay in Mia Agee's house when I was young, and as she suffered from chronic depression, she was allowing Jim's manuscripts to rot in wet cardboard boxes in the cellar. Once she left me alone in the house for a few days and I took 'direct action' at the request of her daughter. I went down and got the manuscripts and dried them out by laying them all over every surface and floor of the house in relays for days. FAMOUS MEN had fortunately been written in hard pencil, so that there was no ink to run or smudge. It is now safely in the University of Texas, and Mia lived for some time on the money she got for it, once it had been dried! Agee died in 1955, but Walker Evans lived to a ripe old age, though he was such an urbane sophisticate you would never know he had once spent months in a house like the one in this film, and I was unable to get him to talk about it much. This film does not have normal continuity in the cinematic sense, but instead progresses in a series of tableaux. However, the emotional and narrative continuity remains intact and is perfectly comprehensible. The film in that sense resembles poetry rather than prose, and indeed it could be said to obey the strict rules of H. D.'s and Pound's Imagism, whereby every word which does not stand for a concrete image must be cut. (Pound cut Eliot's THE WASTELAND by half in this way prior to publication, which is why it became such a world classic.) THE NEON BIBLE is thus an imagist poem, not a prose piece which rambles along in the normal fashion. I have no idea why it is called THE NEON BIBLE because that must have been explained in the novel which provided the story, and which Davies does not explain. Of course, there is a great deal of preaching and religious intolerance in the film, but why it is neon escapes me, unless perchance neon, being such a rare gas, the degree of religious hypocrisy portrayed is meant to be of an equally rare kind, or perhaps the reference is to neon's unnatural glow, like that which emanates from the putrescence of a fermenting small Southern town, being what is really intended. The central performance as Aunt Mae is by Gena Rowlands, yet another example of her inspired and brilliant work, which has been the continuing hallmark of her career. The other female lead is played by Diana Scarwid, who comes from Savannah, Georgia, and is the only performer in the film who has the correct accent. If I were to criticize this film, I would have to call attention to the fact that the director and cast all have tin ears, and cannot detect that they lack the Georgia accents, apart from Scarwid. Scarwid is marvellous as a woman who goes mad under the strains of poverty, battering by her violent husband, then grief at his death (the Patty Heart Syndrome, where you love your captor, and mourn the passing of your tormentor). Jacob Tierney, a Canadian boy, is superb and sensitive as the son who narrates the tale, and whose story it really is. The cinematography by the Scot Michael Coulter is sensationally evocative and technically brilliant. All that steam and pine branches brushing at the windowpanes (hats off to the sound engineer too for that scene!) and mist and gloom really works, as do the flat-on Walker Evans-style shots where surfaces of buildings and features of rooms are treated as naked planes seen in the perpendicular, and which cannot hide as they are helpless to avoid revealing their all to the unremitting eye. The story is sad, both of loss, and of never having had anything to lose, of the unravelling of hopes and dreams, and of the blows which fate inflicts upon the helpless, full to the brim with sombre pathos.
Review of The Neon Bible
