A powerful and unusual personal film memoir about the city of Liverpool

 Terence Davies's documentary film, Of Time and the City (2008), is a personal recollection and evocation of his childhood in Liverpool (in the postwar years, the 50s and 60s), the type of memoir cinema that we're likely to see more of as the format requires no sets and actors and directors, a Covid-possible format for aspiring or established filmmakers (there have been other films like it over the years, of course - e.g. My Winnipeg). There are a few unusual aspects to Davies's project: First of all, the film, which Davies narrates, tells us little about the salient facts of his childhood and nothing at all about the overall course of his life. It's not his story so much as his setting. Second, the film is a melange of several media: extensive use of both still and video photography to capture the look and feel of life in Liverpool in the mid to late 20th century; a really unusual soundtrack with some music typical of the era and the locale plus many passages from the classical repertoire (Mahler - great; Bruckner - what does Davies possibly hear in him?); many passages of poetry and other literature, through which Davies highlights some of the visual sequences - passages from Eliot (which I recognized), the Psalms (ditto), though note that none of these passages are identified, in the film proper or the credits. Most of all, though Davies indicates that he yearns for his childhood in this grim and then-impoverished city, he also makes it clear that Liverpool was a visual and spatial horror: in the early years just an incredibly awful place, truly ugly and frightening housing much of it ij the shows of the gasworks, public buildings of a Gargantuan sort, a waterfront entirely given over to industry, soot and grime and jam-packed crowds everywhere, and, in the later years, public housing of an extraordinarily oppressive design that, as Davies notes, encapsulates the English propensity for the dismal. All told, it's a moving and sometimes frightening testament to the hardships of poverty then and now - and I have only one quibble, which is that Davies barely touches on the music scene and is particularly condescending about the Beatles, a ray of light in the dark past of his home territory.