It would be unthinkable to write about the film director Terence Davies without acknowledging the cinema that introduced me to his films.
Davies died last week, aged 77. London’s Lumiere cinema, on St Martin’s Lane, closed in 1997 after a paltry 16 years. I watched it metamorphose into an Ian Schrager hotel (as I say, it was the 1990s) and the Gymbox fitness club it is today. It was previously an Odeon cinema that screened Walt Disney cartoons, reminiscent of those Terence Davies remembered from the Liverpool of his youth. These venues were his initiation into film, with an elder sister as his escort, when he was 7 years of age. He cried during the iconic dance sequence in ‘Singing In the Rain’ because Gene Kelly was so happy: ‘I remember every single thing about that day. It will be with me for the rest of my life.’
In later years he expressed two main regrets. Firstly, like Siegfried Sassoon, the subject of his last film, he sought redemption,…