Distant Voices, Still Lives

Set in ''a world before Elvis, in a Liverpool before the Beatles'', Terence Davies'' film ''Distant Voices, Still Lives'' is an elegiac and intensely autobiographical meditation on a post-war working-class childhood. Paul Farley''s study of the film is both a personal response, as a Liverpudlian and as a poet, and an exploration of Davies'' unique visual style, blending the spaces - the ''short halls, stairways, coal cellars and meter cupboards of northern England'' - and sounds - the BBC shipping forecast, a pub sing-a-long, the strains of Vaughan Williams and Britten - of memory.