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.