ASTORIA, NY.- Museum of the Moving Image will present a complete film retrospective of the brilliant English filmmaker Terence Davies—the first in the United States since his death in 2023. The series, Terence Davies: Time Present and Time Past, includes the director's nine features, many in rare film prints, and his trilogy of early short films, plus other rarely screened shorts, with permission from the Terence Davies Estate, from September 12–21. Highlights also include Cynthia Nixon in person on September 18 with a screening of A Quiet Passion, in which she stars as poet Emily Dickinson, and an opening night reception celebrating the reissue of Davies’s 1984 novel Hallelujah Now, published by Film Desk Books.

“When Terence Davies passed away in the fall of 2023, the world lost one of its greatest, most uncompromising cinematic artists. Davies all but invented his own film language, using sound and image to radically and meaningfully plumb the depths of human desire and alienation, as well as the joys of family, of poetry, of music, and, of course, movies,” said Michael Koresky, Senior Curator of Film and author of the 2014 book Terence Davies for University of Illinois Press. “We invite everyone to join us in celebrating the life and career of Davies with this complete retrospective to see his films as they were intended, on the big screen and with an audience.”

From the unfathomably moving, aesthetically revelatory autobiographical masterworks Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992), which transformed his memories of growing up in working-class Liverpool into nonlinear dreams that collapsed past and present, to his brilliant adaptations of classic novels—The House of Mirth (2000) and Sunset Song (2015)—to his galvanizing portrayals of poets Emily Dickinson (A Quiet Passion, 2017) and Siegfried Sassoon (Benediction, 2021), Davies created movies as a true artist should, using the form for self-expression and as a means of working through complicated emotions: of wrestling with faith, with his homosexuality, with his familial traumas. Davies made every single moment of every film count, and his work always reflected his true self with honesty, courage, and visual command.

Copies of Davies’s magisterial, long out-of-print novel Hallelujah Now will be available in the Museum Shop. The book functions as a brilliant companion piece to his early films, especially the Terence Davies Trilogy, going darker and deeper into its autobiographical main character’s wounded soul.