Philip Larkin’s poem “Here”, which opens his 1964 collection The Whitsun Weddings, describes the long arc of an eastward train journey from London to Hull. This is a vision of England as manifested in the houses, streets, greenhouses and station platforms that exist for a moment in the window, the “isolate villages / Where removed lives / Loneliness clarifies”. The lives are imaginable yet unknowable; far away but exposed. Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives, released two decades later, echoes Larkin’s line in its title and takes place at the terminal of the westward line, in Liverpool. Like the poem, it takes place in the uncomfortable gap between closeness and distance; the intimacy of the neighbourly relation dissolves into the problem of opacity, the way that other lives are both close and far.

The critical reception to films about the English working class tend to emphasise their Britishness, as if a panorama of terraced houses and suppressed rage distils something essential about nationhood. Davies, however, in an interview with the BFI, rejected the idea that his film belonged to a lineage of British filmmaking, as represented by parties where “you stand around with a rictus grin and you don’t know anybody”. Being outside is the point: “if there’s such a thing as British cinema,” he states, “I certainly don’t feel part of it. I never have.” Yet the film does describe something about nationhood, just as Larkin’s poem does, that a shared national identity contributes to a sense of intimacy while simultaneously stratifying people with social difference.