Terence Davies’s film Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) might as well be an opera: emotion is more central than narrative, and singing, rather than dialogue, carries much of the weight. Dwelling on Davies’s own family and a lost working-class life in 1940s–1950s Liverpool, the film is filled with scenes of singing and listening, as popular songs are rendered powerful for their ability to connect intimacy and public life and to form bonds of community and memory. Alongside such scenes, the film includes other vocal sounds that call on personal and cultural memory: radio broadcasts of litany-like speech (the shipping forecast, the racing results) and unaccompanied vocal music, such as the soprano vocalise from Vaughan Williams’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony, and the performance of ‘In the Brief Midwinter’ that opens the King’s College Festival of Lessons and Carols. Much of the singing has an ‘ethnographic immediacy’, as Berthold Hoeckner notes. And yet, as the film stages memories of Davies’s family – some of them his own, some of them borrowed ‘second-hand’ from his sisters and mother – it also uses voice and song to explore ideas of distance, mediation and absence. The voice’s role in mediating the past is especially at issue in the last moments of the film, when we hear Peter Pears singing Benjamin Britten’s arrangement of the folksong ‘O Waly, Waly’ (1947). This song acts as the film’s closing frame. The opening frame, after a ghostly prologue in which the characters are audible but not visible, is a recording of Jessye Norman singing a spiritual, unaccompanied (‘There’s a Man Going Round Taking Names’); the transition between the two short films that constitute Distant Voices, Still Lives is set to Britten’s unaccompanied choral work Hymn to the Virgin (1930, rev. 1934). All this music is non-diegetic, functioning as narrative commentary; if the film’s popular songs are objects of memory, this music seems to represent the process of remembering. Indeed, it acts as a bridge: between high culture and the vernacular, between past and present. The bridging function of the Pears performance seems especially elaborate. Unlike the Jessye Norman

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淡入黑影，《 O Waly，Waly》（1947年），在特伦斯·戴维斯（Terence Davies）的《遥远的声音》中，仍然存在

特伦斯·戴维斯（Terence Davies）的电影《遥远的声音，静物》（1988）也可能是一部歌剧：情感比叙事更重要，而唱歌而不是对话则更具分量。这部电影生活在戴维斯自己的家庭中，并在1940至1950年代的利物浦失去了上班族的生活，这部电影充满了唱歌和聆听的场景，流行歌曲因其将亲密感和公共生活联系在一起并形成社区纽带的能力而变得强大起来和记忆。除了这些场景外，影片还包括其他唤起个人和文化记忆的声乐声音：无线电广播，播放连绵花样的语音（航运预测，赛车结果）和无伴奏声乐，例如沃恩·威廉姆斯的《田园》中的女高音声乐。交响乐，以及在“短暂的仲冬”中的演出，这些活动开启了国王学院的课程与颂歌节。正如Berthold Hoeckner所指出的那样，大部分演唱都带有“民族志学的即时性”。然而，随着影片上演戴维斯家人的回忆（其中一些是他自己的，有些是从他的姐妹和母亲那里借来的“二手”），它也使用声音和歌曲探索距离，调解和缺席的想法。声音在调解过去中的作用在电影的最后时刻尤其成问题，当我们听到彼得·皮尔斯演唱本杰明·布里顿对民歌《瓦利，瓦利》（O Waly，Waly）的编曲时（1947年）。这首歌是电影的闭幕画面。开场曲是在鬼魂的序幕中出现的，在这些序幕中人物可以听见但看不见，是杰西·诺曼（Jessye Norman）演唱灵性，无人陪伴（“有人围着名字走来走去”）；构成《遥远的声音》，《静物》的两部短片之间的过渡被设定为布里顿的无伴奏合唱作品《向处女的赞美诗》（1930年，1934年修订）。所有这些音乐都是非叙事性的，用作叙事性评论。如果电影中的流行歌曲是记忆的对象，那么这种音乐似乎代表着记忆的过程。的确，它充当了桥梁：在高级文化与本土之间，过去与现在之间。梨演奏的桥接功能似乎特别精致。不像杰西·诺曼（Jessye Norman）如果电影中的流行歌曲是记忆的对象，那么这种音乐似乎代表着记忆的过程。的确，它充当了桥梁：在高级文化与本土之间，过去与现在之间。梨演奏的桥接功能似乎特别精致。不像杰西·诺曼（Jessye Norman）如果电影中的流行歌曲是记忆的对象，那么这种音乐似乎代表着记忆的过程。的确，它充当了桥梁：在高级文化与本土之间，过去与现在之间。梨演奏的桥接功能似乎特别精致。不像杰西·诺曼（Jessye Norman）