In this month's Atlantic Benjamin Schwarz considers David Kynaston's Tales of a New Jerusalem, and Terence Davies' Of Time and the City, works I've mentioned earlier on this blog.
"Of Time and the City is frequently described as “nostalgic,” and while that word fits the filmmaker’s yearning for an irrecoverable past, it doesn’t convey his profound ambivalence toward that past, his appreciation that “we love the place we hate, then we hate the place we love. We leave the place we love, then spend a lifetime trying to regain it.” In this way, Davies shares Kynaston’s insight, unsettling to both progressives and reactionaries, that, as I pointed out in reviewing Austerity Britain, the past was a better place for being a worse place: that the better grew out of the worse, the worse out of the better."
