Gasman

Lynne Ramsay

1998 14mins

A story of two children who react with naïve simple emotion to a situation
imposed upon them by their father's secret. The striking thing about Ramsay's short was the acute sense of atmosphere created through a considered and spare use of sound.

http://www.brief-encounters.org.uk/c_sound_image.asp

Lynne Ramsey's Gasman like the director's other work, Ratcatcher being the
best and most enjoyable example, it 70s or 80s Glasgow, the struggling classes and a fairly grim outlook, but you see the little sparks of interest in real lives, and being a small story told very much from a child's point of view, it's much more hopeful, interesting and happy than it could have been. The characters, so few, and so little seen in the short still have immense believability and completeness. Arty, but not impenetrable, simple but thought provoking.

http://www.moviemail-online.co.uk/films/12148

Ratcatcher

In her breathtaking and assured debut feature, Lynne Ramsay creates a haunting evocation of a troubled Glasgow childhood. Set during Scotland’s national garbage strike of the mid-1970s, Ratcatcher explores the experiences of a poor adolescent boy as he struggles to reconcile his dreams and his guilt with the abjection that surrounds him. Utilizing beautiful, elusive imagery, candid performances, and unexpected humor, Ratcatcher deftly examines the landscape of urban decay and a rich interior landscape of hope and perseverance, resulting in a work at once raw and deeply poetic.

http://www.homevision.com/users/folder.asp?FolderID=1374&id=RAT020

Lynne Ramsey's bleak, beautifully photographed debut unflinchingly portrays
life in a Glasgow housing project during the 1973 garbageworkers strike as seen through the eyes of 12-year-old James Gillespie (William Eadie, in a soulful debut). As the film opens, James is playing with a friend near a filthy canal behind the projects when his friend tragically falls into the water and drowns. James chooses not to tell anyone that he saw the boy die, knowing that he will be implicated. This secret, along with his increasing lack of communication with his drunken football-loving father, causes James to become increasingly withdrawn, fantasizing about his family moving to a newly constructed apartment complex at the city limits on the edge of a beautiful, golden field of grain. As the garbage piles up and rats take up residency around the complex as if they were new tenants, James finds temporary solace in his friendships with Kenny, an odd boy who loves animals, and Margaret Anne, a teenage misfit who lets the local boys use her body as they wish.

While undeniably grim, RATCATCHER manages to combine unusually rich imagery and spare use of dialogue to create a realistic portrait of a simultaneously beautiful and cruel world. Punctuated with unexpected humor, Ramsey's film is subtle and rewarding.

http://www.deepdiscountdvd.com/dvd.cfm?itemid=HVD000213&promotion=y

Morvern Callar

Making a film version of the cult novel Morvern Callar (written in the first person singular) needed a director with guts and vision. Lynne Ramsay (her début film Ratcatcher was screened in 2000 in Rotterdam) stayed close to the
book and made a very intense road movie with traces of black comedy and psychological horror. When the 21-year-old Morvern Callar (another impressive role by Samantha Morton) wakes up on Christmas Day, she finds her boyfriend with his wrists slashed on the kitchen floor. In this oppressive
opening scene, the only sound is the crackling of the Christmas tree lights. Her boyfriend leaves Morvern a Walkman with a cassette compilation, a well-padded bank account and a book he wrote on a floppy disk - with an address list of publishers. Morvern grasps her opportunity, almost without emotion. To flee her dead_end existence in the Scottish town of Oban and her job filling supermarket shelves, she sends the book under her own name to the publishers. In the meantime, the action moves from the grey skies of Scotland to Spain, where Morvern has a wild holiday full of sex and drugs with her best friend Lanna. The powerful soundtrack, with music by the Velvet Underground among others, comes from her boyfriend's Walkman that Morvern listens to throughout.

Lynne Ramsay

Born in Glasgow on 5 December 1969, Lynne Ramsay was educated at Napier
College in Edinburgh, where she studied photography. From there she went to the National Film and Television School, specializing in cinematography and direction. Her graduation film, Small Deaths, won the Prix du Jury at Cannes in 1996, and her other short films Kill the Day and Gasman (both 1997) also garnered numerous awards. Hailed as one of the brightest new talents of British cinema, in a short directorial career Ramsay has already produced a promising and distinctive body of work.

Ramsay's acclaimed debut feature, Ratcatcher (1999), is a darkly redemptive
film set in '70s strike-bound Glasgow, piled high with bags of rotting refuse. A boy is pushed into a polluted canal, and the rest of the film follows his accidental killer, twelve-year-old James. Its grim setting notwithstanding, Ratcatcher is more Dovzhenko than Loach, and in the end James finds a world of hope and redemption at the end of a bus line. Ratcatcher opened the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1999 and won its director the 2000 BAFTA Carl Foreman Award for a newcomer in British film.Reduced to its storyline, Morvern Callar (2002), Ramsay's next film - adapted from Alan Warner's cult novel - sounds grim too: a young supermarket worker in the West of Scotland discovers that her boyfriend has committed suicide, claims authorship of the novel manuscript he has left behind, and goes on a spree in Spain with her best friend. But the plot is hardly the point: Morvern Callar is as emotionally open as it is narratively spare,
allowing the silent, and strangely innocent, world of its heroine to unfold in a succession of haunting images.

Relentlessly experimental, Ramsay brings a photographer's eye to the cinematic image: through silence and space within the frame her films unfold in expanded time, showing rather than telling. Everything is on the surface; there are no hidden depths. Against this visual canvas, sound assumes a special importance, carrying weight and resonance in its own right. "Sound is the other picture," Ramsay has said, and this is certainly true of Morvern Callar's sophisticated use of the music on Morvern's compilation tape (a posthumous gift from her boyfriend), which works at every level from (apparent) underscoring to expression of Morvern's near autistic relationship with her surroundings.

Lynne Ramsay acknowledges the influence of the work of US avant-garde
filmmaker Maya Deren, with its trance-like meditation on detail; and of Robert Bresson's Notes on the Cinematographer ("If the eye is entirely won, give nothing or almost nothing to the ear"). Other filmmakers whose work has been likened to Ramsay's include Bill Douglas and Terence Davies - both influences which probably have less to do with cinematic style than with a shared openness to the silent, brutal and magical world of the child and the innocent.