 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, specialising 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.
Bibliography
Kennedy, Harlan, 'Ratcatcher', Film Comment, Jan./Feb. 2000, pp. 6-9
Ramsay, Lynne, Ratcatcher (London: Faber and Faber, 1999)
Williams, Linda Ruth, 'Escape Artist', Sight and Sound, Oct. 2002, pp. 22-25
Annette Kuhn, Reference Guide to British and Irish Film Directors
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