Ratcatcher

BFI Film Classics

by Annette Kuhn

Lynne Ramsay's bleak yet beautifully photographed debut unflinchingly portrays life on a Glasgow housing estate during the 1973 refuse collectors' strike, as seen through the eyes of 12-year-old James Gillespie (William Eadie). After James's friend falls into a canal and drowns, James becomes increasingly withdrawn. As bags of rubbish pile up and rats move in, James finds solace in his friendships with Kenny, an odd boy who loves animals, and Margaret Anne,a teenage misfit.Annette Kuhn's study of the film, the first to offer an overarching account of Ramsay's work, considers the director's background and Ratcatcher alongside her earlier films. Kuhn traces the film's production history in the context ofScottish media and literary cultures, and its cinematic influences, while acknowledging the distinctiveness of Ramsay's poetic, visionary style. Kuhn draws on interviews with Ramsay and others involved in the film's production, and combines this with a close reading of selected passages to provide an in-depth and illuminating analysis of the film's poetic style and its aesthetics, including an examination of its construction of a child's world through a highly distinctive organisation of cinematic space.

Genres: Film, Nonfiction

96 pages, Kindle Edition

First published July 15, 2008

Reviews

[Paul Bryant · Rating 1 out of 5]

Watch the eager young students take their seats for the first lecture of the film theory course. How happy they look. They are so enthusiastic about film! How can it be, then, that the most committed, the most enthusiastic of all of these students, the one who gets to become a professor of Film Studies at a real grown up university in London and write actual books about films, chooses to write about one of her favourite films in a manner which will make most film fans die quietly in their armchairs.

The topography of a childhood landscape, as it revolves around home and incorporates spaces outside home, is put right into the frame with James – like an avatar – the axis of movement in, throughout and between them. The film’s pivotal setting in James’s home, which figures as a fulcrum, a point of stillness at the centre of a repeated series of outward movements that take in the tenement and its adjacent spaces.

I hate this style of zombie academic writing so much I’m going to quote some more:

The defining feature of these inner and outer worlds and their interrelationship is their spatiality. By definition, spaces are contained by edges, boundaries; and boundaries are shaped in turn by the spaces they contain.

And so on.

If you wanted to produce a small, handsome book to ensure that no one would want to watch Lynne Ramsay’s brilliant 1999 movie ever again, this is it. It’s like the opposite of joy, the opposite of exhilaration.

Professor Kuhn appears to be completely obsessed with the word “space”. Let us open a page at random – p15 – and check every tenth page from there, missing out the ones which are just photographs :

P15

Home is the starting point of his explorations of the spaces that lie outside it


P 25

It is through the nature of its spaces, combined with blah blah

P37

Adjoining the Gillespies’ flat are several spaces


P47

In part because its spatial relationship with the film’s other settings…blah blah

P55

The canal is introduced through two point-of-view shots, which means that this space is initially mediated blah blah

P66

Significantly, too, the space is no longer James’s alone

P75

The first time the new house is seen, the connection of this space with the everyday “real” spaces of home and neighbourhood blah blah

So – see this movie, avoid this academic like a plague of zombies.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ratcatcher is a great film and one that I feel doesn’t get the exposure it deserves. So, I’m grateful to the BFI for commissioning this volume for the BFI Film Classics series, and book’s author, Annette Kuhn. I found the book a thoroughly enjoyed read and one that I’m sure will enhance future viewings of the film.

[Ross Maclean · Rating 3 out of 5]

A little on the dry and academic side for me, as far as the BFI Classics series goes. There’s no argument that its points are salient and it certainly enriched my thinking about the film, but the structure is alienating and details of the production and the context in which it was made come too late on when the bulk of the book has been spent breaking the film down, location by location.