Lynne Ramsay - The Poetry of Details

Hi my name is Tony and
this is Every Frame a Painting.

When I say a film is poetic,
what pops into your head?

Do you think it's slow?
Pretentious? Plotless?

"Is she gonna wake up and do something?"

These are the clichés.
-"No."

But to me, poetry in cinema is when
I can ignore the plot

and just appreciate the picture and
the sound doing something unique.

Scorsese: "The films that I constantly
revisited or saw repeatedly...

...held up longer for me over the years
not because of plot...

...but because of character...

and a very different approach to story."

"The Wrong Man, for example. I talked
about the paranoid camera moves

the feelings of threat, the fear,
the anxiety, the paranoia

it’s all done through the camera
and the person’s face."

-"It is the same."

Lynne Ramsay’s work
has this same quality.

Everything is conveyed through the
camera, the person’s face & the details

"Some things I shoot are very controlled
I know exactly why I want them...

...I will spend ages to get that exactly
right and it’s because for me...

...the details in that are saying
everything about the scene."

But what can we learn from a detail?

Here’s an example. In this scene, a son
taunts his mother by misbehaving

just before his father…

-"Hey guys."

-"Hey dad, how was work?
Take any cool pictures?"

Notice that the father is placed
just on the edge of the frame,

because while he’s around,
he doesn’t really pay attention.

Later on,
when he tries to ignore her fears

-"He’s a sweet little boy.
That’s what boys do."

We still don't see his face.
Instead, we get this shot.

What does this detail tell us? Literally
they haven’t cleaned up the mess

and it's gotten worse.
But what about metaphorically?

What does this say about
them and their son?

What’s interesting about
Lynne Ramsay’s work

is that the entire story is implied
through these detail shots.

And she doesn’t get this effect
by putting lots of stuff in the frame

but by taking things out, so that
you focus on one detail at a time.

"I think that Robert Bresson had a
really good quote about that...

It was something like...

'When the image is doing everything,
don’t have any sound.'

“And when the sound’s doing everything,
don’t have any image."

I mean, don’t do something
too fancy with image."

This is one thing film is great at:
evoking a state of mind

purely through image and sound.

When you work like this
everything depends

on the framing, the person’s face,
and the repetition of details.

So let's go one by one.
First, the framing.

Ramsay often frames so that important
information is cut off from the viewer.

Notice here,
we never see the woman’s eyes.

Meanwhile here, we have a character
who’s literally cut in half by a door.

In all of these shots,
you can guess what someone is feeling

but the frame doesn’t let you
see them in full.

"There's no place like home.
No place like home."

So as an audience, you’re never told
what to feel about these people.

There’s something mysterious about them.

Which brings us to #2: faces.

I don’t know why, but some people just
look right when you put them onscreen.

Even when they aren’t professionals.

In most of her work, Ramsay mixes
professional and non-professional actors

until the two are indistinguishable.

"The best actors for me are the people
who are like non-professional actors...

...You can’t tell where the film
ends or begins...

...As if they were the same offscreen.
They just feel real."

And she picks people who can convey
what’s going on inside their head

without any dialogue.

"He's the double of my Ryan, innit he?
The same eyes."

And #3, there’s
the repetition of certain details.

When you’re watching one of these films,
pay attention how & when images repeat

For instance, notice how mother and son
imitate each other’s body language.

And in the next shot, they do the
exact same thing, ten years later.

At one point, the son
does this with his fingernails

While later in the film, his mother
does the same thing with eggshells.

A more conventional film might
explain the meaning of this

but here, all we get is one image.
And then another.

And we have to work out
the connection for ourselves.

So let’s consider all this over
the course of a single short film.

This is Gasman, made in 1997.

I’m not going to tell you the
big plot point. I’m just going to show

some details from before and after.
See if you can guess what’s happening.

"Gonna lift me up, daddy?"

At the beginning of the film, Lynne and
her father meet a girl on the tracks.

A girl she doesn't know.

Before the event, they bond over
her dress and hold hands.

Notice this shot chops off their heads.

After the event, we see them
holding hands again, but this time...

-"What’s the matter?"
-"She’s hurting me."

To appease them, Lynne’s father
picks them up and does this.

Which mirrors the beginning of the film,
when he did the same with just Lynne.

At the end, the other girl
rejoins her mother.

And we’re left on the tracks,
watching the back of Lynne’s head.

Can you infer what’s going on?

What if I showed you this?

Get it now?

A film like this is basically a before
and after portrait of one kid’s mind

presented through parallel images
and situations.

In other words, it’s indirect.
Poetic filmmaking.

It might not hit you while you watch it
but it can linger long afterwards.

-"So then what you're saying,
it's the eye that's going to captivate-"

-"The vision, the vision that he puts
on the film, which I… the vision...

meaning the actual picture in the frame
and what he puts in the film."

-"Which is, I imagine,
the way a painter would...

...in terms of his aesthetic."
-"Exactly."

-"Ow!"

-"For God's sake,
look at the state of my curtain."

-"Because it opens up every possibility
for sound, for sight, for form."

Exactly.
There aren’t many films like this

and they teach us a very
different way of making movies.

Instead of going big, they go small.

They focus on details.

They show us less instead of more.

And through simplicity,
they find poetry.

And if anybody ever asks you
what poetry means…

I don’t know, make something up.