Great short by Ramsay

Hi All

If you’re into drama and/or art house films this one is a must see. It’s a fine little piece of Cinéma Vérité. It’s about working class people and about a very mundane and “boring” event in everyday life. About living separate lives with shared kids. Unless you are very interested in, and knowledgeable about, film, you must probably be older than, say, twenty, to appreciate it. And I said “Probably”! If you know what I mean when I say “The red Shoes” (or, more precisely, “ruby slippers”), and “There is no place like home”, you are definitely “in”, regardless of age.

As in all true Cinéma Vérité the story is very realistic, but told with a rather elaborate film language (e. g. there is a very short, funny and heart-warming reference to one of the worlds most well-known feature films), and edited as drama rather than as a doc.

It’s shot on 35 mm by Kuchler, and edited by L Zucchetti and has a run time (on DVD read by NTSC) of 15 min. I have only watched it on the Criterion edition of “Ratcatcher”, and here the image quality is pretty bad. Strange really, since Criterion makes the best transfers to DVD. But the cam work and lighting is still excellent. There is a night shot where you see people walking along rails; all, except the rails, is in deep shadow, but the rails shine brightly, and make a very beautiful graphic image. A job well done by the lighting and cam guys indeed.

This film is “family” also in production; one of the kid protagonists is played by Lynne Ramsay junior. Must be pretty hard work to “direct” your own kid daughter, especially as she seems just as rebellious as her mother the filmmaker.

Female filmmakers make better drama films than male (Truffaut, Wong Kar-Wai and Almodóvar are some of the very few exceptions to this rule), simply because females are far more sensitive and receptive to complex social structures than males. Females (regardless of race and culture) are socially more intelligent than males. See the works by S. Baron-Cohen et al for solid evidences for this.

Would be nice to hear from you who appreciated this film. And of course also from you who did not appreciate it, but are capable of doing an objective and well-informed analysis (no, you will not sway me; no way, but I’ll read and seriously consider your arguments).

This is fine film work: it should not be left out in oblivion to die – so please chime in!




cine

"Why is it that men are so much more interested in women than women in men?"
Virginia Woolf