Robin Ramsay (editor)

Transcription

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.