Ratcatcher 9781838719487, 9781838719494, 9781838719463

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BFI Film Classics

The BFI Film Classics series introduces, interprets and celebrates landmarks of world cinema. Each volume offers an argument for the film’s ‘classic’ status, together with discussion of its production and reception history, its place within a genre or national cinema, an account of its technical and aesthetic importance, and in many cases, the author’s personal response to the film. For a full list of titles in the series, please visit https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/series/bfi-film-classics/

Ratcatcher Annette Kuhn

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in 2008 by Palgrave Macmillan This edition first published in 2020 by Bloomsbury on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of filmmakers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Annette Kuhn, 2008, 2020 Annette Kuhn has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. 6 constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover artwork: © Rania Moudarres Series cover design: Louise Dugdale Series text design: ketchup/SE14 Images from Ratcatcher © 1999 Pathé Fund Limited All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. ISBN:

PB: 978-1-8387-1948-7 ePDF: 978-1-8387-1946-3 ePUB: 978-1-8387-1947-0

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Contents Acknowledgments

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1 Understanding Ratcatcher

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2 Plot

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3 Home

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4 Around home

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5 Margaret Anne’s

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6 The canal

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7 The new house

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8 Pathways

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9 Making Ratcatcher

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10 ‘God is in the details’: the director speaks

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Notes

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Credits

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Acknowledgments For encouragement and practical help and support of many kinds, I am deeply grateful to Jean Barr, Jonathan Murray, Barbara McKissack, B. Ruby Rich, Jane Routh, Richard Rushton and Professor Philip Schlesinger. My warmest thanks also to colleagues at Stockholm University: Tytti Soila, Anu Koivunen and the organisers of the ‘Looking Relations’ conference, and Christopher Natzén and the students on my Spring 2006 course ‘Frame, Space, Time’; to Professor David Buckingham of the Institute of Education, University of London, for arranging a Visiting Fellowship; and to Professor Peter Evans and colleagues at Queen Mary, University of London, for their warm welcome. Elizabeth Macdonald of the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, and Rosemary Dohelsky of the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, supplied materials from the Scottish press. Some of the work towards this book was conducted during a period of research leave funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council.

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1 Understanding Ratcatcher I first saw Ratcatcher during its general release in late 1999. The film had premiered at Cannes in May that year, and opened the Edinburgh International Film Festival in August – to rave reviews on both occasions. All this had passed me by. Either that, or the critics’ words had been inadequate preparation for what turned out to be a powerful and intense cinematic experience. I truly felt I had discovered this film – for me, the year’s best – all by myself. Since then, I have seen Ratcatcher countless times. It is one of those rare films that open your eyes to fresh ways of seeing; equally rarely, it is a film that offers up something new on every repeat viewing. While it would be futile to attempt to list all of the memorable images and passages in Ratcatcher, a look at two sequences in the film, which for me never fail to elicit what can best be described as a serenely exhilarating sense of wonder, may begin to convey something of the film’s uniquely affecting quality. Four or five minutes into the film, there is a long take – it runs for about thirty seconds, and is almost a sequence shot – in which one of the main characters is seen walking, screen left to screen right, along a scruffy-looking street, carrying bags of shopping. In the foreground, boys are kicking a football about, and in the background girls are chalking on the pavement. Another woman passes in the opposite direction and a few words are exchanged (p. 44, top right). The first woman turns, walks towards camera, and passes out of frame. For a few seconds, as the camera tracks back to disclose the street scene in wider view, we see the children playing in the street. Then, as the camera’s slow retreat continues, the edges of an entranceway appear on either side of the frame. The background sounds (children’s voices, a police siren, the woman’s footsteps) fade; then there is complete silence. The soundless backwards track

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continues for another six seconds or so until the street view, framed by the entryway, is held briefly in the middle portion of the frame. It is those final six seconds – which in one sense are redundant, in that the shot has already done the work of introducing a key setting and character – that seem so powerfully engaging. This response certainly has something to do with the combination of the slow pace of the retreating camera and the way the edges of the screen are breached, and then gradually encroached upon, to produce a frame within a frame that at once condenses, intensifies and distances the activities on the street. This, along with the silencing of the ambient sounds, lends the moment a meditative, almost dreamlike, quality. The passage is all the more powerful in that, within a single shot, it transports the viewer from one world and one kind of consciousness into another, from the spaces of social document (children playing in a slum street) and then drama (establishing setting and character) to a space of reverie. Then, close to halfway through the film, there is a scene in which the protagonist, a young boy, is exploring a partially built house. At a certain point, he peers into a room and sees on the far wall a view of a bright golden cornfield, framed by an opening that will one day be a window (p. 64). As the camera slowly tracks forward, the character, seen from behind, enters frame left. The forward movements of camera and character towards the view continue; the boy jumps up onto the window sill. The movement halts briefly as the boy is silhouetted against the bright field. As he jumps down to the other side, the movement resumes as, slowly, the edges of the window opening merge with, and then disappear beyond, the edges of the film frame, and the entire screen is filled with the dazzling golden field and blue sky. Unlike the track back from the street in the earlier passage, this is marked as a point-of-view shot, and as such is more clearly tied in to the film’s narrative flow as this is figured through the protagonist’s discovery and exploration of an unfamiliar, fascinating place. At the same time, the world visible through the window opening, the slow movement towards it, and finally the trope of climbing into that

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world ‘with’ the character invite a bodily response that exceeds any engagement with the story or identification with the character. The light-saturated view itself, framed as it is like a picture on the wall – or more aptly, perhaps, like a film on a cinema screen – offers the vision of an intriguing, inviting – altogether different – world.1 The underscoring of the film’s haunting musical theme throughout the passage intensifies the otherworldliness of the space that is framed and contained by the window opening, and sustains the curious satisfaction that is derived from the moment when the frame of the picture melts into and beyond the film frame as we enter fully into that other world. The entire shot, involving as it does a steady, slow forward movement towards an image at a distance, an image that eventually fills the entire film frame, is formally reminiscent of Michael Snow’s rich, rigorous and relentlessly self-reflexive forty-fiveminute experimental film Wavelength (1967).2 While it would be misleading to posit an equivalence between the two, the similarities are nonetheless telling in that in both, the ‘frame within a frame’ contains an elemental image – waves in the Snow film, a field of wheat in Ratcatcher – an image that contrasts in every way with each film’s surrounding ‘real’ world; and that in both films, cinema’s unique capacity to draw the viewer into the worlds that it creates is, paradoxically, both alluded to and enacted, inviting a response that combines involvement and distance. These two shots in Ratcatcher – a slow, silent backward track into an entryway; a forward movement towards, and then into, a view seen through a window – evoke responses that engage the body and the psyche in powerful, wordless ways. The direction and pace of the camera movements direct attention towards, and build tension around, the ever-changing activity at the edges of the film frame; while the double framings simultaneously draw the viewer into, and call attention to the virtual nature of, the film’s spaces. There are many moments in Ratcatcher, too, that are striking not for their movement but for their stillness. These resonate in the imagination as iconic, peculiarly memorable, images; and include a

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number of meticulously composed, long-drawn-out shots of characters held in stasis (top left) and moments stretched out in time in slowed-down images (top right). Certain resonant images and compositions recur, with variations, throughout the film (bottom left and right), as well as lingering close-ups of characters’ faces (p. 11). Every one of these images – beautifully composed, and stunningly lit – is pleasing in itself even when, as so often in a film that persistently seeks out the beautiful in the ugly, the content may be unsettling, even brutal. Looked at within the context of the film as a whole, such ‘still’ images acquire additional nuance, because in their very stasis, their silence, they insert punctuations or interruptions into a medium whose defining characteristics are motion and sound: in halting the flow of the sounds and images that surround them, they become doubly powerful. Paradoxically, perhaps, it is this very play of stillness and movement that makes Ratcatcher such an extraordinarily cinematic film. By this I mean that Ratcatcher finds fresh ways of (Top left) This shot, underscored with the film’s musical theme, runs for almost twenty seconds; (top right) this slow-motion shot, with barely audible sound of dogs barking, runs for thirteen seconds

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using all of the expressive means that make cinema different from every other medium, that make cinema capable of offering a unique kind of aesthetic experience. Cinema unfolds over time; it can marry – and divorce – sounds and images; through editing it can bring together disparate spaces, and disconnect adjacent ones. And as it does all this, it also draws on the indexical qualities of the (Top) This shot of James is held for five seconds, without sound; (bottom) the face of the drowned Ryan

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photographic image to conjure a world that resembles the one we normally inhabit, and yet is at the same time self-evidently virtual. Cinema creates paradoxical worlds, worlds that are imaginary while alluding to the (or a) ‘real’ world.3 It is often suggested that cinema’s many and varied expressive qualities give it a privileged relationship with, and potential for, what the experimental film-maker Maya Deren called the ‘poetic construct’. Because it can manipulate both time and space, film is particularly well equipped, suggested Deren, to conduct ‘a “vertical” investigation of a situation … that … probes the ramifications of the moment, and is concerned with its qualities and its depth’.4 In film, as in no other medium, the active forward movement that characterises narrative and drama (what Deren called the horizontal plane of development) can combine with the in-depth ‘vertical’ investigation, the exploration of a detail or a moment, that distinguishes poetry. In film, an action, an image, can be slowed down or brought to stillness; a moment can be stretched out (horizontally) in time so that it can be contemplated (vertically) in depth. In this way, film can accommodate a meditative attitude that is akin to reverie.5 There is a great deal in Ratcatcher that resonates with, and is illuminated by, these formulations on film poetry and the poetic in film: lingering, thoughtfully composed, motionless or near-motionless images; slow, silent explorations of spaces; intense, searching closeups; visual rhymes; recurrent visual and auditory motifs. These are woven through the film, cutting across its ‘horizontal development’ and offering explorations in depth of its different settings and themes. A visual motif of immersion, for example, runs throughout the film, recurring in different contexts and signifying both domesticity and danger. Windows also figure repeatedly, with multiple and changing meanings.6 Virtually all the point-of-view shots in the film are through windows, and all of the windows in the film appear to be there to be looked through. Beyond them lie views that intrigue, or frighten, or both: views that entice characters, sometimes into enchantment, sometimes into danger. In the second of the shots

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discussed earlier, the window figures as an open sesame to a strange and magical world; and yet later in the film, the same window becomes a barrier. Many of the film’s poetic moments signal a shift of realities – in both the film’s world and the protagonist’s relation to his world. They mark an entry into an inner world, a world separate and different from, and yet still to be found within, the everyday. The shot of the boy’s view of the field through the open window space creates one such moment. In the passage immediately preceding this, he is seen moving through other areas of the half-finished house. In a pair of shots reminiscent of a passage in Deren’s Meshes of the Afternoon (1943), his slow, entranced exploration of the stairway assumes the stretched-out, time-bending quality of film poetry (below and p. 14). In another poetic moment, a slow track left across the white wall of an empty room, in which the boy appears at both the beginning and the end of the shot, bends space as well as time (p. 63). Indeed, the entire passage in which the new house is explored has the spatially unsettling quality of films in the ‘psychodrama’ subgenre of experimental cinema, most famously represented, in fact, by Deren’s work: her Meshes of the Afternoon, for example, charts a young

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woman’s dreamlike exploration of a strange-familiar house whose spaces seem at once reassuring and threatening. In Ratcatcher, such ‘poetic’ moments are sometimes silent and at other times underscored by the film’s musical theme. In either case, the soundtrack signals a change of register, a move into a mood of (Bottom) From Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, 1943)

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reverie or imagination. A fading, muffling or near-absence of sound carries similar meaning: the film’s opening shot, for instance, with its extremely slowed-down image of a boy’s head wrapped around in a net curtain (p. 57), is accompanied by distant, barely audible, sounds of children playing. In the scene in which the protagonist explores the new house, silence as he explores the stairway gives way, at the moment he enters the room with the window and the view, to the musical theme.7 It is in its poetic moments above all that the film’s overarching themes are visited: death, rebirth, homecoming. The protagonist’s home is at the heart of Ratcatcher’s universe. Home is the starting point of his – and the film’s – explorations of the spaces that lie outside it, and the point of return from all these odysseys. The film’s rhythm and flow are in fact organised around these movements from home to various spaces beyond, and back again. Home, too, looks and feels very different from the film’s other settings. This is the place where the daily routines and activities, reassuring and troubling, of family life are played out: watching television, bath night, quarrels with siblings. Like Terence Davies’s Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988), Ratcatcher evokes the feeling tone of working-class home life – from the inside, from a child’s standpoint and, in Ratcatcher, entirely without nostalgia. Although the childhood home figures quite differently in the two films (Distant Voices, Still Lives is above all a much more interior film than Ratcatcher), both take it as read that meaning, and food for the imagination, lie in the everyday details of the most apparently unglamorous of lives. A meditative (‘vertical’) look at commonplace details, activities and gestures, of the kind that normally go unregarded, encapsulates what Davies has called ‘the poetry of the ordinary’: ‘You can say important things by concentrating on the small. … And I think you can do that for ordinary people because I do passionately believe in the poetry of the ordinary.’8 Davies’s view is that the numinous can be present in the most familiar, even unprepossessing, of circumstances; and above all that it can be found in the places and the activities of childhood. The ‘home’

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passages in Ratcatcher have exactly this quality. There is something of the transcendent in the way the film lays out the sensuous, tactile detail – clearly ‘excessive’ in narrative terms – of, for example, the family’s Saturday-night rituals, or the protagonist’s twice-repeated gesture of pulling his sleeping mother’s laddered stocking over her toe.

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Ratcatcher’s characters and settings – a working-class family living in a Glasgow slum tenement – might suggest that the film belongs to the tradition of social realism that is widely regarded as a distinguishing mark of British cinema, from the British New Wave of the 1960s to the contemporary social problem films of Ken Loach and Mike Leigh. But the comparison does not stand up even to minimal scrutiny, because the (possibly ‘diffuse’9) realism of the film’s settings is constantly brought up against its poetic elements. If realism is not a particularly useful critical category with which to approach the film, though, Ratcatcher does set up and weave together several levels of ‘reality’ (including a social realist one). These different realities are in part associated with the film’s various settings – but only in part. In fact, one of the film’s unique qualities is the way its various levels of reality imbue each setting in overlapping, and sometimes changing, ways. Scenes of children playing in the street recall the documentary realism of film-makers and photographers like Denis Mitchell, Bert Hardy and Oscar Marzaroli.10 The shabby inner-urban and industrial landscapes, the desultory comings and goings of adolescent boys, a working-class household with mother at the centre, an edgy father–son relationship – all recall the social realism of Free Cinema and the British New Wave. There are elements of the social problem film, too, in allusions to the historical actualities of a dustmen’s strike and housing problems in Glasgow.11 However, none of these realities – documentary, drama of working-class life, social history, referencing as they do an outer, social, world – dominates the film, either separately or collectively. Rather, they are set against, and qualified by, ‘realities’ that are best described as inner, imaginal, even fantastic: in the protagonist’s exploration of a half-built house, in his contemplation of a magical bright and sunny golden field; when ordinary reality morphs into poetic reverie within the space of a single shot; or when the out-and-out fantastic bursts into the space of the everyday, as in a scene that ends when a white mouse is launched into the air, tied to a balloon, and is next seen landing on the Moon

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(pp. 42–3). Moreover, the film’s key themes and motifs repeatedly ‘cross’ realities, changing their meanings in the process: so, for example, the social-historical actuality of housing shortages resurfaces, transformed, in a boy’s dream of a new home; while the motif of immersion passes between themes of friendship, housing, death and rebirth. Because Ratcatcher weaves together – at the level of images, sounds, motifs, themes – several realities in an extraordinarily complex manner, it can bring together and explore the relationships and rifts between outer and inner worlds, worlds of external reality and worlds of imagination and fantasy. In this way, the film finds unique ways of looking at the transcendence to be found in ugliness, waste and detritus; of showing how danger, death, epiphany and redemption may imbue the familiar and the everyday. This makes the question of ‘what happens’ in Ratcatcher, especially in its ending, unanswerable in any straightforward way. Because the film weaves together different realities, the question of narrative resolution is something of an irrelevance: if there is no single world in the film, then there is no simple resolution. Its repetitions and its recurrent thematic and visual motifs lend the film a cyclical quality, a circularity, as against a linearity or a closure. In particular, the trope of immersion and the motif of the window top and tail the film in a manner that suggests a forward movement that is also a return, much as rebirth is always implicit in death.12 It is this cycle, this return, that is figured in the film’s enigmatic double ending: a rebirth through baptism, and a homecoming.

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2 Plot Because Ratcatcher is decidedly not dominated by any forward narrative movement, watching the film for its story alone is likely to be a frustrating experience. For those whose taste in film runs to tight plotting and plenty of action, Ratcatcher will feel slow, and lacking in incident. This is not to say that the film has no plot, however. On the contrary, a close look at Ratcatcher’s narrative reveals that in the course of the film, several plotlines are set up, worked through, and even brought to resolution – though not necessarily to closure in the classical sense. While a reading of Ratcatcher in terms of its plot alone is probably not the most rewarding approach to the film, it does open up ways of understanding details that may at first sight seem opaque or unrelated to any narrative. Above all, it sheds light on how elements of plot weave through and interact with the film’s settings, mise en scène and visual and auditory motifs; or, in Maya Deren’s terms, how the film works together horizontal development and vertical investigation. Set in mid-1970s Glasgow during a dustmen’s strike, Ratcatcher centres on twelve-year-old James Gillespie, who playfully pushes his friend, Ryan Quinn, into a canal. Ryan drowns. James seems haunted by this and withdraws from his family, who are hoping to be rehoused. James relates mainly to other vulnerable children: Margaret Anne, who is being sexually abused by a local gang of boys; and Kenny, who has speech difficulties. Mysteriously, James’s elder sister, Ellen, is seen catching a bus to an unknown destination. When James tries to follow her, he discovers a new, semi-rural, housing estate. James’s father, George Gillespie, is acclaimed as a local hero after rescuing Kenny from the canal, and is rewarded with a medal for bravery. After the presentation ceremony, George gets drunk and is attacked by a gang of youths. Back home, a party in his honour

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ends abruptly when a bloodied George picks on James and slaps his mother. James runs away, seeking solace first with Margaret Anne, and then at the new housing estate. He finally returns home, to find that the bin strike has ended and the rubbish taken away by the army. He also discovers Margaret Anne having sex with the older boys. He picks a fight with Kenny, who blurts out that he saw James ‘kill’ Ryan. James is next seen apparently throwing himself into the canal. In the final scene, the whole family, including James, is seen coming in procession over a golden field of wheat to arrive at their new house. Reduced to its plot, Ratcatcher seems an ordinary enough story about a boy who is dealing with issues of family, friendship, love and loss of innocence. The action clearly takes place in summer, and over a fairly short stretch of time – according to the published script just ten days13 – and the narration is entirely linear, unbroken by major ellipses, flashbacks or other temporal disjunctions. Although the film is set in the 1970s, signifiers of ‘pastness’ are understated and the narration maintains a continuous present: Ratcatcher, in other words, is neither a heritage film nor a memory text.14 Alongside the story’s straightforward temporal organisation, Ratcatcher’s settings are, with several significant exceptions, coherently laid out. This is a world that revolves around the Gillespies’ flat, tenement and neighbourhood; the canal; the flat where Margaret Anne lives; and the new housing estate. There is nothing complicated, then, about either the film’s narration or, for the most part, its settings. If Ratcatcher does not come across as a conventional sort of narrative film, this has nothing to do with its plot, a breakdown of which throws into relief the story’s spareness, simplicity and clear forward movement.15 The story is set in motion by Ryan’s drowning, which takes place just under four minutes into the film, and is the culmination of a series of opening shots centred on the Quinn family. The scenes that follow, showing the aftermath of the drowning for the Quinns, set out what will be the key features of the film’s settings: the run-down neighbourhood, the bags of uncollected rubbish, the tenement building and its surroundings, the street, the canal. James’s first

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appearance is in a point-of-view shot: Ryan looks out of a window of his flat and sees his friend in the distance, throwing stones into the canal (p. 53). After the drowning, we see James’s mother in the street, on her way home with bags of shopping. She goes into the tenement entrance, and is next seen on an inner landing, anxiously looking out of a window. On the canal bank in the distance, she sees a boy’s body. She waits in her kitchen. James bursts in, breathless. Ma hugs him tightly and wordlessly. Next, Ryan’s hearse draws up on the street outside the tenement. The pavement is littered with bin bags. Among the onlookers are James’s father with some friends, and his mother and sisters. From a distance, James watches the hearse drive by. Here a key plotline, Ryan’s drowning, is introduced along, less overtly, with another – the bin strike. The next sequence takes us into the Gillespies’ flat and shows the family members going about their daily activities and routines. The strike and the health hazards it poses are now explicitly alluded to, in the RP tones of a television report warning that the rubbish will attract rats, ‘notorious vectors of disease’. A third plot strand – the family’s housing need – is introduced when Da presents Ma with a tin of paint that he proposes to use to brighten up the flat. ‘What’s the point?’ enquires Ma. ‘We’re moving.’ ‘Aye, aye, maybe,’ Da replies, sceptically. All three threads – the drowning, the bin strike and the Gillespies’ need for somewhere else to live – are woven and worked through the film’s narrative in different ways, along with a fourth, centring on James’s changing relationships with his friends, especially Margaret Anne and Kenny. Each plotline is eventually brought to some sort of resolution, though a good deal of the plot’s working through takes place implicitly, through the film’s images and background sounds, rather than explicitly, through dialogue and action. The most unambiguously resolved of the plot strands, the binmen’s strike, is the one least spoken about by characters in the film. We hear about the strike’s conclusion in a television news programme that James and Margaret Anne watch after taking a bath together. Later, James’s disappointing second visit to the new house after witnessing his

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father slapping his mother, and then his break with Margaret Anne and Kenny, pave the way for his leap into the canal in the film’s epilogue. Here, the fuzzy, slow-motion image of James underwater makes a rhyme with the early scene in which Ryan drowns. The rhyme functions most obviously as a visual trope, but it also marks a kind of closing off, a coming full circle, of one element of the film’s plot. At the level of action, James’s immersion is plausibly readable as a kind of resolution – a death for a death or, at a personal level, expiation for his guilty involvement in his friend’s drowning. However, the film does not privilege, nor even really invite, such readings, because the emphasis here is on image rather than on plot and action, and the visual rhyme produces an excess, overlaying the ‘death for a death’ narrative reading with another, contradictory, meaning centred on baptism and rebirth. In any event, the next and final scene would certainly cast doubt upon any literal ‘death-for-a-death’ interpretation. For this passage, in which the Gillespies and friends parade, bearing the family’s belongings, over the field towards the new house, offers resolution of a kind to the plot strand that centres on the family’s need for better housing. The housing problem is also the only plotline that is explicitly worked through at several levels of ‘reality’ in the film.

James’s first immersion in the canal

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First of all, the scene in which the local authority housing officers come to the Gillespies’ flat to assess their living conditions alludes, if only glancingly, to the social issue of housing need. Secondly, and more pervasively, the family’s own take on their housing situation comes up in a number of conversations at moments in the film when, uncharacteristically, the plot is moved along through dialogue. Thirdly, the housing question surfaces obliquely, but forcefully, throughout the film as James’s fantasy or wish. This is made apparent largely visually, in passages – including scenes set in and around the new house – that unfold as ‘poetic’ explorations of a moment, marked by slow motion, silence or underscoring by the film’s trancelike musical theme. It also surfaces, less abstractly, in passages that allude implicitly to the joys of the indoor plumbing lacking in his own home: James trying out the unplumbed bath and toilet in the new house, the bath scene at Margaret Anne’s flat. The three levels of ‘reality’ – social, familial, fantasy – collide in the poignantly comic scene in the Gillespies’ flat when James quizzes the bemused housing officers: ‘Will we get a big house with a bath, a toilet and a field?’ A structural analysis of Ratcatcher’s narrative might conclude that the final scene offers a resolution of the housing-need plot strand. And yet in terms of the ensemble of the film’s realities, this is James’s second immersion in the canal

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not a full closure, because it rounds off only the aspect of the housing problem that is figured through James’s desire and imagination. At the social and the familial levels, nothing has changed. Beyond Da’s accusation that if the family don’t get a new house, it will be James’s fault, the consequences of the housing officers’ visit are not explored further. Nor does the film concern itself with any efforts on the Gillespies’ part to get themselves rehoused: in terms of the film’s worlds, this would be simply an irrelevance. Looked at through James’s desire, though, the final, ‘homecoming’ scene makes perfect sense and offers a plausible ending, if not an unambiguous resolution, to this strand of the film’s plot. If James’s immersion in the canal in the previous scene constitutes a closing rhyme at the level of the expressiveness of the film image, this scene offers a closure that is plausible and meaningful within the child’s world. It works in this way because the film sets out a world that is seen, understood and inhabited from James’s standpoint, effectively recreating the spaces of a childhood world as James inhabits and relates to them – with familiarity, fascination or uncertainty. However, one of the many intriguing paradoxes of Ratcatcher is that while James’s standpoint is at its centre, no access is given to the boy’s state of mind. He does not talk about Ryan’s death or his feelings about it. And because James makes his first appearance just before the drowning scene, the film offers no point of comparison between his behaviour before the accident and after it. Any clues as to whether or how he has been affected by the event have to be read from James’s blankly eloquent face, seen in an intense cut-in close-up as he runs away from the scene of the drowning (p . 11). In terms of the tenets of psychological realism, any assumptions derived from the narrative about James’s feelings about, and outward response to, the accident are largely just that – assumptions. On the other hand, the plot trajectory, with Ryan’s death the event that sets the story in motion and the film’s subsequent close pursuit of James’s actions, would certainly allow for an interpretation that sees James as suffering from guilt or trauma, and that regards the film’s story as

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being about a boy learning the hard lessons of love, friendship, family loyalty and loss. Moreover, a convincing argument can be advanced that ‘the tempo and disruption of traumatic experience’ are expressed through Ratcatcher’s very matters of expression, in the ‘slowness, stillness and numbness’ with which the film unfolds.16 However, this only serves to underline the fact that there is more to Ratcatcher than just plot and character. That said, the film succeeds in evoking psychological states without attaching them to particular characters, and without resorting to dialogue to describe or explain anything about these states. Consequently, it offers no possibility of identification with James in the classic sense. Rather, it promotes, and yet simultaneously counters, a certain detachment with regard to the boy’s state of mind. Aside from the bin strike, which figures as a backdrop, and throws up themes and motifs that key into the other issues worked through in the film, the two main concerns for the plot are Ryan’s drowning and its aftermath – including James’s relationships with his other friends – and the Gillespies’ housing need. Both are worked through in relation to the central character, James, and the world that he inhabits. At the same time, through its detached quality, James’s standpoint, which orders Ratcatcher’s world, stands in for a more general childhood consciousness. The film’s double ending addresses, separately, the plotlines relating to Ryan’s drowning on the one hand and to the Gillespies’ housing need on the other. Taken together, the two endings can be said to satisfy the desire for both narrative resolution and a ‘happy ending’ – but in an ambiguous, enigmatic and possibly ironic way. If the engagements invited by Ratcatcher have nothing to do with identification with its characters or plot, they have everything to do with the kind of world the film creates through its distinctive deployment of cinematic language. Considered cinematically, Ratcatcher’s world is distinguished by the very particular way its settings and spaces are composed and framed in the image and juxtaposed in the editing. It is through the nature of its spaces,

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combined with a certain spareness and economy in the editing, that the film’s compelling world emerges. The main setting is James’s home, which figures as a kind of fulcrum, a point of stillness at the centre of a series of repeated outward movements that extend to the tenement building, the street, the canal and finally the new housing estate. The film is so insistently organised around these settings and their interrelationships that the spaces themselves emerge as key protagonists. The lineaments of a childhood landscape, as they revolve around home and its nearby places, are put into the frame, with James the locus of movement in and through them. If Ratcatcher is about childhood, this has as much, or more, to do with the fact that childhood preoccupations are written into the film’s very spaces and their organisation than with any narrative themes or plotlines. In this respect, an examination of the spaces and places that figure in the film and how they interconnect, cinematically, is instructive. In order of proximity to the Gillespies’ flat, Ratcatcher’s main spaces are: the Gillespies’ tenement flat (‘home’); the tenement’s inner stair (the close); the tenement’s backyard (the back court); the street outside; the canal; Margaret Anne’s flat; and the new house and field. This rather confined geography sits comfortably with the limited time frame of the film’s plot. Significantly, all of these spaces are in some way or other connected with James. He appears in almost every scene, and all the film’s key settings are in effect James’s places: places that he passes through, places where he meets and spends time with friends and family.17 They are places he lives in, goes to, hangs around in, or passes through. In fact, Ratcatcher is organised largely around James’s passage between ‘home’ and ‘non-home’ spaces, and the film’s forward movement is in general governed by spaces – their interconnections and, significantly, their dis-connections. In this sense, the film’s human characters are subordinated to their settings: the Gillespies’ home, the spaces around home, Margaret Anne’s flat, the canal and the new house.

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3 Home The interior of the Gillespies’ flat, James’s home, is Ratcatcher’s pivotal location: it figures in every sequence of the film aside from the epilogue. Its first, brief, appearance comes early on, straight after Ryan’s drowning. Ma is seen standing in the kitchen area, alone. She has just seen a body that could be her son’s, or has perhaps witnessed James’s part in the accident. James rushes in, out of breath. They exchange looks. Ma’s protracted, wordless embrace of James is the first of a number of loving gestures between mother and son that identify their relationship as a central emotional vector in the film. The importance of home is further underlined in the next sequence, which includes the first of three lengthy passages set in the Gillespies’ flat and features all the family members: Ma, Da, James, Ellen and Anne Marie. On the day of Ryan’s funeral, James comes home late, to find Ma fast asleep, fully dressed. In close-up, we see Ma’s big toe protruding through a hole in her stocking. James gently

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pulls at the fabric to cover the exposed toe (p. 16, top). Da comes in, drunk, and slumps on the floor by Ma’s bed, watched disapprovingly by James. In the morning, Anne Marie finds a mouse by the bed, but Da warns her to leave it alone: ‘They’re vermin.’ James watches a television report about the bin strike. His parents exchange a few words about redecorating the flat and the possibility

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of moving house: Ma’s attitude to her husband is both affectionate and exasperated. Da’s shortlived enthusiasm for doing up the flat combines with scepticism about the family’s chances of being rehoused. In the outhouse in the back court, Anne Marie’s mouse is flushed down the toilet by Da. In the kitchen, James looks on desultorily as Ellen gets ready to go out; he pours a pile of salt onto the table and absently doodles a flower in it. Ellen refuses to say where she is going, but James spies on her from a window as she boards a bus in the street outside the flat. Da slumps on the white sofa to watch a football match on television, ordering James to fetch him a can of beer from the fridge. In the kitchen, James has a mock fight with Anne Marie. Da scolds James for taking a long time bringing the beer, while Anne Marie cosies up to her father and curries favour by telling him she likes football (pp. 30–1). James is next seen outside in the back court amid the bags of rubbish. He looks down and sees a dead rat. The meticulously drawn portrait of family life in this sequence conveys much about the Gillespies, how they live and their relationships with one another. This is a tender but far from sentimental picture that, with poetic economy, brings out the numinousness that lies inside the everyday. At the same time, strands of the film’s plot – the Gillespies’ housing situation, the bin strike and the mystery about Ellen’s comings and goings that will eventually lead to James’s discovery of the new house – are introduced.18 Most of this activity takes place without words: while there is dialogue throughout the sequence, meaning is conveyed largely through images and sounds. The brief shot of the mouse being dropped into the toilet, for instance, condenses into a single image the vermin versus non-vermin motif that runs through the film and, since the toilet is in an outhouse in the tenement’s back court, the plotline centred on the Gillespies’ housing situation. Like other scenes set in the flat, much of this sequence employs low-key lighting, and there are many tightly framed shots, giving the

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space a closed-in, interior feeling. This space is used only by the Gillespie family. On the three occasions later in the film when outsiders come calling, this feels troubling, disruptive: the man who comes to collect the rent doesn’t get past the front door; Kenny’s mother is close to hysteria when she bursts in, calling on Da to rescue Kenny from the canal; the housing officers enter the flat to find Da covered in mud, half-naked and confused. While the flat’s mise en scène is arranged to bring to mind a certain quality of ‘pastness’, this is understated, and there is certainly no overt 1970s retro feel about the décor and furniture: the place is in any case out of date and lacking in the modern conveniences of the time. In this respect, a contrast is drawn between the Gillespies’ home and Margaret Anne’s flat in a new high-rise block, where in 1970s terms the décor is more up to date. But while the Gillespies’ flat comes across in some ways as an enclosed world, we are occasionally reminded of its connection with the outside, above all in point-of-view shots of views from windows: it is in these that some of the flat’s adjacent spaces, above all the back court and the street, are set out. A second extended passage set inside the family’s flat follows James’s first visit to the new house. It opens with Tom

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Jones on television, singing ‘What’s New, Pussycat?’. Anne Marie, Ma and Da are watching. Da is getting tipsily affectionate with Ma. ‘Aye,’ she retorts, ‘I’m always gorgeous when you’re half cut.’ James is there, too. Ma shoots a wry grin towards the children: Da has fallen asleep, drooling. Next we see Anne Marie in a tin bathtub, laughing and blowing bubbles under the water: Ma hoists her up and scrubs her head with a bar of soap. James sprawls on the white sofa, scratching his head and watching a cartoon on television. Da is getting ready to go out. James protests when Da changes the channel to get the football results.19 Ma grabs James and, holding his head down on the table, starts combing out his nits. Before going out, Da takes some notes from his wage packet and leaves the rest on the mantel: ‘There’s your wages, hen.’ Still at work on James’s headlice, Ma asks Ellen to lift Anne Marie out of the tub. Ellen enquires if there is any news about the new house. ‘Still waiting,’ says Ma. James asks what the nits look like, and Ma shows him the comb. Framed in a tight close-up, the shot presents James’s face as a picture of serene contentment, and yet at the same time echoes the similarly composed shot of the dead Ryan’s face (p. 11).

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The wage packet, the bathtime rituals, the football results, father going out drinking and mother staying in with the children – all are readily recognisable as a family’s shared rituals and routines of a Saturday evening. Most of the activity takes place in one room – the flat only seems to have two – with the now-familiar white sofa and the television set featuring prominently. The confined spaces and the prevalence of tight framing and low-key lighting in the first part of the sequence again suggest a closed-off quality to the family’s life. At the same time, when James goes out to the back court with a bag of rubbish and falls into conversation with Kenny, we are reminded of the flat’s interconnectedness with the spaces next to it. The tin bath further underlines the inadequacies of the Gillespies’ living conditions; and yet the bathtime rituals also convey a comfortable intimacy about the family’s circumstances, which seem far from miserable or deprived. Period details remain understated, the only explicit 1970s reference perhaps being Tom Jones on the black-and-white television. The headlice, which might suggest poverty, have entirely other meanings in this context: they key into the vermin versus non-vermin motif that runs throughout the film; and as an occasion for a display of affection between mother and son, they also have a function in the film’s plot. The next morning, James takes the disinfectant, the soap and the nit comb to Margaret Anne’s flat and repeats his mother’s caring gesture on his friend. The third and last extended passage set in the Gillespies’ flat follows the bath scene at Margaret Anne’s. Again, each of the family members puts in an appearance at some point. When James comes home, he finds his father alone in the flat, fast asleep and covered in mud, having just dragged Kenny from the canal. Two officers from the Housing Department arrive to assess the family’s living conditions, and James lets them in. Da, half-awake and filthy dirty, bungles the interview and afterwards scolds James. We next see Ma helping Da get dressed to go to the ceremony where he will be presented with a bravery medal. After the ceremony, Ma and the

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three children wait at home for Da to join a family party in his honour. Ma puts on an Eddie Cochrane record and persuades James and Anne Marie to jive with her; Ellen refuses. Later, as Ma, Anne Marie and Ellen are dancing to ‘My Boy Lollipop’, a drunk and bloodied Da returns home, and slaps Ma. After this, the Gillespies’ flat is revisited twice. After seeing Da hit Ma, James runs back to Margaret Anne’s and spends the night there. While he is away, his parents make up: in a lingering low-key medium close-up, they hold each other close, dancing slowly to Sinatra’s ‘Something Stupid’. Finally, after the end of the strike, the disappointing return visit to the new house, and the breakups with Margaret Anne and Kenny, James is seen at home at night, stretched. out on the sofa in a shadowy overhead shot (p. 36). A sleepy Anne Marie comes in and asks, ‘Where have you been?’. She joins him on the sofa, and cuddles up. He tries to push her away, but eventually accepts her affectionate gesture. In the morning, James approaches his sleeping mother and, in a reprise of an earlier moment, pulls the worn stocking over her protruding toe (p. 16, bottom). For James, this is a homecoming, a return at the end of an odyssey. This could easily be an ending for the film, too; and the scene does indeed

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propose closure at one level, suggesting a circularity in the plotline centred on the Gillespie family’s world. As it is, though, it figures as precursor to the film’s epilogue, with its dual ending that signifies rebirth, and a homecoming of another kind.

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4 Around home Adjoining the Gillespies’ flat are several spaces, each with a distinctive character and function in the film. The close – the areas inside the tenement building that are shared by all the residents – comprises open back and front entranceways on the ground floor, as well as the stairs, inner landings and half-landings. The back court, the open area lying behind the tenement, is also shared by all the residents. A street runs past the front of the building, with a bus stop on the other side. The close, as its name suggests, is an enclosed space: while residents must pass through it when leaving and returning to their flats, its spaces cannot be seen either from the outside of the tenement, nor as a rule from inside the flats themselves. At once semipublic and out of sight, this is a closed-in place, full of dark corners and walls that you cannot see around. It can be a place of concealment; and by the same token, it can be a fearful place where monsters lurk around every next turn of the stair – the kind of place a child will feel compelled to hurry through, with bated breath and fingers crossed. And indeed, every appearance of the close in the film seems to herald mortality. The close is associated above all with Ryan’s death and its aftermath. The close is first seen in the film’s opening minutes, in a short scene that sets the uneasy, even morbid, tone of the place. Ryan hides from his mother in a corner inside the street entryway. Disobeying her, he untucks his jeans from his boots, before running off to the canal to join James – and to meet his fate. Later, on the day the Quinns move out of the tenement – to a new house, perhaps, though we are not told – there is a near-reprise of this scene. Ryan’s mother has given James the sandals, still unworn, that she bought for her son on the day of his death. James shrinks in superstitious horror and

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tries to refuse the gift: ‘They’re too wee,’ he protests; but his mother prevails. He is next seen concealing himself in the close entryway, just as Ryan had done. Picking up a piece of glass, he slashes the toes of the new shoes. Other scenes set in the close also emphasise the association between this space and Ryan’s death. Immediately after the drowning, James’s mother, standing at a window on a half-landing, looks out and sees Ryan’s body lying on the canal path. Soon after

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this, James comes home, rushing up the close stairs in a breathless panic. On the day of the Quinns’ move, an unwilling and terrified James is sent up to their empty flat to fetch Ryan’s sandals. At a turn of the close stair, he crashes into Ryan’s father and rushes on without a word, as the grief-stricken man sinks to the step, head in hands. The close is seen only once more, and again it is associated with the untoward. It is Saturday evening at the Gillespies’: Da is about to go out, but can’t find his cigarettes. We next see a shadowy figure inside the close entrance, lighting up. The figure emerges: it turns out to be James. He is carrying a rubbish bag, which he throws onto the mounting pile in the back court. From a window above, Kenny spots James and scurries down the close stair, carrying a cage containing his white mouse, Snowball. After some edgy horseplay involving Matt Monroe’s gang, Kenny dashes back

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up the close stair with the cage. He is next seen leaning out of his window, launching Snowball into the air, tied by the tail to a balloon. The appearance of the close in this scene sets up a parallel between the deathly fates of Ryan and Snowball on the one hand, and between the respective culpabilities of James and Kenny on the other. Later, when James accuses Kenny of killing Snowball, Kenny will retort by accusing him of killing Ryan. The tenement’s back court figures prominently throughout the film, especially during its first half. Overlooked by the rear windows of the surrounding tenements, in terms of visibility this space is the very opposite of the close. It is used as a playground by the younger children, including Anne Marie and her friends, who can remain within sight of the adults in the flats around and above. Here, too, are the outhouses with residents’ toilet facilities. The back court is a shared, but not a public, space, used by adults as well as children. It is here that the bags of rubbish pile up most rapidly and profusely; and the place becomes a grim playground, where children hurl refuse about, beating the bags with sticks to flush out rats. In one scene, Anne Marie sits on a pile of rubbish, legs akimbo, enjoying a ‘piece and jam’: the loud buzzing of flies can be heard; and behind her, one

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of Matt’s gang is pulling a dog’s corpse out of one of the rubbish bags. When the strike comes to an end and the army arrives to gather up the rubbish, a scene of carnival ensues in the back court, with young and old alike throwing bags about and gleefully taunting the soldiers. While these scenes are darkly humorous in tone, the conjunction of play and waste, the carnivalesque and the abject, is unsettling.20 In fact, all the scenes set in the back court have a certain bleak, and at times menacing, quality. On the night of Ryan’s death, James comes home after dark, approaching his tenement through the back court, where Mrs Quinn is standing, immobile with grief. James hesitates for a moment, then, in a bid to avoid her notice, quickly launches himself into the building. Later, when Kenny brings Snowball down to the back court, a disturbing scene follows in which the older boys tease Kenny and throw the mouse around. James looks on without intervening, and even winds up the gullible Kenny by joking that Snowball can fly to the Moon; a joke that turns sour when Kenny launches the mouse into space. In a later scene, when James comes back home after his second, disappointing visit to the new house, he passes through into the back court from the street. The rubbish bags have been taken away, but when he peers into one of the outhouses, he sees dozens of rats scurrying about. Kenny rushes up, swinging another rat by the tail; James reminds him that he is supposed to be an animal lover. Rats are pests, Kenny says, and looks up to the sky: ‘Hello, Snowball.’ ‘Snowball’s dead,’ James retorts. ‘You killed him.’ The two boys look on as Matt’s gang gather outside one of the outhouses, laughing and pushing and shoving. Margaret Anne bursts out and exchanges a long look with James before being pulled back into the outhouse by one of the gang. Kenny sets up a chant: ‘Poor cow, poor cow, poor cow’; ‘I’m not your pal any more’; ‘I saw you, I saw you. You killed Ryan Quinn.’ The back court lies within sight of the adults in the flats and is largely the domain of children and adolescents. Because it can be kept under surveillance, it might appear to be a safe playground. At the

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same time, with its toilets, derelict outhouses, piles of rubbish and flourishing colonies of rats, the back court figures as a place of waste and disorder. If there is enjoyment to be had among the rubbish, the fun is laced with danger and the risk of disease. Sure enough, two of the film’s most disturbing scenes – the ‘throwing’ game with Snowball, and James’s fallings-out with Margaret Anne and Kenny – take place in the back court – right next to, and within sight of, home. The street, the one space in the film routinely used by young and old, family and neighbours, also functions to some extent as a spatial link between Ratcatcher’s key settings, anchoring those elements of its topography that belong to the film’s ‘social’ reality. But its meanings and its feeling tone change in the course of the film, from implications of a shared community space to the suggestion of a lonely, empty stage. In the street scenes early in the film, the social setting is documented, key characters are introduced and the drama around Ryan’s drowning is played out. The neighbourhood is run

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down: the tenement buildings are covered in graffiti and many of the windows are boarded up; scrubby patches of litter-strewn grass punctuate the scanty areas between tenements and pavements. Unlike the back court, the street is a place of rule-governed play: football, hopscotch. Adults come and go, and stop to chat with each other. In the film’s opening minutes, Ryan and his mother are seen walking down the street, side by side. She makes him tuck his trousers into his boots. While her attention is elsewhere, he runs off and disappears from view. A little later, Ma comes along the road, carrying bags of shopping, and stops to greet a neighbour. On the day of Ryan’s funeral, his hearse draws up outside the tenement, watched by knots of neighbours. Later, Mr and Mrs Quinn try to ease a wardrobe into a removal van parked on the street. Mrs Quinn breaks down in tears, and is comforted by Ma. Later, the street figures as a space of transition between the everyday world of home and neighbourhood and the dream world of the new house. In pursuit of Ellen, James crosses the street to the bus stop, and from there makes his first, magical, journey to the new house. But by the time he repeats the crossing, towards the end of the film, the street has lost its neighbourly feel and the magic does not

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work. On the morning after the aborted family party and James’s night at Margaret Anne’s, the street is seen from a new, more distanced and slightly elevated, perspective and is now devoid of people and activity. Only the rubbish bags remain (p. 45). Army lorries rumble round the corner, their somewhat ominous noise filling up the empty space. Later, James is seen making his way back from the new house, disconsolate: by now, all the rubbish has been cleared away. Seen from above in long shot, James walks in the middle of the road, a lonely figure marooned in empty space.

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5 Margaret Anne’s In a number of ways, the home of James’s friend Margaret Anne figures as a counterpoint to his own. For a while it also figures, for him, as an alternative home. A modern flat in a new high-rise block, it lies at some unspecified walking distance from James’s neighbourhood and, in part because its spatial relationship with the film’s other settings is not laid out, the block seems cut off from its surroundings. While it becomes apparent over the course of the film that it is reached via the path that runs alongside the canal, the canal itself remains unanchored topographically, not only to the film’s central home and neighbourhood spaces but also to the place where Margaret Anne lives. The flat itself, however, enjoys all the modern conveniences that the Gillespies’ lacks. It is altogether bigger and brighter, and its décor and furnishings more up to date, than the Gillespies’. While the Gillespies’ television is black and white, for example, Margaret Anne has colour. And while James and his family

The Gillespies’ flat

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must share an outside toilet with other tenement residents and take their baths in a portable tin tub, Margaret Anne’s flat boasts its own bathroom – the setting, in fact, for one of the film’s pivotal scenes. But for all its mod cons and fashionable décor, this place, in marked contrast to the Gillespies’, is not a proper home. Margaret Anne appears to have neither a father nor siblings, and her mother is never seen.21 A solitary, neglected latchkey kid, she leads a chaotic, insecure existence in a home that appears to be open to all comers (when James makes one of his visits, a neighbour exclaims with horror: ‘Oh my God, they’re getting younger and younger!’); and the first scene at Margaret Anne’s involves a virtual gang rape. James is hanging around the canal towpath when Matt’s gang come swaggering up to him. He tags along with the older boys, and they all end up at Margaret Anne’s flat. Earlier, when James encountered Margaret Anne by the canal, having half-witnessed the boys in the gang sexually abusing her, she seemed to offer him a kind of friendship that she does not extend to the boys in the gang (‘I hate that Matt Monroe’). But it is unclear whether the offer includes sex or, if it does, exactly what that would mean. James now has an opportunity to find out. At the flat, he is ordered to stay at the Margaret Anne’s flat

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kitchen window as lookout: ‘Keep the edgy from that window in case her ma comes back.’ Offscreen, the gang can be heard taking turns to have sex with Margaret Anne in the next room. Meanwhile, James concentrates on what he can see from the window: in the concreted courtyard below, there is a slide, a man walking a dog and the usual piles of rubbish bags. Eventually, he is invited to take a turn with Margaret Anne. On tentatively entering the living room, he is met with the sight of Margaret Anne stretched out, motionless, on the sofa. In a gesture that is protective rather than sexual, he lies on top of her, covering her body with his. As the film’s musical theme starts up, the jeering gang members magically vanish from the scene. In a lingering high-angle shot, we see James and Margaret Anne sitting side by side on the sofa, their bodies coyly turned away from each other (p. 10). At this point, James becomes a kind of protector for Margaret Anne. By the time he goes to her flat for a second time, he has discovered ‘his’ new house and his world has changed. It is the morning after the Gillespies’ bath night, and he walks over to Margaret Anne’s carrying with him the disinfectant and the carbolic soap Ma used the evening before to deal with his nits: his hamfisted

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combing out of his friend’s headlice is in effect a gift of the sort of maternal care that he enjoys but that she lacks. Then, in a further reprise of the Gillespies’ bath night, Margaret Ann climbs into her bath to wash her hair. There follows a passage in which a scene of cleansing enacted in Margaret Anne’s bathroom is crosscut with Kenny’s near-drowning and rescue. In a complex playing out of the film’s immersion motif, Margaret Anne lowers herself under the bathwater, and we cut to Da pulling Kenny from the canal. Then a close overhead shot of Margaret Anne, lying face down and motionless under the bathwater, followed by a close-up of James’s anxious-looking face, cuts to Kenny lying limply on the canal bank. Margaret Anne resurfaces with a loud splash. James scrubs her head with the carbolic soap, then undresses and climbs into the bath with her. The bath and the rescue scenes both carry visual and emotional references to the scene of Ryan’s drowning, and this in turn sets up an equivalence of sorts between Margaret Anne (as well as Kenny) and the dead Ryan. To this extent, it is feasible to read James’s protective

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behaviour towards her as an act of reparation for the loss of Ryan, and the shared bath as a ritual of absolution and renewal. But, as it turns out, it cannot be done in this way, and redemption lies elsewhere. Towards the end of the film, James goes back to Margaret Anne’s for a third and last time. It is the evening of the family party in Da’s honour, and having been a horrified witness to his father’s hitting out at his mother, James has run to his friend’s flat for solace. He finds Margaret Anne at home alone, getting ready for bed. She invites him into her bedroom, and they hear her mother come in: ‘Don’t worry,’ Margaret Anne reassures James. ‘She won’t come in. Turn the light off.’ He gets into bed with her; she asks him if he loves her. ‘Aye,’ he replies. As he walks home in the morning, James stops to look in the canal for Margaret Anne’s lost spectacles. He spies them, but can’t reach far enough to fish them out of the water. The next time James sees Margaret Anne, it is close to his home, in his tenement’s back court: having elicited a declaration of love, she has betrayed him by reverting to her old ways with Matt’s gang. There is no home for James at Margaret Anne’s. His final place of return must be his own home.

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6 The canal In the opening few minutes of Ratcatcher, the canal appears no fewer than four times, most strikingly in the scene of Ryan’s drowning. The two boys, James and Ryan, fight playfully in the water, and Ryan is accidentally pushed under; James runs away from the scene. This is a shocking moment, in a number of ways. In terms of the film’s plot, it brutally undercuts the expectation, set up in the previous shots, that Ryan will be the film’s main protagonist, and abruptly turns it in a new direction. The brief but powerful underwater close-up of James’s face that punctuates the boys’ fight and precedes James’s escape (p. 22) introduces the visual and thematic motif of immersion that will be repeated throughout the film. This image balances the unflinching identical cut-in close-up of the drowned Ryan’s damaged face that is repeated several times through the film’s opening sequence (p. 11). Because these close-ups are unmotivated, it is left open as to whether or not they are attributable to the subjectivity of a character – James, perhaps, or his mother. This uncertainty adds to the atmosphere of disquiet that punctuates the film. In fact, the canal is seen twice, briefly, before the drowning, on both occasions through the distancing perspective of a point-of-view shot. First, in a version of the classic shot/reverse-shot, Ryan is seen looking out of a window – the window that is visible in the background of the opening slow-motion shot, in which he twists the net curtain around his head (p. 57); offscreen, his mother chides him: ‘Keep your trousers tucked in your boots. … Are you, listening to me?’ The view in the reverse-shot is of the canal bank, where James is on his own, throwing stones into the water. When the same view, clearly marked as a point-of-view shot, is seen again a little later, the source of the look is not this time disclosed (p. 54, top). Whose viewpoint is this? Given the similarity of the two images, the

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immediate assumption is that it must be Ryan’s; but this is confounded as soon as Ryan is seen entering the frame a few seconds later and joining James on the bank of the canal (bottom). This moment, and the question of the source of the look, seems inconsequential, however, and its implications could easily be missed, certainly on a first viewing of the film: though Kenny’s later claim that he saw James ‘kill’ Ryan does suggest an answer. However, this shot is perhaps less significant for its place in the plot than for what it suggests about the canal’s function as one of Ratcatcher’s key spaces. (Top) James, seen from a window; (bottom) Ryan comes onto the scene

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The canal is introduced through two point-of-view shots, which means that this space is initially mediated by the look of a character or characters rather than presented directly. Since these views are from windows in the tenement, the suggestion is that the canal can be seen from there. But there is nothing else in the film’s spatial organisation to support this, and after a series of point-of-view shots during the film’s opening moments, the canal is never seen in this way again. Nor is the canal coherently tied in with other elements of the film’s topography. This lends it a feeling of separateness from the everyday spaces of home and neighbourhood, a separateness tinged with fascination and danger in equal measure. Certainly, it is Ryan’s sighting of the canal that prompts him to defy his mother and go there. The ensuing drowning scene is rounded off by one more pointof-view shot, the last such view of the canal. From the window of a half-landing in the tenement close, James’s mother sees Ryan’s body laid out on the canal bank. Her shock and dismay at what she sees imbues the canal with further ominousness. The atmosphere of isolation, forbidden attraction, challenge and foreboding surrounding the canal that is set up in the film’s opening scenes remains as an undercurrent in each of its subsequent appearances.

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With significant exceptions, the canal is exclusively the domain of teenage boys, for whom it is a hangout and casual meeting place, or simply a place to pass through on the way to somewhere else – most significantly to Margaret Anne’s. Aside from James, who appears in all but one of the canal scenes, at different times Ryan, Matt’s gang, Kenny and an unnamed boy on a bike are seen there. As the only female character to spend time around the canal, Margaret Anne is already marked out as different, split off from the film’s other female characters. Adults go to the canal only in the most extreme circumstances, when its forbidden dangers burst through into the adult world: the three adult figures seen standing over Ryan’s drowned body; Da and a friend dragging the near-drowned Kenny from the water. After Ryan’s drowning, every one of James’s visits to the canal is precipitated by some minor or major upset that propels him away from the family home and the neighbourhood. His first return to the ‘scene of the crime’ takes place after he has been ousted from the flat by Da’s takeover of the sofa to watch football on television: this is when he has his first encounter with Margaret Anne, as she is being taunted by the boys in Matt’s gang. They snatch away her glasses – she can barely see without them – throw them into the water and run off. She asks James if he can see the glasses in the canal. We cut to a close-up, from James’s point of view, of the glasses floating under the water; but he tells Margaret Anne that he can’t see them. She persuades him to sit next to her on a wall, and offers a cigarette: ‘I’ll kill that bastard Matt Monroe,’ she says. She invites James to touch her leg; he is transfixed by a scab on her knee. After the episode with the grieving Quinns and Ryan’s sandals, James goes back to the canal. As he gazes pensively into the water, Kenny bounces up, laughing and eager to show off his pet hamster and new RSPCA badge. They fall into a conversation about fishing, and James kids Kenny that there is a big perch in the canal. Matt’s gang turn up; they taunt James, threatening to throw him into the water: ‘Fancy a swim? Fancy a Ryan Quinn?’ Later, on the morning after Snowball’s Moon launch, Kenny appears on the canal

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path with a fishing net over his head – a visual rhyme with the film’s opening shot (top) that suggests that a fate similar to Ryan’s may be lying in wait for him. James and Margaret Anne come strolling along the path together; Kenny tells them he’s going to catch a perch. They jokingly egg him on and walk away, leaving him leaning over the canal bank holding out the fishing net. The next time the canal is

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seen, Kenny is being dragged out of it by Da. James, however, is not there while the rescue is taking place: he is at Margaret Anne’s, and knows nothing of it until, walking home along the canal towpath, he is stopped by a boy on a bike chanting: ‘Your dad’s a hero, your dad’s a hero’. James sceptically responds with a two-finger salute. In the film’s last two canal scenes, James is alone. After witnessing Da slapping Ma, he is seen running along the towpath towards Margaret Anne’s, where he will stay the night. The next morning, returning home, he stops on the canal bank and tries, unsuccessfully, to retrieve her glasses from the water. Finally, in the penultimate scene, and as the first of its two endings, a tiny figure, presumably James, is seen in extreme long shot, crouching on the canal bank. He takes off his jacket and slides into the water. We cut to a medium shot of the water closing over his head, leaving a circle of bubbles. The film’s musical theme starts up; there is a cut to an underwater shot of James (p. 23), and then a fade to black. The canal is an enigmatic space, a space whose meanings shift over the course of the film. Right from the start, it seems separate from, unconnected with, the spaces of home and neighbourhood. In this respect, it still represents a plausible childhood or adolescent haunt, a hangout that is off the (adult) beaten track, attractive precisely because it is unsupervised and potentially dangerous. Young children don’t go there; nice girls don’t go there; adults don’t normally go there. James, of course, goes there, and as the film proceeds, it becomes a place that he visits on his own; a place of passage more than a meeting place; and finally, a place where the everyday world and the world of imagination meet. It is after Kenny’s rescue that the canal becomes James’s own secret place, a place of escape and reverie; and it is at this point, too, that images of the canal take on a marked poetic quality. When he runs along the canal bank to Margaret Anne’s after the aborted family party, James is seen from an entirely new angle: he also appears to have crossed to the opposite bank, passed literally to ‘the other side’. In a wide travelling shot with the mirror-like water in the foreground, we see

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James running along the far bank (p. 60). He stumbles. As he picks himself up, there is a jump-cut with a match-on-action to a closer shot in which he continues running, in slow motion (p. 10), and is finally overtaken by the camera. The entire passage is essentially silent: only the faint and distant sound of barking dogs can be heard. The change of framing and angle, the camera movement and the

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editing, the near-silence and the slow, dreamy pace of this passage mark it as outside the everyday. In the final canal scene, in which James is again seen on the ‘other side’ of the water, he is framed, at a great distance and in a lingering take, from another new angle. At the moment of immersion, with the cut to the medium close-up of the canal’s surface, the film’s musical theme starts up, continuing into the next scene, the film’s second ending, and then into the closing credits, which run over a frame-by-frame rendering, so slow as to be almost static, of the underwater shot. By the end of the film, the canal has become transformed from a plausible childhood haunt to a route to an alternative home – Margaret Anne’s – and finally to a passage to reverie, even oblivion. In the end, like the river Lethe of Greek myth, the canal offers a passage into an altogether other world.

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7 The new house In terms of Ratcatcher’s topography, the new house and the field that backs onto it, seen three times in the course of the film, is the setting that is furthest away in every respect from James’s home and neighbourhood and from his ordinary, everyday world. Significantly, this place is figured as James’s own discovery, its mise en scène the fulfilment of his desire. Driven by curiosity about where his elder sister, Ellen, goes on her mysterious bus trips, James boards another – curiously empty – bus and finds himself being transported literally to another world. He does not know where he is going and does not have the full fare, and the driver’s function is that of magical helper.22 In mythical terms, he figures as the ferryman conveying James to a world outside the mortal, the real, an interpretation that also supports the reading of the canal, as it figures at the end of the film, as Lethe-like.

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To the entrancing strains on the soundtrack of Nick Drake’s percussive, fugal ‘Cello Song’, James embarks on a seemingly endless voyage; first through rubbish-strewn city streets (where Margaret Anne hoves briefly into view, scratching her head), and then past grassy suburban verges. The bin bags grow fewer and fewer, until eventually there are none to be seen. From the windows of the bus’s top deck, open countryside can be seen all around. At last, the bus comes to a stop at the end of the line. When he jumps off, James is greeted by birdsong and bright sunshine. He comes upon a deserted building site and a row of halffinished white houses. He plays abstractedly with sand, pipes, scaffolding. Suddenly – we do not see how he gets there – he finds himself inside one of the houses, climbing a flight of bare white stairs, and gazing all around (p. 13). Just as in the tenement close, there is a turn in the stair; but this silent, airy, light-filled space invites attentive exploration rather than the usual breathless dash for safety. We cut to James, standing motionless at the top of the stair, framed by a doorway; the camera silently tracks in closer. A jump-cut reveals James, in a lingering, close-up profile, on the far right of the frame, gazing into an empty space backed by a bare white wall. A slow pan across the wall’s blank expanse comes to rest, improbably revealing James at the far side of the room, now facing right. This shot feels dreamlike and slightly unsettling, the space enigmatic. Aside from the doubling of James, it becomes clear retrospectively that the 180degree line has been infringed in some puzzling way. It takes very close scrutiny to see that there has been a double breach of filmic space. The shot ends in the same place in the house as the end of the previous shot: this is in effect a reversed match-cut, viewed from the other side of the line. In a reprise of one of the film’s key motifs, James is next seen in what will become the bathroom: there is a new bath and toilet bowl, but they are not yet plumbed in. He climbs into the polythenewrapped bath and stretches out with a sigh. He tries out the taps: there is no water, of course. He climbs out and uses the loo; pee seeps

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out from under it and onto the bare floor. He makes a slow, wondering descent of the stairs, then is suddenly seen in close-up, peering around the door of a downstairs room. When the reverse field of his gaze is revealed, the silence ends and the film’s theme music starts up. What James sees is an unglazed window opening with an unplumbed sink unit beneath it. The opening frames a sunlit

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field of golden wheat. There is a slow track towards the window, and James enters the frame. Seen from behind, he is silhouetted against the bright view. The forward movement continues as James approaches the window, climbs up onto the sill, jumps down on the other side, and – as the edges of the window opening merge with those of the film frame – runs into the field’s infinite bright expanse.

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He tumbles, frolics, somersaults in the golden corn and, in one of the film’s most striking images, comes at last to a pensive standstill, backlit by a low sun (p. 10). James’s second visit to the new house takes place near the end of the film. He has quarrelled with Kenny and discovered that Margaret Anne has betrayed him by allowing the older boys to have

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sex with her again. He runs out of the back court and crosses the street, jumping onto a passing bus. But this time everything is different; the magic has gone. It is raining hard and nothing can be seen from the bus windows. A close-up of James, reflected in the opaque, steamy window, lends the journey a closed-in feeling, where earlier it had been all openness and light. Significantly, the scene has no musical underscoring. The journey itself is brief; and at the end of it, brutal disillusion awaits. A soaked James trails around outside the new house and discovers he can’t get in. From inside the house, we see the view of the field framed as before by the window; but this time the window is a barrier rather than an entrance (p. 65). We see James outside, jumping up and down, trying to peer into the house. He turns away, and tramps dejectedly into the wet field. When the new house and the field are seen for the third and last time, in the second of the film’s two endings, the earlier magic is restored, and they have become the setting for a dreamlike homecoming. This time, significantly, no journey to the place is shown, and it is the field rather than the house that is seen first. Significantly, too, the space is no longer James’s alone. Following a grey, murky underwater image of James in the canal and a slow fade to black, the screen suffuses with light. A close-up of corn stalks fills the entire frame except for a strip of the bluest sky at the very top. Into this blue and golden space enter Da and Mr Quinn, carrying the Gillespies’ white sofa, followed in procession by Ma, Ellen, Anne Marie and friends, carrying more of the Gillespies’ possessions. There is a track back and, as the musical theme resumes, we see the scene from inside the house, through the kitchen window. Following a cut-in medium close-up of Anne Marie carrying a mirror in which her face is reflected, we finally see James. He slowly puts down the chair he is carrying, straightens up and begins, hesitantly, to smile. As James’s discoveries, the new house and the field represent the greatest possible contrast, in visual terms as well as in terms of the film’s ‘realities’, with his own home and neighbourhood: the airiness, the pristine bathroom, the light-filled stairwell, the very different

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views from windows, the field’s clean, open space. As well as being a place of escape for James, this is the fulfilment of everything he would wish for his family: ‘a big house with a bath, a toilet and a field’. The literal dis-illusion of his second visit, when he finds himself locked out of his dream, is made good in the film’s last scene, in which the space, now entirely split off from the everyday, has reacquired its magic, and the wish of bringing everyone together is fulfilled at last in a dreamlike homecoming.

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8 Pathways James figures centrally in every one of Ratcatcher’s key settings, from his family home to the new house; and indeed the film is structured almost in its entirety around his passages between these spaces. The film foregrounds the different spaces and their interconnections so insistently that the settings themselves seem to emerge as key protagonists. 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, through and between them. The film’s pivotal setting is 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, Margaret Anne’s flat, the canal and the new house. The film’s core settings (home, the close, the back court and the street) are set up as contiguous, and their interconnections intelligibly laid out, largely through editing and point-of-view shots. By contrast, the film’s other key settings – Margaret Anne’s flat, the canal and the new house – are not fully tied in with home and neighbourhood, nor with each other. The degree to which each of the film’s main settings appears intelligible, spatially, in relation to the others is an indicator of which of Ratcatcher’s ‘realities’ that space belongs to.23 This is the key to the detached involvement that Ratcatcher invites: James is in effect a figure moving through a landscape. If the film is about a boy’s troubling coming of age, then, to reduce it to its plot is to disregard the highly cinematic organisation of its various spaces. What Ratcatcher does, through cinema, is create a childhood world or way of being as it were from the inside, inviting the viewer to enter into that world. The feeling tone of this mode of engagement has to do with the body and its relation to space more

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than with, say, language or looking. This makes for an unusually immersive involvement. Through its distinctive use of cinema’s means of expression, Ratcatcher succeeds in capturing nonverbal, or preverbal, mental and bodily states, invoking ‘the joyful and silent experience of childhood’. This phrase comes from Michel de Certeau, who has written about how we ‘practise’ space in our daily lives as we walk in and through familiar places. Our everyday spatial practices, says de Certeau, are ‘ways of moving into something different’ that repeat ‘the decisive and originary experience – that of the child’s differentiation from the mother’.24 Cinema, through its distinctive organisation of space and movement, has the capacity to evoke the very processes through which we become human subjects. In childhood activities, such as playing, we ‘move into something different’, putting in place, and enacting, a division between our own body and inner world on the one hand and the world outside our body on the other.25 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 in turn are shaped and defined by the spaces they contain. The infant’s exploration of mental and bodily borderlands and boundaries through playing extends into experimentation around merger with, and separation from, its familiar places. This process starts at, and with, home; so that home itself becomes invested with dream meaning and feeling. Spaces and boundaries in and around home – thresholds – can therefore assume considerable imaginal and emotional weight for the child.26 Liminal spaces can be experienced as challenging in positive or negative ways; they can feel inviting and frightening simultaneously and in equal measure. Liminal points in and around the familiar spaces of home – windows and doors, for instance – exert attraction because they allow the child to feel secure while responding to the challenge to go exploring, to move into something, somewhere, different.

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Negotiating the home’s thresholds is an important developmental task of childhood; and significantly in this regard, a number of children’s games involve a zone of security that players call ‘home’. These games are about leaving a secure ‘home’ zone and making oneself vulnerable to being caught and dismissed from the game, or ‘out’. Outside ‘home’ lies a dangerous open space – real, imaginary or virtual – that must be conquered with skill and daring in the game. The game’s attraction lies exactly in this risky and thrilling venture into open, potentially insecure, terrain. It works because players can leave the zone of security in the confident hope that they can always return to it.27 ‘Home’ may be the place we start from, but it is also the place we want to feel we can go back to. The interaction of the inner life of fantasy and imagination with the outer, real world is re-enacted in the ways children, as they grow older, routinely relate to spaces inside and outside home; and in many societies there is an active, vibrant, independent childhood culture organised around the exploration and use of a range of nonhome spaces. The spatial ranges permitted to children are normally a product of negotiation with parents; with permitted ranges varying according to a child’s age and gender. Children also have their own ‘path networks’: these are entirely independent of the routes used by adults, the main objective not necessarily being to get from A to B; for the journey itself is frequently the purpose of the trip. Children make use of shortcuts and ‘ritual routes’ – often illegal – in their journeyings; and are often attracted by challenging places (woods, ponds, quarries and the like) – ‘non-home’ spaces that have the lure of the frightening, the dangerous or the forbidden. In order to figure in the mental maps of their ‘path networks’, children’s spaces must be accessible through their own locomotion – on foot or by bicycle.28 Ratcatcher has its own ‘children’s geographies’, whose path networks can be represented like this:

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The solid lines represent connections between the film’s main settings that are made apparent through editing, camera movement, point-ofview shots and other cinematic spatial linking devices. The dotted lines indicate points of interconnection that are implied or elided rather than mapped out; the arrowheads show direction of movement or connection between spaces. The diagram demonstrates how the Gillespies’ flat (home) figures as the pivot of the film’s outward and return journeyings, with its proximate spaces (close, back court and street) firmly connected, spatially, with it. Less clear spatial connections are apparent between home and/or neighbourhood on the one hand and the canal on the other, and there is no connection between the former and Margaret Anne’s flat. However, a spatial connection of sorts is implied, but no more, between the canal and Margaret Anne’s, in that towards the end of the film James is seen going to, and returning from, Margaret Anne’s via the canal bank. The passage to the new house from the street outside the Gillespies’ tenement is laid out only in the first two of the film’s three visits there, and the only return journey shown (after the first visit) is more or less elided. Just as a repeated return ‘home’ is a key motif of Ratcatcher, so a pattern emerges in the relationships set up between home and the

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film’s other spaces. As the film’s central space, home is firmly tied in to its adjacent spaces. But there is a proliferation of thresholds surrounding ‘home’, so that within the central home/close/back court/street nexus, a number of different spatial relations is set up. The clearest links are those set out in shots, usually point-of-view shots, in which the street or the back court is seen through a window. For example, when James looks out of a window and sees Ellen cross the street to the bus stop, the spatial relationship between home and not-home is literally put into the image, with the window as threshold. The action of looking out of a window figures repeatedly throughout the film, in fact, with play frequently made with the opportunities for surveillance inherent in tenement architecture. The variable meanings of the window-threshold carry over into other spaces in the film, too. In the first sequence at Margaret Anne’s flat, for example, a look out of a window becomes the occasion for averting James’s/the camera’s gaze from the sexual activities in the next room, while eavesdropping on what is going on. Finally, the window-threshold migrates across the film’s ‘realities’ when in the new house the same window figures first of all as a portal to an enticing new world, and later on as a barrier. Certain spatial relations between home and not-home seem more ambiguous. In particular, the film’s rendering of the architecture of the tenement building, where the close has qualities of both inside and outside, makes the precise location of the edges of ‘home’ uncertain. Stairways and landings, inner and outer doorways (entrance doors to the flats, entrances to the yard and the street) may all be regarded as thresholds. And yet some of these thresholds are rather challenging places. The proliferation of thresholds in and around the tenement implies a complex zone of transition, even a permeability, between ‘home’ and adjacent spaces such as the back court and the street. In complicating the ‘home’/‘not-home’ relationship, some of Ratcatcher’s thresholds embody an uncertainty as to where inside and outside, the secure and the risky, begin and end, and even hint at threat or danger very close to home. This is

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especially true of the close, as noted earlier; and it applies also to the back court, with its unsettling, abject, juxtaposition of play and detritus. The associations of concealment, disobedience, punishment, danger and mortality that attach to these ambiguous thresholds contrast markedly with the brightness, openness and clarity of the spaces and thresholds in and around the new house. As the setting for the plot’s motivating event, as well as for one of the film’s endings, the canal clearly has critical significance. And yet its relationship with the film’s other spaces is not fully laid out: it lacks intermediate spaces, is literally dis-located. Notwithstanding the three point-of-view shots of the canal seen early in the film, there are no plausible linking spaces between the canal and any of the film’s other spaces. The way from ‘home’ to the canal, and – crucially – back again, is never mapped out. Significantly, as the domain of children and adolescents, the canal clearly figures as one of the ritual routes and challenging places that are a feature of children’s geographies. It is a dangerous place (Ryan drowns there, Kenny nearly drowns there, and it is the scene of a number of less dramatic, but still troubling, situations and events). At first, the path and the waste ground alongside the canal figure as a meeting place rather than a ritual route. However, the canal later begins to assume the qualities of a place of passage, most explicitly between ‘home’ and Margaret Anne’s flat. But this is an uncertain, dis-located passage, in that the beginning and end points of the journeys are not spatially tied together. The canal is different from the film’s other spaces, too, in that its framing changes over the course of the film. At first it is tightly, almost claustrophobically, framed. As the film progresses, however, the canal is seen in an ever broader spatial context, until at the end it is set in a wide, extreme long shot that shows an expanse of waste ground edged in the far distance by high-rise flats and other buildings. At the same time, in the course of the film the canal becomes less and less a social space shared by a number of children and adolescents and increasingly James’s sole domain, a space of reverie.

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The first time the new house is seen, the connection of this space with the everyday ‘real’ spaces of home and neighbourhood is set out in considerable detail. James sits on the step at the front entrance of the close, on the threshold between close and street. His sisters are seen, from his point of view, crossing the street. James crosses over and joins Ellen at the bus stop, and there follows a tetchy exchange between them: she refuses to tell him where she is going. The bus departs, leaving James behind. We cut to the interior of the Gillespies’ flat, where James is filching coins from Da’s trouser pocket. We next see James getting on a bus. A series of point-of-view shots from the top deck of the bus follows, with the view changing from urban to suburban and finally to rural. The bus reaches the end of the line, and James gets out. We cut to a building site, where James wanders around and plays with building materials. He is next seen exploring the interior of one of the partially built houses. From inside the house, he sees a golden field through a window space, climbs out and frolics and somersaults in it. He starts walking home along an empty road. We cut to the interior of the Gillespies’ flat, where a television programme featuring Tom Jones is on. In this extended passage, the different spaces – home, street, bus, building site, house, field – are connected together, usually quite explicitly, either by point-of-view shots or by spatiotemporal editing. The exceptions, where the conjunctions are less explicit, are firstly James’s entry into the house, which in the context of the composition, framing and editing of the scenes inside the house takes on the quality of a magical transition; and secondly, James’s journey home, which figures only very briefly and elliptically. Here the temporal ellipsis underlines the significance of the outward voyage to the magical world of the new house, while making it clear that a return to home and ‘reality’ is an essential part of the journey. At the same time, the long-drawn-out bus journey, an uncharacteristic instance of locomotion that is not on foot, breaks with one of the key tenets of children’s geographies. And so, while this journey ties the space of the new house into the film’s everyday spaces, it also renders it

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unmistakably ‘other’ in terms of the child’s world. In these respects, the new house figures as both ‘real’ and imaginary. The differences between the cinematic ‘geography’ of the first visit to the new house and the subsequent two are telling as regards readings of the new house, and especially of its figuration in the film’s enigmatic second ending. In telling, in its distanced manner, James’s story, Ratcatcher sets out a world that is organised like a map of every child’s spaces – familiar, unfamiliar, dangerous spaces; and spaces of imagination and reverie – and then explores that world, cinematically. Indeed, the film’s geography expresses that very mix of outer and inner realities that characterises childhood activities and states. In this way, Ratcatcher opens the door to the child’s world, with all its fears, uncertainties and lures; and offers an invitation into, and a meditation on, that world.

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9 Making Ratcatcher Ratcatcher is the debut feature of Glasgow-born writer/director Lynne Ramsay – who was only twenty-nine years old when it was released. But Ramsay’s distinctive slant on the cruel, tender and magical world of childhood and adolescence and her telling way with images and sounds are already present in her earlier short films, all of them – like Ratcatcher – set in and around Glasgow. The three vignettes that make up Small Deaths (1995) include a portrait of a little girl who is playing at home while her mother helps her father get ready for a night out (‘When will my dad be home?’ asks the child. ‘Late,’ replies her mother); a tale of children wandering in a sumptuous pastoral landscape and coming across a dying cow; and a grisly practical joke played out in a tenement close. In Kill the Day (1996), lengthy scenes of boys playing by a canal and in a cornfield are set up as childhood memories of the central character, a young man just released from prison. Gasman (1997) is a small and intense drama, told from a child’s standpoint, involving a man who has two families. Lynne Ramsay is a graduate of the National Film and Television School where, with a first degree in photography, she started out as a cinematographer. Having made the change to directing, she assembled the team she was to work with on all her projects up to and including Ratcatcher: producer Gavin Emerson, cinematographer Alwin Kuechler, editor Lucia Zucchetti and production designer Jane Morton.29 Small Deaths, her graduation film, attracted attention when it won the Prix du Jury at Cannes, and on the strength of this success Ramsay and her team were able to complete Kill the Day and Gasman and were approached by BBC Films to develop the feature that was to become Ratcatcher.30

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Most of the film was shot in Glasgow, where production began in the late summer of 1998 in Kintra Street, in the inner-city district of Govan.31 The film was completed in time for the Cannes 1999 selection process, and when it was screened in ‘Un Certain Regard’ met with an extraordinarily enthusiastic reception. It was spotted by Edinburgh International Film Festival director Lizzie Francke, who selected it for the Festival’s opening gala in August that year: Ratcatcher was in fact the first Scottish picture to open the Festival since Bill Forsyth’s Comfort and Joy in 1984. Its UK release was in November 1999, with subsequent openings in France, Germany and the USA, and it premiered on UK television (BBC 2) in March 2002. While it did not attract huge box-office receipts, Ratcatcher was a tremendous succès d’estime: critics found it ‘visionary’, ‘assured and masterly’, ‘distinguished by a profound sense of psychic landscape’, and ‘an intensely personal story rooted in a particular time and place which yet achieves a poetic and universal resonance’;32 and the film and its director won numerous wards, among them a BAFTA, Best Director at the Chicago International Film Festival and the BBC 2 Award for Best Film.33 The launch of Lynne Ramsay’s career took place at an auspicious time for film-making in Scotland. In the mid- to late 1990s, following the worldwide successes of Danny Boyle’s Shallow Grave (1994) and Trainspotting (1996), optimism was at its height in the Scottish media industries. Relatively generous amounts of funding for film-making became available, and the number of films made wholly or partly in Scotland saw a steep increase. In 1997, Scottish Screen was formed as an umbrella body for a range of existing arts and media organisations, including the Scottish Film Production Fund (SFPF) and the Glasgow Film Office, its remit being to develop a sustainable production industry, and to promote and nurture film culture, in Scotland. In the same year, the Scottish Arts Council assumed responsibility for administering National Lottery funds in Scotland. The Tartan Shorts programme, established in 1993 with backing from the SFPF and BBC Scotland and the objective of

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cultivating new Scottish talent, had commissioned Ramsay’s Gasman. Such was the bullishness in these years that there was even talk of the birth of a New Scottish Cinema.34 While the bulk of Ratcatcher’s budget, including its National Lottery subsidy, appears to have come from non-Scottish sources, the film received other important forms of support from within Scotland. Aside from the energy and general optimism surrounding Scottish media projects in the late 1990s, the impetus from Tartan Shorts and the continuing support of BBC Scotland were clearly indispensable. To what extent, then, can Ratcatcher be regarded as a Scottish film? Arguments about the significance of indigenous funding or production aside, the film would certainly seem to fit well within what is widely regarded as a set of distinctively Scottish cultural traditions, discernible across a range of media: dark, Gothic-tinged urban fictions, integrations of realism and fantasy, and expressions of interiority and ‘fantastic inner experience’. In Scottish cinema specifically, narratives of childhood (as, for instance, in Bill Douglas’s Trilogy) have been identified as a particularly enduring feature.35 At the same time, Ratcatcher seems to sit more comfortably within a tradition of European art cinema than within a wider British (or English) cinematic tradition of realism: a preoccupation with the world of the child; shifts between ‘reality’ and reverie; a lack of overt ‘plottiness’ and enigmatic endings are among the characteristic features of art cinema that are evident in Ratcatcher. Indeed, it is sometimes argued that Scottish culture (especially where the art film is concerned) embraces the transnational rather than the (British) national; and Scottish critics certainly tend to be attracted by a ‘European’ quality in films. Ramsay’s work, significantly, is more often likened to Robert Bresson’s than to, say, Bill Douglas’s, and Ramsay herself sees her work as being in a Bressonian tradition. At the same time, there is no ignoring the salience of Ratcatcher’s Glasgow setting. Ramsay has drawn on what she knows: she grew up in Glasgow and, born in 1969, will have been about the same age as her character Anne Marie (who is played by

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her niece, also called Lynne Ramsay) during the dustmen’s strike that forms a backdrop and a plotline for the film and inspiration for some of its most striking images. During the director’s early childhood, and in the period in which Ratcatcher is set, too, the city was in the throes of a revolution in social housing that is etched in the memories of several generations of Glaswegians. Thousands of innercity slum tenements were demolished and their residents rehoused in urban high-rise flats (like Margaret Anne’s in the film), new housing estates on the city’s outer edges (like the place where James finds his dream house) and new towns. The Glasgow-born writer Andrew O’Hagan, who is of the same generation as Ramsay, has written about this time, drawing on his own memories of being rehoused to a new town as a young child. The year he was born, he says, was ‘a sort of year zero: the past was being stamped out, areas were being cleared and made new’.36 Images in Ratcatcher of street and tenement life resonate, too, with classic documentary images of Glasgow’s slum children by the photographers Bert Hardy and Oscar Marzaroli.37 The feeling tone of the film’s ‘children’s geographies’ owes much to the peculiarities of tenement architecture, with its merging of indoor and outdoor, public and private, spaces. The ‘piece and jam’, like the one consumed by Anne Marie in the back court, is an archetypal cultural memory of Glaswegian tenement childhood.38 Looked at in the Glasgow context, therefore, Ratcatcher accrues additional layers of meaning because it speaks to key, and specific, moments in popular memory. But if the place, and some of the feelings and memories evoked by it, is particular, the childhood world in Ratcatcher resonates with the universal. This is why the occasional criticisms of the film for not dealing with the strike in any depth, or for promulgating a grim and miserabilist image of Scottish life, are wide of the mark.39 Ratcatcher’s Scottish setting is important, and the director’s close knowledge of it brings the authenticity of the ‘poetry of the ordinary’, as well as an attention to the details of everyday life understood from the inside, to a film that, if informed in some

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measure by a characteristically Scottish cultural consciousness, is not in the end ‘about’ Scotland nor even ‘just’ Scottish, but expresses, through cinema, experiences and ways of being and seeing that can be recognised, and felt, by everyone who has ever been a child.

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10 ‘God is in the details’: the director speaks40 Influences I started by studying fine art and photography in Edinburgh. I wasn’t a cinephile at all, and had only ever watched films on television, or Hollywood films at the cinema. One day, when I was taking a course on dance and choreography, we were shown Meshes of the Afternoon, a film by the American experimental film-maker Maya Deren that really struck me. It was a decisive moment, and it turned me on to cinema. [Robert Bresson’s] use of sound, image and timing is breathtaking. On the whole, what’s special about Bresson’s work, for me, is the performances, the way he uses actors. … The performances … in Bresson’s films are incredible. And like Bresson, I use a lot of non-professional actors, such as William Eadie in Ratcatcher. … [Bresson’s] films are absolutely beautifully shot. He had a great eye. But he never saw an image standing alone as a great image. [Robert Bresson’s Notes on Cinematography] was the antithesis of what I was being taught at film school. It was like finding a diamond in the rough. It was great to find something I identified with just at the time when my ideas about film were evolving. It really became a kind of bible. A few of his films are masterpieces. It’s a tough cinema for some people, but for me, it’s the purest form of cinema. Glasgow I don’t want to become the person who makes films about ‘gritty Glasgow’. I don’t want to be called the next Scottish film-maker or the next woman film-maker. If I come from any tradition it’s a European cinema as opposed to an American one.

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[Glasgow’s] got a lot of little urban villages, or suburbs just like any city, but you can look to the skyline of Glasgow and see the hills. … Absolutely stunningly beautiful, yet in some places in the city, it’s kind of ugly beautiful. I always thought it would be a good place to shoot a science-fiction film. I’m really interested in buildings as well and Glasgow feels quite timeless in places. I wanted to make something personal, and it’s perhaps a cliché or a truism to say that for a first film you are inclined to stick to the world you know, but it’s often true. At the same time, I didn’t want to make a ‘Scottish’ film. I wanted the situations to be identifiable. I also like Glasgow: it has a strange ugly beauty, and if you look up, at the edges of the city you can see mountains. It’s very strange, but cinematic, too. Strike I was a very young child [at the time of the binmen’s strike], but I remember it almost as a medieval landscape. But I didn’t want to go too deep into the political point of view that has been done before very eloquently with other film-makers. I wanted to look at it through the eyes of the people living there. The title comes from a headline: ‘The Ratcatcher!’ – a soldier holding all these rats they’d killed at the end of the strike when the army had come in. [The strike] was the starting point of the film. It was something I vaguely remembered when I was growing up. I was not using the strike in order to make a social comment. It has been put to me that the politics of the strike are not dealt with in the film, but a boy like James would hardly be concerned with politics, would he? I looked at some photographs from that time and they were quite surreal – kids pulling things from the rubbish, dressing up, finding old dolls, killing rats. I’ve been criticised for the absence of politics in [dealing with the strike]. But I treated it from James’s point of view; and since my

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character was not interested in the politics of the situation, I couldn’t be either. For me, it’s a metaphor for the deterioration of things, for anarchy. Nonetheless it is a political film, but obliquely, not explicitly, so. I remember people throwing milk bottles out into the backyards so that it would be clear [of rats] when they went out. Childhood As a kid, you accept your environment. Everything was an adventure, even playing among the garbage. Kids tend to find something beautiful wherever they live. For me, childhood is an interesting time because your opinions are not yet set. Perhaps you see the world around you more clearly and openly, in a simpler way, without the baggage of moral judgment. It is interesting to see the absurdity of the adult world from this point of view. Childhood is like a blank canvas, in terms of the direction you can take for good or bad. I knew when I was writing the script, and also when we filmed [the scene in which James explores the new house], that this boy had never seen a field before. The feeling of him going through the empty house is … almost sensual and I wanted to show this completely heightened sense from his perspective rather than from an objective one, even though it was filmed objectively. … It’s about making a tiny moment feel big cinematically. I’m fascinated by the age around eleven and twelve when you’re not quite defined as a person, you know? There’s something really lovely about being in that state of not knowing where you should be in the world. I think childhood is brutal. I was fed up with the sickly view of how we grew up in this country. I’ve had people in Glasgow come up to me and say ‘I had the same background’.

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Realism and fantasy I like moving from one to another; from mesmeric to hard reality; from internal reality to outside world, from internal [or] brutal to observational. A lot of people have misconstrued this film as social realism, and I don’t think it is. I try to avoid some of the clichés of that. To be honest, I was trying to go into the psychology of the scenes, … trying to get under the skin of it a bit, inside the boy’s head … so you go from this kind of harsh reality into something that’s much more hard to pin down. It’s more unreal, I guess. It’s almost like two opposing styles. Details God is in the details. There is a lot of tenderness in the least obvious acts. A minuscule detail like [James pulling his mother’s laddered tights over her toes] can say a lot about a relationship. I am constantly trying to think cinematically. What can be shown instead of said. It’s attention to details that are not dramatic and trying to make them dramatic, rather than the drama being in the narrative. … It’s about making drama from the details you normally don’t pay any attention to. I try for sensuousness and, though it’s difficult to express it, to reach for the sublime in the everyday. I believe you can approach a character’s psychology through a detail or an action better than through a succession of sequences. Ending There was a lot of discussion about the ending – which I think is open to interpretation. When I first wrote the film, I didn’t want to make it black and white – does he live or die? It was more a sense of things ending, a cycle, a childhood that happened too fast.

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It was always going to end with them coming through the field with the furniture. I was getting a lot of pressure to have a happy ending. At that point I thought I’d go for this really ambiguous approach where one way you’d be in his head. … It was meant to be a dream, well, not a dream – it’s surrealistic. For me it was always that he’s going down in the water and what is projected for him is like his fantasy. I put him back in the water because I didn’t want it to be heavily depressing, but neither did I want to finish it with this smiling kid looking down at the camera. So I tried to put these two things together. …

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Notes 1 On ‘the world in the cinema’, see Annette Kuhn, ‘Heterotopia, Heterochronia: Space and Time in Cinema Memory’, Screen vol. 45 no. 2 (2004), pp. 106–14. 2 For details, see (accessed 2 March 2007). 3 In ‘Ontology of the Photographic Image’, in What is Cinema? (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1971), pp. 9–16, André Bazin explores these grounding principles in the phenomenology of the cinematic experience. 4 Maya Deren, in a contribution to ‘Poetry and Film: A Symposium’, in Amos Vogel (ed.), Film Culture: An Anthology (New York: Praeger, 1970), p. 174. 5 In The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language and the Cosmos (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1971), Gaston Bachelard explores the relationship between reverie and the poetic imagination, and argues that these states are especially apparent during childhood. For a discussion of these issues as they relate to cinema, see Paul Schrader, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1972); and Shohini Chaudhuri and Howard Finn, ‘The Open Image: Poetic Realism and the New Iranian Cinema’, Screen vol. 44 no. 1 (2003), pp. 38–57. 6 Catherine Cullen notes that windows in Ratcatcher ‘indicate places in the psyche that open up or close down; are porous or shuttered; fluid or static. The window frame visually establishes inside and outside while the

transparent pane suggests psychic movement between and through’: Cullen, ‘Details are Acoustical: The Films of Lynne Ramsay’, Afterimage vol. 29 no. 1 (2001), pp. 12–13; the quotation is on p. 13. 7 On the soundtrack of Ratcatcher, see ibid. 8 Davies said this during an appearance on the South Bank Show (London Weekend Television, 5 April 1992), and is quoted by Martin Hunt, in ‘The Poetry of the Ordinary: Terence Davies and the Social Art Film’, Screen vol. 40 no. 1 (1999), pp. 1–16; the quotation is on p. 3. On poetry and Distant Voices, Still Lives, see Paul Farley, Distant Voices, Still Lives (London: BFI, 2006). 9 Christopher Williams develops the idea of a social art cinema that marries the ‘social diffuse’ with features of European art cinema in ‘The Social Art Cinema: A Moment in the History of British Film and Television Culture’, in Christopher Williams (ed.), Cinema: The Beginnings and the Future (London: University of Westminster Press, 1996), pp. 190–200. In ‘Terence Davies and the Social Art Film’, Martin Hunt argues that much of Terence Davies’s work falls into this category. On realisms in Ratcatcher, see Alex Gilkison, ‘Realisms, and Beyond, in Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher’, Media Education Journal no. 30 (2001), pp. 13–17. 10 Denis Mitchell is best known for directing an early television documentary, Morning in the Streets (BBC, 1959), about working-class street life in northern England. Hardy worked for Picture Post and Marzaroli was a

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Glasgow-based photographer. For further details, see note 37. 11 An obvious comparison with Ratcatcher is Ken Loach’s television drama Cathy, Come Home (BBC, 1966). Both treat the issue of housing problems, but from diametrically different approaches. 12 The images of immersion in Ratcatcher offer an illuminating comparison with the work of video artist Bill Viola, in particular his Nantes Triptych (1992) and Five Angels for the Millennium (2001). In the former, the trope of immersion figures in a repeated cycle of birth–death–rebirth, and in the latter it suggests spiritual cleansing and renewal through baptism. 13 Lynne Ramsay and Gerald Clarke, Ratcatcher (London: Faber and Faber, 1999). 14 The idea of ‘alternative heritage’ is perhaps more appropriate here: on this, see Phil Powrie, ‘On the Threshold between Past and Present: “Alternative Heritage”’, in Justine Ashby and Andrew Higson (eds), British Cinema, Past and Present (London: Routledge, 2000), pp. 316–26. On the memory text, see Annette Kuhn, Family Secrets: Acts of Memory and Imagination (London: Verso, 2002), pp. 161–4. 15 The film’s plot breaks down as follows: 1. Ryan’s death: Ryan’s drowning and funeral. James, Ma, Da and James’s sisters Ellen (fourteen) and Anne Marie (six) are introduced. Settings: around home, canal, home. 2. The family: The Gillespies’ flat and the tenement close: a television report about the bin strike; Ma and Da mention the possibility of moving. Settings: home, around home.

3. Beyond the family: James meets Margaret Anne. Mrs Quinn gives him Ryan’s sandals. Kenny is introduced. James is bullied by Matt Monroe’s gang, then acts as lookout while they have sex with Margaret Anne. Settings: canal, around home, home, Margaret Anne’s flat. 4. The new house: James tries to follow Ellen and ends up taking a bus trip to the end of the line, where he discovers a new housing estate next to a golden field of wheat. Settings: around home, new house. 5. Home and the tenement: At home, Da goes out. Anne Marie is washed in a tin bath, Ma combs nits out of James’s hair. In the back court, Kenny shows James his pet hamster, Snowball, and is teased by the gang. Kenny releases Snowball into space, tied to a balloon. Settings: home, around home, the Moon. 6. Immersion: James goes to Margaret Anne’s flat, meeting Kenny on the way. There James combs the nits out of her hair and he and Margaret Anne take a bath together. On television, the end of the strike is reported. Meanwhile, Da rescues Kenny from the canal. Settings: home, canal, Margaret Anne’s. 7. The hero: Back home, James admits two housing officers. Da dresses up in his best clothes and the family accompany him to the medal award ceremony. On his way home, he is attacked by a razor gang. Meanwhile, Ma has organised a celebration at the flat. When Da comes in, he slaps her and picks on James.

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Settings: home, waste ground, town hall, unspecified street. 8. Love: James runs to Margaret Anne’s and gets into bed with her. At home, Ma and Da slow dance and kiss. Settings: canal, Margaret Anne’s, home, around home. 9. Disappointment: The army clears away the rubbish. James goes to the new house but can’t get in. Kenny accuses James of killing Ryan. Matt Monroe’s gang have sex with Margaret Anne. At home, James is comforted by Anne Marie. Settings: around home, new house, home. 10. Epilogue: James jumps into the canal. The family and James come over the field in procession towards the new house. Settings: canal, new house. 16 Emma Wilson, ‘Still Time: Ratcatcher’, in Cinema’s Missing Children (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), pp. 108–22. The quotations are from p. 110. 17 Most of the scenes in which James is not present are ones where he is clearly shown to be elsewhere at that moment: Kenny’s rescue from the canal is intercut with the scene in which he and Margaret Anne share a bath at her flat; while his parents are making up after their quarrel following the aborted family party, James is once again at Margaret Anne’s; when Da is slashed by the razor gang, James is at home with the rest of the family; when Snowball lands on the Moon, he is at home, dozing and dreaming. 18 The original script solves the latter mystery by including a scene in which Ellen visits a friend who lives on a new housing estate. In my view, the

film is enhanced by the elision of this scene. See Ramsay and Clarke, Ratcatcher. 19 As well as placing the scene at the weekend, the Saturday-night recitation of the football results figures as a sort of auditory madeleine, much like the shipping forecast on the soundtrack at the beginning of Distant Voices, Still Lives: see Farley, Distant Voices, Still Lives, p. 12. 20 In ‘Magical Urbanism: Walter Benjamin and Utopian Realism in the Film Ratcatcher’, Historical Materialism vol. 10 no. 4 (2002), pp. 173–211, Alex Law and Jan Law cite Benjamin on this subject: ‘In the city, children inhabit a political economy of waste. Children’s play prises utopian possibilities out of discarded, worn-out obsolete objects …’ (p. 196). 21 Margaret Anne’s mother figures in the film’s original script, as a character called Rita, a girlfriend of Da’s. See Ramsay and Clarke, Ratcatcher. 22 See V. I. Propp, Morphology of the Folktale, trans. Laurence Scott (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1968), pp. 39–42. 23 There are one or two settings belonging to the film’s ‘real’ world that are not spatially tied in: the hall where Da receives his bravery medal, and the street where he is attacked afterwards. Because they relate solely to the film’s plot, these spaces feel somewhat anomalous. The out-and-out fantasy setting of the Moon, where Snowball lands after being launched by Kenny, is recuperated into the space of ‘home’ when the image resolves into interference on the family’s television set, in front of which James is asleep on the sofa: we can therefore infer that it has been James’s dream.

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24 Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1984), p. 110; p. 109: de Certeau’s emphasis. 25 The psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott argued that playing involves the body as well as the imagination; and that while playing, the child manipulates external phenomena, investing them with ‘dream meaning and feeling’: D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock Press, 1971), p. 69. 26 In an essay on the infant’s separation from the mother, the psychoanalyst Anni Bergman asks: ‘The space surrounding the self is not part of the self, but it is not part of others. … How far does it extend? With whom and under what circumstances can it be shared? When is it friendly and protective, and when frightening and vast? When does it isolate, when does it connect?’ Anni Bergman, ‘From Mother to the World Outside: The Use of Space during the Separation – Individuation Phase’, in Simon A. Grolnick and Leonard S. Barkin (eds), From Fantasy to Reality: Winnicott’s Concepts of Transitional Objects and Phenomena (Northvale, NJ: Aronson, Inc., 1995), p. 148. 27 ‘All thrills entail the leaving and rejoining of security’: Michael Balint, Thrills and Regressions, International Psycho-Analytic Library, vol. 54 (London: Hogarth Press, 1959), p. 26 (Balint’s emphasis). The idea of thresholds is discussed in relation to cinematic space in Annette Kuhn, ‘Thresholds: Film as Film and the Aesthetic Experience’, Screen vol. 46 no. 4 (2005), pp. 401–14. 28 This is a crude summary of key findings of a classic, groundbreaking study of ‘children’s geographies’: Roger

Hart, Children’s Experience of Place (New York: Irvington Publishers, Inc., 1979). 29 For further information, see the entry on Lynne Ramsay at BFI screenonline, (accessed 17 August 2007). 30 Kill the Day was funded by the BFI and Channel 4; Gasman was commissioned for the Tartan Shorts series by BBC Scotland, the Scottish Film Production Fund and the Scottish Arts Council. On the making of Gasman, see Eileen Elsey and Andrew Kelly, ‘Interview with Lynne Ramsay’, in In Short: A Guide to Short Film-Making in the Digital Age (London: BFI, 2002), pp. 52–60. Television backing for Ratcatcher was put together by successive Heads of Drama at BBC Scotland, Andrea Calderwood and Barbara McKissack. Other presale funding was advanced by Pathé Pictures (to which Calderwood moved in 1998 as Head of Production), with additional input from French companies Lazennec and Studio Canal+. With a subsidy of £615,000 from the National Lottery via the Arts Council of England, the film’s total budget was just short of £2 million, a sum towards the low end for UK feature budgets at the time. 31 Most of the actors – including William Eadie, who played James – were non-professional, and the only setbuilding required (and the production’s largest single expense) involved the canal. During shooting, editor Lucia Zucchetti set up a cutting room in the old Govan Town Hall; and postproduction was completed in London. 32 Jonathan Romney, Guardian, 17 May 1999; John Archer, The Herald, 23 December 1999; Gavin Smith,

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The Village Voice, 8 June 1999; Anthony Quinn, Independent, 12 November 1999. 33 Ratcatcher’s awards are: 1999 Edinburgh International Film Festival: Herald Angel for Excellence, New Director’s Award; 1999 BAFTA: Carl Foreman Award for Best Newcomer; 1999 BFI Sutherland Award: Most Original First Film; 1999 British Independent Film Awards: Ramsay winner of Douglas Hickox Award; 1999 Chicago International Film Festival: Silver Hugo for Best Director; 2000 BBC 2 Awards: Best Film. 34 Duncan Petrie, ‘The New Scottish Cinema’, in Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (eds), Cinema and Nation (London: Routledge, 2000). I am indebted to the detailed accounts of the industrial and organisational background of Scottish film production in Duncan Petrie, Screening Scotland (London: BFI, 2000). See also the Scottish cinema dossier in Screen vol. 46 no. 2 (2005), pp. 213–45; and Ivan Turok, ‘Cities, Clusters and Creative Industries: The Case of Film and Television in Scotland’, European Planning Studies vol. 11 no. 5 (2003), pp. 549–65. 35 The quotation is from Ian Goode’s contribution to the Scottish cinema dossier in Screen (p. 235). See also Duncan Petrie, Contemporary Scottish Fictions: Film, Television and the Novel (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); Jonathan Murray, ‘Contemporary Scottish Film’, Irish Review no. 28 (2001), pp. 75–88. Bill Douglas’s Trilogy comprises My Childhood (1972), My Ain Folk (1973) and My Way Home (1978). 36 See Andrew O’Hagan, Our Fathers (London: Faber and Faber, 1999). The quotation is taken from O’Hagan’s The Missing (London: Faber and Faber,

1995), p. 38. In his review of Ratcatcher (Daily Telegraph, 12 November 1999), O’Hagan writes: ‘the tenement life is coming to an end. … [T]his was the hope for many families – to escape over the fields to somewhere clean, new and out of the dark.’ O’Hagan was born in 1968. 37 Bert Hardy’s famous photograph of street children in Glasgow’s Gorbals first appeared in Picture Post in 1948. Oscar Marzaroli lived and worked in Glasgow, and his large body of photographic work includes a record of the Gorbals in the 1960s. See, for example, Oscar Marzaroli, Glasgow’s People 1956–1988 (Edinburgh: Mainstream Publishing, 1993); Andrew Blaikie, ‘Photography, Childhood and Urban Poverty: Remembering the Forgotten Gorbals’, Visual Culture in Britain vol. 7 no. 2 (2006), pp. 47–68. 38 Usually remembered, unlike the scene in the film, as being thrown down to the back court or the street from a window above. Glaswegian friends also point out that the back court is sometimes called, regardless of whether or not grass is present, the back green. 39 See, for example Alastair McKay, ‘A Different Field of Vision’, The Scotsman, 18 August 1999; Paul Pender, ‘Could We Just Lighten up a Little?’, Scotland on Sunday, 22 August 1999; Pete Jackson, ‘Quiet Anger in the Dust’, Socialist Worker, 13 November 1999. 40 This section is comprised of edited quotations from interviews with the director in: Anon, ‘Whiff of Success’, Scotland on Sunday, 18 July 1999; Andy Bailey, ‘Gutter Jewel, Lynne Ramsay Finds Beauty in Ratcatcher’, IndieWire, , 2000

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(accessed 8 November 2006); Michel Ciment, ‘Lynne Ramsay: je préfère les stratégies obliques’, Positif no. 467 (January 2000), pp. 8–11; Cullen, ‘Details are Acoustical’; Eileen Elsey, ‘Herstories: Lynne Ramsay Talks about Narrative Structure and the Gender of Storytelling’, Vertigo vol. 2 no. 4 (2003), pp. 14–15; Elsey and Kelly, ‘Interview with Lynne Ramsay’; Graham Fuller, ‘Pollution, Rats and Death Make One

Beautiful Picture’, Interview, , 2000 (accessed 8 November 2006); Lynne Ramsay, ‘The Pure Thing’, Scotland on Sunday, 22 August 1999; Ramsay and Clarke, Ratcatcher, pp. vii–xiv; Liese Spencer, ‘What are You Looking at?’ Sight and Sound (September 1999), pp. 17–19.

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Credits Ratcatcher Great Britain 1999 Directed by Lynne Ramsay Produced by Gavin Emerson Screenplay Lynne Ramsay Director of Photography Alwin Kuechler Editor Lucia Zucchetti Production Designer Jane Morton Music Rachel Portman © 1999 Pathé Fund Limited

Production Companies Pathé Pictures and BBC Films present in association with the Arts Council of England and Lazennec and Le Studio Canal+ a Holy Cow Films production Supported by The National Lottery through the Arts Council of England Developed in association with BBC Scotland Developed with the assistance of Moonstone International Executive Producers Andrea Calderwood Barbara McKissack Sarah Radclyffe Co-producer Bertrand Faivre Associate Producer Peter Gallagher Pathé Development Executive Ruth McCance BBC Scotland Production Executive Christine MacLean Production Co-ordinator Su Bainbridge Location Manager Pauline Ogle Post-production Co-ordinator Francesca Dowd

Assistant Directors Nick McCarthy Anneli Downing Mark Murdoch Tracey Skelton John Armstrong Script Supervisor Karen Wood Casting Director Gillian Berrie Camera Operators 2nd Unit Tom Townend Nick Barrett Visual Effects Magic Camera Company Visual Effects Supervisor Steve Begg Domino Compositor Daniel Pettipher Model Maker Ian Kettles Art Director Robina Nicholson Storyboard Artist Derek Gray Costume Designer Gill Horn Wardrobe Supervisor Elaine Nichols Titles Design David James Associates Titles Malcolm Webb Score Conductor David Arch Score Orchestrator Rachel Portman Recording/Mix Engineer Chris Dibble

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Soundtrack ‘Lollipop’ by Beverly Ross, Julius Dixon, performed by The Chordettes; ‘C’mon Everybody’ by Jerry N. Capehart, Eddie Cochran, performed by Eddie Cochran; ‘What’s New Pussycat’ by Burt Bacharach, Hal David, performed by Tom Jones; ‘Something Stupid’ by Carson Parks, performed by Frank Sinatra, Nancy Sinatra; ‘Cello Song’ by/performed by Nick Drake; ‘Roobarb & Custard’ written by Grange Calverley, narrated by Richard Briers Sound Supervisor Paul Davies Sound Recording Richard Flynn 2nd Unit Sound Recordist Stuart Wilson Dubbing Mixer Tim Alban Dialogue Editor Richard Flynn Foley Artists Felicity Cottrell Jack Stew Recordist Jens Christensen

Editor Jens Christensen Stunt Co-ordinator Paul Heasman Animals Creature Feature Animal Trainer Derek Anderson CAST William Eadie James Gillespie Tommy Flanagan Da Mandy Matthews Ma Michelle Stewart Ellen Gillespie Lynne Ramsay Jr Anne Marie Gillespie Leanne Mullen Margaret Anne John Miller Kenny Jackie Quinn Mrs Quinn James Ramsay Mr Quinn Anne McLean Mrs Fowler Craig Bonar Matt Monroe Andrew McKenna Billy Mick Maharg Stef James Montgomery Hammy Thomas McTaggart Ryan Quinn Stuart Gordon Tommy Stephen Sloan Mackie

Molly Innes Miss McDonald Stephen King Mr Mohan John Comerford insurance man Jimmy Grimes Mr Mullen Anne Marie Lafferty Rita Bess McDonald elderly lady Leanne Jenkins kitten girl Ian Cameron Brian Steel soldiers Dougie Jones Joe McCrone scavengers James Watson bus driver Stephen Purdon boy on bike Marion Connell Jesse Robert Farrell boy Donnie McMillan Artie Lisa Taylor Anne Marie’s friend Certificate 15 Distributor: Pathé© Distribution 8,406 feet Running time: 93 minutes 24 seconds Dolby In Colour