The Vision of a Camera of a Good Life in Ratcatcher by Ramsay - Essay Example

9 August “Perceptions The Camera’s Vision of a Good Life in Ramsay’s Ratcatcher Cinema, as a product and communication of perceptions through the engagement of the senses, can influence their audiences’ perceptions too. To understand “perception” in films, the essay explores its conceptualisation through Walter Benjamin’s and Stan Brakhage’s writings. In “A Child’s View of Colour,” Walter Benjamin argues that children perceive colour as something to be valued and experienced per se and apart from its object’s physical elements. In the essay, “From Metaphors on Vision,” Stan Brakhage confirms the power and beauty of perception that is unfettered by logic. Like Benjamin, Brakhage asserts that infants, who have not yet acquired human logic, possess the purest perceptions because they have not learned the meaning of fear. These notions of “perception” are applied on Lynne Ramsay’s 1999 film, Ratcatcher. Ratcatcher demonstrates the different visions of a good life from the viewpoints of the director, children, and the audience because of their varied, potentially conflicting, perceptions of images that are caused by differences in how these three groups perceive, understand, and express the film’s colours, sounds, composition, and sequences. Before going through the claims of the essay, an overview of the film is essential to understanding its elements. The setting of the film is Glasgow in 1973. During this time, Glasgow suffers from poor housing conditions that are worsened when the garbage collectors go on strike. Because of the strike, garbage accumulates and pollutes the surroundings. The government balances numerous priorities, as it pursues a development program that includes a housing project and seeks to resolve the problem of the garbage workers going on strike. James Gillespie (William Eadie) is the main protagonist of the film, where he and his family are waiting to be re-housed in one of the newly built apartments of the government (Ratcatcher). James’ friend is Ryan Quinn (Thomas McTaggart), who is supposed to visit his father in jail. Instead of going to his father, Ryan plays with James (Ratcatcher). Their rough play has resulted to Ryan’s drowning in the canal. James feels guilty because he has not alarmed the neighbours of what happened, and instead, he runs away. James has other friends, Margaret Anne (Leanne Mullen) and Kenny (John Miller), who all have their personal issues. The rough boys in the neighbourhood make fun of Kenny and Margaret Anne, while also sexually abusing the latter. The military arrives to clean the rubbish in the area, but somehow, James feels that only the outside aspect of their social dilemma is cleansed. He jumps into the canal and commits suicide, while the film ends with the vision of his family relocating to their new house. To begin the analysis of “perception,” Ratcatcher illustrates the perception of the director of a good life that can be described as limited and delimiting. The difference between limited and delimiting is that limited pertains to the film as it is, a limited view of life, while delimiting pertains to the intentions and biases of the director that affect what can be included and not included in the elements of the film. The director controls the camera, which, as a tool of perception, can only include a semblance of reality. In the bus scene, where James runs away and rides a bus, he sees mounds of trash from the bus windows (Ratcatcher). The bus windows are similar to the camera. It can only catch what is in front of it without fully covering everything and without completely conveying what the presence and absence of images mean. The scene exposes the limitations of the camera as an eye for the director, and in connection, to the viewers. Brakhage states that the camera can only capture so much, as it superimposes images on one another and attempts to cover varied motions and emotions (122). He argues that the camera eye is a limited peek into the world. Furthermore, the director holds the camera and designs the editing process. Referring to the bus scene once more, Ramsay places Margaret Anne along the ruins (Ratcatcher). The impact indicates that like garbage around her, society’s maltreatment of the girl has turned her into someone who feels like trash too. The sexual abuses she endures must be taunting her, pushing her deeper into the abyss of moral pollution through sexual corruption. The mise-en-scene from the window of the moving bus is Ramsay’s way of capturing society’s breakdown, despite the promises of a good life of capitalism. Brakhage accepts, not only the limitation of the camera eye, but also its restrictions because it is a human being’s eye. He sees the camera eye as something that may be false or incomplete because of the intentions of the director: And there (right there) we have the camera eye (the limitation the original liar); yet lyre sings to the mind so immediately (the exalted selectivity one wants to forget that its strings can so easily make puppetry of human motivation)...” (Brakhage 122) Brakhage understands the inability of films to express the whole truth because the truth has multiple faces and directors can choose one or more version of the truth only. In other words, Ramsay might only be limiting her social analysis through seeing the wrongs of capitalism without portraying its possibilities. Her motivation affects what she thinks is the motivations of capitalism. The good life is questioned in the scene, but it is something that cannot be taken on its own without understanding its limitations. Aside from images, the director controls the rest of the elements too, which affect the portrayal of the film’s social and individual issues. Ratcatcher can be analysed as a dystopian film hinged on social realism to some extent. Ale Law and Jan Law use Walter Benjamin’s concepts and beliefs to explore the ability of Ratcatcher to change perceptions and to produce impressions on the audience. Though they see the film as an example of utopian realism, the dystopian quality of the film lies in its hopelessness for the characters, including Ryan, James, Kenny, and Margaret Anne. Ryan might have felt terribly alone because of the absence of his father and the desperation of his mother to replace his father economically and socially. Kenny shifts his feelings of physical and intellectual weaknesses to his love for animals, but somehow, these animals cannot replace his need for genuine human connection. Margaret Anne is lost in a world of peer pressure and sex. She has been diminished into a sexual object, a toy to be tossed around like a rat to the boys who use her. James, by not taking responsibility for the death of friend, loses responsibility for his own existence. Films engage the senses for deeper meanings and implications to be gathered from them. Brakhage uses the metaphor of a garden: “Realize the garden as you will- the growing is mostly underground” (124). Every element of the film and their interactions has meaning for these characters. The director uses these elements to shape the audiences’ understanding of the characters and their innermost fears and hopelessness. To remark further on the perception of a good life from the view of the director, the bus scene is explored once more. The transition of the scene from the garbage of the city to the nature at its periphery indicates the imagining of the director according to composition and sequence. Ramsay shows how society tricks the characters into believing their realities as something distressing, finite, and permanent. These children accept the rabbits, or their own weaknesses and society’s limitations, and believe them to be true and lasting. The camera eye is the directors’ eye that projects unto audiences, helping them see the world from the characters’ tarnished perceptions of the world and their identities. Brakhage describes the “19th century Western compositional perspective” that bends light and limits the frame (121), turning films into “rabbits” (123). He provides different ways of showing one aspect of one image, such as through motion of holding the camera and exposure of the film, because films are works of magicians, a way of tricking audience into seeing and believing something. The garbage in the bus scene is not garbage initially, but a mixture of things that people need, want, and consume. They are food, books, equipment, and things of comfort and convenience. Only in their end garbage state can people perceive that capitalism has its drawbacks too, including the isolation of workers from their labour, the destruction of the environment through pollution, and the breakdown of social ties. The notion of a good life that is related to capitalism is not perfect. But not all people see this, the drawbacks of the contemporary idea of a good life. Brakhage talks about the importance of perception to a child that may be lost to an adult: “Question any child as to his drawing and he will defend the ‘reality’ of what you claim ‘scribbles’” (124). The statement can be applied to the myopic understanding of a good life, which when revealed, results to a liberated perception (Hedges 175). Reality can be argued as a product of perceptions, and some people’s perceptions, when taught to another, can become a norm of perceptions regarding success and happiness. Sound is another important element that enables directors to control the image and what they can mean to the audience. James does not express himself too much and Ramsay uses music to suggest what James feels and thinks about. In the bus scene, the diegetic sounds of the rumbling bus gives way to non-diegetic music as the bus enters a more idyllic surrounding (Ratcatcher). The music is upbeat, sending the impression that James feels liberated because he escapes his urban reality. Bela Balazs explains formative film theory, which includes the element of sound. He says that sounds can demonstrate inner lives: “Our ear will hear the different voices in the general babble and distinguish their character as manifestations of individual life” (198). Ramsay uses the non-diegetic music to explore the inner hopes of a young boy, to expose his perception of a better life. The scene suggests that a better life is sanitised of commercial images and focuses on freedom and individuality. In addition, the music during the setting that shows the wheat fields in the bus scene can be described as giving cause to James’ motivations in life. He sits inside the bus but he consumes nature with his movements. Balazs talks about the importance of sound to films: “Sound will not merely be a corollary to the picture, but the subject, source and mover of the action. In other words it will become a dramaturgical element in the film” (199). Inside the bus, the music causes joy and hope for James. It sends the feeling that maybe, not everything is as bleak as it seems. The music, though James does not hear it, manifests his motivation to find a better life for himself and his family. The film depicts how the director intends to use sound as a way of moving characters and the audience into the direction of possibilities. Sounds impact the perception of the characters and what they can potentially experience through their motivations in life. Apart from the viewpoint of the director, perceptions in film include those of the audiences too, and in this case, the writer of the essay represents one of the audiences who analyses the film from the “perceptions” of Benjamin and Brakhage. One of the scenes in Ratcatcher shows James entering one of the building’s rooms, or units. The camera seems to be following him first from behind and then later on takes his perspective as it sweeps around the room (Ratcatcher). As an audience, the writer of this essay cannot appreciate the empty room, not until the perspective shifts to the character, a young boy from the working class. From here, the camera eye changes, as if the viewers possess the boy’s eyes. His eyes depict wonder. The walls are not empty to him. Benjamin notes that children see colours in their purest level, where they have meaning through their essence, not through the forms of their objects. The whiteness of the walls represents purity and space to James. Through his eyes, the audience no longer sees emptiness, but opportunities. As the camera pans around the room and goes back to James, the impact is the oneness of the audience with the character. The moment they see the world through his eyes, they can understand how he perceives and experiences the room, and indeed, the world at large. The purity of the walls, which is connected to the relocation of the people to the new community, however, is misleading. Brakhage explains the deception of the camera eye: “The original word was a trick, and so were all the rules of the game that followed in its wake” (124). He seems to be alluding to the Word of God that is true and permanent for His believers, but in this case, the words and images in the film are not always true and permanent at all. Instead, the words and the rules it produced are misleading and incomplete. Just because people will soon have houses, it does not mean that they will experience a better life. The image of physical beauty in the whiteness of the house is false because it does not assure people of a truly good life. To discuss the topic of appearance better, the apartment scene depicts the magic contained in the imagination of viewers. The scene inside the apartment shows James enjoying facilities that he and his family do not have. He imagines bathing in a tub, thinking of the wonders of manipulating the coldness and hotness of the water’s temperature (Ratcatcher). The magic of his experiences can be perceived through the imagination of the viewers. A good life, based on this scene, is one where people can take a bath at whatever temperature is most comfortable, among other amenities. It is based on physical experiences, on the sensuality of feeling comfort through one’s skin and seeing beautiful objects. Then, the next scene is James peeing into a toilet bowl that is not working yet. His urine seeps out of the bowl. The editing has meaning that permeates the entire film. Annette Michelson asserts that Brakhage seeks to redefine “the space of cinematic representation” “through speed and fluidity of editing, of a new temporality: that of a continuous present in which spectatorial memory and anticipation were modified or eliminated” (113). The enjoyment that James feels in the tub is not complete. It is magical because it is untrue. The audience might think that he will have a better life, a good life in the end, but the pissing indicates the opposite. The urine that is seeping out foreshadows the dirty tricks of society. But not all of the audience will realize the foreshadowing. Brakhage states the difference between reality and cinematic illusion: “The schizophrenic does... believe in the reality of Rorschach, yet he will not yield to the suggestion that a pin-point light in a darkened room will move, being the only one capable of perceiving its stasis correctly” (124). At this point, James has not yet fully embraced the hopelessness of his life and society, and the audience most likely not have to also. Cinema expresses images of a new life through a picket-fenced home with white walls and complete amenities, but the audience can soon understand more about the superficial definition of a good life as the film continues. While the director shapes the perceptions of characters and the audience, the viewpoints of the child is an important aspect of Ratcatcher too, wherein they can see purity in ways that adults have forgotten. When James sees Kenny’s mouse on a balloon, the redness of the balloon looks so bright and engaging. The colours burst and launch his imagination of the mouse reaching the moon and a population of mice growing on it. Benjamin suggests that perception differs according to people’s understanding of what they see because this knowledge affects what they think and feel and how they behave. Children can perceive the world better because they see colours without judgment. Brakhage agrees and celebrates the power of vision for children: “To see is to retain- to behold.” Brakhage maintains that seeing with pure perception is to understand the vision without the lens of human language and logic. James does not question a mouse travelling in outer space. He does not consider the mouse dying or the balloon popping. It just gets to the moon, which suggests that James wants to be as free as the mouse that can reach the moon. In the moon, he can experience freedom and autonomy. He keeps the image of the mouse in his mind, giving him an opportunity to dream and to be a new person. These perceptions are gained from the symbolism of the mouse and the character of James. In another essay, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” Benjamin examines the uses of language. He asserts that language is not only for the “communication of the communicable,” but also “a symbol of the noncommunicable” (Benjamin 74). The noncommunicable is what James cannot directly express, which the film depicts through symbols that are present in his dreams and imagination. Another example of seeing colours in their purity is the close-up shot of James’ face in the bus scene, which indicates his awe for nature and freedom. He looks around, carefully and yet greedily consuming the space around him. He sees, retains and beholds, as Brakhage says. The wide expanse of space with golden wheat and dots of green grasses, trees, and plants encourage James to feel alive and, for a short time, to feel happy and hopeful. Benjamin asserts that children see colour and appreciate the beauty of its nuances without relating them to the object’s internal matters, while adults emphasize the matter that is coloured, thereby prioritizing form and other internal characteristics of the object over colour. James sees the fields and the skies and feels freedom from their beauty. Adults see colour and they perceive it as a “layer of something superimposed on matter,” while children look at colour and they see “nuances of color” that jumps “from one form to another” (50). Their wheat fields are sources of food and income, not colours. Adults do not see colour as an important form, but something that serves the purpose related to the object’s inner characteristics. James sees the colours of his surroundings jump to him, and they make him jump and move too. Despite the pollution of humanity’s abstractions, James is still capable of pure perception. His senses enable him to enjoy his fleeting encounter with nature and freedom. To delve further into the purity of children’s perceptions, colour represents the highest plane of sight. After the bus scene, James visits the compounds where houses are being built for people like them. As James goes into one of the uninhabited and almost-finished buildings, he feels power and freedom. The act of jumping into the soil and shovelling suggests his autonomy. The soil is not only a part of the building, but a way of expression. Benjamin underscores that children see colour as “sight at its purest, because it is isolated” (50). Adults divide their senses in neat boundaries, but children can enjoy their sight at its peak without being bothered by other sensual perceptions. Benjamin believes that children see colours and the world of imagination expands for them, while adults view colours as something imposed on objects that are far more important than the former. Before entering the building, James plays around the tools and materials. The orange tubes serve as roads or bridges or means for shouting and letting himself be heard. Adults see the same materials and do not appreciate their colours. They only see their purposes; they are everything in-process, means to human ends. James sees these colours of the building’s tools as powerful means of expression. They are his partners to freedom, his playmates of autonomy. Furthermore, James goes into the building and feels the whiteness of the walls. The ceiling is high, as if nothing is impossible. James gets a better sense of height later on with nature, but while inside the building, the whiteness stands for space around him. He appreciates the space that contains him and that which he also feels he controls. His plane of sight elevates his perceptions and colours his experiences. The scene suggests the power of children to appreciate life more through the colours that excite their senses. Because sight can be isolated through colours, Benjamin asserts that in the eyes of children, to see colour is to experience it creatively and spiritually. Indeed, James plays creatively in and around the building. He maximizes the space and the things on it to experience freedom without the rough boys in his neighbourhood or the craziness of his family and friends. Children see colour as a moving component, an experience that Benjamin likens to children’s activities that concern color, such as “painted sticks,” “sewing kits,” and “parlor games” (50). Colour is alive and it breathes life into children’s eyes, from sight to experience to creativity. Brakhage agrees with the purity of experience that children go through because of their innocence. He says: Imagine an eye unruled by manmade laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. (Brakhage 120) James enjoys his short trip to the fields through his adventure of perception. The colours in his surroundings shape his experience, his happiness, suggesting that a good life is more than physical comfort because it can also include the essence of creative engagement of the senses that appeals to the soul. The scene underscores the power of perception to engaging different definitions of a good life. Another example is Kenny and his mouse, Snowball, because one scene demonstrates the perception of a good life that is not related to human relations alone. The scene refers to Kenny showing Snowball to the rest of the boys. They play with Snowball, throwing him around like a ball. Kenny tries to get his pet back, a sign of his loyalty to his pet. It shows that he values his pet more than these neighbourhood boys. Then again, he releases Snowball into sky. He ties it to a balloon because he wants Snowball to the first mouse in the moon. Again, he demonstrates his love for his pet, which might be his source of steady companionship. The sight of the red balloon on an overcast sky is coupled with a happy music. The music comes from James’ active imagination. He sees the image of a flying mouse and his creativity flies. Brakhage underscores the beauty of innocence that produces pure perceptions. He says: “Imagine a world alive with incomprehensible objects and shimmering with an endless variety of movement and innumerable gradations of color. Imagine a world before the ‘beginning was the word’” (Brakhage 120). Logic impedes creativity, but children have not yet fully developed an adult’s logic. As a result, they are free to imagine and because they can freely imagine, they are truly free. Adults, on the contrary, distinguish something superficial with colour. When the boys throw the mouse around, the background is shown in full dreary colour too. The walls have vandalism and the premises are dirty. This is what adults would see- the colours of drab living, not the colours of a flying mouse. Colours, for adults, can seem like a “deceptive cloak for individual objects existing in time and space” (Benjamin 50). As a cloak, it is not something that moves like a living thing and definitely not something that can move people’s minds and behaviours. Benjamin goes on that colour is critical to creativity because children do not intellectualise what they see. The rawness of colour, the way children perceive it, results to a “coloring-in” approach to perception that results to consuming colour in its spectacular image that is “full of light and shade, full of movement, arbitrary and always beautiful” (Benjamin 51). As the mouse floats in the air, James sees beauty in movement and colours. The other boys are just laughing. They have acquired the eyes of adults and they do not perceive anything beautiful in the image of flying mouse. Benjamin underlines that adults do not perceive colours this way because they use laws and reason to understand the meaning of colours. Instead of seeing and feeling colours, they develop a “world order” from these colours (Benjamin 51). It is order that restricts their imagination though. Instead of appreciating the colours of the world, they see through it, seeing the lies of the cosmopolitan society. The spiritual enlightenment in the film comes from engagement with the senses. Children are free to explore their world through their senses, the way James and Kenny do. After James goes through the unit, he arrives at the window, which shows the wheat fields. The golden swaying stalks beckon him, calling him to enjoy a good life in its simplicity. Though Brakhage may call this scene one of the many illusions of cinema, it excites the senses of the child: I am meaning, simply, that the rhythms of change in the beam of illumination which now goes entirely over the heads of the audience, in the work of art, contain in itself some quality of a spiritual experience. (Brakhage 126) The beam of light on the wheat enhances their golden colours. On top is the sky with feathery clouds. It looks like paradise, and James jumps into the image of bounty and beauty. The music enhances the sense of wonder and exploration for James. He runs into the field and falls into the wheat stalks several times. He looks around his space, as if it his space for good. The low angle that shows a medium shot makes him larger than usual. He becomes larger in his experience of colours and space. He kneels and looks like he is part of the field. He is one with nature and he is finally free. The spiritual awakening comes from his reconnection with nature that is boundless and free. Benjamin explores the irony of colours, where children see and do not judge and yet they have richer spiritual sights compared to adults. Adults contemplate on colours and their forms, areas, and spaces (Benjamin 51). Benjamin provides an experiential reflective analysis of children’s perception of colours: “Children are not ashamed, since they do not reflect but only see” (51). Children see the purity of colours and how wonderful they are to consume and to use for production without rationalisations and judgments, and for that, they are able to experience the spiritual awakening that colours can give. Adults see causes and effects in colours, while children receive and express colours creatively and spiritually. The scene with the field represents the spiritual consumption of colours because James becomes part of the nature that gives happiness and freedom to him the way modern society cannot. The ending of the film, nevertheless, signifies the illusion of film that is a metaphor for the illusion of society. James has another spiritual enlightenment. After Kenny tells him that he knows that he killed Ryan, James realizes that his happiness in the field is a fabrication of his imagination. James plunges into the canal and kills himself. He cannot last in reality anymore because it is filled with lies, fears and broken dreams. Death becomes the best solution to his miserable life. Brakhage is right when he criticises the falseness of cinema because the “absolute realism” of films is a “contemporary mechanical myth” (127). James’ idea of a good life, where his family has a new home, is a myth too. The realism comes from his understanding that life is utterly hopeless is revealed in the end. He dies with an image of his family moving into the fields, into their new home. It is an image of a good life that society teaches him to believe. Sadly, until his death, he and his family do not attain the good life because he dies without experiencing it at all. The good life is eternally out of their reach. The film offers social criticism that delves into the meaning of perceptions to people’s values, beliefs and practices. Benjamin underscores the perceptions of children who dwell on colours. Because children see and appreciate colours, they can live freely. Brakhage criticises colours and other elements of film because they can mislead people. Indeed, Ratcatcher presents a sad ending. It is already limited through the perceptions of the director, the audience, and the characters, but its themes of a good life and happiness are poignant because they reflect social reality. Ratcatcher is a film that questions the perceptions of a good life. What is a good life to a child who only wants a whole family and freedom from harassment? What is a good life when he dies like a rat downing in a canal, after living like one? His perception dies with him, in the same canal where every other disillusioned child dies. Works Cited Balazs, Bela. Theory of the Film. Trans. Edith Bone. New York: Arno Press and New York Times, 1972. Web. 7 Aug. 2013. Benjamin, Walter. “A Child’s View on Colour.” Selected Writings 1913-1926. Eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard U P, 1996. 50-51. Print. ---. “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man.” Selected Writings 1913-1926. Eds. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings. Cambridge:Cambridge: Belknap P of Harvard U P, 1996. 62-74. Print. Brakhage, Stan. “From Metaphors on Vision.” The Avant-Garde Film: A Reader of Theory and Criticism. Ed. P. Adams Sitney. New York: Anthology Film Archives, 1978. 120-128. Print. Bullock, Marcus. “In a Blauer Reiter Frame: Walter Benjamin's Intentions of the Eye and Derrida's Specters of Marx.” Monatshefte 93.2 (2001): 177-195. Academic Search Premier. Web. 7 Aug. 2013. Hedges, Inez. “Stan Brakhage’s Film Testament: The Four Faust Films.” Avant-Garde Film. Eds. Alexander Graf and Dietrich Scheunemann. Netherlands: Rodopi. 165-182. Print. Law, Ale, and Jan Law. “Magical Urbanism: Walter Benjamin and Utopian Realism in the film Ratcatcher.” Historical Materialism 10.4 (2002): 173-311. Academic Search Premier. Web. 7 Aug. 2013. Michelson, Annette. “Stan Brakhage (1933-2003).” October 108 (2004): 112-115. Literary Reference Center. Web. 7 Aug. 2013. Ratcatcher. Dir. Lynne Ramsay. Perf. Tommy Flanagan, Mandy Matthews, and William Eadie. Pathe Pictures International, 1999. Film. Read More