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Absorbed in the private world of an invented child's game and sulking about attending a Christmas party, the older brother in Lynne Ramsay's film Gasman (1997) pours a snowfall of sugar over a toy car. Some filmmakers shine a bright light that blurs the intimate, the indistinct and the fugitive. Ramsay shines a flashlight here and there, in an open, daring, quietly confident manner and with an acute eye to the particulars that inform. Within families a lot happens on the periphery and the most telling details are often seen out of the corner of one's eye. Every family, as the viewer can see in Ramsay's films, has a shorthand language of gesture and sound that is peculiarly private yet universally understood.
Ramsay's use of sound and the silent gravity of her pictures magnifies subtle inner movements. Exquisitely attuned to the ability of sound to conjure and modulate the inner fluctuations and private gestures of emotional life, she pulls the viewer into an intimacy with her characters. Sound and image work in a kind of correspondence. Though the narrative is driven by a cinematography of masterfully composed shots that often radiate inwardness, the true veracity of emotion lies in her use of music and both diegetic and non-- diegetic sound to pinpoint, extend, deepen and fracture feeling. Often three sound spaces are used in a scene to establish place, to continue the narrative line and to balloon or condense in the emotional space. As a young boy slowly shrouds himself in a curtain in the dreamy opening scene of Ratcatcher (1999), the muffled voices of children at play, a slow rumble and a spell-like booming quiet act together as a portent of death. It is often one aspect of the soundscape, though, that stays with the viewer: the simple sounds of the television as Margaret Anne and James sit on the couch eating sandwiches after scrubbing each other's lice-infested scalps; a twangy sound that loosens and resonates as if something newly discovered inside is expanding as James rides the bus to the outskirts of Glasgow.
The hypnotic ethereality of the opening image is suddenly broken as Ryan's alarmed mother unwraps the boy from the window curtain cocoon and scolds him with the combination of worry...