Ratcatcher: Spine Number 162

It has never occurred to me, as a film student, that someone like Ramsay would make short films. Alongside this wonderful feature, spine number 162 promises three award-winning shorts by the same woman who, weeks earlier, spoke to me across an elementary-school classroom, whose Morvern Callar was engrossing to the degree that when fire alarms went off and lights pulsed during a Telluride screening at the Chuck Jones Cinema, no one batted an eye or fled for cover. We simply assumed it was a part of this most immersive show.

Small Deaths, Kill the Day, and Gasman are the first shorts I see directed by anyone other than my film-school peers. This is a rude awakening, because it is one thing to meet Lynne and, through her grace, feel as though she and you are somehow undertaking the same or similar things; it is another to witness her working within comparable limitations of time and scope but in a manner that is, to put it plainly, a stratosphere beyond you.

I won’t spoil the magic Lynne conjures in these short films by speaking directly to what transpires in them, their plots. For me, it is more important to witness how these things happen, how visual language is manifested in the hands of an artist unencumbered by the rules of story and instead fully empowered by the specific nature of visual imagery.

Synesthesia is a word I, as a child raised in a lagging public-education system, have not heard by this point in my life. But it is the one that best encapsulates what I find in these films. Spine number 162 opens a portal, a path on which I find myself following Lynne’s example, mining my own upbringing for sublimity and meaning through an honest conjuring of the environment that formed and shaped me.

Later, while browsing the student flea market, I come across one of those framed items that adorn the walls of undergrads from Providence to Berkeley and, yes, Tallahassee. The aphorism, attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, reads, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication.” And, on an adjoining print, “Painting is poetry that is seen rather than felt, and poetry is painting that is felt rather than seen.” In this moment, I take these quotes to heart, because, for me, they sum up the power of Lynne’s work.

It’s unclear to me how many times I watch the films on this disc. I just watch. And watch and watch and watch. One day, I am watching these films, the feature and the shorts—my goodness, as a film student, these shorts!—and I feel the fulfillment of Leonardo’s aphorisms; finally. Lynne’s work is so great that it renders aphorisms ineffable. Working in images, she makes the discarded exurbs of Glasgow tactile and known, a history forgotten to the 1970s true and irrefutable.

There is a photo I took of Lynne during her session at the Telluride symposium. In the picture, she is flanked by one of the symposium’s stewards, the great Linda Williams. Behind and around me, there are forty-nine other students from all over the world—film, medical, and physics students, a sincere array. We are asking random and disparate questions, but Lynne is here for all of it, captured in a moment of oration, hands askew as she works through a thought, field cap turned just so.