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“She's the real McCoy . . . one of those rare directors who creates the kind of films that just would not be there if she didn’t make them.”
—Tilda Swinton
BAMPFA is honored to present a retrospective of Lynne Ramsay’s extraordinary films this August. As a writer and director, Ramsay has—since her first Cannes Film Festival award–winning short film, Small Deaths—been interested in exploring those shifts in perception that forever change a person’s relationship to the world and often to themselves. She has a talent for creating and communicating a palpable sense of place, an atmosphere within which complex social relationships play out and the emotional and psychological state of her characters is reflected.
Ramsay, drawn to photography before her shift to filmmaking, said that she “thinks in images” and references photographers like Richard Billingham, William Eggleston, and Nan Goldin among her influences. Her movies benefit from her keen eye for what Henri Cartier-Bresson dubbed “the decisive moment.” As Lizzie Francke observed, Ramsay has a “documentarian’s sensitivity to details both abstract and absurd, she can draw the viewer’s eye to some gesture that is both casual and momentous—while she allows almost still images to resonate.” Ramsay makes space for this resonance in her edits, and as in the films of Robert Bresson, her precise and selective use of sound creates heightened awareness in the viewer. Hers is a cinema that is sensed as much as it is seen.
—Kate MacKay, Associate Film Curator