Small Deaths
Dir: Lynne Ramsay
1996
****

Small Deaths is Lynne Ramsay's debut short film that she completed as her graduating film at the UK's National Film and Television School. Small Deaths is a series of three vignettes of children grappling with familial realities and the repercussions of their actions. It’s a deeply personal film to Ramsay, although not necessarily auto-biographical. Ramsay is the Writer, Director and cinematographer for the entire film and it is an impressive piece. The first vignette features a young girl as she watches her mother cutting her father’s hair. While the composition is controlled the audio is more fly-on-the-wall and unscripted. The mother cuts the father’s hair before he goes out for the evening – the mother and daughter empty and dejected when he says he doesn’t know when he’ll be back. The second vignette features two young girls enjoying the freedom of the countryside. They chase each other through meadows and across streams until they encounter a gang of boys throwing rocks at a heard of cows. One cow is badly hurt, and once the boys leave the two girls run to its side, trying to understand the pointless brutality they have just witnessed. The third and final vignette sees a older girl in her late teens putting on make-up at the bottom of the stairs of a block of flats. Once finished, she climbs the stair to a flat where we assume she is to meet friends she wants to impress. As she approaches the front door she is met by panic. A female friend is slumped in a chair with a needle in her arm as the rest of the group stand around shouting in wild mania for her do something about it. It is a prank and the girl in the chair moves and they all laugh at her as she goes back down the stairs. The vignettes are each small death of life that may – or may not be autobiographical. The context of each film is never clear, Ramsay trained as a photographer and cinematographer, so she lets the images do the talking. There is magic in her gritty realism. Her characters are all reflecting on something, the subjects are open to interpretations and the viewer is welcome to come up with their own background stories – that aspect really isn’t important. The films are of the here and now (or the there and then), the stark and sombre poetry of meagre circumstances and bruised memory. She’s one of the best directors working today and has been since 1996.