‘The in-between of things’: intermediality in Ratcatcher

Abstract

This paper approaches Lynne Ramsay's Ratcatcher through the rubric of Siegfried Kracauer's materialist film theory, which suggests that film is interested in the ‘refuse’ of existence, drawn to ‘what is just there’ in reality. It will be suggested here that Ratcatcher's multi-sensory investment in a ‘low-plane reality’ works to reclaim some of the possibilities that Kracauer and other modern film theorists conferred upon the medium of cinema. However, in contrast to Kracauer's insistence on the ‘redemptive’ mission of cinema, it draws from the recent body of ‘new materialist’ theory in order to reframe cinema's relations with things. Through attentiveness to what Elizabeth Grosz calls the ‘in-between of things’, this paper develops an argument about the materiality of things that also accounts for the materiality of the cinema as a thing, and for the immanent relations it establishes with other media forms. The paper draws from the concept of intermediality, to suggest that this heightened awareness of materiality emerges most powerfully in Ratcatcher's creation of an interstitial space between film, art and the real. In turn, the paper suggests that it is ultimately in privileging the still life of things that Ratcatcher most powerfully foregrounds cinema's affective and aesthetic potential.