Expressive Realism and Troubled Subjectivities in the Films of Lynne Ramsay (1999-2017)

If all Ramsay’s four feature films all center on troubled characters, my interest lies not so much in their psychology, but in the devices utilized to express these subjectivities. In short, I’d like to determine to what extent Ramsay’s project can be seen as an attempt to develop a poetics of troubled subjectivities that operates on the levels of both cognition and sensation. I argue that Ramsay’s films demonstrate how objective and expressive realism, two art cinema traditions Bordwell initially opposed, may interact. The difference between objective and expressive realism is by no means radical; it is, rather, a matter of emphasis, of privileging the social over the psychological. For ultimately both traditions aim to capture human experience: expressive realism by objectifying the subjective, objective realism by subjectifying the objective, which, in our post-modern, post-structural world, is already subjective in the first place. My exploration of Ramsay’s brand of expressive realism will focus on three elements of her poetics : narrative disruptions, point of view and texture.