Last weekend I watched two very different films: Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher and Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. I can’t tell you why I finally decided to pull them out of my watchlist — those two films, on those two days in October. I have no idea. But I deeply loved them, and now they’re permanently part of my emotional imagination.
This is a mysterious thing to me: cinema’s uncanny ability, despite all awareness of craft and artifice, to land a sucker-punch. I’ve been sucker-punched by films before, but I’m always surprised when it happens. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s like watching a play, where at first the whole thing seems contrived and you feel some degree of secondhand embarrassment for the first actor who has to break the silence, but then gradually the whole audience buys in and swaps the baggage of their real lives with the drama happening on stage. With films, it’s similar. There are the opening credits to overcome, along with maybe a few scenes of exposition. But then, if the film is good, you no longer see the cuts, no longer comprehend the dialogue intellectually, and are fully immersed.
With the best films, that sense of immersion results in a sucker-punch of emotion. I equate the feeling to walking away from an encounter with a stranger and being made to feel giddy by your strange conviction that you will see them again. That there was something there, something precious which, even if it isn’t to endure, is still in its onset a powerful reason to rededicate to life and all its pain and glory.
I felt that feeling of being sucker-punched after watching Ratcatcher and Ali. I also felt a certain humility. A recognition that, while watching them, my relationship with them was inverted, that they were not so much the objects of my judgment as they were the subjects of my instruction. That they were actively teaching me how to watch them.
Take the opening scene of Ratcatcher, for example. Even just the opening shot. In choppy, exaggerated slow motion, some kind of swinging, rotating figure emerges from the white. Eventually, we realize it’s a little boy inside a lace window curtain, twisting it into a tight spiral. Over the image we hear a cacophony of community sounds; kids at play, maybe some parents scolding them. Then we’re violently jolted out of the slow-mo by the boy’s mother smacking him on the head. She fishes him out of the curtain and leads him off camera. We’re left to watch the curtain slowly untwist itself as the film’s title — “Ratcatcher” — appears on screen.
This is simply a brilliant opening shot. When I first saw it, only a minute in, I had no idea what was to come, but I knew I had already been taught several things about how it was to come. First, I was taught that I could expect a film that was, if not experimental, then at least loose in form, given the unconventional use of slow motion. Second, that the film would likely be rooted in the point of view of an adolescent (the slow motion and dislocated sounds create a strong sense of being inside the boy’s head, lost in his own little world; the mother, her face out of frame, eventually jolting the image and sound back to reality only adds to this subjectivity). Third, I was taught that I was dealing with a filmmaker with a keen eye for visual storytelling and a tolerance for ambiguity. The image itself, of a kid twisting himself in a lace curtain, is incredibly powerful. We have no idea what we’re looking at initially. It just feels vaguely menacing, evocative of a creature in agony, or a suicide by hanging, or something caught in a trap. When we realize it’s only a boy at play, the knowledge somewhat reassures us, but the sense of menace doesn’t fully abate. If anything, watching the curtain untwist itself after the boy is dragged out feels plaintive, resembling the death throes of a creature finally put out of its misery.
Without giving away any more of the film, all this knowledge is relevant and even more impactful in retrospect. It’s all contained in about sixty seconds. By the time the title appears, we’re fully ready to cede our authority as skeptical spectators to the screen, to Lynne Ramsay. It’s a brilliant opening, and shot after shot of the next few minutes only continues to teach us about the tone and subject of the film and how we, as viewers, ought to regard it.
The same is true of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul. The film is about an older German widow who falls in love with a younger Moroccan migrant worker. The opening scene shows the woman (Emmi) walking into a bar full of migrant workers who greet her with a frozen stare. One of the patrons jokingly (perhaps cruelly) dares another (Ali) to “dance with the old girl.” He accepts the challenge, she says yes, and, while slowly swaying on the dance floor, they talk. Later, he walks her home. An unlikely romance develops.
Even this brief section of the opening scene demonstrates that this is a wildly different film from Ratcatcher, with its own emotional register which, as viewers, we ought to be introduced to as quickly and efficiently as possible. The mise-en-scène in Ali is more self-consciously composed; the first two shots, of Emmi and the patrons staring back at her in an icy tableaux, set up a stylistic motif which is used throughout the film in order to reinforce the isolation of the characters (here, just Emmi, but later, both Emmi and Ali as a couple) in the face of society’s prejudices. There is much more to be said about the opening scene but, again, it’s an example of a film asserting its authority by confidently introducing its themes, tone, and style. In the case of Ali, we are also taught to expect a stoic, matter-of-fact kind of acting, somewhere between Bresson and Rohmer. Throughout the film, this stoicism contrasts more and more with the melodrama of the story, strangely creating an even greater emotional impact than if the actors had been more conventionally emotive.
With both films, I was sucker-punched by emotion not only because both films were objectively well-made, but because I was a willing student of their instruction. It is only because Ramsay taught me how to watch Ratcatcher that, later in the film, during a scene in which some teenagers toss a naive boy’s pet rat back and forth like a hot potato, each whip of the camera as the rat exchanged hands made my heart feel not dissimilar to the rat. It is only because Fassbinder taught me how to watch Ali that I felt inexplicably moved when, in an early scene, Brigitte Mira, playing the older woman, squeezes past the chair of her younger lover at the breakfast table. It’s not highlighted at all, and other viewers may not even make anything of it, but in the scene Brigitte Mira is wearing a colorful, self-dignifying dress and a face of such pure anticipation of life’s next moment of wonder, of such pure tenderness, that I found myself verklempt.
Cultivating that feeling of being a student in thrall of his teacher’s authority and secrets is essential to transformative movie-watching. That sounds lofty, but there it is; it’s just something I believe is true. I suspect that we sometimes dampen or distort our experience of films because we are, for one reason or another, unwilling to cultivate that feeling. We elevate our sense of our own taste beyond any possibility of a film to expand our palette and surprise us. For most of us, it’s not necessarily our fault; we’re not being lazy. It’s just that a TV show on a home television set (or computer monitor) is our most common source of visual storytelling.
We’re fed an incessant diet of serial shows these days, to the point where even the good ones (the auteur-driven ones not algorithmically-written or marketed to death) may be warping our ability to think freshly about the images we receive, so caught up are we in the familiar rhythms of serial exposition, character development, and plot “arcs.” We may not even realize the extent to which our taste is actively being narrowed and directed to the most profitable pieces of streaming content available1. Then of course there’s (social) media, which lures any raindrop of an independent thought we may have about something into a vast ocean of posturing, attitude, and personality, all under the banner of “discourse.”
Or, maybe I’m just a cranky old soul. But I wonder what would happen if more people fought the algorithms and gave a chance to more types of films, if we were all a bit more receptive to learning from a film than learning about it — certainly before judging it. Maybe more of us would find more of those films that unexpectedly transform us, that make us a tiny bit more tolerant, more thoughtful, more at ease with “our inability to [all] be sentient together, in exactly the same way.”2
If you haven’t read it, I recommend this great in-depth look at Netflix’s business model by Matthew Ball from a few years ago.
Great insights! I need to watch both films.
Being sucker-punched by emotion is always a good feeling because it makes you take stock of what you truly care about.
Would be curious what else is on your watch list!