Time, Memory, and Cinema: Tarkovsky Through Lynne Ramsay’s Gasman

Image: A still from Gasman (1997) by Lynne Ramsay, featuring the pivotal moment where the father lifts his daughter atop the hill's horizon--- love suspended at the edge of memory..​

Time, Memory, and Cinema: 

Tarkovsky Through Lynne Ramsay’s Gasman

Tarkovsky argues that cinema is based on observation. It is a poetic distillation of reality, like a hieroglyphic. He writes: “The point [of cinema] is to pick out and join together the bits of sequential facts, knowing, seeing and hearing precisely what lies beneath them and what kind of chain holds them together” (*Sculpting in Time*, p. 65).

This is especially significant to me when thinking about Lynne Ramsay, who creates highly complex visual images—cinematic poetry not driven by plot, but by propulsion through images and sound. In her framing, she often leaves out details: she cuts faces in half, obscures full views, and in doing so, allows true observation. The camera never instructs us on how to feel about her characters. It simply *watches*.

In her 1997 short *Gasman*, the opening sequence is made of wide close-up shots and skewed angles. The power of the sequence lies in what Ramsay does not allow us to see. A little boy sprinkles sugar on a toy car to imagine snow, then sends the car speeding through it, crashing. We don’t see his face. A girl struggles to put on her shoes, saying, "there’s no place like home," dancing around. She lifts her arms to slip into a party dress. Only then do we see her face. Slowly, we piece together that they’re getting ready for a party. The brother doesn’t want to go.

These moments are, in Tarkovsky’s words, visual hieroglyphics.

Tarkovsky also writes that time is a subjective and spiritual category. “The time we have lived settles in our soul as an experience placed within time” (p. 58). And further: “Time is a state: the flame in which there lives the salamander of the human soul” (p. 57). For Tarkovsky, time gives rise to moral searching. Memory becomes not just a record, but a fragile vessel for meaning.

This poetic treatment of time and memory is central to Ramsay’s work. Her images feel like fragments from a deep, interior archive. Her moments are highly liminal: the order of things suspended. We cross a threshold with her. She invites us to make our own kinetic connections to memory and trauma.

In *Gasman*, Ramsay flags important memories by contrasting flat, compressed shots with scenes of profound depth. After the interior, domestic shots, the film opens up into a long exterior shot with incredible depth of field: the family walking up a hill to the party. The parallel lines of sidewalk, grass, and street all converge at a distant horizon. There’s a street lamp at the hill's apex. The daughter runs diagonally across the frame. The father picks her up and spins her around, silhouetted at the top of the hill—a moment of pure connection. It pierces us. In that moment, love triumphs over context.

But the next sequence delivers a quiet devastation. We arrive at the train tracks. Again: parallel lines. But this time, they lead not to joy, but to revelation. The little girl sees her father’s *other* family. The betrayal is not spoken aloud. It is felt, seen. And it stays.

Tarkovsky believed that the past only exists in the present. The present itself goes unnoticed until it is remembered. Meaning is not in the moment, but in its recollection. Pain, meaning, and art live in that remembrance.

*Gasman* lets us experience a child’s trauma exactly in that Tarkovskian way: through observation, fragmentation, and time. It creates, as Tarkovsky might say, the flame of recognition and heartache.

—Paolina Weber  

Originally written Nov 18, 2019 | Revised for publication

Image Source: IMDb Media Gallery for Gasman​IMDb+1IMDb+1

A Portal To Marlon

A Portal To Marlon

Socrates: Pao. Where have you been?

I've been writing scripts.

Socrates: And why do you think you can do such a thing?

Arrogance.

Socrates: But your voice is still muffled?

Austin said it's okay to be embarrassed by audaciousness.

( But he also said don't talk about your process. Nobody cares. )

Nevertheless, a while back, I had a magical moment, worthy of sharing:

I found a picture of Tennessee Williams on Bill Clerk's table.

Inside a big pile of images.

That had made a 'stop'.

Diana, had reached out through time and space and said, "Paolina, learn from this artist."

So there I was, seeing him.

There was even a roll that hadn't been developed, so Bill had developed it.

In these pictures Marlon was a wistful boy.

Doing homework, bored out of his mind.

He stops,  He asks his mother to take pictures of him.

He puts on a Greek theatrical mask that she had sitting on the kitchen table.

He stands in his attic bedroom, by the window and he looks out at me, through time and space

I am unbelieving.

Why am I seeing you, nobody has seen these, how could I be seeing this?

I get very quiet,

Hearing his heartbeat and feeling his thoughts.

Do you know who it was?

I will spell it out for you.

Marlon Brando.

From a roll of film that hadn't been developed. 

There he was looking back at me, as a 16 year old.

It was a look that said,

See me if you dare touch my eternal thoughts.

(I saw that same look in another boy recently, an image on Instagram, too embarrassed )

When Marlon Brando died, all his personal photos were on Bill Clerk's table in the country. 

Bill was his sister's best friend.  So he was sending them to her at Patching Place.

 (I also was a young artist myself, like we could have gone dancing.)

And in that pile was also the Tennessee Williams photo.

It was a picture of the two of them somewhere, from the time of Streetcar Named Desire, Now he's thirty maybe, some press tour to Mexico, or LA, sitting on a couch, a late night party. laughing uncontrollably.

Taken from someone's hacienda house, I could tell from the plaster walls.

I have never seen so much energy.

A visitation from the heroes and an invitation to join them, catch up Pao.

Bye Marlon and thank you Universe.

 I'm Acting As If,  deeper, tighter, glazing through time, ravenously.

Working as quickly as I can.

Pao 10/07/24

I Remember Him Really Well

Mommy and Jean-Michel in her gallery. 

Photo by Naoki Okamoto

I remember him really well, painting barefoot.

I would come from the UN school to go to my mother’s gallery. I hadn’t gotten into Bronx Science yet. I would wear these Agnes B. mini skirts and cropped sweatshirts with pearl snaps. Yellow boots — a white stripe down the center — like Doc Martens, but not. I had been taking myself to school on the train since I was ten years old. I was very, very independent.

I would take the train and get off on Prince Street. My mother would be very busy in the back office, so I would stay at the front desk, doing homework, staring out the big windows.
Jean-Michel would be downstairs. There was a huge staircase with a green banister with big knobs. I would open the back door of the gallery and go say hi.

He would have papers all over the floor, xerox copies of his work. So many sentences would fly out at me — “Peso Neto,” “arroz con pollo,” "lead."

He was always there; he had a very soft voice, with a smile from the inside. It was strange because he was a grown-up, but he was somebody really familiar, so I didn’t need to explain anything.

The people around him were Rammellzee — who I didn’t really understand but who was not there much, just when he did a show. She did do a show for him too; his long metal paintings about future refugee warfare. But I remember my mom being mad at Rammellzee and then Jean-Michel, and being upset about them.

I remember him always happy. The very first time I met him was when his father Gerard and Nora took us (me and my mom) to this fancy chicken restaurant on the Upper East Side. I remember it was a 'chicken restaurant' because it was American, and I ordered chicken.

I was a kid, so it was a big deal for me to go to a restaurant with an artist, mother, and father. I had been to many restaurants in Italy or during art fairs, but I had never gone with a family — like a mother and father — who seemed very proper and organized and friendly. The chairs were round chairs with rungs, like half moons, with yellow wood, and the lighting was very dark and the walls were red.

Back at the gallery, I remember feeling very comfortable when he was around. On Saturdays, I would be around him all day. He would come up to get something from Dean and DeLuca. He had linen pants on, with leather sandals — very chic — and it’s strange because I thought he was wearing an Armani suit, a grey one. (But in your film, I found out he later wore Comme des Garçons.) The jacket was buttoned up, no shirt underneath — really beautiful and nondescript.

I remember collectors would come by, and they made jingling noises with jewelry or sparkled with overly enthusiastic smiles.

Mainly, I remember my mother was really loud on the phone in the back, speaking with her accent on fire, usually screaming “NO” or “WHAT?” and then laughing as broadly as her yells were loud.

Then I remember when my mother found him the space on Crosby Street behind the gallery. It was sad when he moved because the basement was so bright, like this big bright elephant’s ribcage. His canvases would start off white. The sunlight would come streaming inside — the back wall was sloped like a greenhouse, made of many panels of windows.

You mentioned his art was not as much about aesthetics as it was about ideas. But to me, it was an encyclopedia of aesthetics. It was as if he was filtering all of art history through his art.

As if the X axis was history — starting from the birth of the earth, the Mesopotamians, the Romans, and then colonization, Haiti, to now.

The Y axis was form — the form that the art could take — from frescoes on ancient Roman villas, to Matisse cutouts, to Caravaggio portraits, to huge paintings by Goya about the French Revolution, to Christ paintings by Leonardo da Vinci, to urinals by Duchamp, to Aztec art.

Then the Z axis, which was all his personal memories — the emotional life he would filter: superheroes, or hearing Charlie Parker, or reading The Subterraneans by Jack Kerouac, or crime novels, and then all the broken hearts and joys of life.

So his paintings would exist at the intersection of these three planes. You could be studying a still life, while processing the invention of the cotton gin, while contemplating what it means to be loyal.

Then, add this to the art-making process: the fact that while you are making art, you are listening to Ravel, or Fab Five Freddy, or even better, coming up with music yourself. Then, you put on sneakers because you don't like the bathroom downstairs; you run upstairs. Or you want to take a shower, then you run back downstairs. Your high tops got dirt on them — from the dirt on the stairs — which you have trailed back downstairs, so it’s now landed on your work.

Does that make sense? So Jean-Michel's paintings from my mother’s gallery, for example, could be about Las Meninas, Twombly, and memory. As much as he was writing visual poetry, he was painting time-space portraits.

This was also art for art’s sake; the doors were chosen because they were proportional — otherwise, he could have been writing on bricks.

Anyway, back to my memories. We were in Italy, sitting in the back of the car, and my mother was driving. He was showing me all his Polaroids, telling me about the models he liked the most, the girl he had the biggest crush on. I didn't know what to say — the girls were a lot older than me. Then we started talking about Central Park and spending time in Sheep's Meadow. We compared the fronts of our arms. He had his left leg crossed, looking out the open window.

Except my mother started to interrupt and talk to him about not going to Modena, or something about not doing a show in Modena and how she didn’t want him to give the paintings to the dealer Emilio Mazzoli. She was always right. My mom wanted to protect Jean-Michel. She sold them carefully — never for profit — it was always about spreading the work to important collectors and museums for the history of art.

She was a teacher.

I remember she had to scream this and turn her head. The sea was blowing in from Via Aurelia. I felt so lucky he wanted to sit with me, but she had to scream into the wind. Plus, he was listening to mixtapes.

He stayed with us at my mother’s house at the beach. He usually did his own thing, and for me, that was a big deal because I was terrified of my mother, so it made a big impression that he would insist on his way.

He liked Rome, also.

I also remember going to Los Angeles to see his first show at Larry Gagosian.

At that point, my memory of him shifts to me really contemplating his art, seeing all those paintings I knew by heart. Looking up at Famous Negro Athletes, I learned about "exceptionalism" — the painting showed the concept. A tribute that looked like a "line-up."

I would step into them — seeing my mother on the phone with the huge black painting, the white crown figure in the center. She had this huge rectangular wooden desk, and the painting seemed to be made just to sit right behind her. It was as long as the wall — as if he was saying, “OK, don’t mess with her."

Anyway, this is what it was like for me to know him as a kid.

-Paolina Weber

(originally written as an email to his niece)

6/6/21

Hear me/mi senti?

There is a gap between C3 and C4, behind my larynx

a blue foam room and a shaving cream slide
give way to my stomach

Under my jaw are yellow tight ropes

My ears are wind tunnels

that ache and hiss

A scourge travels up my eye escalator

and enters the scalding nasal passage

Simmering drops collect under my eardrum

forming impressions of my waning pallor

My toes wiggle in the ashes

In this chilly Autumn

I hide fingers away
and slide them into my intercostal pockets

also known as my empty ribs

Can anybody hear me

Why is this cloud yellow?

Can Indigo be so lovely

I look beyond the flood lights at my indigo infinity

obviously I block out the chimneys

obviously

and I play with The One Me, my clipped hair.

that I set aside and hid in the rail of a wooden bunk

It is intermixed with my mother's strands

I know she can feel me around her this way

all the single strands intertwining

Kissing me like

she does at night in the linen sheets

Did

with my night light still on

How cliche

I could hear her playing my favorite Etudes

and I would imagine I was George Sand

That I was in bed with Chopin

Back then

To continue now is hopeless, my only words are

crescendo and largo

The piano, outside my door, and my linen,

crisp and cold

fold me

We are between my fingers
enfolded around my palm


listening to the indigo sky

The c sharp and her frozen brown wave

Andante
Largo

andate al lago?

al lago

Come andate?

Andante
andate in treno?

andate

Sono andati furiosamente nel fuoco

Paolina Weber

2/13/11

for Giovanna Friedman Ukleja who survived Auchwitz at 16 with Romano Ukleja, a polish worker, who saved her in the line. When Auschwitz was liberated they hitchiked to my grandparents in Rome.She told me they had on German nazi uniforms and that my grandfather took them straight to Giolitti, near the Pantheon, for ice cream.

*Translation from Italian Music Tempo and colloquial:

andante=walking (moderately slow)

Largo=broad (slow and dignified)

andate al lago?= are you going to the Lake?

al lago (the lake)...

Come andate? =How?

andate (moderately slow (solemmo))
andate in treno?= you go by train.

andate=go, then go.

sono andati furiosamente nel fuoco=they went furiously into the fire