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‘A bath, a toilet and a field’: dreaming and deprivation in Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher

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posted on 2023-06-09, 01:20 authored by Vicky Lebeau
This article explores the figure of the child in relation to the topics of housing, class and the social state in contemporary Britain. Its starting-point is Lynne Ramsay’s Ratcatcher, a film that puts the work of a child’s playing, his dreaming and dying, at the heart of its historical and sociological understanding of the peculiarly working-class experience of slum clearance and relocation to housing estates on the outskirts of major cities and towns across the country. It is central to my argument that, as well as being in dialogue with a rich tradition of social realism in British cinema, Ratcatcher provides a crucial opportunity to explore the contemporary welfare imagination and the role of the social state. The primary aim of this article is to use that opportunity to raise new questions about the value of cultural forms as sites of critical research and provocations to re-thinking and re-imagining the social state at the beginning of the 21st century.

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Publisher

Bloomsbury

Page range

15-31

Pages

296.0

Book title

Childhood and nation in contemporary world cinema : borders and encounters

Place of publication

New York

ISBN

9781501318580

Department affiliated with

  • English Publications

Full text available

  • No

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Editors

Stephanie Hemelryk Donald, Sarah Wright, Emma Wilson

Legacy Posted Date

2016-05-23

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2016-05-23