2016 Directed by Theo Anthony
Across walls, fences, and alleys, rats not only expose our boundaries of separation but make homes in them. "Rat Film" is a feature-length documentary that uses the rat—as well as the humans that love them, live with them, and kill them--to explore the history of Baltimore.
Switzerland
Locarno Film Festival
USA
True/False Film Festival
Switzerland
USA
hey guess what the rats are a metaphor, one i'm not sure im in love with, but it's a metaphor!!
just a fyi but baltimore city knowingly, deliberately crafted restrictive housing covenants that denied blacks & jews entry into white communities. redlining was not an accident. segregation was not an accident. the direct result of those, systemic poverty, was not an accident. racism and discrimination are never accidental. they are not something that's done unwittingly. white people in positions of power knew exactly what they were doing. they know what they're doing. it's unbelievably disingenuous and oblivious to the state of american racial politics to suggest that the white men in governments, local and national, legally enforced racism without being aware of what they were doing. that is not how white supremacy works. ok. that's all. bye.
Rat Film redefines what a documentary can do. What I thought would be a simple observation of Baltimore’s widespread rat problem evolves into a larger, striking narrative about race. It’s a tragic tale of how a city unwittingly planned itself into segregation, poverty and disrepair. The interweaving throughlines of Baltimore’s history dealing with rats, the consequences this has imposed on its citizens and video game footage among others are both somehow incongruous and seamless. This is so close to perfect that I can’t believe this is a feature-length debut.
Looking over reviews of this at least on here suggests that I have a stronger admiration for the project that most, and as I discuss with director Theo Anthony on the podcast, I think that's because I find the style of the film not easily boxed in. Reviews seem to suggest that one subplot is too many, or Anthony does better with his humans than his history (or visa versa). I find the variety of it all to be what is provocative, like a control-f for one thing leading down another to another to another and the accumulation of data and systems utterly inapproachable to actually solving issues (this is the answer to the 538 era). I find this genuinely compelling and surprisingly emotional in how it tackles its various subjects, and I think this is the start of a career that won't reflect most of the boxes we expect for non-fiction—even in the T/F cinephile world.
[6]
Certainly one of last year's most interesting documentaries, Theo Anthony's Rat Film admirably bites off just a bit more than it can gnaw. In its organization, it is part of a subgenre that I like to call "radial documentaries." There is a dominant hub concept from which various tangents emerge, like spokes in a wheel. In other words, the starting point is intended to become more complex as the film goes along, instead of the usual approach of explaining a problem or answering a question. Masters of this form include Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, and Harun Farocki.
The trick is to maintain some sort of connection to the hub, and while I absolutely laud the clear ambition and political…
Sociological urban planning documentary as vaporwave apocalyptic horror film. Can't stress how indispensable this is as a text on systemic racism.
With the rats comes the plague.
In the times of the bubonic plague, bodies lined the streets. Everywhere was death and decay, poverty and hunger. The rats roamed free. There is doubt that the rats were even responsible for the spread of this plague, but there they were. Out of control.
Today, cities have a new plague. Poverty and hunger run rife once more. And the rats are back.
What I find most interestingly disturbing about Rat Film is how we see those of means keeping rodents as pets, while, in the low income areas of Baltimore, they are invasive pests wrecking havoc upon the community. All Theo Anthony has to do is show us this simple fact to get his message across. But if that weren't enough, he shows us maps of Baltimore city laying out the various detrimental factors such as early death rates, unemployment rates, and so on; and (to no one’s surprise) these maps directly coincide with the districting maps drawn out in the ‘30s which enforced racial discrimination via both redlining and prejudicial denial of home loans as well as inability to accumulate wealth. Right…
So just an fyi, the guy fishing for rats is an actor. He confirmed this after our screening, though he mentioned that rat fishing was once a sport wherein contestants would hunt for the biggest rat.
There's one notable dissent on here, a harsher assessment than my own which nevertheless takes up a few concerns I share. The experiment comparing rat sociality to humans' is a slippery slope mostly unaddressed by Anthony. He asserted at the Q&A that he's not sharing that social experiment as an answer to social planning, nor are there many answers put forward in the film at all. He's right, and I think his pushing away from tepid liberal pontification in favor of abstraction is the…
Baltimore is a city not so much infested with rats as utterly beleaguered by them — plagued, besieged, tormented by vermin, inundated as in a biblical story. In Theo Anthony’s excellent new documentary Rat Film these parasitic little critters seem to be scuttling about wherever the camera happens to look: down shadowy alleys and up desolate streets, ducking beneath residential foliage or darting out from under curbside cars. It’s a disturbing portrait of urban degradation, as you might imagine. But Anthony is interested in rather more than rooting out the rodents teeming in the gutters of his hometown — and Rat Film proves a sophisticated study of how one of America’s most populous cities planned itself into squalor, and doomed…
Vermin as a jumping off point for a historical examination of the social strife that's plagued Baltimore, MD throughout its history. Evokes Adam Curtis through its tangential exploration of power structures while the subjects (which include both a modern exterminator and a trainer for forensic crime scene analysts) are given Herzogian questions like "do the rats go to heaven?" A work of avant garde genius, complete with a Dan Deacon score.
a baby rat won’t open its eyes until it’s two weeks old. does the blind rat dream?
a fascinating and creative exploration of baltimore’s racial and socioeconomic history.
