Rat Film

"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. "There's never been a rat problem in Baltimore, it's always been a people problem." Although this film is excellent, it may be unsettling for some viewers who prefer the lineal, traditional documentary film. This film is not the same old thing, and even the title is rather misleading.

Yes, we have stories about rats in Baltimore, rat catchers, people with rats for pets... and did you happen to know that rat poison came from Baltimore after it could no longer be obtained from Germany? But it also covers the history of segregation in Baltimore and how the system perpetuates itself. Theo Anthony, the director, sees the film as a series of tangents and tangents on tangents that all relate. Viewers may see it, maybe not. Sometimes the tangents get really out of hand... the forensic science sections are fascinating, and are worthy of a look, but how do they relate to rats or any of this?

This was one of the worst films a SXSW Film Festival. The audience found it confusing and almost incoherent. The experimental attempt kept jumping around from rats to video games to the sociology of race in Baltimore to some sort of attempt to recreate crime scenes. None of these parts seemed to be connect to the other parts. It just jumped from one part to another without any real transition or clear narrative. The narration was also done in this strange voice that sounded almost like a computerized voice. There were individual scenes and characters that seemed somewhat intriguing particularly as they related to the human relations with rats. Some people wanted to exterminate them while others treated them as pets. But none of it connected in this poorly edited mess of a movie. This was film is sadly a failed experiment.

I have no idea what this film was supposed to be about. Some rats are present, both the wild and the lab kind, and Baltimore gets mentioned a lot, but you don't learn anything interesting about rats, Baltimore, or rats in Baltimore. Some lunatics hunt rats with blowpipe and fish them from alleys using bait and tackle (that image is where the film earns a second star from me). Contents also include: superficial musings on segregation; some stuff about forensics training that appears to have been recovered from another project and tacked on to this one to fill out the time; slow-mo shots of fireworks; and lots and lots of rendered footage purportedly from a video game but looking to all the world like Google Earth with 3D switched on running on a low-spec laptop. Baffling.

I was skipping forward a lot as many of the scenes are lingering for much much longer than they're worth. And I'm not one of the commenters here who were disappointed that this film is not really about rats. It has an important topic of history of segregation, systemic racism of urban planners and then private sector and how it didn't disappear today. I can see attempts to stimulate thinking about different scales switching from the rat scale: first rat houses, limiting their freedom of movements in the living room with reinforced plastic walls, then talk about redlining in Baltimore, preventing development of the poorest neighborhood, reinforced borders - red areas stayed red. Miniatures of death scenes, then human size forensics training rooms. I can see the potential. But the important informations/feelings this document has given me could be easily edited down to 15 minutes that would have more intense impact on me, this felt like listening to someone talking with half a minute pauses after each word.

Intriguing and uncomfortable questions are raised by Theo Anthony's film, which gives itself permission to meander between straight-forward aspects of pest control, and the larger innuendo surrounding the control of human society.

Yes, big cities like Baltimore have endemic problems. The rats are a ripe visual reminder in its gritty streets.

But what Theo Anthony really captures is that this same notorious mammal that is so often used in experimentation and treated as a close-equivalent for what to expect in humans via testing, is in fact a marker for what humans should expect in the society that is altering quickly around them.

The Rockefeller Foundation and other arms of scientific research have indeed tested on rats, and aimed to eugenically target certain human populations as well. There is much, much more to be found in personal research. A huge area, a blight on the part of society's self-appointed shepherds.

An unsettling visual metaphor emerges from the flow of the film -- the relationship between populations and their food supply; the relationship between the environment, and its ability to change its inhabitants; and at the same time, the perpetuation of conditions, the ghettos of Baltimore, namely, through policies, zoning, labeling and lending/lack of lending and investment.

What and who is marked as a pest, tends to remain a pest. Maybe it is a problem of what the looker has decided to see?