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Rat Film Finds People Problems, Film Ideas by Gerry Fialka & Will Nediger
Shot from Theo Anthony’s 'Rat Film', a sociological art exploration. photo: courtesy T. Anthony
THEO ANTHONY'S 'RAT FILM' IS A FILM
both radically of its time and radically distinct from it, see clip.
Of its time because it’s alive to the possibilities of cinema in the digital era, and distinct because it rejects the dominant aesthetics of the documentary in the 21st century. This sounds like a bold claim, so we hasten to add that "Rat Film" is as far from the thoroughgoing radicality of, say, late-period Godard as it is from a conventional talking-heads documentary.
Anthony studied with Werner Herzog. As a writer, photographer and filmmaker, his work has been featured in The Atlantic, BBC World News, and Vice. The New Yorker’s Richard Brody called "Rat Film", Anthony’s first feature, "one of the most extraordinary, visionary inspirations in the recent cinema."
In broad outline, it sounds strikingly similar to Ava DuVernay’s recent documentary "13th," which, though rightly acclaimed for the importance of its subject matter, doesn’t break any new formal ground. "13th" makes the case that the Thirteenth Amendment, far from actually abolishing slavery, simply transmuted it into a different form—that crucial clause, “except as a punishment for crime,” allowed whiteness, with its limitless creative capacity for oppressing blackness, to maintain slavery in the form of mass incarceration.
"Rat Film" traces an analogous history. Though ostensibly a documentary about the history of rats in Baltimore, it uses rats as a metaphor for the way that racist zoning ordinances, which were deemed unconstitutional, were simply recapitulated in the form of racially restrictive covenants and red-lining.
“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose!”
Anthony at the screening of 'Rat Film' in Columbia, Missouri, March, 2017. photo: Adam Vogler
Early in the film, the exterminator Harold Edmond, who serves as the viewer’s informal guide, articulates what is a blatant thesis statement for the entire film: “It ain’t never been a rat problem in Baltimore. Always been a people problem.”
Indeed, the film provides many illustrations of how that history has played out and continues to play out to this day. In a striking sequence, we see maps of various measures of poverty in Baltimore today overlaid on the original red-lined maps of Baltimore from decades ago, with the results needing no explanation.
We’re also given contrasting views of how white and black residents of Baltimore react to the city’s rat problem. The white residents seem to luxuriate in violence against the rats, either with glee (as in the man who proudly shows off his collection of guns that he uses to kill rats) or with rage (as in the men who improvise a rap about smashing “those fuckers” with a baseball bat).
For the black residents, one gets the impression that it’s much more serious business, though Anthony doesn’t editorialize on this point.
“Personally, at the moment, I favor form over content, because there’s such an overemphasis on content,” explains Anthony. “Content can very easily become sponsored content, you just put a logo on it and it becomes a commercial, which is the advertising trend of the last five years. I’m interested in formal innovations that can interrupt that branding process.”
Aesthetically, though, "Rat Film" is pitched halfway between "13th" and something like Isiah Medina’s "88:88," another exploration of urban poverty, but one which is not at all beholden to the norms of filmmaking, documentary or otherwise.
A white rat hunter from a scene from 'Rat Film'. photo: courtesy T. Anthony
Anthony uses a variety of distancing techniques to subtly remind us that his documentary, like all documentaries, is constructed. One constant is the otherworldly voiceover work of Maureen Jones, who has a soothingly robotic tone reminiscent of Laurie Anderson’s “O Superman.”
Another technique he uses in selected sequences is to insert an electronic clicking sound every time there’s a cut, hearkening back to Peter Watkins’ "The Journey," which, every time it shows a news clip, plays a loud beep during every cut to draw attention to the fact that news reports don’t provide unmediated access to reality. (We found that technique rather facile in Watkins’ film, but Anthony wisely refrains from drawing attention to or explaining the clicks.)
“I think that our everyday reality is composed of a lot of fictional components,” Anthony told us in our interview. “And these structures that get passed off as natural. But there is no natural frame, it’s all this construction of active participation. And I think that we go to the movies to be relieved of that structure for another structure of reality, but documentary has this interesting way of revealing the fiction in non-fiction.”
These Brechtian techniques are intermixed with talking-heads interviews, although there’s always something else going on in the frame. Indeed, Anthony comes across as a pack rat, taking whatever formal resources he comes across and using them for his own purposes, so that at times the film feels like a pastiche of documentary styles.
For example, there’s a symmetrical frontal shot of a man sitting on his couch with rats on his shoulders playing a tune on his Native American flute which could come straight from an Ulrich Seidl documentary, but it’s never commented on, nor are there any other formally similar shots in the film. This intensifies the sense that Anthony is attempting to explore his subject aleatorically and without preconceptions, though Anthony would likely be the first to admit that that’s an impossible task.
The film is at its best when it gives into those psychogeographic impulses, as in the various passages that travel though the city of Baltimore via roughly rendered video game visuals based on Google Street View images.
Black rat hunters from a scene from 'Rat Film. photo: courtesy T. Anthony
“My dad used to take us on these things called ‘improvisational adventures’,” Anthony said, “where we’d just sort of drive around and we’d complain in his car, and he’d stop at random buildings and tell us about buildings.”
At points, glitches reveal the endless space behind the cityscape. A brief segment explores how Google’s algorithms, which detect human faces so they can be blurred, sometimes mistake inanimate objects for human faces.
The subtext, of course, is that all of these digital representations, like the red-lined maps which have so decisively determined the present condition of life in Baltimore, are fundamentally arbitrary impositions of structure whose underlying assumptions are worth questioning.
The subtext to the subtext is that the form of any given documentary, "Rat Film" included, is another such imposition. Though much of the film can be read as a polemic with a definite point of view, at other times the form actively resists such an interpretation. The impressionistic collage of the last five minutes represents the most rigorous resistance, pointing to the promise of even more profoundly self-reflexive films in Anthony’s future.
“I try to be as transparently subjective as possible in my work, I don’t try to pass it off as the capital-T truth or even that I’m digging towards something that another person can’t, given the same tools.”
Film poster from Theo Anthony’s 'Rat Film'. illo: courtesy T. Anthony
Near the beginning of "Rat Film" we see a rat trying to escape from a garbage can. The voiceover narration notes that an adult Norway rat can jump 32 inches high, and that Baltimore city garbage cans are 34 inches high. A shot of the rat making a leap towards the camera abruptly cuts to the title card.
We never learn whether that rat managed to escape from the garbage can, and we doubt Anthony would tell us if we asked. But maybe it’s better left as a mystery.
NOTE: Anthony’s quotes are excerpted from Gerry Fialka’s interview with Theo Anthony, from his forthcoming book, due March 15, 2018, "Strange Questions: Experimental Film as Conversation", edited by Rachael Kerr and introduction by David James.
Gerry Fialka and Will Nediger are currently writing a book on the future of 'the history of avant-garde film', with more info Laughtears.com and reachable . Posted on Dec 27, 2017 - 10:06 PM