Theo Anthony's multi-prime documentary Rat Film is available on MUBI. The opportunity to return to this committed film, highlighting the systematization of the redlining in the USA through the problem of rat invasions. Political and exciting!
« Before the world became the world, it was an egg. Inside the egg was dark. The rat nibbled the egg and let the light in. And the world began. »
An egg story
This is how Baltimore, Maryland, United States of America was born. An embryonic egg of humanity, placed on a colony of rats. For ages, rodents have been here. Take advantage of the poor neighborhoods, the walls, the garbage that we never collect. Believe in human misery. Feed on our miasms. Pull until you get awkward. The camera goes down the ground, heats up the bitumen by sneaking into the kingdom of rats, explores the Baltimore from the back of garbage, sewer mouths and darkly drowned alleys.
Then the camera turns around, abandons the animal trapped in his garbage box to attach itself to the man. From redneck proudly exposing its collection of weapons to the solilosting deratizer, mothers of families exasperated to nöoser letting the children out in the garden to scientists passionate about strange rodents, they form a perfectly heterogeneous fabric but tied by the same madness: the lubice of rats. That they exasperate, that they are passionate, that they are the very material allowing their return to pay or their most total disarray, the rat is there, on the lookout, in each of the energists before whom the camera of Rat Film.
Man is a rat for man
In this intrication between rodent and man, one question remains: who is the harmful? For certainly the fragrant gardens of these four-legged bugs bearing a bad reputation – the plague, in particular, but also the leptospirosis, the transmission of tenias and a thousand other joyous ones are not there – the streets teeming with men filmed in Rat Film do not give much more desire. Sometimes you flirt on the side of urban alienation described in Limbo, with these overwhelming masses, these ghettos built of bric and broc that saturate the image until it becomes illegible, the hagard eyes of their inhabitants perfused with artificial chemical paradises, planted directly in the vein to bear the hell they have to endure here below.
Worse still, these men proudly exhibiting their slaughtered rats with a bullet in the head, the brain flowing out of a sticky cracking in the skull. These men debilitated by weapons displayed as unalterable proof of their ill patriotism. These men disappoint from any distraction that they come to use their nights to watch over the ostentatious and misguided alleyways, to burst the misguided rodent with sound bats. And again the question, who is the harmful?
The recipe for class struggle
A question that is all the more judicious Rat Film proposes a scale change, in the course of documentary. If the first images of a Rattus norvegicus Mahous trapped in a trash can almost lurk on the side of the horror film, immediately demonizing the rodent making a hell live in the lower classes, Rat Film will then dezoomize and scale up the middle and upper classes.
Therefore, the rats disappear and remain only by causing the lower classes themselves to disappear: undernourished (or malnourished), undereducated, having access only to unhealthy, often racialized neighbourhoods... And it understands thanks to the dabble inserts on superimposed cards that redlining For centuries, this artificial impoverishment and hermetic non-mixage between poor neighbourhoods abandoned to their fate and rich neighbourhoods have been undertaken. Redlining, a clumsy anglicism to designate a U.S. policy established in 1935 allowing the establishment of a system of racial discrimination taking its roots within the city's urban planning itself...
These poor, sick and illiterate, only have to stay in their slums as long as they don't come to die open mouths in beautiful neighborhoods. This is in a word the very essence of this policy whose consequences are still being felt today...
Science fiction or documentary?
The female voice with dystopic accents that present Rat Film derealizes the feature film, it almost enters in the register of science fiction. And while she repeats the words spoken in opening film – Before the world became the world, it was an egg. Inside the egg was dark. The rat nibbled the egg and let the light in. And the world began – we understand that the rat is not necessarily what we think, and that the world will begin when we agree to shed light on our most perverse behaviors...
You will understand, Rat Film is a highly political documentary, borrowing as much from a grammar of fiction (the voice-off as it sounds from a SF film, the sound-design hallucinating the film, the angry montage allowing to highlight the changes of scales proposed by the feature film and supporting its message) than to a typical documentary logic.
Available on MUBI, Rat Film would be placed in a triptych containing A Glitch in the Matrix (2021) of the King of Manipulation Rodney Ascher and The Cat, The Reverend and The Slave (2009) by Kaori Kinoshita and Alain Della Negra. Two equally morbid documentaries, exploring through synthetic worlds (just like a part of Rat Film) the most extreme traverses of humanity, the first by seizing the concept of K. Dickien from the hypothesis of simulation to the Matrix, the second by diving into the daily lives of users disconnected from the real immersed in their artificial life of Second Life.
Passionate, terrifying, political, three documentaries to put high on your list of movies to see!
[...] its familiar, out-of-court and yet perfectly banal tragedy. A film to be drawn closer to Rat Film, describing how an insensitive and despicable policy can be caught by [...]
[...] Eat the night would become the fictional counterpart of the documentary triptych composed by Rat Film (2016), The Cat, The Reverend and The Slave (2009) and A Glitch in the Matrix (2021). Three visions [...]