Of mice and men
A film that seems to have multiple souls, but only one body: that of a mouse. Metaphor and metonymy of an existential condition, the human one, which finds in Baltimore a sort of paradigmatic objective correlative. A place that is the synthesis and stratification of struggles and chases, distances and entanglements. Sum of labyrinths and subtraction of lights - so where is my way home, towards the future, towards food?
Rat Film is a hunt for the intruder, for the unwelcome guest , to the one who inhabits the mirror, and who began the world. Of mice and men, to quote Steinbeck: but who are one and who are the other? Who haunts what? There is the story of a place that seems far from the world, at the center of a descent into a timeless maelstrom (but with all the storms): because it only has one place, Baltimore, which remains faithful to itself - but of that fidelity tired, habitual, taken for granted, given up. I think the city is the true protagonist, and is told through the eyes of its mice, its men, their relationships, which unfold along nights of hunting and dull days left to dry in the sun.
Because life is hard, because these are difficult times, because these streets, these gardens, these houses: because "the savannah has returned to the neighborhood". And we are men and we are mice. We have been moving through the labyrinth of our ego for a lifetime, searching for that food that we can perhaps see, but never grasp. Yet we dream of it, every night, like the mice we are, or that we dream of being. We take infinite leaps, but we are condemned to live in bins that are six centimeters too high. Yet the sun is there, we see it, why can't we reach it? I wish I could gnaw on just one piece, really, just one. Then perhaps all that remains is to create the world again, not another one: this one.
In the beginning it was the squeak, the verb rat of God that builds every place: toponymy with teeth dirty from dreams.
Space and time, the fishing rod in the alleys, among rubbish, at night. The cage-house and freedom in some way. The gnawed cables. The experiments, the madness, the similarity. The maps, the rooms with death inside, the exercises, Baltimore reflecting itself and all of us - men and mice - who fear ending up in the jaws of the serpent that brings darkness into the world.
Rat Film is a hunt for the intruder, for the unwelcome guest , to the one who inhabits the mirror, and who began the world. Of mice and men, to quote Steinbeck: but who are one and who are the other? Who haunts what? There is the story of a place that seems far from the world, at the center of a descent into a timeless maelstrom (but with all the storms): because it only has one place, Baltimore, which remains faithful to itself - but of that fidelity tired, habitual, taken for granted, given up. I think the city is the true protagonist, and is told through the eyes of its mice, its men, their relationships, which unfold along nights of hunting and dull days left to dry in the sun.
Because life is hard, because these are difficult times, because these streets, these gardens, these houses: because "the savannah has returned to the neighborhood". And we are men and we are mice. We have been moving through the labyrinth of our ego for a lifetime, searching for that food that we can perhaps see, but never grasp. Yet we dream of it, every night, like the mice we are, or that we dream of being. We take infinite leaps, but we are condemned to live in bins that are six centimeters too high. Yet the sun is there, we see it, why can't we reach it? I wish I could gnaw on just one piece, really, just one. Then perhaps all that remains is to create the world again, not another one: this one.
In the beginning it was the squeak, the verb rat of God that builds every place: toponymy with teeth dirty from dreams.
Space and time, the fishing rod in the alleys, among rubbish, at night. The cage-house and freedom in some way. The gnawed cables. The experiments, the madness, the similarity. The maps, the rooms with death inside, the exercises, Baltimore reflecting itself and all of us - men and mice - who fear ending up in the jaws of the serpent that brings darkness into the world.
