Rat Film

Film - 2016

7,5

28.1K

Rat Film it's a movie with Maureen Jones Full cast. Directed by Theo Anthony. Original title Rat Film, runtime 82 minutes. Genre Documentary.

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Review of

Riccardo Simoncini

“Before the world became the world, it was an egg. Inside the egg it was dark. The rat munched on the egg and let the light in. And the world began.” A film of very strange cataloging (which only by simplifying could we define documentary) which opens with a new and singular version of the myth of creation, through the privileged point of view of a rat. The most denigrated, segregated animal that has always been used metaphorically as a symbol of disease and dirt here even becomes the center of the world, from which everything originated. A pretext, narrative first and foremost, but also historical and anthropological to tell about us: human beings, even more complex animals who have always had to coexist with us (with rats and with ourselves), especially in an equally singular city like Baltimore, very far away (apparently) from that classic beastly savannah of the lions so often told by National Geographic. Rather, taking up the best documentary traditions from Herzog to Chris Marker, Theo Anthony (here in his feature film debut) constructs a work of great heterogeneity, which starting from an apparently informative character arrives at an extremely visionary and poetic dimension. It seems like a puzzle, with fragmentary pieces that we can hardly rearrange at the beginning: we see entire sections of history, of eugenics, of urban planning. From the historic laws of Baltimore with which the organization of neighborhoods was sanctioned, to the incessant and diversified behavioral experiments on mice. From interviews with ordinary people and their relationship with rats, to actual museum visits to training facilities for investigators and criminologists. Up to even entire segments that lead back to video art. But, as happened in Michael Haneke's '71 Fragments of a Case Chronology', slowly those multiple pieces will come together in a progressive crescendo of tension. In that infinite concatenation we begin to see something bigger. Common elements, but above all Read all

Of mice and men of

Roberto Flauto

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, for the one who inhabits the mirror, and who he started 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 real protagonist, and it 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. At that time Read all

plot

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.