Why, You No-Good Dirty –
The first feature-length work from Theo Anthony, Rat Film [2016] strikes me as one of the great films of the last ten years. Fabulous comprehensive essay in the booklet accompanying the new Memory release on Blu-ray by none other than Baltimore soldier-of-cinema and movie ambassador Eric Hatch, who in a cogent passage writes of the film's hometown premiere at the refurbished (albeit currently shuttered again) Parkway: "an auditorium that visibly preserved multiple layers of decades-past grandeur and decline while feeding present-day gentrification discussions only made more palpable the film's investigative power. ... continually finds new points of view from which to ponder rats, each sparking inquiries into much larger issues." Among these one must obviously count Baltimore's burgeoning rat population; the poverty line; the racial and economic gerrymandering of districts based on class variations; the preponderance of nooses and multiple echoes of their shape and knots; real vs. virtual spaces from the pre-tech-era nevertheless (tunnels and alleys and crawlspaces and backyard-jungle trails) to the present and beyond; and... in moments, hypnosis....
Hatch points out the film's "formal risks" and this is no joke: the Google Street View-sourced replication of the city on auto-glide, the opening of the cosmos and the abyss sighted past missing polygons and textures absent in the would-be congruity of an e-Baltimore simulacrum... virus evident in the presence of the disease-ridden rats and geo-re-spatialization clawing at the barrier of Utopia.Two domestics in their owner's living room attempt to grip up or down on the fabric of his clothes, as he sits in this pose on the sofa, his eyes staring directly into the lens. This portraiture interlude might sit clever and stupid in the work of a lesser filmmaker; Rat Film, on the contrary, provides us such moments to ponder the complexity inherent to point-of-view. •
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