Rat Film
There are only two animal species found on all seven continents: humans and the common rat, rattus norvegivus. The rat is the other side of the human coin, fellow travellers entangled in an interspecies unfolding: where we gather, so do they, as the persistent and unwanted shadow of trade and agriculture.
Our ways of living entice other lifeforms to share in the bounties and crannies. The threat of the pest implies an inside and an outside divided by a porous boundary—a home, an apartment complex, or simply one’s skin–that the “pestered” asserts and defends. All kinds of techniques are assembled for finding, observing, tracking, trapping, washing, sterilizing, killing, transplanting, and disposing of the pest. Data is collected to determine the effectiveness of the interventions, and we’re advertised promises for new means to ward away the pests online, on the sides of work trucks, and by word of mouth. As pests, an animal is turned into a population to be managed, and the means by which that’s done become constitutive elements of our conduct, our tools, and our architecture.
Theo Anthony’s experimental indie documentary Rat Film captures all this and much, much more. To tell the story of the relationships between humans and rats in Baltimore, Anthony follows the contours of the history of race, class, surveillance, policing, architecture and science to make real sense of the full social lives of the rodents and the people who share life with them. With an Errol Morris-ian tenderness towards the people on screen, and original score from Baltimorean Dan Deacon, Rat Film is a central pillar around which Infest Fest was built.