Rat Film: Screening and Discussion with Theo Anthony and Paige Glotzer

Described by film critic Eric Kohn as “careen[ing] from scientific observation and historical overview to spiritual inquiry with a freewheeling approach that never ceases to surprise,” Rat Film is a profound—and profoundly troubling—meditation on the disturbing congruity between discourses on race and on rat removal in Baltimore. Filmmaker Theo Anthony interweaves the story of present-day efforts to exterminate the city's rats with Baltimore's historical practices of brutal racial segregation and the stated admiration of eugenics by the city's former "chief rat catcher." Narrated by a detached, seemingly inhuman voice, the film reveals the ways in which racialized thinking so often underlies seemingly scientific planning and public health policy. Far from neutral, such policies, in Anthony's telling, institutionalize racism and continue to restrict the very lives and livelihoods of Black Baltimoreans. The screening will be followed by a conversation between Mr. Anthony and historian Paige Glotzer. This event is co-sponsored by UnionDocs and NYU Gallatin.

Presented as a part of Gallatin’s Black History Month programming.  

Theo Anthony is a writer, photographer, and filmmaker whose work has been featured in The Atlantic, Vice, BBC World News, and other international media outlets. His films have received premieres at the Toronto International Film Festival, Locarno International Film Festival, Rotterdam International Film Festival, SXSW, and Anthology Film Archives. In 2015, he was named one of Filmmaker Magazine’s “25 New Faces of Independent Film.” Rat Film, his first feature, debuted at the 2016 Locarno International Film Festival to critical acclaim, with Richard Brody of the New Yorker calling it “one of the most extraordinary, visionary inspirations in the recent cinema.”

Paige Glotzer is a Prize Fellow in Economics, History, and Politics at Harvard University. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University. Her research is on the history of housing segregation in the nineteenth and twentieth century and brings together discussions of political economy, cultural history, and the spatial construction of difference. Her book, Building Suburban Power: The Business of Exclusionary Housing Markets, 1890–1960, forthcoming from Columbia University Press charts how suburban developers, including Baltimore's Roland Park Company, ushered in modern housing segregation with the help of transnational financiers, real estate institutions, and public policymakers. The effects of their efforts continue to be felt today.