Rats, Killing, and the Library: Three New Documentaries Explore Institutional Inequality
A trio of seemingly disparate new films—about Baltimore’s rat problem, an untried Long Island killing, and the New York Public Library—have one thing in common: They all examine public institutions and the people they sometimes fail to serve
A library, a murder, a history of pests. There are three major documentaries out this week, in limited runs and available to stream, and on the surface, they have seemingly little in common. Rat Film, Theo Anthony’s debut, is a historically minded, experimental study of Baltimore’s rat problem. Yance Ford’s Strong Island, another debut, explores the 1992 slaying of the filmmaker’s brother, William, and the grief and confusion that continue to fester in its wake. Meanwhile, Ex Libris: New York Public Library, Frederick Wiseman’s 43rd film, trains its eye on the 92 branches of New York’s library system and the broad, fast-changing community of citizens the library serves.
These documentaries couldn’t feel more different in style and interest: Wiseman’s seemingly distant patience appears at odds with the urgency of Ford’s investigation and the politically persuasive trickery of Anthony’s Google Maps tours of Baltimore. Yet these films are all, at heart, about public institutions: universities and medical research centers, public housing authorities, libraries, and the legal system. More pointedly, they are about the people those institutions fail to support—and, in the case of Wiseman’s insider take, about one institution’s valiant efforts to make up for that failure.
Rat Film
“I can’t even come out here and hang clothes,” says a Baltimore woman suffering from a rat infestation. The ratcatcher, who likes rats, chuckles. Baltimore’s rats are, indeed, a problem—a geographically specific problem, depending on who you ask. “That’s where you’re going to find a rat,” the ratcatcher, a good-humored older black man, later says. “In the places where the most uneducated people are, the ones who have the least resources.”
Rat Film, on its face, understands this to be a story about housing segregation and the storied rat experiments at Johns Hopkins. Through a surprising range of odd aesthetic choices—a Siri-like narrator, a series of Google Maps tours whose images digitally degrade over the course of the movie, random shifts in tone and subject—rats somehow emerge as both victims and villains in this story. As animals intelligent enough to be used as a proxy for humans in social-behavior experiments, rats have sometimes come off as motivated historical players. But then you see them get hunted: by hired ratcatchers as well as backyard enthusiasts with pellet guns, blow darts, even baseball bats. And then you see people who keep rats as pets—people who chill out, watching TV, with pet rats atop their heads and shoulders. By the time you watch a snake slowly ingest a rat whole, late in the movie, your sense of disgust toward the rats has morphed into something like sympathy.
That’s thanks to Anthony, who weaves our public perceptions of rats into a story about our analogous perceptions of the poor, largely black communities of Baltimore. Urban poverty and foreclosures, which can leave swathes of a city uninhabited (by humans), are a boon—practically an invitation—to rat populations everywhere. But as Anthony shows, the Baltimore-specific rat problem has other sources, among them, a historically lax attitude toward running experiments in poor neighborhoods, as was the case during the early rat poison trials run out of JHU. The histories of race, class, and geography are inescapably imbricated. In laying this all out, Rat Film becomes as dense as the problems it studies.
Strong Island
Ford’s inventively personal documentary, which debuts on Netflix on Friday, has all the makings of a true-crime doc—but for the fact that there’s no murder mystery. We already know who killed Yance’s older brother, Will, in 1992, after a series of disputes that began with a car accident and ended with a bullet to his chest and a refusal by a grand jury to take the case to trial. That much is clear. What’s less certain is why the killer got away with it. That, Yance’s documentary suggests, is a story left for Will’s family, who had in some ways buried their grief over his killing, to tell. “I’m not angry,” Ford—a black trans man—says early on, straight into the camera. “I’m also not willing to accept that someone else gets to say who Will was.”
Who Will Ford was—what he looked like, what he loved, how he behaved—becomes the subject of Strong Island, just as it became the subject of the investigation into his death. But Strong Island isn’t journalism. This is filmmaking as confession: The details unspool according to the logic of confusion, grief, and anger, over the course of interviews with Yance’s mother and sister, as well as Will’s friends (one of whom says she was a witness to his slaying), the investigating detective, and others. It’s broadly a story about institutional failure, particularly that of the legal system, in the guise of a family history. But we also hear about how the Fords were among the many blacks to migrate to what once was, essentially, a segregated neighborhood in Long Island. And we hear about Ford’s own queer childhood, which, we eventually learn, merges with the story of Will’s killing in unexpected ways.
Strong Island is enough of a true-crime project that you can expect a few late surprises, all of them devastating. But the film’s real anchors are the interviews and, in Ford’s case, first-person confessions, all of which feel like miniature studies of how people talk and behave in the midst of unresolved grief. You can tell that the person behind the camera isn’t a stranger, or a reporter, but is indeed family. Images of Yance himself sorting through old family photographs, laying them out in front of the camera to punctuate narrations of his family’s history, reinforce that notion. These moments are no mere quirks or flashes of style. They make the whole affair feel tactile, somehow, as if to remind us that this is living history, living grief, and that Ford is still very much in it. The pain of Will’s death is very much present, still, and Strong Island—one of the best films of the year—is an attempt to harness it.
Ex Libris: New York Public Library
Here’s a statistic that should trouble you: nearly 3 million New Yorkers—a third of the city—lack access to broadband internet. Those New Yorkers are, predictably, disproportionately poor. In 2015, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced a $10 million plan to change that, starting with providing free broadband access to five housing developments in need. That’s wonderful news for those it benefits. And for everyone else? There’s always the library—at least in theory.
Libraries have always played a central role in educating the public. Ex-Libris: New York Public Library, a three-hour-and-17 minute documentary by the renowned filmmaker Wiseman, is a study of the New York Public Library as it adapts that mission to the needs of the 21st century. It is, like so many of Wiseman’s movies—in which public and private institutions are revealed to be sources of community, conflict, and above all knowledge—a study of institutional change. His first film, 1967’s Titicut Follies, was an investigation of life at the State Prison for the Criminally Insane at Bridgewater, Massachusetts. His other classics—among them High School (1969), Welfare (1975), Meat (1976), Domestic Violence (2001), and Boxing Gym (2010)—have titles that speak for themselves. In Ex Libris, Wiseman trains a sharp eye on the New York Public Library, including its many patrons as well as its wide-ranging staff, during a time of great upheaval—a time when, as one NYPL employee notes, digitization is seen as “the holy grail of the 21st century.” It’s a time of e-books, digital literacy, and broadband promises from politicians, as well as one of relative apathy toward these staid cultural centers, which from the outside often feel like brick-and-mortar tributaries to outdated forms of knowledge.
But as Wiseman’s sprawling documentary shows, New York’s library system, with its 92 branches, ranging from the tiny Macomb’s Bridge Library in Harlem to the gargantuan Stephen A. Schwarzman Building on 42nd Street and Fifth Avenue, are above all centers of community. They are, at their best, a public resource whose mission is to serve the underserved. That’s what emerges between, on the one hand, scenes that observe patrons on their phones and computers, digging around in the archives, and attending public talks to see the likes of Patti Smith, Ta-Nehisi Coates, and Richard Dawkins; and on the other, long scenes of board meetings with Tony Marx, the NYPL’s CEO, as he and his colleagues hash out the funding and resources for these endeavors. We move back and forth between these worlds, seeing Marx and Co.’s ideas put into action.
Wiseman soaks every scene in the rhetorical and behavioral rhythms of the people therein. He makes us privy to revealing conversations about what, for example, the library owes the city’s substantial homeless population—and how to navigate the upturned noses of the patrons who complain about them. We see firsthand what it’s like for a library to face the constant encroachment of e-books and the need to revise traditional acquisition models. And then we see the people: We see their faces in the crowd during performances and talks; we watch children wind their way through after-school activities; we see computer and ESL classes, job info sessions, and community board meetings. We see an institution come alive, in other words, as the sum of the robust, diverse groups of people within it, talking, listening, strategizing, learning.
As the movie’s run time suggests, these are spacious, attentive scenes, cut in a way that every new image feels like a glimmer of fresh insight into this roving collective. Wiseman inundates us with the kinds of mundane details another filmmaker might take for granted. Everyone knows what goes on in a library, right? Yet it’s funny what happens when, at Wiseman’s insistence, we begin to pay attention. As always, Wiseman, who at 87 is just as structurally rigorous and observationally precise as ever, morphs this institutional study into a story about people. You, in the audience, become one of them. And you walk away all the better for it.