frightening for its unearthly muteness. How we respond to this silenced cry depends on our attitudes towards sui- cide and on whether we share Siwiec’s sense of urgency. But we should perhaps remember that what inspired him was not ancient Buddhism so much as an immola- tion of a monk that took place in 1963, in direct protest to the Vietnam War. Today, our own powerlessness when faced with violence on a global scale, and our govern- ment’s complicity in it, brings us a step closer to Siwiec’s outrage. Drygas’s insistence on imagining the unimagi- nable, expressing the repressed, points to film as a glori- ous utopia, an art fueled by the belief that no human act is too sacred to depict.
While Maciej Drygas’s Hear My Cry addresses the
sacred, Andrzej Czarnecki’s twenty-minute short Rat Catcher anoints the ugly and the profane as its patron saints. In 1986, three years before communism fell and the political climate in Poland was still asphyxiating, Czarnecki and his cinematographer Piotr Sobociński broke all imaginable taboos. They picked one of the world’s least sexy professions, vermin exterminator, and made the rats their film’s protagonists. Moreover, the rats are progressively humanized. We learn their habits, intel- ligence, and, dare we say, valor. Meanwhile the human, heard mostly offscreen as he goes about his work, becomes vermin-like. Monstrously Kafkaesque. The film evokes the oppressive state while it parades as an homage to a valiant worker, and so spoofs the social- ist mania for extolling the working class. Forget produc- tion quotas—how many communists could brag about cracking rat psychology, or rat blitzes? As a social alle- gory, the film was transparent enough, though Czarnecki avoided blatant political allusions. Nevertheless, with its
sickly green look and abattoir mise-en-scène, Rat Catcher riffs on Orson Welles’s Animal Farm’s apocalyptic mur- murings. Beyond the literary tropes, a story of methodi- cally isolating and eliminating pack leaders, as the rat catcher does, rang frightfully real. A few years back, dur- ing the martial law, Solidarity’s members were either jailed or hunted by the secret police. It didn’t take much for a Pole to identify with a measly rat. Polish viewers compared the exterminator’s dark, thick glasses to the ones worn by General Jaruzelski. Jaruzelski had imposed the martial law in 1981 to crack down on the indepen- dent union. He has emerged as a controversial figure since then, often viewed as someone caught between his Polish and Soviet allegiances. But back then, he was seen as first and foremost a traitor. And indeed, as the film takes us, rather clinically, through the extermina- tor’s range of methods, we catch whiff of his treasonous intent. The catcher gains the rats’ trust by throwing them crumbs, an echo of Poland’s regime own inept economic reforms and cynical political games. Rat Catcher might have less staying power were it not
for its artful cinematography. An eco-horror film staged in a studio, it is perhaps even more viscerally frightening now that it can’t be decoded with facile political short- hand. Stripped of allegory, Czarnecki’s short takes on a Blair Witchy thrill. Its night-vision scenes, recorded to the sound of incessantly pattering feet and squeals are worthy of a psychological thriller. Not to mention the genuinely creepy trust between the rats and the exterminator, with hints of intimacy and aggression. Nor is it insignificant that the night vision necessary to capture rats on film is a modern-day paramilitary tool. What also strikes a discom- forting chord is the exterminator’s discourse on “humane methods,” the drama of man vs. nature, which forces us into an antagonistic position—a kind of war of the worlds on a micro scale. The exterminator’s pseudo-philosophical
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