The Smell of Burning Ants (1994)

　　"The Smell of Burning Ants" looks at the underbelly of what it calls "male socialization and boyhood cruelty." At one point the narrator says that boys "become boys, in large part, by not being girls. The ones who don'...展开t figure this out are the same ones who get beat up." One of the problems that the film is probing is the vacuum of clear social edification; boys get their identity through social cues which are mediated with large distortion. Men who are already fragmented find themselves inexplicably angry, unable to cope with a mechanized society that pigeonholes masculinity as automated and repetitive violence (verbal and physical). The anger gets loosed on the family, and the children internalize this as both being directed toward them and a pattern to mimic. Masculinity is a poisoned bloodline but is the only one transmitted. Boys must reject the creative anima in place of loyalty. If there is a social genealogy the film tracks then it is sired by brute strength and alienation.
　　A lot of the footage is found footage, but it is cut and manipulated enough (optical printing, slowed framerate) that it feels like fiction rather than a documentary. It's a highly charged fiction though, given a haunting soundtrack and a narrative voice that lisps just enough to undercut the seriousness of the tone. It teeters between art and melodrama. It's my favorite Rosenblatt of the bunch I've seen and should get a receptive audience at kg.