Focus — Machinima: Gamepad Filmmaking

Machinima, a blend of “machine” and “cinema,” refers to the creation of films using video games or game engines. Originating in the late 1990s, the term may seem outdated in the gaming community, but machinima itself continues to evolve. It has become mainstream in internet culture, thanks to Let's Plays, live streams, speedruns, and animated series. Additionally, it is gaining recognition in major film festivals and contemporary art galleries, where it competes with traditional screen art. At the heart of machinima is the misuse of video games to create images rather than play as such. This makes it similar to the situationist practice of détournement, glitch art and other forms of critical media art. Moreover, machinima offers a valuable research tool for exploring online behaviour, hyper-realistic imagery and world-building practices. This promising artistic medium can be seen as a digital counterpart to the world of cinema, where alternative processes of understanding reality and self-reflection take place. Curated by Vladimir Nadein and Dmitry Frolov

Sections

How to Disappear

Total Refusal | Duration 21’

An anti-war movie in the true sense of the word, How to Disappear searches for possibilities of peace in the most unlikely place of an online war game. It’s a tribute to disobedience and desertion — in both digital and physical-real warfare.

Why Don’t the Cops Fight Each Other

Grayson Earle | Duration 9’

This desktop documentary investigates the relationships between police officers in GTA V. Through an exhaustive forensic analysis of the game’s source code, it demonstrates the extent to which the cultural imaginary concerning the real world police is projected into the game space.

The Grannies

Marie Foulston | Duration 27’

A group of players venture beyond the game's boundaries and discover a captivating, ethereal space that reveals the humanity and materiality of digital creations. This peek behind the curtain of the virtual world allows to capture a unique experience that transcends the game itself.

Dance, Voldo, Dance

Chris Brandt | Duration 4’

Voldo is a character in the fighting video game Soulcalibur. The choreographed moves of two equally freaky Voldos in this recording are all actual game play. This early machinima was made during a week of full-time training and performance.

It’s in the Game ’17

Sondra Perry | Duration 16’

Sondra Perry looks into how gaming can capitalise on the simulation of bodies and objects. She focuses on her brother Sandy, whose physical statistics were licensed, without his consent, to game developer EA Sports. This raises the question of ownership and agency in relation to digital bodies.

Parallel I

Harun Farocki | Duration 16'

The four-part cycle Parallel deals with the image genre of computer animation. The series focuses on the construction, visual landscape and inherent rules of computer-animated worlds. Parallel I opens up a history of styles in computer graphics and meditates on the current orientation towards photorealism.

This Water Gives Back No Images

Aleksandar Radan | Duration 6'

A tropical landscape turns out to be the distorted world of a human avatar. In Aleksandar Radan's film nothing is as it seems yet eerily real.

Cosecha mecánica

Felix Klee | Duration 3'

Non-playable latinx characters work in endless loops alongside propagandistic praise of cheap Mexican labor. Somewhere on a field a worker sings: Lo que quiero es una máquina lechuguera (All I want is a salad harvesting machine). Cosecha mecánica ("mechanical harvest") juxtaposes the 1950s US propaganda film „Why braceros?“, contemporary audio field-recordings and background characters of a video game to visually explore how work is reshaped and its value redefined to suit our consumerist needs.

Happy New Year, Jim

Andrea Gatopoulos | Duration 9'

It's New Year's Eve. Jim and Morten play video games all night long, just like they do every day. But their regular voice chat conversation is not the same as usual. Tonight, Morten is not feeling comfortable.

Descent into Hell

Jacky Connoly | Duration 37'

A woman is alone in her apartment in an empty, abandoned world. This opens onto a story of a woman in an alternate timeline, on a journey through California. She rides freight trains, explores hidden corners of the city, and encounters strange happenings along the way.

Grand Theft Hamlet

Pinny Grylls și Sam Crane | Duration 88’

January 2021. The UK is in its 3rd lockdown and all entertainment venues remain closed. For theatre actors Sam and Mark, the future looks bleak. As the pandemic drags on, Mark - single and childless - is increasingly socially isolated, while Sam panics about how he is going to support his young family. They spend their days in the online digital world of Grand Theft Auto and when they stumble across a theatre, they suddenly have an idea to stage a full production of Hamlet within the game. This film charts their ridiculous, hilarious and moving adventure as they battle violent griefers and discover surprising truths about life, friendship and the enduring power of Shakespeare.

Punctured Sky

Jon Rafman | Duration 21'

An unseen narrator reunites with his old friend Joey Bernstein in the dingy back room of a comic and games store located in a dead mall. Bernstein asks if the narrator remembers their favorite childhood computer game, Punctured Sky, and informs him that all trace of the game has vanished from history. The narrator embarks on a quest through a parallel universe full of animal-human hybrids to uncover the truth behind the mysterious disappearance of Punctured Sky.

Theta

Lawrence Lek | Duration 11'

In the smart city of SimBeijing, a self-driving police car confronts their existential troubles with their built-in AI therapist. While patrolling the streets of this ghost town, the car reveals the darker reasons behind why it was abandoned.

Dreams about Putin

Nastia Korkia & Vlad Fishez | Duration 30'

After the beginning of the full-scale invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022 many people started to dream about Putin. And they shared these dreams in the media. Over 1000 dreams about Putin are documented. This film is an attempt to reflect on the theme of repression through a combination of found footage and 3D game animation made in Unreal Engine in order to portray the authentic dreams of those affected by the war and explore the theme of the collective unconscious in society.

Sleep #2

Radu Jude | Duration 61'

Jude’s interest for Warhol’s art has been known for years now, and yet nobody could’ve anticipated Sleep #2. A rendition of Warhol’s radical cinematic practices — “bad filmmaking” — his static takes, indifferent zooms and philosophy of pop, the film is a poetic meditation on work, surveillance, public space, and image form. What makes Jude so special to modern cinephilia is a certain flair of his to be watching a screen, any screen, and understand its glass, desktop, and interface as a landscape, and the landscape as mise-en-scène. That is, as something given yet subject to change. Warhol understood the same about portraits. And in the end, there’s no principial difference between a landscape and a portrait. (Călin Boto)

Empire

Phil Solomon | Duration 48'

A re-make of Andy Warhol’s Empire from high atop the Manhattan Island of Grand Theft Auto IV, far from the madding crowd of thieves, cops, prostitutes and murderers down below. I hijacked a copter, leaped onto the rooftop of an adjacent building, spawned a scooter out of the thin air and then gingerly drove it to the very edge of the precipice in order to roughly approximate that familiar view from July 25-26, 1964. And then I put the controller aside and did exactly nothing for 24 hours (48 minutes in our world). A day of rest and bordered inaction. And lo and behold, the Overseers appear to have accounted for someone, somewhere doing exactly this, resisting the game’s narrative intention toward movement and action.