Complete Refusal, an avant-garde artwork collective that repurposes video video games into critiques of capitalism, is about to make its first full-length function movie, a “post-apocalyptic political musical” referred to as Cash Is a Type of Speech.
The undertaking, which Complete Refusal is producing along with Vienna-based movie group Glitter & Doom — the group behind Achmed Abdel-Salam’s German-language horror movie Heimsuchung — will use the sport engine of Ubisoft motion shooter Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 to make a movie that “talks concerning the relationship between capitalism and democracy and whether or not the 2 are ever appropriate,” says Complete Refusal co-founder Robert Klengel.
The Division 2 online game, launched in 2019, is about in a near-future Washington, D.C. within the aftermath of a genetically engineered pandemic. Customers play an agent of the Strategic Homeland Division as they attempt to rebuild town. Division 2 is an “open world” recreation that enables gamers to freely wander the streets of a hyper-realistic, architecturally-accurate model of the U.S. capital.
“In our movie, we principally stroll the route from the White Home to the U.S. Capitol constructing, on the best way speaking about totally different locations on Pennsylvania Avenue and elements of U.S. democracy,” says Klengel. “So it’s a lecture film. However it’s additionally a dance film as a result of we’re forcing the silly avatars to do dance choreography. There’ll be a whole lot of music, a whole lot of leisure. It’s a very absurd undertaking.”
Absurd is nothing new for Complete Refusal, whose members describe themselves on their web site as “pseudo-Marxist media guerrillas.” Based mostly in Austria, the group is thought for movies, artwork installations and life performances that “upcycle” figures and motifs in video video games to “reveal the political equipment” behind fashionable leisure.
In Hardly Working, which is nominated for a 2023 European Movie Award in the very best brief class, the group follows non-player characters (NPCs) from the 2018 Western recreation Purple Lifeless Redemption 2, framing their limitless routines of pointless exercise as a parable of the lives of staff below capitalism.
“Our final aim is to beat capitalism,” says Hardly Working co-director Leonhard Müllner wryly.
Cash Is a Type of Speech is being produced as a function for theatrical and pageant launch however the group can also be trying into utilizing components of the video for its reside performances or to interrupt up into shorter episodic segments for launch through on-line platforms, similar to YouTube and Twitch.
You possibly can try the trailer for Hardly Working under.
