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Total Refusal – Filmprogramm
The films of the young, internationally successful Austrian avant-garde collective Total Refusal are known as ‘machinimas’. These are films that are staged with the help of game engines. Specifically, TOTAL REFUSAL practises and researches strategies for artistic interventions in contemporary video games. With their radically critical appropriation and rededication of commercial game resources, they perform a reversal of their reading. As pseudo-Marxist media guerrillas - as the members of TOTAL REFUSAL call themselves - they analyse society in a way that is critical of capitalism by means of popular PC games between short film, performance and installation.
Their filmed gaming performance Operation Jane Walk (2018) first attracted the attention of the film industry, in which Total Refusal have since made a lasting impression. Hardly Working (2022), a critique of meritocracy, was even honoured with the European Film Award in 2023. The critical analysis of the virtual and hyper-realistic worlds of games clearly strikes a chord with the times.
The films and performances of Total Refusal have been presented at the Berlinale, Locarno and MoMA in NYC, among others. To date, they have received more than 46 international and national awards and honours. The current members of Total Refusal are: Susanna Flock, Adrian Jonas Haim, Jona Kleinlein, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner and Michael Stumpf.
19:00 FILM PROGRAMME
Operation Jane Walk (2018, 16 min)
Total Refusal utilise the dystopian cityscape of the multiplayer shooter game ‘Tom Clancy's: The Division’ for a peaceful city walk in which they discuss themes of architectural history and urbanism. Urban flâneurs in a digital world that is a detailed recreation of Midtown Manhattan.
How to Dissapear (2020, 21 min)
An anti-war film set in the picturesque warscapes of Battlefield V, using the hyper-real graphics of the video game as the backdrop for an essayistic narrative about deserters.
Superwonder (2021, 4 min 30 sec)
The starting point is the observation that digital worlds in current open-world engines spread out their cosmos on pre-Aristotelian discs. The constructed nature of the digital firmament is revealed, points of contact between late capitalist, conspiracy theory and romantic world experience become visible.
Hardly Working (2022 | 20 min 30 sec) With ethnographic precision, the film observes so-called NPCs, digital extras who populate the hyperreal worlds in order to create the appearance of normality. Here they are a laundress, a stablehand, a street sweeper and a labourer. NPCs are digital Sisyphean machines that have no prospect of breaking out of their plot loops. Awarded the European Short Film Prize 2023!
Children's film (2023, 11 min 35 sec) A normal day in the game ‘Grand Theft Auto V’: the streets are full of cars, people are going about their routines, barbecuing in their gardens or sunbathing on the beach. And yet the world is marked by a serious absence: a missing future that has been cancelled for security reasons. Unable to name the void, protagonist Edgar follows the traces of what is missing from the code of his reality. He explores a beautiful but deeply nightmarish normality. (Text: Lemonade films)
Film still: How to Dissapear (2020, 21 min)