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Felix Klee's most brazenly political machinima developed with/in Grand Theft Auto V investigate the cop as an ideological force - but also as a farce - within the game.
No one left to frisk and Police running wild were originally presented in the context of United We Stream festival (2020) — which dealt with the theme of “The Authoritarian and the Potential of Art” — and at the 23rd Equinoxio Film Festival Bogotá and Retina Latina.
Exploring the sociopolitical dimension of Grand Theft Auto through modding and machinima, Klee seeks to present an understanding of the relationship between real life police brutality and the simulated violence of video games, where carnivalesque excesses are the norm and real life consequences negligible or non existent. These works also raise interesting questions about the very possibility of the artist in articulating such dichotomy and introducing a nuanced point of view. No one left to frisk and Police running wild exemplify Klee's constant preoccupation with the political, which he approaches with a surreal, almost comical tone. The filmmaker juxtaposes the seriousness of real world abuse by policemen against minorities and people of color - one machinima explicitly evoke in its very title the so called stop-question-and-frisk program, or stop-and-frisk, a controversial practice of temporarily detaining, questioning, and at times searching civilians on the street for weapons and other contraband in New York City. Such practice is known elsewhere as the Terry stop. In the past decade, several activists have alleged that the program unfairly targets African-Americans and Hispanic-Americans.
The criticism is hiding in plain sight in Klee's short video, which features a bored policeman who spends his day sitting on a chair in the porch of his foreclosed home. However, his idle time is interrupted by a confrontation with an invisible criminal. The outcome mixes real world tragedy with slapstick style action.
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