Cris Ubermann, a prolific French experimental filmmaker, appropriated and manipulated Grand Theft Auto V to adapt a classic fable by Jean De La Fontaine, “The wolf and the dog”, which is currently featured in our special back-to-back program, Bad Tales.
We asked Cris to provide some contextual information about his latest project.
Matteo Bittanti: You have been working with experimental cinema since the 1990s. What prompted you to adapt Jean de la Fontaine's short story in machinima form?
Cris Ubermann: Le loup et le chien is an allegory of voluntary servitude. The tale poses a simple, yet profound question: Are you a dog or a wolf? For contextual information, I’d recommend The Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, a work attributed to Étienne de La Boétie by Montaigne which was published clandestinely in 1577. More information is available here. It’s hard for me to explain exactly why I decided to turn this tale into a machinima. All I can say is that there are many philosophical and political implications. Most importantly, I strongly believe that today it is essential for a filmmaker to engage with video games, because gaming is the language of the young: it’s their aesthetics. They speak through video games. In order to communicate, today, we cannot ignore video games.
Matteo Bittanti: What prompted you to appropriate and repurpose Grand Theft Auto V to create such a work as Le loup et le chien? Where do video games fit into your broader practice as a filmmaker and artist?
Cris Ubermann: The truth is that most of the video games available on the market use violence as a guideline, as a leitmotif. One of the main goals by working machinima for me was to completely erase any kind of physical violence, to completely eliminate it for the benefit of more beautiful and worthy aspects of mankind. With such a powerful graphic engine, one must reconsider the fields of the possible, to introduce a broader creative horizon, look beyond shooting and killing. As a filmmaker, the world of Grand Theft Auto V provides an incredibly compelling tool, the Rockstar Editor, to create films and using a variety of environments, settings, and characters, which is only expanded by the possibility of modding the original game. Other video games are linked to a specific environment (western, sci-fi, fantasy...), but in Grand Theft Auto V you can create almost any environment you want. It’s an unparalleled narrative matrix.
