Locarno Film Festival

EVENT: HARDLY WORKING (LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL, ONLINE)

Total Refusal’s masterful video essay Hardly Working is now accessible on demand on the Locarno Film Festival’s website.

This monumental game video essay spotlights digital gaming’s unsung background performers — the rote routines of NPCs (non-player characters). Populating worlds solely to represent banality and engage in trivial pursuits, this supporting cast of a laundress, stable boy, street sweeper and carpenter now occupy center stage. Captured through an ethnographic lens, their repetitive labor cycles, programmed patterns, and periodic bugs form a potent analog to modern working life under capitalism – an endless hamster wheel of menial, thankless tasks. Like Sisyphus sentenced to perpetually roll his boulder in futility, these NPCs epitomize the toil intrinsic to system dynamics tilted starkly against them by coded design. Their endless drudgery upholds the stage so that gamers can play.

In June 2023, the machinima has been featured on the New York Times as well in their “Op-Docs” section.

Hardly Working has been screened at the 2023 Milan Machinima Festival.

The artist, researcher and filmmaker collective and pseudo-marxist media guerrilla Total Refusal appropriates contemporary video games and writes about games and politics. They upcycle the resources of mainstream video games, creating political narrations in the form of videos, interventions, live performances, lectures and workshops. Since its foundation in 2018, their work has been awarded with more than 50 awards and honorary mentions - like the European Film Award or the Best Short Direction Award at the Locarno Film Festival. The current members of Total Refusal are:Susanna Flock, Adrian Jonas Haim, Jona Kleinlein, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner & Michael Stumpf



NEWS: TOTAL REFUSAL’S KINDERFILM TO DEBUT AT THE LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL

Total Refusal, Kinderfilm, 2023 (poster)

The Austrian collective Total Refusal will introduce their new work, Kinderfilm, at the Locarno Film Festival, which is currently taking place in the Swiss town (August 2-12 2023). The machinima is featured in the prestigious Pardi di domani – International Competition. Similar to its predecessors, Kinderfilm unfolds exclusively within the confines of a video game universe. However, it diverges from the documentary-style approach adopted by earlier installments, venturing into the realm of full scale experimentation and sheer absurdity. Set against the backdrop of Grand Theft Auto V, the movie follows the perplexing journey of an NPC grappling with the very essence of its existence. In short, more Charlie Kaufman and less Karl Marx (and the beach scene does remind us of Ari Aster’s Beau is Afraid). We are happy to share the first stills, trailer, and synopsis. Clocking at 11’ 35”, Kinderfilm was directed and written by Adrian Jonas Haim, Robin Klengel, Michael Stumpf and shot with/in Grand Theft Auto V.

Watch the trailer below:

Below is the extended synopsis:

On a typical day within the virtual realm of Grand Theft Auto V, the  streets bustle with cars, pedestrians adhere to their daily routines, and leisure activities like backyard barbecues and beachfront sunbathing are the norm. However, amidst this seemingly ordinary backdrop, an ominous void looms—the conspicuous absence of a future held back by safety apprehensions. The central character, Edgar, undertakes the  enigmatic task of unraveling the clues left by this absence within the fabric of his simulated reality. As he delves into the eerie aspects of his routine existence, he unearths a paradoxically captivating yet  unsettling realm that had slipped from his grasp—a world that is both beautiful and nightmarish in its essence.

Total Refusal describes themselves as “a pseudo-marxist  media guerrilla focused on the artistic intervention and appropriation of  mainstream video games” who “upcycle video games in order to reveal the  political apparatus beyond the glossy and hyperreal textures of this  media.”

Total Refusal (the Kinderfilm team: Adrian Jonas Haim, Robin Klengel, and Michael Stumpf)

Adrian Jonas Haim (*1991 Vienna) does film and  politics in Vienna and elsewhere. Studies of Political Science &  Experimental Game Cultures at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.  Involved in various writing, music and art projects with a focus on  marxism and ideology in cross media culture. Former editor at MALMOE  Zeitung, programmer for film series on politics of remembrance (Filmclub  Tacheles, Vienna Jewish Filmfestival, This Human World Filmfestival).  Joined Total Refusal in 2020.

Robin Klengel (*1988 in Graz), lives and works as an artist and cultural anthropologist  in Vienna and Graz. He researches, writes texts, gives lectures and  courses and makes films in the field of artistic-scientific research of  urban and digital spaces. He studied cultural anthropology in Graz and  Berlin. Since 2021 he is co-chairman of the interdisciplinary art and  culture space Forum Stadtpark in Graz. He co-founded the collective in  2018.

Michael Stumpf (*1985 in Wels), studied  Philosophy in Vienna as well as Media Culture and Art Theories in Linz  (unfinished). His research interlaces a background in phenomenology with  media and culture semiotics, analyzing the relevance and operating mode  of popular cultural tropes. He works as an artist, designer and coder.  Stumpf co-founded the collective in 2018.

Read more about Total Refusal 

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NEWS: TOTAL REFUSAL WINS BEST DIRECTOR AWARD AT THE LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL ("PARDI DI DOMANI")

TOTAL REFUSAL’S HARDLY WORKING (2021) WON THE BEST DIRECTOR’S AWARD IN THE PARDI DI DOMANI SHORT FILM COMPETITION AT THE 2022 LOCARNO FILM FESTIVAL

A pungent critique on the labor conditions of NPCs in open world games — and specifically Red Dead Redemption 2 — Hardly Working is a meta-documentary on what would be called “extras” in a cinematic production: NPCs or non-player characters. In fact, the narrative function of such characters is limited, if not marginal and they seem to have no real agency or autonomy.

Hardly working is a 20 minute “ethnographic exploration of the work and daily life of non-player characters, the digital extras in video games. Their labor loops, activity patterns as well as bugs and malfunctions paint a vivid analogy for work under capitalism.”

As the artists explain:

Here a laundress, a stableman, a street sweeper, and a handyman are the four main characters of this film. With ethnographic precision, the film observes their daily work: a rhythm composed of loops that makes them work daily and tirelessly. Their work neither results in a product, nor does it change anything about their status quo. In light of Hannah Arendt description of ‘animal laborans’ – in contrast to the acting subject –, the NPCs as individuum are an exaggeration as their work performance actually manifests their status.

The Pardi di Domani competition is described by the curators as “a territory for expressive experimentation and innovative formal poetry, [which] showcases short and medium length films as world or international premieres. The section consists of three competitions: Concorso internazionale, with works by emerging filmmakers from all over the world; Concorso nazionale, for Swiss productions; and Concorso Corti d’autore, with short works by established directors.” This year, the Best Auteur Short Film was awarded to Big Bang by Carlos Segundo and the Best International Short Film prize went to Sovereign by Wara. Total Refusal’s well deserved award from one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals, is a major recognition for machinima as a form of art.

Originally founded by Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner and Michael Stumpf, Total Refusal describes itself as “a pseudo-marxist media guerilla focused on the artistic intervention and appropriation of mainstream video games. We upcycle video games in order to reveal the political apparatus beyond the glossy and hyperreal textures of this media.”

Read more about Hardly Working

Red more about Total Refusal

Images and videos courtesy of the Artists