Total Refusal, an avant-garde art collective that repurposes video games into critiques of capitalism, is set to make its first full-length feature film, a “post-apocalyptic political musical” called Money Is a Form of Speech.
The project, which Total Refusal is producing together with Vienna-based film group Glitter & Doom — the team behind Achmed Abdel-Salam’s German-language horror film Heimsuchung — will use the game engine of Ubisoft action shooter Tom Clancy’s The Division 2 to make a film that “talks about the relationship between capitalism and democracy and whether the two are ever compatible,” says Total Refusal co-founder Robert Klengel.
The Division 2 video game, released in 2019, is set in a near-future Washington, D.C. in the aftermath of a genetically engineered pandemic. Users play an agent of the Strategic Homeland Division as they try to rebuild the city. Division 2 is an “open world” game that allows players to freely wander the streets of a hyper-realistic, architecturally-accurate version of the U.S. capital.
“In our film, we basically walk the route from the White House to the U.S. Capitol building, on the way talking about different places on Pennsylvania Avenue and aspects of U.S. democracy,” says Klengel. “So it’s a lecture movie. But it’s also a dance movie because we’re forcing the stupid avatars to do dance choreography. There’ll be a lot of music, a lot of entertainment. It’s a really absurd project.”
Absurd is nothing new for Total Refusal, whose members describe themselves on their website as “pseudo-Marxist media guerrillas.” Based in Austria, the group is known for videos, art installations and life performances that “upcycle” figures and motifs in video games to “reveal the political apparatus” behind popular entertainment.
In Hardly Working, which is nominated for a 2023 European Film Award in the best short category, the group follows non-player characters (NPCs) from the 2018 Western game Red Dead Redemption 2, framing their endless routines of pointless activity as a parable of the lives of workers under capitalism.
“Our ultimate goal is to overcome capitalism,” says Hardly Working co-director Leonhard Müllner wryly.
Money Is a Form of Speech is being produced as a feature for theatrical and festival release but the group is also looking into using parts of the video for its live performances or to break up into shorter episodic segments for release via online platforms, such as YouTube and Twitch.
You can check out the trailer for Hardly Working below.
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