A Different Kind of French Revolution
The emergence of low-cost digital video cameras and inexpensive editing software has given rise to a new generation of independent directors, documentarians, and podcasters, expanding the media landscape in all sorts of new directions. There are still many for whom a $1000 video camera and a $500 piece of software are still out of reach, but even some of these people are finding a way to make themselves heard in a loud and crowded landscape, using whatever tools are handy to make whatever images and sounds they can.
One of these tools is Lionhead's The Movies, a Sims-style game in which the player takes on the role of a Hollywood executive, exerting a level of control over his or her studio that would leave David O. Selznick green with envy. Managing a stable of virtual actors is not where the bulk of the game's buzz has come from, however; the big draw for many is the fact that the game provides tools that enable the player to make his or her own films using virtual actors, props, and sets. Once shot and edited, these films can then be uploaded to the Web for public consumption.
While machinima (the art of making movies out of appropriated video game graphics) has been around for a while now, last fall's release of The Movies ratcheted the cost of entry -- in both cash and labor -- for budding auteurs down by yet another notch. When filmmaking is literally turned into a game that anyone can play, one might suspect that the results would tend towards the whimsical, and judging by most of the movies on display at Lionhead's web site -- where space pirates, kung-fu fighting apes, and spoofs of The Dating Game rule the day -- one might be right.
There's always an exception to the rule of the day, though, and the exception here was triggered by another event in the fall of 2005: the riots in France. After two teenagers were electrocuted while hiding in a power station from a police identity check, riots broke out in suburbs around Paris and other cities throughout France. Amidst flaming cars, confused news coverage, and conflicting rhetoric, Alex Chan produced a short film using The Movies. The French Democracy is Chan's attempt to contextualize the French riots and to clarify their motivations, to counteract what he saw as misinformation in the mainstream media about the aims of the rioters.
The film follows three young black Frenchmen, tracing the discrimination and indignities they endure on a regular basis. One leaves his identity card at home, and gets tossed in jail for a night as a result; another has an MBA, but can't get a job because of distrust both real and imagined by customers and employers; the third is a drug dealer, but the police seem to be less interested in his trade than in the color of his skin. With frustrations running high, news of the two dead teenagers combine with unsympathetic speeches by politicians to create a spark that sets these men off. And the flames rise.
In a medium that's mostly known for making inside jokes about Halo and World of Warcraft, The French Democracy's eagerness to tackle real-world subjects is enough to set it apart from the pack. As machinima gains popularity and its practitioners gain comfort with their tools, studios like Rooster Teeth Productions are able to produce increasingly polished work, but seem content to stay within the realm of fan films, limiting themselves to skits about Warthogs and ninja looters. Chan, however, has set his sights a little higher, wrestling with the limited tools at his disposal to create something with a broader outlook.
A film made from off-the-shelf parts is bound to have some rough edges, though, and The French Democracy is no exception. Limited to props and settings built into The Movies, Chan makes the most of what he's got, which on the face of it doesn't seem like much. A Paris metro stop looks suspiciously like a New York subway station, and the power station where the boys died is rendered as a wooden shack in a forest. Then there are the virtual actors themselves, whose exaggerated motions, the way their limbs flail about when they move, were clearly meant for a lighter style of filmmaking, and at times can make police brutality look more like Keystone Cops.
The stiff characters, mismatched props, and English subtitling that could generously be described as "awkward" give The French Democracy a slapdash, amateur feel. A mark against any film. However, that's exactly what it claims to be, and that's what makes it compelling. The rough edges on Chan's work give it an air of urgency; finished products with a professional sheen are a luxury reserved for those who aren't watching buildings burn before them.
It may say something about The French Democracy, and about the still-maturing machinima scene as a whole, that the film's closest relative is not Red vs. Blue or The Neverhood but Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 film La Haine (released in the U.S. as Hate). Like Chan's film, La Haine revolves around tensions between police and minorities in the suburbs of Paris, and was lauded for its low-budget aesthetic as much as for its expressions of rage, fear, and alienation. The French Democracy won't win any awards at Canne, but it covers much of the same political and psychic territory with an immediacy that's as moving as it is alarming. It seems a little strange, though, that while ten years is plenty of time for there to be waves of simpler, cheaper filmmaking tools, it is not long enough to have any affect on the issues that filmmakers need to bring to the public's attention.
— 9 March 2006
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