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This project has been funded with support
from the European Commision.
This Sunday, we're going to make one more attempt to convince you that you're
allocating too little of your attention to the most successful product in the
history of the entertainment industry. Within 24 hours after its release in
September 2013, it generated 800 million dollars in revenue (1), three years
later, it is supposed to have sold around 100 million copies world-wide (2),
and it's probably fair to say that its commercial success has at least
partially obscured some of its qualities. And of course, as with pretty much
every computer game, the problem is that it's just a game: that it comes with
protagonists and a storyline and hundreds of missions and side quests, and is
accompanied by a multiplayer online universe where players have to complete
jobs and heists and stunt races in order to acquire sports cars and penthouse
apartments and luxury yachts. All of that can be fun, but obviously, none of
that is why we think it's worth taking another look at Grand Theft Auto V.
David Simon's "The Wire" has once been described as "a richly textured universe
unto itself, populated by detectives, drug dealers, longshoremen, politicians
and lawyers who have motives so diverse, surprising and complicated, each scene
seems to reveal a new layer of depth and complexity. Watching this series is
like navigating the streets of a genius-level SimCity -- it takes a while to
grasp just how far from the TV-land basics creator David Simon is willing to
wander." (3) Grand Theft Auto V may be the only other 21st century portrait of
an American city that fulfills each of these promises. It strays just as far
from the Games-world basics, above all by proposing a universe that is based on
reality rather than fantasy: The detectives, drug dealers, longshoremen,
politicians and lawyers are all present, and so are the homeless, the hookers,
the crackheads, the immigrant laborers and the art students. And obviously, in
GTA V you are *literally* navigating the streets of a world that is at least
one technological generation ahead of any genius-level version of SimCity,
complete with realistic traffic patterns and weather cycles, plus 20 radio
stations, two 24-hour TV channels, dozens of smart phone apps and an entire
in-game internet. Even though, again: we're not going to spend much time on it.
The reference to Thom Andersen's "Los Angeles Plays Itself" (4) isn't entirely
random: We've already seen how some of the most iconic movie scenes that
Andersen picked for his film reappear throughout the game (5), in equal parts
as a tribute to the history of cinema, as a mockery of a dead medium and as a
demonstration that film has lost its monopoly on cinematicity. But there's
another point to be made about the city and the way it "plays itself". Set in
a semi-fictional version of Los Angeles and surrounding Southern California,
Grand Theft Auto V brings its world to life by reconstructing it with an
absolutely obsessive attention to detail (6), based on years of location
scouting and hundreds of interviews with local historians, off-duty cops and
retired criminals. While most of the "scripted" parts of the game are usually
seen as a satirical take on Hollywood and American consumerism, it's the
"unscripted" parts (no less scripted of course) in which the virtual universe
begins to breathe. But in order to make Los Angeles play itself, one has to
play the game against itself, and in order to reveal the grandeur of the game
world, it's best to drop both the Theft and the Auto. So what we propose is to
explore the city on foot, by bike and occasionally using the subway (just like
visitors to Los Angeles, players in GTA V are often surprised to find out that
their city has a functioning public transportation system), to obey traffic
rules, refrain from using firearms and put the mobile phone on silent. It's
likely that things are going to go wrong at some point, but we'll try our best.
And since there won't be enough time to discover much of the territory that
lies beyond the city, our program includes the two most groundbreaking
wildlife documentaries ever filmed inside the game. Technically, that still
counts as "machinima", but it's probably time to come up with a better name.
(1) The highest-grossing Hollywood movies of 2013, "The Hunger Games: Catching
Fire" and "Iron Man 3", each made about half of that in the entire year.
(2) In September 2013, it represented 50% of all software sales in the U.S.
(3) https://piratecinema.org/screenings/20070909
(4) https://piratecinema.org/screenings/20151018
(5) https://piratecinema.org/screenings/20151122
(6) For an interactive map of more than thousand in-game landmarks and their
real-life counterparts, see http://grandtheftdata.com/landmarks
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pirate cinema berlin
u kottbusser tor
sunday, september 18, 9 pm
grand theft auto v
rockstar games, 2013
live, ca. 90 mins
before & after
into the deep, 8-bit-bastard, 2014, 13 mins
onto the land, 8-bit-bastard, 2015, 15 mins
12 seats, rsvp
first come first serve
location in separate mail
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pirate cinema berlin
www.piratecinema.org
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