The French Democracy

Last updated
The French Democracy
The French Democracy scene.jpg
A scene from The French Democracy, showing dialogue in English subtitles and the three central youths of the film
Game(s) The Movies
Genre(s) Political
Running time13 min.
Created byAlex Chan
Production company Atomic Prod
Release(s)22 November 2005
Format(s) QuickTime, WMV

The French Democracy is a 2005 English-language French short political film made by Alex Chan using computer animation from Lionhead Studios' 2005 business simulation game The Movies . The plot centers on three Moroccan men who turn to rioting after facing different forms of discrimination. Chan, a French native of Chinese descent, created the film to convey his view that racism caused the riots of the 2005 civil unrest in France. Although Chan was restricted by shortcomings and technical limitations in The Movies, he finished the film after four days of production.

Contents

The film was uploaded to The Movies Online, Lionhead's website for user-created videos, on 22 November 2005 and was soon covered by American and French press. Although real-time-rendered, three-dimensional computer animation (machinima) had been used in earlier political films, The French Democracy attained an unprecedented level of mainstream attention for political machinima. While acknowledging the film's flaws, such as the grammatically poor English subtitles, commentators praised its clear political message and compared it to films such as La Haine and Do the Right Thing . The French Democracy inspired other politically conscious machinima works and fueled discussion about the art form's potential for political expression. Some raised concerns that video game companies would use their copyrights to control the content of derivative machinima films.

Synopsis

The French Democracy begins with a re-enactment of the real-life 27 October 2005 event that triggered riots in France: the electrocution of two teenagers, Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré. [1] In the film, the youths attempt to hide from police in a building near an electric power station. [2] In a televised speech, the Minister of the Interior vows to increase efforts to fight crime. Three fictional Moroccan [3] men discuss the recent events and disagree with means used by the police, and feel that blacks are unfairly targeted. They face different forms of discrimination: overnight detention for lack of a passport during an identity check, refusal of employment and housing rental, and police brutality. [2] Angered, the three riot using Molotov cocktails. [3] A white family watches television coverage of the chaos, [3] and the film ends with a dedication to Benna and Traoré, lamenting the loss of the French ideals of freedom, equality, and fraternity. [4]

Background and production

Alex Chan, the creator of The French Democracy, had no previous film-making experience. Alex Chan at Machinima Festival Europe 2007.jpg
Alex Chan, the creator of The French Democracy, had no previous film-making experience.

Alex Chan, 27 years old at the time of the civil unrest, was a French-born freelance industrial designer whose parents were Chinese immigrants from Hong Kong. [5] Although Chan was successful professionally, he felt that there was racial and cultural discrimination in France, based on his own previous attempts to find housing and violence directed towards him. [2] He lived in Seine-Saint-Denis, a suburb of Paris, [6] near housing projects where rioting [7] had caused the destruction of cars owned by acquaintances. [2] In the aftermath of the unrest, Chan was dissatisfied, stating that "the media, especially in the United States, ... linked what was happening, the riots, to terrorism and put the blame on the Muslim community". [8] Chan wanted instead to depict "more human" [3] rioters who turned to violence in response to racism. [2] According to Chan, the title The French Democracy is meant to be ironic, in that the youths express themselves by rioting rather than through the political system. [1] He elaborated:

[The French Democracy is] a shortcut made with The Movies technology about the recent events concerning riots in French suburbs. This movie is trying to help people have a better understanding of the origin of these events, as some reasons that pushed all this youth to have such violent acts. As a matter of fact TFD offers a sincere inside view from a French citizen who lives in one of these neighborhoods where the riots took place. This fictional documentary is strongly inspired by real events and reactions and tries to make the spectator think more about how French society could and should potentially be. [9]

Although he had no previous film-making experience, [6] Chan decided to make his public statement as a film after he bought The Movies, a business simulation game released by Lionhead Studios on 8 November. [2] After he progressed in the game far enough to unlock the desired film-making tools, [10] he switched to Sandbox mode, [11] in which he completed the film in three or four days. [10] Because Chan had no computer microphone, the film presents dialogue in English subtitles. Despite his lack of fluency, he chose English to broaden his audience. Production was also affected by the limitations of The Movies. Restricted to the scenery provided by the software, Chan set the electrocution deaths in a shack. The game's Manhattan-based setting forced him to approximate the Paris Métro with the New York City Subway [12] and to include the Empire State Building in the background. [2] Given the game's choices for skin color, Chan needed to apply the lightest pigment available for blacks to one character. [13]

Reception

Under the pseudonym Koulamata, Chan uploaded the finished film to The Movies Online on 22 November 2005. [14] Some viewers praised it, [15] but others criticized the poor subtitles or the portrayal of police action against minorities. [1] According to Libération , criticism was stronger in France than elsewhere. [16] Lionhead's selection of The French Democracy as a "hot pick" [2] led to redistribution from other Internet sites, followed by coverage in mainstream media—including The Washington Post , BusinessWeek , USA Today , and Libération. [17] The Washington Post and MTV originally created religious connotations by incorrectly labeling Chan's characters as Muslims; they issued corrected stories after Chan complained. [7] In 2006, the film was shown at the Flash Festival at Centre Georges Pompidou and at the World Wide Short Film Festival in Toronto. [14]

By Chan's own assessment, The French Democracy is unpolished. [2] The Washington Post found "broken English" [10] in the subtitles, and BusinessWeek deemed them "stilted and ungrammatical". [2] Josh Lee of PopMatters deemed the character animations of The Movies too exaggerated for the film's serious message; he felt that they made the film's depiction of police brutality seem better suited for the silent film comedy series Keystone Cops . [12] Alterités, a French Internet publication about media issues related to immigration, called the characters "très ethnicisés" (very ethnicized). [13]

However, some critics felt that these problems with production quality helped to convey the film's message. In a MétaMorphoses article, Franck Beau considered the film's aesthetic a strong point because, having originated in video games, it completely differed from those of traditional animation and filming. [18] He argued that the work's power lay in its "simplicité extrême" (extreme simplicity) and in the "fonctionnement logique" (logical operation) of the underlying video game. [19] BusinessWeek wrote that "the combination of amateurish technique and a strong emotional message is oddly moving", [2] and Henry Lowood of Stanford University similarly thought that the awkward subtitles and cinematography created a sense of authenticity. [14] Lee found a filming precedent in Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 work La Haine , also "lauded for its low-budget aesthetic as much as for its expressions of rage, fear, and alienation". [12] A discussion panel at the AMAS' 2006 Machinima Film Festival compared Chan's work to Do the Right Thing (1989) and The Battle of Algiers (1966). [3]

Legacy

Although earlier political machinima films existed, The French Democracy attained an unprecedented level of mainstream attention, according to Paul Marino, executive director of the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences (AMAS). [1] Based on the interest, Marino considered adding a documentary or commentary category to the AMAS' awards. [7] Xavier Lardy, founder of machinima.fr, stated that no previous machinima work had "such a clear and prominent political message". [8] Others further contrasted The French Democracy's serious nature with the prevalence of gaming-related references in other machinima works, such as the Leeroy Jenkins video [20] and Rooster Teeth Productions' comedy series Red vs. Blue: The Blood Gulch Chronicles . [10] Berkeley stated that The French Democracy was a rare exception to machinima's basis in "accepted cinematic and televisual conventions". [21]

The French Democracy was, according to Alterités, "evidence that 'technological innovations are being used to satisfy the thirst for public expression", [22] and Olli Sotamaa felt that the work justified further research into connections between citizenship and video gaming. [23] Peter Molyneux, chief executive officer of Lionhead Studios, praised Chan's "timely and poignant" [8] work for inspiring other commentary films on American and British society [8] and for "demonstrating the potential power and impact that these films can have". [24] In CineAction , Elijah Horwatt wrote that Thuyen Nguyen's 2006 An Unfair War, a criticism of the Iraq War, similarly attempts "to speak for those who cannot". [25] Joshua Garrison mimicked Chan's "political pseudo-documentary style" [25] in his Virginia Tech Massacre, a controversial Halo 3 –based re-enactment of the eponymous real-life event. [26] Although initially undecided, Chan eventually became a professional machinima film-maker. [27] His later work includes World of Electors, a series about the 2007 French presidential election. [27]

Writing for The Escapist , Allen Varney felt that the political awareness was overstated because the percentage of The Movies films that offered social commentary remained small and because the machinima and political communities were mostly separate. [28] He argued that machinima's outstanding copyright issues and possible marginalization constrained potential for expression. [28] Marino and others added concerns that, although game developers had condoned machinima, a controversial film could prompt them to control machinima content by enforcing their copyrights. [29]

Notes

  1. 1 2 3 4 Totilo 2005
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 Matlack 2005
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 R. Lee 2006 , 3
  4. ↑ Beau 2006 , 75
  5. ↑ Lowood 2007 , 166; Matlack 2005; Hood 2005
  6. 1 2 Lowood 2007 , 166
  7. 1 2 3 Hood 2005
  8. 1 2 3 4 Diderich 2005
  9. ↑ Alexandria 2005
  10. 1 2 3 4 Musgrove 2005
  11. ↑ Crabtree 2006
  12. 1 2 3 J. Lee 2006
  13. 1 2 Abdallah 2005
  14. 1 2 3 Lowood 2007 , 167
  15. ↑ Totilo 2005; Lowood 2007 , 167
  16. ↑ Lechner 2005
  17. ↑ Matlack 2005; Lowood 2007 , 167
  18. ↑ Beau 2006 , 76–77
  19. ↑ Beau 2006 , 78
  20. ↑ Colbourne 2006
  21. ↑ Berkeley 2006 , 70
  22. ↑ Translated and quoted in Lowood 2007 , 168
  23. ↑ Sotamaa 2007 , 395
  24. ↑ Quoted in Sotamaa 2007 , 395
  25. 1 2 Horwatt 2008 , 13
  26. ↑ Horwatt 2008 , 13; Gish 2008
  27. 1 2 Gubert 2008
  28. 1 2 Varney 2007 , 3
  29. ↑ Varney 2007 , 2; Sotamaa 2007 , 395; Coleman & Dyer-Witheford 2007 , 943

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lionhead Studios</span> British video game developer, 1997–2016

Lionhead Studios Limited was a British video game developer founded in July 1997 by Peter Molyneux, Mark Webley, Tim Rance, and Steve Jackson. The company is best known for the Black & White and Fable series. Lionhead started as a breakaway from developer Bullfrog Productions, which was also founded by Molyneux. Lionhead's first game was Black & White, a god game with elements of artificial life and strategy games. Black & White was published by Electronic Arts in 2001. Lionhead Studios is named after Webley's hamster, which died not long after the naming of the studio, as a result of which the studio was very briefly renamed to Redeye Studios.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Machinima</span> Film production in graphics engines

Machinima, originally machinema, is the use of real-time computer graphics engines to create a cinematic production. The word "machinima" is a portmanteau of the words machine and cinema. According to Guinness World Records, machinima is the art of making animated narrative films from computer graphics, most commonly using the engines found in video games.

<i>Red vs. Blue</i> American comic science fiction web series produced by Rooster Teeth

Red vs. Blue, often abbreviated as RvB, is an American web series created by Burnie Burns with his production company Rooster Teeth. The show is based on the setting of the military science fiction first-person shooter series and media franchise Halo. It is distributed through Rooster Teeth's website, as well as on DVD, Blu-ray, and formerly on the El Rey Network and Netflix. The series initially centers on two opposite teams fighting in an ostensible civil war—shown to actually be a live fire exercise for elite soldiers—in the middle of Blood Gulch, a desolate box canyon, in a parody of first-person shooter video games, military life, and science fiction films.

Emergent gameplay refers to complex situations in video games, board games, or role-playing games that emerge from the interaction of relatively simple game mechanics.

<i>The Movies</i> (video game) 2005 video game

The Movies is a business simulation game created by Lionhead Studios for Microsoft Windows and ported to Mac OS X by Feral Interactive. Players run a Hollywood film studio, creating films that can be exported from the game. The Movies was released in November 2005 to positive reviews and several awards, but sold poorly. An expansion, The Movies: Stunts & Effects, was released in 2006.

Paul Marino is a film director, producer, animator, voice actor, and author currently focused on machinima, the art of using engines from video games to create films. He is a co-founder and the executive director of the Academy of Machinima Arts & Sciences (AMAS), a non-profit organization formed in 2002 to promote and organize the growth of machinima. Marino also co-founded the ILL Clan, a machinima production group, and, working under the pseudonym ILL Robinson, helped to create a number of the group's machinima pieces. In particular, he directed Hardly Workin', an August 2000 comedy video that won a Best in SHO award in Showtime's alt.SHO.com Alternative Media Festival, held on February 8, 2001, and an award for Best Acting at the AMAS's 2002 Machinima Film Festival.

<i>This Spartan Life</i>

This Spartan Life is a talk show created by Bong + Dern Productions and produced and directed by Chris Burke, who hosts the show under the pseudonym Damian Lacedaemion. Premiering in 2005 and distributed over the Internet, the show is created using the machinima technique of recording the video and audio from a multiplayer Xbox Live session of Bungie' first-person shooter video game Halo 2. The half-hour episodes are released in six smaller parts, called modules. Guests, such as Bungie's audio director Martin O'Donnell are interviewed via Xbox Live within the online multiplayer worlds of Halo 2, and most recently Halo 3.

Edgeworks Entertainment is a machinima and new media production company founded by Alexander Winn and cofounded by Lacey Hannan. The company first gained recognition for their machinima series including The Codex Series, Vox Populi, Forsaken and Radical. Edgeworks is also known for hit terraforming game TerraGenesis, which has over 20 million downloads.

<i>Diary of a Camper</i> 1996 machinima animated short film

Diary of a Camper is an American short film released in October 1996 that was made using id Software's first-person shooter video game Quake. The film was created by the Rangers, a clan or group of video game players, and first released over the Internet as a non-interactive game demo file. The minute and a half-long video is commonly considered the first example of machinima—the art of using real-time, virtual 3D environments, often game engines, to create animated films. The story centers on five members of the Rangers clan fighting against a lone camper in a multiplayer deathmatch.

<i>BloodSpell</i>

BloodSpell is a 2006 fantasy film produced by Strange Company. BloodSpell employs filming techniques known as machinima, and is the first feature-length production to use BioWare's Aurora Engine, developed for the role-playing video game Neverwinter Nights, to generate the video portion of the film. The film was serially released in short episodes under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 License, which allows for redistribution, modification, and creation of fan fiction. Strange Company have asserted somewhat controversially that, as of 2006, BloodSpell, was the largest machinima production. The series features numerous cameo appearances, including several voice appearances from science fiction author Charles Stross.

<i>Operation Bayshield</i>

Operation Bayshield is a short 1997 film made by Clan Undead, a group of video game players. The work was created by using the machinima technique of recording a demonstration file of player actions in id Software's 1996 first-person shooter video game Quake, which could replay such files on demand. The group had seen the first known machinima productions, made by United Ranger Films, and decided to make a comedy film. The result, Operation Bayshield, follows a task force's attempts to thwart terrorists who have chemical explosives. Released on January 23, 1997, the work received praise from contemporary Quake movie review sites and helped to attract others, including Hugh Hancock of Strange Company and members of the ILL Clan, to machinima. It pioneered technical advances in machinima, such as the use of custom digital assets and of lip synchronization.

The following is a list of notable machinima-related events in the year 2005. These include several new machinima productions, season finales, and the 2005 Machinima Film Festival.

DeFRaG is a free software modification for id Software's first-person shooter computer game Quake III Arena (Q3A). The mod is dedicated to player movements and trickjumping. It aims at providing a platform for self-training, competition, online tricking, machinima making, and trickjumping. Hence it constitutes an exception among other Q3A mods.

<i>Dance, Voldo, Dance</i> 2002 music video

Dance, Voldo, Dance is a machinima-based music video produced in 2002 by Chris Brandt. The video, created using the fighting game Soulcalibur, features two players both controlling the character Voldo, using existing in-game animation to have the characters perform a synchronized dance to the song "Hot in Herre" by musician Nelly. The result of over a week's full-time preparation and training, the video was conceived after Brandt noticed the character's animations and attacks could be triggered in sync with the beat of a song, and the reactions of onlookers to such a display. While several groups demonstrated interest in showcasing the video, complications arose from the copyright holders whose works were involved in creation.

<i>Male Restroom Etiquette</i>

Male Restroom Etiquette is a 2006 American short subject created by Phil R. Rice and produced by his company Zarathustra Studios. The film is a mockumentary about unwritten rules of behavior in male restrooms and is intended to be a parody of educational and social guidance films. Narrated by Rice, Male Restroom Etiquette states restroom customs to be followed and depicts a scenario of social chaos if they are violated. The film was made using the machinima technique of recording video footage from computer games, namely The Sims 2 and SimCity 4. Male Restroom Etiquette won multiple awards and was listed by Guinness World Records Gamer's Edition in 2009 as the most popular Sims video uploaded to YouTube.

Quad God is a 2000 film made by Tritin Films. It was created using the machinima technique of recording video frames from id Software's 1999 first-person shooter (FPS) video game Quake III Arena. Featured during the launch of the website machinima.com, the work was initially controversial among machining filmmakers because it was created and distributed in a conventional video file format, whereas previous machinima films were demo files that required the original game to view. However, the more accessible format broadened Quad God's viewership, and, in a few years, the use of conventional video formats became nearly universal for machinima.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Isabelle Arvers</span> French media art curator, critic and author

Isabelle Arvers is a French media art curator, critic, and author, specializing in video and computer games, web animation, digital cinema, retrogaming, chip tunes and machinima. She was born in Paris in 1972 and currently lives in Marseille. She curated exhibitions in France and worldwide on the relationship between art, video and computer games, and politics. She also promotes free and open source culture as well as indie games and art games.

How They Got Game is a project that aims to explore the historical and cultural impact of new media, through interactive simulation and video gaming. The involvement was through people researching many defined areas of computing, such as storytelling, strategy, simulation, sports, and shooters.

References

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.