pirate cinema this sunday: los angeles plays itself, reloaded

[pirate cinema berlin]

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