Purgatory, desolation and loneliness aren’t the first words that come to mind when the carjacking video game “Grand Theft Auto” is mentioned.
But Phil Solomon, a film professor from the University of Colorado, adapted the landscape of the game to create the poignant and bleak film “Last Days In a Lonely Place,” one of the films that will be screening Tuesday at the James Bridges Theater as part of the Avant-game program.
Avant-game will be presented by Melnitz Movies, Los Angeles Filmforum and the graduate student gaming organization, LUDUS, whose name is a derivation of the word “ludology,” which means the academic study of video games. The program features screenings of experimental films based on the idea of machinima, the art of filmmaking using three-dimensional graphics often found in video game play. The screenings also rely heavily on the concept of appropriation, where elements are borrowed from the visual culture and re-conceptualized in a new interpretation.
“Avant-game is what we’re trying to do to show other ways that people have united cinema and video games,” said Harrison Gish, vice president of LUDUS. “These are experimental films using footage from old video game devices like old Game Boys, combined with footage of other films that are represented by video games. We’re trying to show how far these boundaries can be pushed and what way these different types of mediums tend to intertwine with each other.”
Andrew Hall, director of Melnitz Movies, picked up on this innovative concept from the Los Angeles Filmforum’s Festival of (In)appropriation last summer and was inspired to seek out filmmakers in the growing field of machinima.
“This is an appropriation of gaming imagery and video where the interactions are alive and I hope that this is going to be an introduction for a lot of students to experimental film,” Hall said.
While these films appropriate video game imagery, the intermingling of the two mediums expands upon the sometimes introverted qualities of the gaming experience. The screening will feature works appropriated from popular games like the aforementioned “Grand Theft Auto,” “World of Warcraft” and “Tomb Raider,” creating works with themes such as gender, metaphysics and identity, a departure from the regularity of blatant video game blood, guts and violence.
“It’s very interesting to use these games and take them quite seriously, and there”˜s a poignancy for me in that they’re not real and they want to be real. I’m kind of affirming the fact that it”˜s not a realistic landscape, but I also find great beauty in the games,” Solomon said.
For instance, filmmaker Peggy Ahwesh featured the virtual world of “Tomb Raider” in her work, “She Puppet,” inhabiting the “Lara Croft” avatar with personas such as an alien, an orphan and a clone.
“I come from a tradition of experimental film, and a lot of people over the years have worked with this concept called appropriations, where you take materials that are available in the world and re-edit them to make some other new meaning,” Ahwesh said. “So that’s kind of what I did with the gameplay, and I was using something from the popular culture and reworking it to raise the issue about the female, femininity, just set in virtual reality.”
Gish notes that while many of the films incorporate video game play, they are actually more of a mesh of two digital mediums.
“These aren’t adaptions, they aren’t necessarily machinima either,” Gish said. “They fall in the gray area in between. You might call them experimental films, you might call them experimental games, but really, they’re a mash-up of the two.”
Hall hopes that Avant-game will unite the various gaming organizations throughout UCLA.
“Hopefully, there will be more interest in engaging in gaming student groups on campus that also operate independently of each other,” Hall said. “There will be more interaction among them, and more dialogue and more fun events in that nature.”