The French Democracy
The machinima genre makes some mainstream headlines due to The French Democracy – a 13 min movie on the riots in the French Suburbs. The creator, Alex Chan, 27, used The Movies, (a video game that centers around movie making). Chan who lives in a French suburb explained his motivation for the creation of the movie (quoted on MTV.com) :
"Many French people still don't know or don't want to really understand what happened in their neighborhood (….) That's why I chose this ironic title of 'The French Democracy' in order to refer to the fact that the youth prefer to use Molotov cocktails than ballot papers to get heard by the government. In this way in my movie, I try to bring people to think or to understand — not to necessarily forgive — what can push a young person or teenager to act like this."
He also explained why he opted for machinima as his medium:
“Through these tools you can get some more spontaneous reaction or reflection," he said, "not from mass media but from a simple citizen like me."
The French Democracy breaks with machinima’s comic tradition (of “here we are making movies from video games”) and deals with ‘issues’. Another movie that does that is Intelligent Design.
It seems that machinima might be going past the initial phase of foregrounding its “newness” as a genre, and is more focused on exploration of what it can do with the older media it (re) mediates. The French Democracy definitely does that. Clive Thompson in a beautiful analysis of this movie, shows how it utilizes conventions of both games and films.
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