Hardly Working
2022 · 20m · Austria
Directed by Total Refusal
Genres: documentary, experimental
Tones: contemplative, darkly comic, surreal
Set entirely inside Red Dead Redemption 2, the film observes four non-playable characters — a laundress, a stable boy, a street sweeper, and a carpenter — performing repetitive, purposeless labor loops, drawing on Hannah Arendt's concept of 'animal laborans' to critique meaningless work under capitalism.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Twenty minutes inside Red Dead Redemption 2 trailing the laundress and the stable boy — Hannah Arendt's animal laborans as machinima ethnography. This is the kind of formal stunt I came here for, and the politics actually land.
Total Refusal hacking Red Dead Redemption 2's camera to study NPCs through Hannah Arendt's animal laborans — this is the most provocative machinima-documentary lineage since Harun Farocki's Parallel series. Twenty minutes of genuine theoretical labor; essential.
20 minutes shot entirely inside Red Dead Redemption 2 by hacking the camera onto NPCs that exist only to perform labor loops — that's a genuinely novel cinematographic apparatus and the Arendt framework gives it intellectual spine. 39K views; the medium IS the thesis.
Reviews
Hardly Working fully accords with the canons and style of the collective's works, and through an entirely original and subjective mise-en-scene it traces a sincere and sadly realistic fresco of the world.
This film hits the zeitgeist right on the head.
Festivals
- Locarno Film Festival 2022, Best Direction Award, Junior Jury Award
- European Film Awards 2023, Best European Short Film
- Viennale 2022