How to Disappear
2020 · 21m · Austria
Directed by Michael Stumpf, Leonhard Müllner, Robin Klengel
Genres: essay film, experimental, satire
Tones: absurdist, contemplative, provocative
A machinima essay constructed entirely from footage filmed inside the war simulation game Battlefield V, pairing a voiceover on the history of military desertion with players' attempts to avoid combat.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most people would never think to mine a military shooter for genuine philosophical resistance—they'd dismiss it as found footage novelty—but Stumpf, Müllner, and Klengel nail the absurdist core: watching players stumble through Battlefield's maps trying *not* to kill becomes a perfect inversion of the game's entire purpose, which is exactly the kind of subversive premise that makes consensus critics squirm.
The essay film tradition of Harun Farocki and Johan Grimonprez meets ludic intervention here, and while the conceptual apparatus is sharp, the formal execution—layering desertion theory over in-engine chaos—walks a fine line between pointed critique and tonal diffusion that not all viewers will accept as intentional rigor.
The masterstroke is committing to let players' actual confusion and fumbling define the pacing rather than cutting around it; every moment of AI pathfinding gone wrong or a soldier standing still in the crossfire becomes the voiceover's argument, and that restraint—refusing to impose false meaning on the chaos—is what transforms commodity footage into something genuinely unsettling.
Reviews
This short comes to us from a performance art collective called Total Refusal, which describes itself as "a pseudo-marxist media guerilla focused on the artistic intervention and appropriation of mainstream video games." Instead I think it's interesting to consider the form, where the whole film takes place in a virtual environment, a movie created not only without a human being appearing on screen, but using no items or even a camera that ever existed except as the image we see.