A horse holds a book tour in Someone to Steal Horses With
Dylan Pailes-Friedman's Los Santos machinima, shot partly on Super 16mm, is streaming free after a run of nearly 30 festivals.
A horse has written a memoir, and the press tour is not going well for anyone in Los Santos. That is the premise of Someone to Steal Horses With, Dylan Pailes-Friedman's nine-minute machinima shot inside Grand Theft Auto V, in which the author reflects on memory from a TV studio stage while the city's citizens have their routines gently ruined around the tour. Per the announcement, the film is now streaming free on Nouvelle Bug Cinematheque, fresh off being named a Vimeo Staff Pick.
From Someone to Steal Horses With. Watch the full film with sound on Nouvelle Bug Cinematheque.
In a move that would make Hito Steyerl beam, Pailes-Friedman shot the film in digital and Super 16mm, running game-world images through actual celluloid, and the result carries festival-grade grain over Rockstar's California. The credits run as horse modeling and animation by John Irving, a TV studio built by photogrammetry, film processed at On8mil in London. It earned a real debut, too: a premiere at Lago Film Fest, nearly 30 festivals including Karlovy Vary and Slamdance, the Best Technical Innovation Award in Bremen and a Special Mention at Pragueshorts.
The film came out of Nouvelle Bug Vol. 2, the machinima development program from Il Varco whose tutors include Total Refusal, with Andrea Gatopoulos producing alongside 56 Bones. That pipeline is quietly building a festival circuit for game-engine cinema, and machinima is having a moment well beyond it.
The horse has a recent art-world cousin. Lawrence Lek's NOX, which came to Los Angeles last year as NOX High-Rise at the Hammer Museum, imagines a corporate clinic for self-driving cars that break down on the job, where one prescribed treatment is equine therapy with real horses. Lek has said he saw an affinity between the horse as an earlier form of human transport and the autonomous car as the current one, and the work keeps circling what happens to a body once its economic use runs out: the cars are rehabilitated so they can go back to work. Pailes-Friedman's horse, long since replaced by the cars that fill Los Santos, has found new work as an author.
Los Santos, remembered. Images: Dylan Pailes-Friedman
Killscreen has argued for machinima as real cinema since 2010, and the festivals are finally catching up. The free Radar brings you three issues like this a week.
