Does capitalism turn us all into background characters? A strange and unsettling look at labour, repetition and invisible lives.
“There will never be enough nails in the wood.”
The Austrian art collective Total Refusal, who describe their work as “pseudo-Marxist”, creates short films entirely from the visual worlds of popular video games. In Hardly Working, they turn away from the heroic violence and grand landscapes of Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) and focus instead on the figures most players barely notice: carpenters, laundresses, stable boys and street sweepers.
These non-playable characters move through the game world in endless routines, performing the same tasks again and again without progress, reward or escape. At first, their mechanical labour seems quietly absurd, even funny. But as the film lingers on their gestures, the humour gives way to unease. What begins as a study of background animation becomes a meditation on work itself: a world where labour is endlessly performed, rarely completed, and almost never allowed to matter.
Directors: Susanna Flock, Robin Klengel, Leonhard Müllner, Michael Stumpf
Website: Total Refusal
