In Conversation with Total Refusal’s LEONHARD MÜLLNER
The International Cinemarxist Association celebrates its inaugural interview with Leonhard Müllner, Viennese artist, game theorist, lecturer, and filmmaker.
I first became aware of the term “Cinemarxist” thanks to Sympathy For the Devil, a 1968 Rolling Stones music documentary, directed by Jean Luc Godard. ‘68, a huge year for both band and filmmaker. Godard had declared cinema dead and successfully cancelled the Cannes Film Festival (alongside his cinematic comrade, Francois Trauffaut) in solidarity with the general strike in France. For the Stones, Beggar’s Banquet would become a landmark album in their repertoire, confirming their bad boy image with guitarist Keith Richards stating, “There are black magicians who think we are acting as unknown agents of Lucifer and others who think we are Lucifer. Everybody’s Lucifer.”
Even the term “music doc” doesn’t quite capture the scope of the film, but it’s close. It begins with “fly-on-the wall” studio session footage of the Stones themselves toying around with instruments in the studio, smoking cigarettes, and warming up to record. As the film continues, listeners familiar with the Stones will begin to hear parts of the chorus, iconic riffs, and key lines come together, ultimately culminating in the complete song.
Interspersed throughout, fantastical political allegories and guerilla footage of Anne Wiamezky (the second Mrs. Godard) grafitting the streets of London provides a visual, cinematic illustration of the iconoclastic energy of the Stones’ music. “They shouted out, who killed the Kennedy’s!? Well after all it was you and me”. Across a metal fence in black spray paint, she sprays “C-I-N-E-M-A-R-X-I-S-T”.
Approaching cinema through a Marxist lens reveals much about not only who is telling the story, but what kind of story is being told and the techniques they choose to employ. I for one have been on a journey deconstructing my previously held beliefs of what cinema is and how it “should” be made. One point of focus in particular is de-centering “Hollywood”, de-centering American, Western, pro-capitalist, box-office minded cinema. The kind of corporate, safe, sanitized, cinema by committee designed to not only sell tickets, but to also sell merchandise packaged by brands that further line the pockets of our almighty shareholders.
I know the word “globalism” is a dirty word depending on who you talk to nowadays. Being raised by immigrants, I see nothing wrong with global mobility. I wanted to emphasize the “international” nature of this publication because I’d be doing myself and others a disservice by not talking to other filmmakers from all over the world in order to have a better understanding of the cinematic landscape.
In that spirit, I had the great fortune of being welcomed into an international community of filmmakers thanks to Italian filmmaker Andrea Gatopoulos. Andrea and I first met briefly at the Director’s Fortnight (the fortnight was created in response to the cancelled ‘68 edition of Cannes) in 2022. The following year, I alongside 30 other filmmakers from around the world, participated in Nouvelle Bug, Andrea’s directing residency, specializing in “Machinima”, video game cinema, using VR and AI to our advantage. Instead of fearing an AI takeover of cinema, we were able to come together to share both information and resources and use AI to our advantage as directors, screenwriters, filmmakers.
One mentor that stuck with me in particular was from the collective known as Total Refusal. Based out of Vienna, Austria, they describe themselves as a “pseudo-marxist media guerilla focused on the artistic intervention and appropriation of mainstream video games. We upcycle video games in order to reveal the political apparatus beyond the glossy and hyperreal textures of this media.”
Leonhard Müllner, one of the founding members of Total Refusal, was kind enough to agree to the first interview with the International Cinemarxist Association. We corresponded via email over the summer, and this is Vol. 1 of our discussions.
Dear Leonhard,
I’m so grateful that we have this opportunity to communicate through this written correspondance. I’ve only been introduced to you and your work recently but I feel like I’ve been waiting to cross paths with someone like you. I definitely have to thank our mutual comrade Andrea Gatopolous for making that introduction. As of late, I’ve made an effort to cultivate a global cinematic community of my own which values films/filmmaking not only as an aesthetic good but a societal necessity. “Film school” here in the states was only able to teach me so much.
My first question to get the email chain started has to do with how you approach community with other filmmakers. I’ll start with some general questions:
MURILLO: How do you see yourself in relation to cinema?
MÜLLNER: To be called filmmakers, even directors, seemed like an imposture to us at first. Since we come from different backgrounds like video art, cultural anthropology, philosophy and design etc., we haven't attended any film academy yet. Our first film, Operation Jane Walk, was meant to be an in-game game performance, the film was conceived as a documentation of the game. It was made with a lot of disregard for filmmaking skills. But the festival swallowed us up. Within the short film scene, it's a great bubble to be in, much more inclusive than the arts, from which we partly derive, even with a higher level of political engagement and intellectuality. People there are sometimes researchers or activists, which makes the conversations so much richer than just talking about aesthetics and materials. In retrospect, being included in the film world was one of the best strokes of fate, and it makes much more sense. Together with other great filmmakers such as Andrea Gatopolous, Felix Klee, Ismaël Joffroy Chandoutis, Antoine Chapon and Marie Foulston and others, we revived a film genre from hibernation: machinima, creating films from the engines of video games. So we are, despite our arbitrary encounter within the film sector, embedded in a cinematic tradition.
However, this next-generation machinima scene has many more options and tools at its disposal than its 1990s predecessors. If someone from the arts enters this niche out of fascination rather than a gaming background though, the whole range of equipment sometimes remains on the surface of its possibilities, so we try to motivate everyone to delve deep into the worlds of games and play, but the young cultural bourgeoisie still clings to its media panic and moral anxieties when it comes to mass media, as we sometimes observe.
MURILLO: In the typical, American, capitalist sense, what would you say do you do for a living?
MÜLLNER: Robin is a trained cultural anthropologist and currently runs a cultural centre in the city of Graz, in addition to his work in TR. Michael compensates for his strenuous demands by designing and programming. Susi and I both studied conceptual and video art, Susi has a solo career alongside that of the collective, but like me, lives mostly from TR. In the beginning, the two of us, Robin and I, lived mostly from the collective output, later it was even enough for Michael. But since we've been mostly dependent on prizes, and since they no longer come with money or only pay symbolic sums, the collective output alone is no longer enough for anything more than a precarious existence. Nevertheless, TR receives grants and funds, although we have to share most of them between all the members.
MURILLO: How did you meet all the members of Total Refusal?
MÜLLNER: Susi, Robin and I were old friends from school. We learned graphics and design in a special highschool. Michael once attended one of my PhD lectures. He later told me that, as shy as he was back then, I was the only stranger he ever approached in his life (I don't know if that's true, haha). He asked me what I was playing and we found out that we shared the same passion for Company of Heroes 2 which we then played together excessively. That is how we became close friends.
MURILLO: What led you to formally organise a "pseudo-Marxist media guerrilla collective"?
MÜLLNER: First we started to formalise under the code of arms of pacifism. In the beginning we called Total Refusal a "digital disarmament movement". Within the pandemics, we started writing our script for our feature-length film about capitalism and democracy. We read a lot of post-Marxist literature. Since we wanted to flood the brains of the hesitant left-liberals and liberals with our agitation with any kind of Marxist or communist connotation, we "prefixed" our collective with a gesture of humility: this is how "pseudo" came into being. In terms of content, we are faced with a contemporary global situation that is not capable of solving any of the current problems or catastrophes, but instead is worsening according to the navigational chart of most of the political and economic captains in charge. Since we were born in the late eighties, we have been told that ideology is fatal and that we have to solve political problems without politics. We are now paying the bill for letting banks, investors, lobbyists and corporate politicians take over sensitive tasks of any sorts. The Western world, let's call it an empire, with all its covert non-majoritarian institutions, its outsourced corporate complexes, prisons and military facilities, and its heavy influence on countries of the global south and east, has created a capitalist world in which neither humans nor animals feel at home anymore. And it is getting worse every day. As filmmakers and academics, we can't continue to enjoy entertainment and culture as we have done in the past. We can't just do nice and funny arts and films. We can't sit on our hands, we have to make fists out of them, tattoo them with K-A-R-L M-A-R-X and try to incite the people within our reach to radicalism, to compromise them with hateful thoughts about capitalism and to fight back against corpo politics wherever possible.
Moreover, our medium of choice, the video game, is the poster child of late capitalism. It loops stories and gameplay of meritocratic hegemony, where everyone can be a hero if they just try hard enough, tells us ancient myths of the uniqueness of powerful individuals, injects us with hyper-masculine toxicity and lets us dominate the weak by exploiting their resources. The video game industry is the most powerful investment opportunity within the entertainment sector, shareholders, publishers and marketing departments control what ends up on your computer, and therefore it would be absurd not to use the glossy worlds of video games as a battleground for our Marxist efforts.
MURILLO: Are there any other collectives that you have been involved with or have been inspired by?
MÜLLNER: We love the DIS collective, the Bitnik collective, the Janez Jansa collective, Chto Delat, and generally enjoy the greatness of theatre and performance ensembles and film teams. It's unfair and wrong that the public usually only knows one name when consuming the work of a collective of dozens or hundreds.