Combining stunning, stunningly artificial images from World War II game “Battlefield V” with a wryly analytical voiceover, How to Disappear is a dreamlike wander through an imaginary world whose rules and ideologies are still inexorably tied to the real world that birthed it. Godlike shots of vast fake landscapes in all weathers; talk of representation, social order, utopia, productive force; bodies concealed among flowers, lying bloodied on the ground, or writhing together, incapable of escape. If a war game recreates the experience of war in all its facets, how come it won’t let you desert?
(JL)
-Berlinale - 2020
-Glasgow Short Film Festival - 2020
-Diagonale Festival of Austrian Film - 2020
Robin Klengel, * 1988 in Graz. He lives and works as artist, illustrator and cultural anthropologist in Vienna and Graz. Since 2017 he is vice chairman of the interdisciplinary art and culture space Forum Stadtpark. In 2018 he received the Vimeo Staff Pick Award, the award for the "Best Austrian Film", at Vienna Short Film Festival, the Audience Award at the Shortwave Film Festival in Poznan and the Explorer Award at the AMaze Berlin, amongst others.
Michael Stumpf was born in 1985 in the city of Wels, region of Upper Austria. He studied Philosophy at the University of Vienna and is currently studying Media, Art and Cultural Theory at the University of Art and Industrial Design in Linz. Michael Stumpf now works as a philosopher, designer and artist.
Born 1987 in Graz, he lives and works in Vienna as a visual artist and media researcher. He studied Visual Art and Media Art at the UFG Linz (AT), at the HGB Leipzig (DE) and at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (AT). He is currently writing his PhD on Practice in the field of Cultural Studies.