Translated by Maia Sefton

The witch hunts during the Renaissance led to around 100 000 executions in Europe, the victim being mostly old, poor rural women. Between 1560 and 1660, it’s a brutal repression especially along the Rhin, but women are guilty by nature for most catholics. The church strongly encourages the denunciation of Jewish women, who are supposedly the origin of the mythical evil witches and the sabbath, which is a demonic ceremony that involves orgies and the cooking of children. Witches are seen as even more menacing when they are jewish, her persecution relies mostly on an imaginary conspiracy that would threaten christianity. If a women was suspected of being a witch whether it be because she was outspoken or lived alone the common procedure waas to torture her until they discovered the mark of the devil or any old scar really that would cement the idea that she has indeed made a deal with the devil. Sometimes she was tied up and thrown in a lake: if she floated then the assumptions were correct and she was then burned at the stake, but if she sank she was just a regular woman who drowned. The church led the charge since the devil himself is said to be the one who causes all the woes of the world such as earthquakes and epidemics – these epidemics were on the rise because of the growing number of rats in the streets caused by the lack of cats since they were killed due to them being associated with witchcraft.

Moreover the printing press started diffusing the treaty of Malleus Maleficarum ( or “witches hammer”) at the end of the XVth century which shared the idea that women were inferior and that witches were a huge threat. A witch, a free and independent woman is scary for a lot of men. Because what does a woman have when she is free of a husband and has no children? She has power. A witch chooses her own lifestyle. She is no longer beholden to society’s values that tell a woman to get married, have kids, to have no intense sexuelle experiences and to just be quiet and look pretty, to be seen but not heard. A witch lives alone and flourishes by helping her community thanks to her knowledge and therapeutic practices. The single woman embodies independence which is not taught to young girls. For them growing as a person is intertwined with building a family and marriage whereas for men there is no miraculous idea of marriage but more the idea that they need to conquer the world. If older ladies are more oppressed it’s because their experience allows them to know better and be more self assured which is accentuated by the lack of a husband. They are less submissive then the younger women which is frowned upon in the patriarchy. Moreover a woman’s aging body is a symbol of repulsion, grey hair is a sign of negligence (or rebellion). When a woman grows old, her body shouldn’t show the slightest sign of aging since a woman’s worth depends solely on what her body looks like. Having a rational mind is labelled as maculine and the natural body is labelled as feminin. All women have to rely on is their bodies that is why aging is seen as such a big problem : in Baudelaire’s “Une charogne” he describes a carcass in anticipation of what the future holds for his lover without even thinking that he too shall age. The time when people believed that we had to kill women to allow men to flourish is over- if we don’t take into account the 146 femicides in France in 2019 (one every two and a half days, a 21% raise over the course of a year). Witches have also made a huge comeback in literature these past few years ; such as “ Les Sorcière” by Céline du Chéné which was inspired by a France Culture documentary series (2018) and “ Sorcières La puissance invaincu des femmes” (2018) by Mona Chollet.

Nevertheless by the end of the 1960’s witches were already being appropriated by a few feminist movements as a sign of rebellion. The group WITCH ((Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), founded on Halloween of 1968 in New York would cast hexes in front of Wall Street as an anti-capitalist movement. American witches continue to meet up at the foot of Trump Tower to curse the president. And in France The Witch bloc Aix- Marseille protested in 2019 against “ la marche pour la vie” which was against abortions with slogans such as brush conservatisme under the rug or embryos for our potions. Witche aren’t just used as a symbol for feminism, their fights span across numerous causes as the Witch bloc Aix-Marseille proclaimed: “ feminists, anarchist are against all systematic oppression. We are anti racism, antifaschist, anticapitalist pro sexworkers, fighting for womens rights,cis and trans, for LGBTQ+ rights, people of colors rights and our group is anonymous and single-sex.”

However this contemporary movement has a certain aspect of white feminism that is appropriating cultures and practices that foreign to them and appropriating a memory that is not their own.

By Heolruz and translated by Maia Sefton

Generations correspond to the idea that a certain decade is represented by a group of people. We are talking about “generations” to represent our elders or musically speaking, the different decades represent different artists or music genres. “Generations” are even mentioned in the famous game Pokemon, all of these references are part of commun knowledge to us. It is also quite similar in the cinematic world. There are of course tens of generations of directors, and many different generations of actors and actresses, etc.. I did not want to do an extremely ambitious expose recounting all emblematic people from each generation so I turned towards a wider definition of the word generations. The generation often being that of our elders. I wanted to take a look at how these people are portrayed by the camera who played and still play big roles in society.

I wanted to present a film that I hold in my heart, it’s a documentary called Plogoff, rocks against shotguns, which was released in 1980 and it focuses on a fight that led a small breton village to fight against the installation of a nuclear power plant. In this film we are interested in the problems that could transcend generations for young people to not so young. In this documentary we are lucky to have many witnesses and statements. It is not a cinematic subgenre, La déchirure ( 1984) is here to remind us how thin the border between film and documentary is. Plogoff benefited from a new outburst of support due to it’s restoration by the region of Bretagne, Bretagne’s Cinematheque, and the national cinema center. This documentary was then redistributed in cinemas in 2019 and 2020.

The year is 1980, Plogoff is a play about the mobilisation against the construction of a nuclear power plant and Felix and Nicole Le Garrec decide to join the movement. To bring light to the situation they decide to make a film, a film about the people of plogoff, a film where the (subventions) are assured by the Le Garrec family. For two months they filmed the confrontations between the police and the protestor , the speeches and interviewed many of the locals. Plogoff brings us the feelings and words of the generations in this village. While watching this film we understand the interest of
these kind of pieces, we rediscover different ways of living, differents ways of thinking and we understand the different endgames and evolutions. Filming the actor and actresses, is telling a story but filming men and women is showing their story. The generation found its place within this documentary, and in the end it was one of the only films to show in cinemas the generations opinions on the nuclear.

In a completely different register I recommend a sad but very interesting short film by Anthony Chen : Ah Ma (2007). The generational aspect is definitely found since the film is centered around one of the character’s deaths. Anthony Chen’s talents lead us through fifteen minutes of painful passage between generations. This Singaporian director was awarded at Cannes for this short film.

Wrote by Mayli and translated by Nolwenn.

Always under the spotlight, the woman’s body doesn’t have to be functional, strong or healthy, but pretty. Muscles are necessary to seem toned, but they must not be too prominent, at the risk of not being perceived as a REAL woman. Appearances are far more important to women than it is to men, because they introduced this « activity » in their lifestyles as a task to accomplish. As they say, you must suffer to be beautiful, otherwise you will never find a husband ! Aristotle, who influenced philosophy forever, kindly wrote « the male is separated from the female because the principle of movement, which represents the male in every born beings, is better and godly ; the female merely is the principle representing the matter ». Yet, the matter that is the body, is inferior, repugnant and passive compared to the great spirit represented by the male. From then on, women are only identified by their bodies, as they don’t have enough intelligence to stand out otherwise. To slack, especially on pilosity, is intolerable for women and translates a lack of discipline – for men, its a symbol of virility. Since a few years back, with the injunction to have a perfect body, we’re being asked to love what we have with a two-time guilt-creating #bodypositive : I have to try to love my body when everything I see tells me to change it.

Wanting everybody, but first and foremost women, to look alike thanks to « 10 tips to slim down before summer ! » isn’t an ideal, all the more so as women must tend to slimness, which for Noémie Renard, represents weakness. Indeed, from the start of the 1930’s in the US, when women begin to liberate themselves from the norms, and start to bare their bodies more and more, this obsession with thinness appears. The latter is often perceived as a patriarchal backfire, in which in exchange of certain rights, men then have the right to ask the women to be more obedient regarding their own physical standards for them. As a study demonstrated, sexism and adhesion to social norms are really tightly roped, and the most sexist men only find the slimmest bodies attractive. The philosopher Sandra Bartky, leaning on some of Foucaults’ works, explains that the beauty practices are in fact disciplinary practices, allowing to create more docile, weak and helpless bodies for women. For example developing biceps on a woman’s body is very badly considered since it’s a symbol of strength and we want female bodies to remain powerless. The male body also suffers from some beauty standards – although a lot less – however to be associated with strength – muscles – is a more enjoyable than having to stand with weakness.

THE summer body, as found literally everywhere during the preceding months of summer, only seems to be a matter of will : the will to exercise and eat healthier. Yet, the Arte documentary « An obese world » shows us that obese people for the most part are not lazy nor failures, but they really are not entirely in control of their weight. We are talking about a « liberal society who hates fat but creates fat people ». The conception of being overweight as being fat because we don’t do physical exercise is nothing more than an alibi for the food industry ; the reciprocity of this statement being : if you do exercise, you can eat and drink whatever you want. However, despite all the reality shows showing us the miraculous power of the gym – which can allegedly help us lose dozens of lbs in only a couple of weeks without the yo-yo effect – physical exercise alone, is in fact inefficient : if a 230lbs weighing person was to run 7 miles, they would have consumed 1000 calories, or 2 chocolatines [pains au chocolat here in the South of France, Translator’s note]. To change dietary habits is therefore crucial if a person doesn’t want to intensely exercise for two hours to only barely eliminate their breakfast. Thus, by encouraging fast foods implantation especially in poor neighbourhoods – where obesity levels is already high – the american government is subsidising to this obesity epidemic. Obviously, the poor and middle-class people are the most affected, this can be seen in supermarkets : fatty and sugary foods are far cheaper than organic, healthy and natural foods – complete and organic coconut sugar is five times more expensive than white refined sugar. In many grocery stores in Mexico – country devastated by the American’s sugary drinks industry -,  bottle of water is more expensive than a bottle soda.

Nonetheless, as the culture of diets is well engraved in our societies, a heavy responsibility weighs on those who dare to be physically outside the norms, in an often open fatphobia. Let’s remind ourselves that the argument of health in not valid, partly because the size of an individual’s body doesn’t specifically tell us a lot about their health, but mostly because if the « anti-fats » really wanted to increase humanity’s lifespan, their focus would rather be on economic inequalities – in average, the poorest French people live 13 years less than the richest.

@Filokunst

Personally I’m not a big fan of summer, I find that this season is just a large amount of time where people force themselves to complete meaningless and futile tasks under the pretext that it’s to get us out of our comfort zones. This idea is not necessarily contemptible, but personally summer has always taken the form of a trip to the Atlantic ocean. An ocean from which the only thing we take full advantage of is this incomprehensible body of water that is a constant reminder of how insignificantly small we are. Unlike other landscapes, but the ocean is the only one to make me feel this heavy weight that is loneliness. Being at a loss in the face of the incomprehensible, and the fear of getting lost, never being able to find shore. I always assumed that I wasn’t the only person who gets this feeling of discomfort when faced with the seemingly endless body of water that is the ocean. So when a game decided to exploit this feeling and made it a starting point for the development of all their ideas, it piqued my curiosity.

I saw this game: Sea Of Solitude. (July 5, 2019, available on PS4, Xbox and PC) while it was competing for the title of best indie game at the 2019 Games Awards. I’ve already had the opportunity to talk about Sea Of Solitude in a previous issue. Although I mainly focused on its creator Cornelia Geppert and her approach to video games. Today I’m primarily going to focus on the use of water, the omnipresent and founding landscape. A quick reminder, this game from Jo Mei Games shows us that we need to embrace our fears like the creator did by staging her trauma with this game.

We follow the journey of a character called Kay on her little motor boat, who is travelling around a small town submerged by the sea. In this town there are two different types of living beings: monstrous black animals (crows, jellyfish, chameleons, wolves, crustaceans and a whale) and luminous beings. There are also two types of humanoid beings: Kay and a radiant young girl dressed in an anorak with a bright yellow bob. This contrast between light and dark, fear and hope can be found throughout the game. Monsters hide within the black water with the sole purpose of destroying you. The water is your enemy just like in many games, touching the water or staying in it for too long will lead to your death. This is to add a more practical side to the game since it makes it possible to delimit the playable areas from the non-playable ones and to ensure a logical end to the rest of the story. The notion of this limit is particularly visible in the passages where Kay remembers her past, since she should have her feet on the ground for these moments: the water disappears.

In Sea Of Solitude, water is present visually but it is also there to represent morality. What Cornelia Geppert is trying to explain to us through these stories and these moments of life, is that if we understand our fears we will be able to control them. The water goes from being this hostile place to a haven of peace. So now we can jump head first into this place that understands us, a place that has sheltered our sorrows, our fears and our sufferings. After all, these are the places that know us best. Once we’re free of our fears, diving into these places can only be a source of happiness. We reminisce over the miles that our little boat helped us sail across. It’s as if these places kept all our happy memories, the pleasures that were made invisible by problems that are out of our control. And it is then, at that precise moment, that we are able to see them for the first time, and we become one with ourselves and the monsters living inside of us disappear forever.

I would like to end this article with a quote from Christopher Johnson McCandless aka Alexander Supertramp the hero of the film / book that retraces his story: Into The Wild. He spent the last three years of his life trying to understand the demons that surrounded his own Sea Of Solitude. It’s only by facing the ocean that he realized the distance traveled and all that he still has to go through to reach his completion: “The sea’s only gifts are harsh blows, and, occasionally, the chance to
feel strong. Now, I don’t know much about the sea, but I do know that that’s the way it is here. And I also know how important it is in life not necessarily to be strong, but to feel strong, to measure yourself at least once, to find yourself at least once in the most ancient of human conditions, facing the blind, deaf stone alone with nothing to help you but your hands and your own head.”

by Bastien Silty and translated by Nolwenn.

If this tweet from Siobhan Thompson is sarcastic and only partially true, it makes us see that depression holds a huge spot in video games. Rightfully so, because it plays a great part in the making of a game, and for very different reasons, wether if we study a Triple A (or AAA which stands for every game made in a big production), or an indie game. So in this very article, guaranteed without any spoilers, we are going to see the links between work and video games.

Let’s begin with the independent games, which seems to have a favorite theme, grief and depression. We are going to talk about two indie games, Celeste (Jan 25th, 2018), from Matt Makes Games and Sea of Solitude (Jul 5th, 2019), from Jo-Mei Games. We will finish by talking about the burn outs caused by Epic Games and Fortnite (Nov 2017).
An indie developer, as suggested by Bounthavy Suvilay in her book « Indie Games », has too much problems to handle during the creation of their story, that they cannot think of what’s next. She insists that an indie game is a total investment. A financial investment, but also and foremost an investment of time and energy. The creators of Flappy Bird (2013), Antichamber (2013) or even Ridiculous Fishing (2013) sunk into depression at the launch of their game. For diverse reasons ; they found themselves without a goal after the launch, or they were guilt ridden when their money incomes were far more important than what they had hoped. This brutal change of situation added to the incomprehension happen with most indie games, especially in debut games, a creator’s first game. Indie games are made by groups of passionate, often 10 to 15 or less, either in a garage or small locals. For instance, in Extremely Ok (Celeste and TowerFall’s creators) there are 7 people, Jo-Mei Games are 13 and at Nomada Studio (GRIS’ creators) they are 10, with 7 for the music only.

Celeste tells the story of Madeline, depressed and trying to climb a mountain. On her track, she meets several characters who are going to help her in different ways. To rough it up, the story translates her will to get back on her feet helped by her friends. Matt Makes Games, after the success of TowerFall, went to live in a shared-flat with three other creators to create their next game. Nonetheless, he found himself surrounded by work on the development of TowerFall on other consoles. He explained that TowerFall’s loud success could crash his relation with his flatmates as most of the large money incomes would come to him. A new source of anxiety coming from creating video games, which he got over with the help of his flatmates. A similar scheme can be found in Cornelia Geppert and Boris Munser’s Sea of Solitude’s creation.
We follow Kay in her introspection who is trying to fight her demons, helped by her boat and her memories. Each phases of metaphoric depression can be seen. Cornelia Geppert had wanted to tell her own story through the art she excelled best in : video games. That is how we find ourselves lost in a sea of solitude in this depression filled work. In several interviews, Cornelia Geppert has described herself in her depression as a mere shadow of herself, and this metaphor is the game’s base design (cf. a picture taken from the game showing principal character Kay). In those same interviews, she has explained that the characters depicted are her own friends and family; the second to last being her ex boyfriend, suffering from a mental illness, who brought her to depression in 2014. Thus, when an indie game talks about depression, it often is because it is the creators’ (only) way to exteriorize everything they can feel inside, work becoming emancipatory for them.

For AAA games, what happens is the contrary, burn outs are present but for other different reasons. In big productions, there is a lot of people. I am not teaching you anything here, but it defines work as a whole, there is a LOT of people. In capitalist’s logic, a game has to be sold to the greater number, the story must therefore be marketable and watered-down, the artists’ visions and personal work being wiped out. Not only that, but with the logic of competition in the industry, games have to be released ever quicker and at their maximum quality. Employees are then forced to do as quickly as possible. This regularly leads these people to have burn outs. An investigation has been made with Fortnite’s developers after its global success in 2017 by Colin Campbell, from the website Polygon. He exposes the real necessity for the game to keep its leader position, Battle Royales being the most popular play mode of the last couple of years, and competitors beginning to make these kind of games. First observation, a vast majority of employees admit they have worked between 70 to 100 hours per week during the making of Fortnite. Quick reminder, the french legislation sets the maximum legal working hours at 35 per week. These overtime hours can be explained by two major factors. The first one being the practice of the « crunch », an efficient pressure tactic consisting of asking employees to work harder and for longer hours only until the game or one of its extension is launched. At Epic Games, these crunches have lasted for weeks, even months, and have often been renewed. The second explanation is the lack of syndicate in the video game industry. The IGDA or International Game Developers Association calls to an important unionization to stop these destructive practices over the employees’ mental health. The latter, often called to work on menial or precise tasks, are hired as temps, so that they cannot gather up and fight their employers and their ideals. This article still brought a bigger feeling of empathy towards the developers from the players, who then asked for release dates to be postponed, to allow the employees to have a personal life outside of their work. In 2019/2020, several games have seen their release dates delayed, without any outrage from the public. Some players have even asked Masahiro Sakurai to take a break from developing Super Smash Bros Ultimate as he seemed more and more exhausted in interviews. Thus, if Triple A doesn’t speak publicly and freely about depression or burn outs, it is mostly because it is experienced by employees who cannot express themselves, forced to follow strict agendas from their bosses, whose only concern is for their competitors’ sales revenues and always making better ones.

Links :

The Story Behind Celeste
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gZr40T9rvY&t=0s

Celeste’s creation team
https://exok.com/team.html

Sea of Solitude’s creation team
https://www.jo-mei.com/team

Colin Campbell’s article
https://www.polygon.com/2019/4/23/18507750/fortnite-work-crunch-epic-games

Trailer Sea of Solitude
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3EDcrwDCYqo

Trailer Celeste
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70d9irlxiB4