Movie scene – followthethings.com

“Life Of A Bullet“
Opening credits to the movie ‘Lord Of War’ directed by Andrew Niccol with visual effects supervisor Yann Blondel.
Opening credits embedded above. Search online to watch them here. Stream the full movie here.

Imagine you could literally follow a thing, from the thing’s own point of view – like a video game – from its sites of production to its sites of consumption and maybe beyond. The opening credits of a Hollywood movie starring Nicholas Cage do just this. Set to Buffalo Springfield’s 1960s counterculture song ‘For what it’s worth (stop, hey what’s that sound)’, Lord of War begins by following the life of a bullet from a piece of sheet metal in a Ukrainian arms factory to a bullet flying out of an AK-47 assault rifle in streets of a Sierra Leone gunfight. Along the way it’s handled by lots of different people connected through its supply chain. At the end of its life, it serves its purpose by entering the forehead of a child soldier. This is when the song abruptly stops and the screen goes black. It’s catchy, bleak and brutal. But a bullet cannot be followed like this IRL. You need some research, an imagination and some heavy duty CGI expertise: like visual effects supervisor Yann Blondel’s. At followthethings.com this example has achieved a cult status. It’s like a foundation stone in the follow the thing genre. We keep coming back to it. Not only is this 3 minutes of GGI animation the best part of the movie (many commenters agree with us on that). It’s also the most brutally clear ‘follow the thing’ example we’ve found. Plus, it’s provoked the wildest discussions we have found about anything featured ion our site. Some discussion is are about the evils of the arms trade, and its undertones of colonialism and racial capitalism. But there are so many other perspectives. Some seem to have experience of shoot-em-up POV video games, others seem to have experience with real guns and ammunition, while still others seem to have an apparently deep knowledge of CGI animation, and more besides. Read the comments we’ve arranged below to see what we mean. If you’re a budding trade justice activist and you want to provoke enthusiastic discussion with your work, maybe this is the example to dig into. But, if you want that discussion to be focused on trade (in)justice, maybe it’s not. The movie, and the iconic opening scene that we’re talking about here, do get caught up in an international campaign to regulate the arms trade alongside another example we’ve researched (check here). But that doesn’t seem to have been the intention at the start.

Page reference: Ian Cook et al (2019) Life Of A Bullet. followthethings.com/pipetrouble.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 50 minutes.

followthethings.com
Fashion

2001

WORLD TRADE ORGANISATION

TEXTILE FABRIC

WORN IN THE GLOBAL NORTH

EXPERIENCED IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

ACTIVIST PRANK

MOVIE SCENE

CHANGE GOVERNMENT BEHAVIOUR

CHANGE CORPORATE BEHAVIOUR

BRING REGULATORS INTO VIEW

LIE TO TELL THE TRUTH

CHOOSE AN AUDIENCE

PLACE THINGS CAREFULLY

INCLUDE THE DIGITAL

MAKE THE HIDDEN VISIBLE

CREATE A CHARACTER

MAKE IT PROVOCATIVE

MAKE IT FUNNY

“Employee Visualisation Appendage“
A conference talk prank by The Yes Men at a ‘Textiles of The Future’ conference in Tampere, Finland – filmed & featured in ‘The Yes Men’ movie.

Cultural activists and ‘identity correctors’ The Yes Men set up a fake World Trade Organisation (WTO) website and offer a man called Hank Hardy Unruh to speak at conferences on its behalf. The organisers of a ‘Textiles of the Future’ conference in Finland believe the website is genuine and invite him to give a talk. In the conference hall, the audience watch his assistant ripping off his business suit to reveal a gold lamé telematic suit underneath from which he inflates a huge phallus. This ’employee visualisation appendage’, they say, will allow future managers to give electric shocks to sweatshop workers when their productivity levels dip. To the Yes Men, this gold lamé performance exaggerates to ridiculous proportions the inhumanity of the WTO’s neo-liberal ideology and its dehumanisation of supply chain workers. It’s outrageous and kind of obscene (both the ideology and their performance). Movie audiences find it hilarious. But why is there such a muted reaction in the hall? And what impacts (if any) might these reactions have on the lives of workers in textile supply chains? This compilation page is arranged a little differently than others on our website because this prank had two audiences: the conference delegates and the movie audiences. We find this example fascinating. It’s fair to say that it’s memorable. But where – and upon whom – did it make an impact?

Page reference: Tom Best, Tom Gibson, Beth Massey, Chloe Rees, Kate Ross & Jemma Sherman (2019) Employee Visualisation Appendage. followthethings.com/employee-visualisation-appendage.shtml (last accessed <insert date here>)

Estimated reading time: 47 minutes.